so these days I consistently beat 1600 rated and lose to 2000 rated bots. Sicilian accelerated dragon for 1e4, King's Indian for 1d4 and Italian game as white. have mostly abandoned classic Dragon and Ruy Lopez

has anyone ever come out of retirement as often as Daniel Day Lewis

new episode out today! we read a bunch of the federalist papers to try to figure out what these people had in mind when they started, well, all this. peel back the curtain with us on the vision behind America's first republic! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1...

everything is soaked through with blood. just corpses everywhere, the walking and the stilled. future children history's dead already. can you imagine your hands ever again feeling clean? I can't.

Nozick's critique of what he calls time-slice or end-state principles for determining whether a given society's distribution of assets counts as just or unjust is really very sharp. no critic of wealth and income inequality can afford to ignore it

what is the legal theory according to which you can just declare that you're allowed to steal from everyone unless they explicitly say no don't do that www.reuters.com/technology/o...

TCW, looking at people making fun of Ezra Klein on the basis of their correct assessment of his hollow politics and moral cowardice: Yet another substance free meltdown by the performative woke left I see

you're telling me that, like Spinoza, David Ricardo was also from a Sephardic Jewish family exiled from Portugal during the Inquisition, and he also wound up cut off from his family? the main difference is that Spinoza was cut off for having cool ideas about God whereas Ricardo married a Quaker girl

I will be banging on this drum for probably the rest of my life. those of us on the left need to articulate a positive program. it's not hard and it will be popular. these are our enemies and we should know them, know that, and spend as little on them as possible. they love taking up our time

I'm glad I spent so much time learning about political economy from a historical materialist perspective because I'm able now to predict the coming catastrophes with disturbing accuracy and also I can't do anything about them. this makes me fun to be around

my students discovered the problems involved in counterfactual reasoning in lesser evilism from first principles. so this is a pretty good thursday

Rousseau's Social Contract is such a fascinating disaster

it makes sense that Locke would be the most influential social contract theorist because he's the most birdbrained. he's like God surely wouldn't want you to hoard acorns because they'd eventually rot, and that's why it's so dope that we invented money, which you can accumulate endlessly

ooh, I can help! reaction is a big tent project whose internecine disagreements come out only when they're already in charge, mostly to give the appearance of a diversity of viewpoints. they're all nazis, but some can now position themselves as the good ones with reasonable concerns. same old game

it's so embarrassing to admit you had a Disney+ subscription to cancel

sorry but this is basically just what the American State is. cranked up a few degrees, sure. but if you want to know why this is happening with so little institutional friction, it's because the US has been fascist and genocidal for at least 20 years and let's be honest quite a bit longer than that

Ezra Klein: Having principles is bad and divisive, except for my one deeply held principle, which is that Nazis are people too and we must be extra nice to them

new episode out now! we talk about literature and Marxism through the work of Raymond Williams. this turns out mostly to be an excuse to reveal ourselves as big Jane Austen fans. the full episode is a patron exclusive, teaser below www.patreon.com/posts/139000...

respectability dogwhistling was an experiment that lasted from the 1960s to the 2010s and it failed. the right wing no longer feels the need to hide that they want to talk about the Jewish question, black inferiority, and their desire to kill sexual minorities. for 50 years they pretended. that's it

it's wild to live in a period when the rising tide of imperial hegemony has already broken and now there exists almost nothing but various forms of reaction to the undeniable fact of inevitable decline. America is already dead and we here now will almost all be ground to bone dust in the crashout

I miss the good old days when lack of consensus reality was due to Kant's arguments about objectivity in the Critique of Pure Reason and not due to fascists successfully infiltrating 21st century tech consensus machines and useful idiot liberals cheerleading the process

I don't know who did the shooting or what their motivations were, but I do know that it will be blamed on the left and used to justify deepening authoritarianism no matter what

this is one of the best episodes yet. if you aren't listening to this podcast you're playing yourself

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

I've now seen several articles like Why are markets still trending positive even though America is being run into the ground by a self-destructive idiot? and uh yeah markets don't cognize. this does not need to be explained

could have been 0 but someone out there slipped

student energy seems to have shifted in the past few years. things that would have provoked outrage are increasingly not even registered at all. this is the intended outcome of the fascists constantly doing the most outrageous shit possible on every front: a generalized numbing of moral sensibility

can anyone explain the glitch in the matrix that is Peter Thiel? this man is so cartoonishly evil it is ridiculous

some days the blinding horror of genocide makes it feel insane to do anything at all. my heart just fucking breaks

hey is it good if the economy collapses

breaking news: trend chasing midwit does exactly what you'd expect

this is straight up wrong in a few dozen different ways at once which is impressive for so few sentences

about four or five times a year for the past several decades the first ever study finds that giving poor people money really helps them. it's always the first ever time

I was reading Hegel earlier and it hit me: only people who spend their time reading Hegel should be in charge

the world would be so much poorer without cicada song

I wish I had the kinds of problems this guy has. it seems really nice.

new episode out now! we talk with Nicholas Vrousalis about why we should understand exploitation as a form of domination and why this is a powerful argument for capitalism being unjust. also we lovingly give G.A. Cohen and John Roemer a little bit of a hard time. www.patreon.com/posts/119-ex...

does anyone prematurely celebrating Trump's death realize that on the other side of that we will have President JD Vance

a pleasant upside to having to work 7 days a week is I have zero idea what the Rudy Giuliani or the Taylor Lorenz thing is and I will not be finding out. if you try to inform me I will use ancient magicks to curse your bloodline

this one features interviews with @sisyphus55.bsky.social, CJ the X, Dr. Fatima, Dr. Gregory B Sadler, Jared Henderson, @epochphilosophy.com, and @gilmorejon.bsky.social of @leftofphilosophy.bsky.social

pro tip: don't look up how many Nuremburg trials conviction sentences were commuted

NEW ON THE CTWG SITE MARGIN NOTES: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL THEORY V1: KERNELS OF EARLY CRITICAL THEORY Critical Theory is only right in a wrong world. Link: ctwgwebsite.github.io/projects/1_p...

just spent 45 minutes fighting with a printer and I'm prepared to say universities must be abolished

oh wow I've just learned about the Worst Thing: Peter Singer AI, the official website where you can ask a computer to evaporate a lake so it can generate text about why it is good to sterilize people with disabilities

it's capitalism

now in my first day of class syllabus review, I get to say during my anti-AI rant that not only is it unreliable, disabling, and environmentally destructive, chatgpt might just actually fucking kill you

"Do horses become better or worse when they're harmed" is legit probably the greatest question ever asked

I've never taught Plato's Republic for the same reason I spent the first 22 years of my life refusing to listen to Radiohead. anything that widely acclaimed has to be bad even if it's excellent

I like derek but I also do not give a shit about this. if stephen miller's suit had a Really Good Pocket he would still be a major driver of the current regime's white nationalist deportation and fascist criminalization agenda so what are we doing here

have you ever noticed that whenever someone attempts to do political philosophy or ethics 'from first principles' they always just wind up reinventing eugenics and authoritarianism