How many academics who say they’ll speak their minds when they get tenure still never speak their minds after getting it?

The United States has been leaping from one moral panic to the next: Black Lives Matter, MeToo, George Floyd, and now data centers plus the specter of AI-driven human extinction. In every case a genuine problem exists, but the threat is inflated out of all proportion and the costs of overreaction are overlooked. The resulting hysteria blocks clear thinking and closes off rational discussion. Consequently, individuals never notice that self-appointed experts are distorting the facts for their own gain. Companies with billions in AI stakes are perfectly capable of staging “rogue LLM” incidents to stampede politicians into regulation that keeps out competitors or simply reduces their own liability. Previous panics have already damaged trust in institutions and among ourselves. They have also intensified the political polarization that now endangers American democracy. We should resist the current panic rather than feed it. The costs of getting this one wrong dwarf those of the last several.

Social media has been a net setback for humanity

Out of respect for Elon Musk’s many awesome achievements in promoting technology and freedom, I’ll say the following as diplomatically as I can: His post below is, which implies that all concerns about AI extinction risk are nothing more than a ‘psyop’ that’s been ‘prepared for a long time’ is very puzzling, and is not consistent with Elon’s own past concerns about AI safety. Of all the ‘AI Doomers’ in the world, Elon has been the richest, the most powerful, and the most influential. Since 2014 he has been warning about possible extinction risks from Artificial Superintelligence, long before other tech billionaires were paying attention. It’s been a major theme in his life for over a decade, and he's expressed his concerns publicly hundreds of times. We have the receipts: 1) Aug 2, 2014: Elon tweeted ‘We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.’ Since then, he has posted hundreds of times on social media about AI extinction risks and the need for serious AI safety work. 2) Oct 2015: At MIT, Elon said AI is ‘our biggest existential threat’, and he explicitly compared training AI to ‘summoning the demon’. His warning was dramatic, emphatic, and alarming. 3) Dec 2015: Elon co-founded OpenAI in direct response to his fears about AI extinction risk; he was especially concerned that Google/Deepmind was developing AI recklessly, with insufficient safeguards. He structured OpenAI as a non-profit that was supposed to explicitly prioritize safety and humanity over development speed and profit. 4) 2023-2024: During the post-ChatGPT excitement, Elon posted many, many warnings on X about AI extinction risk, frequently saying his personal estimate of a catastrophic AI outcome (‘p(doom’’) was 10-20%. 4) Feb 2024: Elon sued OpenAI over AI safety concerns, arguing that it had betrayed its original safety mission, disbanded safety teams, rushed ahead for commercial gain, and prioritized profits over safety; his lawyers in court emphasized that advanced AI could trigger extinction. Only since 2024 has Elon started mocking concerns about AI safety, and only in the last few weeks has he called the worries about extinction risk a ‘setup’ and a ‘psyop’. So, has Elon legitimately changed his mind? Did he switch from thinking that advanced AI would be a serious extinction risk (as he repeatedly said, for ten years, from 2014 – 2024), to thinking that all such concerns are just a politically motivated psyop? If so, he should let everyone know why he changed his mind, based on what new evidence – especially since most AI safety experts and citizens have updated their beliefs in the opposite direction, towards more concern about extinction risk. Or does he feel that he was somehow taken in by an ancient ‘psyop’ that was running even before 2014, long before the current AI investment boom, that convinced him way back then that AI extinction risk is a serious concern? If so, he should explain why, as one of the smartest and most skeptical people in the world, he was taken in by such a ‘psyop’, and signal-boosted it so ardently and publicly, for so long. Or is he being disingenuous, deceptive, and/or hypocritical, hoping that people would forget he was the most prominent and influential ‘AI Doomer’ in the world for 10 years?

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing to radically rewrite his state’s health code to give his administration authoritarian police powers as he seeks re-election. Read my latest for @realDailyWire here: dailywire.com/news/josh-shap…

Someone needs to use formal math to study citation patterns in humanities and social science. I have the impression they string-cite like crazy, maybe to inflate each others' citation counts. They areprobably in different competing tribes too, even if they are all communist.

I cannot begin to describe how sick I am of the sanctimonious, “credentialed” types now emerging to tell us that no one really knew, that everything was messy, that it was the fog of war, and that everyone was simply doing their best under difficult circumstances. None of that is true. The evidence was there and the facts were known, it’s just that the public health establishment, the credentialed elites, and the institutions they control lied about the origin of the virus, the infection rate, lockdowns, masks, the “vaccines,” and everything else. Many of us knew it at the time, and we said so at the time. That is the part I find hardest to accept. The people who lied, enforced the lies, or quietly went along with them will keep their jobs, their television contracts, their prestige, and their institutional power. Meanwhile, those of us who challenged them from the trenches were threatened with professional ruin, censorship, and permanent dismissal as conspiracy theorists. And many paid exactly that price, despite having been right all along. We risked everything by telling the truth. They risked nothing by lying. We were punished, and they were rewarded.

I laughed out loud: "The ‘lived experience’ of being a mid-career academic in the UK is not all that different from being, say, manager of a call centre on an industrial estate just outside Darlington: a lot of grappling with bits of software that don’t talk to each other, a lot of deleting irrelevant emails, a lot of meetings scheduled by people who are compensating for nonexistent social lives." dailysceptic.org/2026/08/02/…

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real. 1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else. 2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after. 3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state. 4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging. 5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design. 6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign. 7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

The lack of transparency which is usually supposed to be there for the victims' sake makes the whole process shady and favors agressors. Also, it makes people not believe most legitimate claims.

There's no inherent reason to want to engage in self governance. Governance is work, a real pain in the ass. Some people want to do governance because they are nerds, sadists, corrupt, martyr complex, whatever. But much better to simply *be* governed, as long as it's tolerable.