Look man I know it’s all kind of a lot right now but fwiw there is also a silent flame of inscrutable life fluttering dovelike in its quiet passion through the very ligaments of all things, leaving no heart or pelt or stamen or willow in the world unmoved. So there’s that.

French Poststructuralism and postmodernism may have brought back a kind of "neo-animism" to popular thinking, where mere seemings and anthropomorphism are equated as equal in substance with the things they imitate. Seeing it happen at scale looks like mass psychosis.

They desire both a God and a Slave.

AI cannot love its creations.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

One endpoint of AI is what I like to call "mental deindustrialisation," where minds are no longer called on to produce, and then, eventually, become unable to produce. Sci Fi AI apocalypse is frightening, and deserves consideration, but more ordinary dystopias are possible, too.

"In sanity both [the sane poet] and his poetry are eclipsed by poetry composed by men who are mad." - Plato (Phaedrus, 245a)

No offense to all the writers out there, but AI will replace a lot of writing because a big fraction of what is being published is AI-like slop without much original thinking already.

Dans l’esprit des passionnés d’Antiquité.

NEW: Previous estimates found 1 in 65 teen girls in Oregon with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Oregon was second to Vermont in total prevalence. A new @ManhattanInst analysis finds that in some OR & VT zip codes, 1 in 40 girls and 1 in 65 boys were diagnosed. 🧵

You would think "powerful companies made something that might kill us all" would be a natural position for leftists to entertain but it turns out "I'm smarter than everyone in tech and in principle they can never do anything interesting" is a more central belief for many of them

It never ceases to amaze me that the very people who talk incessantly about homophobia and micro aggressions will also very freely depict their political enemies as engaged in typical acts of gay sex as a sign of their weakness or repulsiveness.

Don't forget the Other 9/11 in 1973 when the first democratically elected Marxist president across Latin America was violently removed from office in a military coup d'état sponsored by the US state. This resulted in a dictatorship under Pinochet that killed and disappeared more than 3,000 people and tortured tens of thousands.

AI research, among other things, is fully private and unregulated weapons development. It is as if we let a few companies split the atom in their backyards.

Maybe I am an outlier on the left but I think it is always good idea to make yourself healthier and stronger and arguing otherwise is dumb

The most telling marker of the sheepish group-think of contemporary academia is how *so* many universities decided to abandon their large followings on X and huddle in the pen of BluSky, where they couldn't reach the general public but at least they'd be seen among the in-group.

I am heartbroken for the families of the gay men m*rdered at yesterday's shooting at a gay bar in Tucson. The k*ller? A homophobe who believed he was doing Allah's work. The gay men? Pro-Palestine activists. The press? Most of it either refers to them as "qu*er" or "LGBTQIA+". A serious conversation needs to take place in Western society. We need to stop propagandising to people about the Middle East, about Islam, about Judaism, about homosexuality, about history... None of this would be happening if we just stopped lying to people on all sides. We have convinced people to fight for all the wrong things by giving each group a scapegoat for all their problems. This is not how real life works. And people are k*lling each other over these lies. Ask yourself what the end goal is.