John Holbo

Reading comics.

Dammit, I should have asked my wife or either of my two daughters at any point in the last decade, apparently. That would have cleared this right up. But I have been obliviously letting them just play away without educating myself.

More people should be willing to admit they don't get jokes. Everyone likes to pretend they get every joke.

I am man enough to admit I don't get this joke. It seems like the sort of thing that is highly hilarious, but the hilarity must involve recognition of a connection - yet not a connection: how could there be - between the things in question. I am not seeing the connection. More fool I, apparently.

Make Americans Guess Again.

Quite remarkable that the framers, despite their considerable mutual differences, were able to agree on a constitutional framework. This was due, in no small measure, to events having driven them negatively to a position we would describe today as ‘never Trump’, crosscutting left-right differences.

The US-Canada split is notable.

'Kibblesmith'. C'mon.

Chris Rufo Tweet: "On Talarico’s “God is nonbinary”: Pope Benedict has a great collection of homilies on Genesis, in which he argues that the male-female binary is superficially about sexual reproduction, but more deeply, built into the order of the cosmos itself. The world is not “multi-gender.”"

I dunno, man. If male-female is only superficially about reproductive plumbing - chromosomes, bio stuff - and really about cosmic depths, why would you want to insist peoples' driver's licenses must reflect assigned-at-birth biological sex rather than registering their deep, cosmic gender?

If you can launch a major war without first settling on a strategic objective - with people just trusting you to pick a good one later - I don't see why this should be MORE of a problem.

This hadn’t gone exactly how they’d like. In December, Bloomberg reported recently, “a senior US defense official posed a hypothetical scenario” to Amodei: What if a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile were hurtling towards the US with only 90 seconds to spare, and Anthropic’s AI were the only way to trigger a missile response to save the country, but the company’s safeguards wouldn’t allow it, the senior official mused in a December phone call. “Call me,” was how Pentagon officials interpreted Amodei’s answer, according to another senior defense official briefed on the discussion, who described being astounded by the billionaire’s response. LOL. Our beautiful generals have many medals and some even have battlefield experience, but I can say with some confidence that they have never engaged with a Rationalist online and are deeply unprepared for what it means to pick a fight with one.

[Dario Amodei Bane voice] “Oh, you think stupid elaborate hypotheticals are your ally. But you merely adopted elaborate and weirdly specific hypothetical scenarios; I was born in them, molded by them. I didn’t see a normal argument until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!”

one of the funniest things to keep coming out of the anthropic reporting is that the pentagon was trying to convince amodei by proposing elaborate hypothetical scenarios. buddy do you think an EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST has never considered a bizarrely specific and elaborate hypothetical scenario??

Wittgenstein: the world is all that is the case.
Chotiner: So you say, but ...
...
Wittgenstein: whereof we cannot speak ...

Crikey.

I remember buying this off the rack and being very impressed by the story! So ironic! I already knew I liked uncanny things, since I liked the X-Men. So 'most uncanny' was a strong selling point. I was not disappointed!

Home Trekonomics.

I'm sure Bibi tried to talk him into it. But I think, after Venezuela, Trump bought it because he is independently convinced that, for him, it will always be low cost.

I think there's a good chance he's wrong this time and it will be a huge disaster. But from his point of view, he hasn't been punished for reckless, bad behaviour to date. It's got him this far, why should this time be different?

I think Trump invaded Iran because he's impulsive & unchecked. He sees no downside. Best case: he somehow wins bigly. Worst case: something turns up he can sell to his base as winning and he's back where he was. The alternative: Bibi tricked him into it. I don't buy that.

One creepy clown cannot save a whole cursed town from being ridiculous. And they say that no franchise that dies ever really dies. So here's looking forward to season 2!

The secret of Bad King is unforced error: breaking all suspense & dispelling Good Stephen King-ish atmosphere with needless convolution (over-explanation of whatever-it-is - in this case, IT), then frosting the half-fallen, half-unrisen cake with extra blood n guts to conceal its poor quality.

But there was a time in my life when 8-hours of page-turning bleah was enough! "It: Welcome to Derry" let me relive it. (It's important that this "It" wasn't trying to be bad in this signature way. It was trying, instead, to ride "Stranger Things", which rides Good King, in a good way!)

Bad King is its own aesthetic, quite distinct from Good King - which is good! "It: Welcome to Derry" nails Bad King authentically. Like a leftover Dominos pepperoni pizza, and a bag of stale Freetos & two Big Gulps of coke, through a too-hot summer afternoon on into too late at night. Bleah.

We made our own fun! It was the 80's. Reagan was President.

Courtesy of a long plane trip I watched all of "It: Welcome to Derry" in one sitting. This afforded an unusual nostalgia. Several times in my youth did I consume an entire, bad Stephen King novel in one voracious sitting. Like "The Tommyknockers" - twice. I had nothing better to do.

When the imminent threat is an immanent eschaton.

Old school: the death of irony.

New rule: irony awakens in a panic, spitting dirt, digging itself out of a shallow grave in the desert, with no memory of how it got there. When it pieces together what it was, and who betrayed it, its revenge will be epic.

From The Brave and the Bold #160. Batman: I’m … sorry. I usually fon’t go on like that. Alana Strange: Don’t apologise … we all need to ‘go on like that’ sometimes. Batman: Perhaps, but I’d rather not - 🚨 🚨 🚨 What… ?”

Same.

In a weird way, I'll bet Elise Stefanik can relate. But I would prefer that the 'everything Trump touches, dies' principle apply only to those who voluntarily seek to get close to him.

Musk retweet of Cremieux confidently asserting that the solution to all big problems is just to 'flip the switch'.

Conservatism is the wise denial of the possibility that bold social engineering projects may have unintended consequences.M

ok thanks.