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Feb 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Erik writes a passionate call for terror-driven political agitation to stop the development of AI, even calling for a “jihad” to end its progress in a very short time frame… without ever mentioning the obvious tactic someone animated by these concerns will adopt:

terrorism.
Terrorism even fits his favored historical precedents: anti Cold War activism and environmentalism spawned real terrorist groups. Bombings, kidnappings, assassinations.
I am not going to argue the merits of terrorism as a tactic with anybody here—just know it fits the historical pattern.
Overeducated, Ideologically motivated, tightly networked young men who feel hopeless in the face of structures of power/capital that threaten extinction, desperate to polarize public opinion and call attention to intolerable evils?

This is a recipe for terrorism.

That’s all.

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More from @Scholars_Stage

T. Greer Profile picture
Feb 15
This one is it. No one should bother writing about BAP after this. No one is going to top this. Extremely thoughtful, well done.
It also gets at the heart of my dissatisfaction with Strauss and Straussian approaches: I neither believe that courageous free thinking is an adequate life purpose, nor that there is anything special about the narrow ‘elite’ that pursues it.
AC Graham has a line about the difference between Chinese and Western axial age philosophy: “The Greek philosopher was concerned with finding the *truth*, the Chinese philosopher with finding the *way.*
Read 4 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Feb 13
Since AP tests are in the news let me highlight a particularly destructive change made to an AP course over the last few years.

The course is AP World History.

The change was the CB’s decision to remake it AP World History: Modern.
I could write a long thread about this but here is the short version: truncating the course to the “modern” reduces world history down to a narrative of “the west acts, the world reacts.”
Persiante civilization, China, India, et al are in this schema not taught and understood in their *own* terms but in terms of colonialism and reactions to it. Students are never given the chance to step outside the western frame.
Read 8 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Feb 10
plough.com/en/topics/just… Frustrating essay by @NotoriousTIB. It starts with a list of social ills that are explicitly identified as problems that dramatically worsened b/t "1990 and 2020" but then blame these social changes on...

"the long arc of Enlightenment thinking"
at some level we have to ask: why didn't the long arc of enlightenment thinking also cause these problems in 1985? 1975? 1925? 1880? and so forth
strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that John Locke is to blame for the changing number of friends Americans had between the years 1990 and 2020, but had no such impact in any of the centuries in between his life and ours.
Read 4 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Feb 4
Panic is a myth based in fictional narrative, not historical fact.

Fear serves a valuable purpose; the role of government and media is not to stifle it, but inform it.

palladiummag.com/2021/07/15/the…
As per the original object of the thread: the knew bird flu has been wrecking havoc on world poultry stocks this year—if you want to know why your egg prices are up, this is it.
A coordinated and drastic response, *if it is effective* is at this point necessary.
Read 7 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jan 30
No one who says this has provided me with an credible and actionable alternative to deterrence. "Shaping context so that deterrence is unnecessary" is a contentless phrase, more a hope than a strategy.
This is the most galling expression of the general train of thought I critiqued here: scholars-stage.org/we-can-only-ki…
Then, as here, the big problem is that it assumes *American* actions are the driving force in militarization of PRC-Taiwan relations, when in reality political forces in Taiwan and the growing strength of the PLA are the actual drivers here.
Read 15 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jan 27
Several years ago I learned Kun Khmer. This is the Cambodian version of Muay Thai. There are minor differences, but they are largely indistinguishable.

The Khmer are insistent, however, that *they* invented this art. To prove this thesis they turn to carvings like these:
These carvings are from តាព្រហ្ (Ta Prohm), one of the temple sites at the broader Angkor Wat complex. Ta Prohm's construction was finished in 1186 A.D.
Whether the carvings you see here actually represent Kun Khmer (Muay Thai) or some older wrestling art I cannot say; what I can say is that every single Cambodian alive is *convinced* they do in fact depict the modern art, & that the Thais have stolen credit for their invention.
Read 5 tweets

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