But one of the things that distinguishes the 1950s-60s films from the 1980s-2010s version (exemplified IMHO by Pixar) is the moral urgency of the message.

https://twitter.com/Arbitrary_user/status/1895363688221286877

And perhaps that suggests a shift in the substance of the thing.

The 1950s narratives lionize man the THINKER. They express great faith in the potential of man as an abstract ideal; the focus is not “be yourself” but “learn to think. Take your stand.”

What do presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have in common?

Each began their term in office -- and for Trump, both terms -- convinced that America needed some sort of reset with Russia, and if they played their cards right, they would get it.

https://twitter.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1891183505729536479

So many folks talk about the power of nat/sec groupthink and DC 'NPC's who thoughtlessly shuffle down paths tread ten thousand times before, but nobody talks about Russia in this context.

If you want a measure by which to judge which tech right leaders are sincere and which are selfish—that is, in it to maximize their financial returns regardless of the cost to the rest of us—you only need to do one thing: read what they said when Silicon Valley bank went under. Some of these individuals tried to save their investments by attempting to cause a general banking panic—to ensure that the government would bail out the bank.

I have never looked at them the same again.

From my copybook.

1. Paradise Lost, Book IX, lines 120-130:

"By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts." From my copybook.

Glenn Gray, The Warriors, pp. 216-217:

"They were not longing for the old days in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement had enabled them to keep covered up.

No folks, here is what happening.

1. Donald Trump believes in the madman theory. Here he is last year explaining why the Chinese won't dare attack Taiwan under his watch: "Xi Jinping knows that I am F----g crazy." Exact quote he gave to the WSJ last summer. He believes, deeply, that is power on the international stage is directly related to how crazy the rest of the world thinks he is.

How do you convince people you are an unpredictable, erratic son-of-a-bitch? By doing crazy things.

Thesis: Southern gothic stopped making sense as a living genre sometime in the’90s.

Regional identity is too weak.

The isolated world of the southern county is isolated no longer. Also: the world where families feel connected to, much less cursed by, their connection to antebellum fortunes and hierarchies also past. Average Georgian can tell you nothing about her family in 1870—much less be haunted by their ghosts.

In November I traveled to India. Met with government officials. Traveled the high Himalayas. Listened to Bengalore coders speak.

Here I share what I learned. 🧵 I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by @rammadhav_ 's India Foundation (@indfoundation) and put together by @wrmead. The explicit intent of this trip to was to forge connections between the Indian and American right. As I put it in my essay:

This misunderstands Colby's logic, and perhaps misunderstands Xi Jinping as well.

@ElbridgeColby says TSMC should be destroyed if Taiwan falls not because he thinks TSMC is the reason Xi would authorize an invasion, but because he views Taiwan mostly through the US-China strategic balance, and believes that Chinese possession of pristine TSMC fabs would tip that balance away from the United States. Hitler didn't invade France BECAUSE he wanted the French fleet--but once the Germans were in, it was better to scuttle the fleet than to hand it over. That is the logic.

But there is a broader, important question here--do the fabs matter at all for Xi's invasion plan?

I would say "yes." They are a reason not to invade. Xi Jinping earnestly believes that China can only pull ahead of the United States by pioneering the next techno-scientific revolution. This is the plan for making China #1. (I have written at length about this before and will link to some of that in the next tweet).

At the present this requires Taiwanese fabs to stand in good working order. "The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" is not possible on the timelines Xi has articulated without either a functioning Taiwanese economy or the successful reproduction of Taiwanese technology in the mainland. This incentivizes Xi to wait. On the short term Xi faces a trade off between national reunion and national greatness. Xi does not need to be "Michael Moore's Dick Cheney" for the destruction of TSMC to give him pause.

Of course, it has always been a fantasy that full on war would not lead to the disruption of TSMC facilities or the death of TSMC employees, regardless of American policies. If Xi Jinping authorizes an invasion this will have already been baked into his calculations. Colby's comments are all about the American calculus, not Beijing's. The promised link: scholars-stage.org/saving-china-t…

My wife has a special genius for organization, task management, and finding the exact tool for solving every problem a person might face. She is a living lifehacker encyclopedia.

In honor of the first year of our marriage, a small 🧵of Mrs. Greer's recommended homehacks. Most of these hacks have bettered my life in small ways. Others have led to dramatic improvements in agency, efficiency, or comfort.

While her list of hacks could go on indefinitely, those I include here have:

Overly large books that I thought were really worth it:

1. Dream of the Red Chamber
2. Paradise Lost
3. Iliad
4. War and Peace
5. Life and Fate
6. House of Government
7. War in Human Civilization
8. Muqaddihmah
9. Democracy in America
10. Mote's Imperial China
11. Sima Qian's Record of the Grand Historian
12. Caro's Lyndon B Johnson books Numbers not meant as a ranking

It is fine to romanticize living on a homestead.

Many people with personal experience on the homestead romanticized it (think Laura Ingalls). There are, in fact, many people who intentionally choose to live on homesteads today. You do not need to turn to Robert Caro to understand how they live: there are thousands of their vlogs on YouTube.

What does Caro describe? Caro describes people trying to eke a living out on marginal desert lands over-farmed to the point where not only the topsoil, but *all* soil had eroded away, leaving only exposed bedrock and thorny scrub-brush. A place so isolated from the rest of America that passable roads were only built into it in the 20th century. And he describes their life during the 1920s and 30s—especially difficult years for indebted American farmers caught in a two decade long agricultural price crash.*

Caro does not describe many things. He does not describe what it was like to be a homesteading pioneer in the Williamette, Ohio, or Hudson River Valleys, or anywhere else famed for its bounty. He does not describe what it was like to be a farmer in those places as they were connected by road, canal, and railroad to the national market. He does not describe their prosperity in days when prices rose and credit boomed.

Caro’s writing should not be used as a cudgel like this way.

Those who would make Caro a cudgel are either dogmatic or dishonest. I have no patience for it—this need to flatten the real trade-offs of modernization—trade offs that fired revolutions, birthed philosophers, and broke the dreams of many millions—down to smug twitter clap-backs.

And here is the sad thing about all that: this girl does not even want a homestead. She doesn’t want the “sad irons.” She is not hoping to go back to the world before the internet—much less electricity. What she wants is a hobby farm—and time to tend to it. She wants a world where her husband earns enough money for her to spend full time attention on her children, a cow, and a few chickens.

What is wrong with that?

It is a sad definition of “abundance,” a poor definition of “progress” that sees a girl who yearns for a different world—a world abundant enough for her family to own ducks and horses, a world prosperous enough that a mother is not daily forced to leave her home—and reacts with smug dismissal.

What vision of “progress” does not have room in its mansions for a girl like this?

No vision worth our respect.

*And that after a decades-long fight to keep the political economy of the republic oriented towards the yeoman farmer instead of the northeastern industrialist—the constituency for a farmer’s republic was much larger than you would imagine if farming was a living hell! What were they fighting for? Why did they fight so hard? What virtue did they see in their independent little farm plots? Does Stapp know? Does Stapp care? Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of saying “people need to stop being nostalgic for a world where people lived outside, closer to nature, away from dehumanizing elements of modern bureaucracy and technology, working independently as their own boss instead of as a cog in an administrative machine, because that world sucked” and instead said, “what can be done to restore things people nostalgically yearn for without the costs they used to have to bear in order to enjoy them?” Which of these seems more concerned with…

*progress?*

My most center-lib opinion is that the western China journalists are good, actually.

Most have gone across the country chasing stories, are well plugged into interesting circles in Beijing and Shanghai, and great many have experienced some rough things at the hand of the state. Like yeah, I have respect for the girl who got roughed up by police in Inner Mongolia or the guy who has to flush his interview notes down the toilet before “tea.”

I think this thread takes the wrong lesson from Bill Kristol's trajectory. (And the point I am going to make is true for many people who have moved the opposite way, like Elon Musk).

https://twitter.com/America_2100/status/1848058246503727572

Eric Gould and Esteban Klor have this paper where they analyze American voters who believe that abortion is the single most important issue in American politics over time. Remember: before the 1980s abortion was not polarized by party.

Do not use the word “status.”

It is a poor substitution for “Honor” and “esteem.” The modern understanding of the "status" crystalized in the writings of American sociologists between 1920 and 1950.

How did people talk about "status" before then? Do we seriously propose that thing this word describes did not exist then--or that the people then living were too stupid to have noticed it?

https://x.com/aftabm95/status/1847770250651046106

This is a very interesting essay. It reminds me a bit of an old D. Brooks essay on the status anxieties of the nationally famous op-ed writer.

Such a writer might make $250k (in early aughts money), have a nationally syndicated column, and complete job security. Puts him leagues above his fellow reporters and columnists. But as a leader of his industry he meets leaders in other industries; he interacts regularly with people whose wealth grows more in a day than his does in a year. He thus starts to think of himself differently.

Aaron is very successful at what he does—successful enough to realize that he is as smart and hard working as many of the rich, powerful, and influential that he meets. He has a different reference class for high ambition.

A lot of people who have never impressed a billionaire or a high politician are crapping on his post. I don’t really think they have the right to—it is very easy to reject the temptations of a world you have never touched. Now here is the part @aaron_renn does not say, but is important to his broader lessons-learned: there are tens of thousands of “tech workers” in Silicon Valley but only a handful of Zuckerbergs; many kids at McKinsey but only a few rise as high as Buttigieg (and is that really high?).

Attempting to climb the honor hierarchies with the highest gradients is not the same thing as actually reaching their summit.

I appreciate Dario’s willingness to explicitly lay out what he foresees AGI to look like.

However, there are projections in this essay that I think are conceptually flawed—or at least very underdeveloped.

https://twitter.com/DarioAmodei/status/1844830404064288934

1. Dario spends a large portion of his essay talking about the need for a liberal-democratic political coalition to control the commanding heights of AI technology to keep this technology from authoritarian powers.

In a "mature precision strike regime" where long range missiles and drones are accurate and plentiful, the naval battle field will be divided into three broad areas:

1. The region where the land-based long-range fires of the enemy will destroy all that enters.

2. the friendly region under the cover of your own missile-aircraft-drone complex.

3. A no-man's land where neither side has the protection of land based fires.

In this sort of weapons regime, the key assets, especially in early stages of any war, will be those that can safely penetrate the enemy bubble without taking fire.

By and large that means long-range stealth aircraft and submersibles. The PLA Rocket force currently fields:

I am trying to understand if attitudes like this are downstream of video games, role playing games, or Bryan Sanderson

https://twitter.com/Andrewnsnyder/status/1841454334841651207

That is part of it but I don’t think it is the whole thing. (See next tweet)

https://x.com/CrimsonBees/status/1841493077459898455

I think this poster is correct, but not for the correct reasons.

Marx’s empirical predictions were out of date by time Lenin wrote IMPERIALISM—indeed, it is *why* Lenin had to write that book.

https://twitter.com/Astro_Eggcelent/status/1838114609481335276

Marx took the economists of his time very seriously. Very hard to imagine him not taking subsequent economic research just as seriously.

Or the sort of historical developments that caused Lenin to ”update” Marx’s ideas—and the century of developments that followed after that.

Less people should write books than do, I think.

As I see it there are five reasons to write a book, instead of something else.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1835757717228781677

1. as a grant of authority to get people to pay attention to that something else—writing the book gets you on the television, on the lecture circuit, etc.

Some of the themes of Vassily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE are subtle. Some are counterintuitive. But one reoccurring theme is the value—the superiority, even—of kindness. Explicitly and repeatedly he extols kindness as the better virtue. Better to be kind, he says, than to be good. Be kind.