I’m looking forward to this election cycle being over, but maybe it’ll just never end

I do subscribe to a kind of long term progressivism when it comes to liberty. I think in the grandest of human timeframes—centuries and millennia—it’s hard for civilizations to persist backward away from human freedom over very long stretches of time. Americans worried about an imminent backslide of liberty in this country may have legitimate cases to articulate over the course of their own lifetimes. That’s obviously important. It’s something we should continue working to address together. However, I believe our grandchildren and their children are likely to be both the most free and the most self-realized human beings this planet has ever known. A large part of that is because the ideas on the which the United States was founded, which basically come down to valuing every person and trusting them, are already out there. They’ve reached escape velocity in history. America as an idea put into practice has been done, and while I don’t want to see a world in which it has to be done again, it can be.

The idea that one can “be on the right side of history” certainly is intoxicating. It takes failure and hardship and humility to get to the other side of it.

I think a lot of people would like to opt out of certain features of our economy or society, be it Social-Security-as-Ponzi-scheme or nonstop coverage of the presidential election, but they don’t feel like they can. You can opt out of inflation though, at least with your savings vehicle. It may not prevent you from having to pay more for groceries every month, but saving in scarce assets will prevent you from having to pay more for a house with each passing year.

Tuck and Zuck? Mark Zuckerberg’s based turn has been super well-documented. How long until he’s on the Tucker Carlson show?

Alright, I just got the Damus joke. Took about six weeks.

The real price gouging is at the veterinarian’s office

The Fourth Turning is like onchain for politics. I’ll leave it at that for now, but gonna think more on it soon.

Reading the introductory part of the The Fourth Turning and some thoughts come to mind: Seasonality, the number four and circles are all primevally associated with the feminine. Linearity, triangles, the number three and dominion over nature, on the other hand, are traditionally aligned with masculinity. On paper, these things are mutually exclusive. In every day life, though, they elide. I think it's a good thing that we've got raw milk broskis paying a lot of attention to Circadian cycles of daylight alongside their testosterone levels. Some of them are sourcing their meat locally from regenerative farms and at least tangentially concerning themselves with the happiness of cows and whatnot. Insofar as they balance stereotypically♂and ♀qualities, this subculture could have some common ground with the more progressive concept of "nonbinary," if only the cultural conversation were less shrill and threatening to everyone.

Did "fiat" and "deep state" enter the popular vernacular around the same time? Hard to tell from google trends. I was thinking about how the loss of faith in institutions during a fourth turning doesn't usually get applied to shadowy intelligence institutions. Most people who talk about them at any length seem pretty convinced of their continued efficacy, despite the same people usually having zero faith in things like the education system or government in general. But maybe just having the term out there is a signal that the edifice is crumbling. Similar to how we used to just call fiat "money." Now it's just one type of money. Even if it's not the same year or two, these two terms definitely entered the mass consciousness in the same decade, which is pretty interesting.

Man even being a little bit sick is pretty dis-motivating.

Voting for a write-in candidate is paradoxical in that it often shows one cares about the issues at hand very deeply and opts out of voting at the same time. Bitcoin is similar. Many Bitcoiners know and care a lot more about the world’s financial infrastructure than the average person, but they choose to opt out of it. If you don’t feel like you have any good options this November, you could write in Bitcoin.

I wonder if, in the same way that Bitcoin’s market cap goes up every time global liquidity increases, Nostr usage will go rise in tandem with global communications censorship. Wen hypernostrization?

I chide my mom for watching the “local” (conglomerately-owned) nightly news and self-administering a regular dose of panic, but X and certainly Instagram or any other platforms further down the centralization spectrum are just Millenial and Gen Z versions of the same thing. Still useful, but only up to a certain point.

Language with a low density of meaning hits its bottom when someone’s about to fight and they just repeat the same battle cry over and over.

“You don’t need a majority, you just need an alternative.” Most encouraging idea I’ve encountered this week courtesy of Michael Malice.

Interesting how Chamath's "primary law of capitalism," in which companies compete out excess return, doesn't apply to money, even if people expect it to do so. When a money succeeds because it's the most accepted and desired store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, its competitors don't get to eat away at the edges of its success, at least not for the long run. In fact, the opposite is true: it eats its competitors. Digital currencies are interesting because some of them function like companies and some effectively ARE companies, so people instinctively come think of them in terms of Chamath's law. (I have no idea if he came up with this, but I've heard him talk about it on All-In enough to just call it that.) People confuse buying ETH or SOL instead of BTC as some kind of parallel to AMD or Groq or Apple absorbing some of Nvidia's margins over the long haul, which is likely to happen. But it's not. What's unlikely to happen is anything outcompeting BTC on the money front. Instead, any pretense ETH had to being money is just getting obliterated by BTC with each passing day, each passing catalyst in either direction price-wise. There's no competition to the point that ETH has a chronic narrative problem, SOL is just acknowledged as gambling on memes and everything else is, well, everything else.

It does feel different here.

N The first American chess congress

Hey Nostr - let’s decentralize social media! Very excited to join