One thing you discover when you have no job and can more or less do whatever you want is what you most want is to do what life requires, and that entails making peace with situations you used to avoid when you had someone else (or customers) dictating what to do. The irony is you are *more* bound by things than before, but because that bond is voluntary rather than coerced your goal is to appreciate its terms rather than to get it over with so you can do something else more pleasant.

Most of the political violence in recent years has come from the left, but I think that’s more due to ideological capture than anything inherent about left vs right. Because the left captured all the institutions — tech, media, academia — people on the left were able to live in a bubble. They were able to avoid the unpleasant cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering opposing viewpoints. It was like being in a very large cult. When this persists for long enough, it’s easy to become a fundamentalist of sorts, someone who views contrary viewpoints not just as incorrect but evil. It’s easy to see how this would happen — as your worldview gets ever more affirmed, it becomes ever-more painful to have it exposed to contradictions and internal incoherence. People on the right the last few decades were constantly told they were bad and wrong by the media. It was almost impossible for them to live in a bubble. When you don’t live in a bubble, you are exposed to cognitive dissonance all the time, and you have less absolutism and fundamentalism. Less existential dread when someone disagrees with you, more rigor in formulating your worldview. What the right should not want is to swap places with the left where their views become fundamentalism, dissent from them is verboten and their side gets radicalized when challenged. Free speech you disagree with has to be protected no matter what. Unfortunately, I think it’s just the nature of power that it corrupts, and when the right re-takes it (they have in the US, but not entirely as the institutions are still very much leftist), they’ll probably do stupid shit like outlaw mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination as “hate speech” or outlaw flag burning.

Excerpt from Week 2 Observations:

Week 2 Observations

Could Be Worse

Text exchange with a not-very-online friend:

When a saint feeds the poor, it’s not because he’s trying to do “good” but because it doesn’t cost him anything — he’s already paid the cost. Unlike regular people, he’s got nothing “better” to do.

Predicing/putting money on what will happen in the NFL is subjecting your personal beliefs, narratives and ideas to the harsh test of reality. Much harder to delude yourself when you are forced to part with your funds. It’s good practice for real life.

I suspect a lot of the most vitriolic anons online are compliant pussies IRL.

I’ve purposely checked out on the Core vs Knots argument. Like I see snippets of it all the time in my feed, but haven’t bothered to understand what’s actually at stake, some vague notions about spam vs censorship is all I took away from it. Is this worth my attention or not?

Was in Lausanne, Switzerland a month ago — a lot of beautiful parts of that city, but some ugly ones. Rode the metro, lots of young attractive people on it, but was an immigrant guy, passed out in his own piss, and the stench wafted into several cars. All the “good” Eurolibs were just tolerating this, like it’s perfectly normal to have one person stinking up three cars at 6 pm on a summer evening. There need to be standards for society, and the liberals have failed to live up to them. The cities are more dangerous, less clean and ill-functioning. They tolerate things that decent adults should not tolerate, and the extreme case of this is the murder of Iryna Zarutska (even if I think there’s something about that that doesn’t quite add up.) On the other hand, this is NOT the same thing as saying, Muslims, Africans and others are inherently unable to live in Western societies — plainly many are, and reverting to lazy heuristics because you are scared is also misguided and cowardly. I’ve been to dozens of cities the last few years, walked through some sketchy neighborhoods, and it’s not as bad as it’s made out to be online by terrified poasters. It should be much better, obviously, there should never be a time you’re walking through a modern, Western civiliation and feel ill at ease, but it’s not that scary. Incidentally San Francisco in what wasn’t a sketch neighborhood was the worst, insane people screaming, ranting and drugged out of their minds. Liberals tolerate way too much, basically too cowardly with too much confused empathy for the wrong people, and reactionaries too cowardly and stupid to address the actual problem which is the lowering of standards and pity-based liberal racism that ignores reality. This is not to say that nefarious billionaires don’t prey on misplaced liberal empathy and enact these policies on purpose (they probably are) and it’s not to say that there are not nefarious factions pushing a reversion to old school racism to divide the populace and keep them focused on anything but the kleptocracy at the top (probably the case too.) It’s just that there are solutions to these problems that require courage to say something and higher standards while at the same time uniting people, irrespective of disparate ancestry, against the narrow self-serving agendas of the few.

If you want to see true evil, observe the way people behave when they are most convinced of their righteousness. This is exactly what happened to the left. They were sure Trump and Charlie Kirk and all the people who disagreed with them were nazis. Guard against making the same mistake.

The reverse cancel culture going on for the people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination is really fascinating to me. The liberals being cancelled are so used to being on “Team Good” they can’t believe what they’re saying is subject to consequences. That’s only for racists and anti-vaxxers. At least when I was posting about covid, I KNEW I was saying something with which sycophantic pearl-clutchers and virtue signalers would probably take issue. Feels like these clowns have policed the cultural discourse for so long they're totally blindsided. Getting canned from their jobs left and right, didn’t see it coming at all. I don’t know if this is a good thing — yes, these people would cancel you in a heartbeat for expressing even the mildest dissent regarding evil totalitarian policies, and yes it’s classless and vile to celebrate the death of someone who engaged in peaceful discourse just because you don’t like his view, but losing your livelihood for making a stupid and classless post is draconian. They too are just engaging in speech we don’t like. They didn’t shoot Charlie Kirk. On the other hand, it’s hard not to have some schadenfreude seeing the intolerant subjected to their own medicine. As I said I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but it might be necessary. More just a fascinating thing because unlike people who dissented during covid and knew the compliant mob was coming, seems like these idiots hadn’t the faintest clue.

The purpose of life is to experience suffering to its essence, and in that essence discover peace. But most people are taught suffering is something you have to minimize to the greatest extent possible in the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment. The problem is that just leads to more suffering and no peace.

Wife's liberal friend posted on Facebook a long “thoughtful piece” about how of course it’s tragic, and of course she has empathy, but basically Charlie Kirk got what was coming from his incendiary rhetoric. It’s like she got the requisite platitudes out of the way, and then justified his murder because she really really really disagreed with him.

If you wanted to be like Warren Buffett, would you just buy all the stocks in Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio or would you rigorously research prospectuses and markets for decades until you had a deep understanding? If you wanted to be like Michael Jordan would you learn his particular moves, shave your head and stick your tongue out while driving to the basket, or would you channel insatiable competitiveness into unfathomable devotion to playing winning basketball in your own style? If you wanted to be like Jesus, would you become a Christian and read the Bible, or would you manifest as God incarnate and tell the truth no matter how badly you were treated for doing so?

28 Days Later was a documentary

New Podcast: Big pharma on trial, assassination, murder and chaos.