The constitution, the Bible, works of stoicism, Austrian economics, they are all just maps, provisional (and often useful), but not the territory. Once you familiarize yourself with the actual terrain, you might glance at the map as needed to re-orient yourself, but mostly it’s folded and put away.

Relatedly my friend posted this on other social media I’m not on (wife sent it to me):

Too many established facts unaccounted for by the official narratives. Too many demonstrable lies. The conspiracy theorists might sometimes be wrong in the specifics, but they are 100 right to question the transparently bad explanations we’ve been given. My question was whether this questioning itself has now become something to exploit on purpose, that crumbs are dropped, falsehoods allowed by design. View quoted note →

I'm getting a bit of conspiracy theory fatigue. Every major event like this JFK/9/11/Vegas shooting/Trump assassination attempt/Kirk assassination just has endless loose ends, unanswered questions, unexplained facts. It’s almost like a huge part of the psyop is to make everyone waste their time becoming online detectives. It’s like fucking Wordle for critical thinkers. New puzzle every few months.

I run around the track 3x per week now, only two miles each, slow pace. Every lap is miserable, but it’s the kind of misery you cannot get from sitting in front of a computer screen. You are lucky if you are willing to experience that misery.

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.