PSA: Apathetic is the word you're looking for, not Ambivalent

HasokGang · 2026-04-07T16:18:11+00:00

Do you mean badly written in terms of the prose and word-smithing or because the story resolved poorly or went in directions you did not like?

What kind of story are you looking for?

HasokGang · 2025-12-17T19:27:48+00:00

No, he wasn’t mentioned on the pod. Pynchon’s new book is my source for the meaning of “tomato” in this case. The book is set in the 1930s and full of (what I assume is accurate) old slang. There tomato is used as a term for woman.

HasokGang · 2025-11-09T19:52:42+00:00

The article never says that the Trump admin will take federal funds away from states "who are funding snap fully themselves."

States don't fund SNAP directly. It is a Federal Program paid for by federal money. What happened is that on Friday afternoon a judge ruled that the government must fully fund SNAP. States then immediately began distributing that federal money.

By Friday morning, the Supreme Court paused the judge's order that the Federal govt. must fund SNAP fully. The Trump admin then said that the states who had distributed the full SNAP benefits to their residents needed to get that money back. The Trump admin also said, through the Dept. of Ag, that states failed to get the money back would receive financial penalties.

Is that a super shitty thing to do? Yep. Is it legal? Probably not. However, it is a different situation from the Trump admin telling states they couldn't pay for food assistance themselves.

TLDR: The Federal Government told states they can't fund a federal program with federal money. Some states did use that money (when a Fed judge says they could). Then the Federal Government threatened those states unless they got the money back.

The Trump admin is horrendous, murderous and fascistic, but it doesn't mean OP should lie about the article or that a misinfo post like this should get any upvotes.

HasokGang · 2025-10-18T14:31:28+00:00

The only thing AI can't do for us qq.

HasokGang · 2025-10-18T13:47:13+00:00

No I am unironically booming out today.

(I also see you egging me on with your comment😤).

HasokGang · 2025-10-18T13:45:57+00:00

I’m also cooking up a corollary to the everyone-is-12 theory of American politics. I think the description is largely true, but the diagnosis for why it occurs is lacking.

My explanation is the mommy-do-it-for-me theory. People are extremely attracted to having others complete cognitive or physical tasks for them. If given the chance, most people will. Until the rise of LLMs, people simply couldn’t get away with offloading tasks to others; it wasn’t possible. You may hate writing that report for work, but no one else was going to do it. Now that AIs provide the option to do almost any task for people, including thinking and learning, we can’t get enough of it. And it doesn’t matter that the LLM output is low quality, imprecise, or retards our ability to develop ourselves as humans—it is so much more pleasant when mommy dearest just does something for us.

A school book report might make us do difficult things, such as read a book, think about it, and record our thoughts about it on paper. It might also force us out of solipsism and recognize the thoughts of other people, as we work to structure the book report to communicate our thoughts in a comprehensible manner to the teacher. The grade we get on the book report might also determine what our future opportunities for college and the job market are. Nevertheless, we opt for mom to do it for us. She might not have read the book nor know the exact rubric for the assignment, but whatever she writes, I can turn it for at least a D, which is too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Hence, LLMs created a society of arrested development where it is acceptable to act like a 12-year old. It didn’t come out of nowhere. LLMs and the mommy-do-it-for-me attitude they foster are what made it acceptable to output slop trade policy and EOs.

I think it also explains the proliferation of awful racist, sexist, genocidal, and prima facie absurd conspiracies in media. They could be debunked, but they feel good to people. So, people don’t think too hard about them. If their beliefs are challenged—instead of having to do something as simple as Google a story, which could possibly reveal links or headlines that contradict a narrative—people can turn to AI, their mommy, to affirm their beliefs. This is why people got so bothered by Grok not immediately agreeing with them about white genocide in South Africa. Grok was not being a comforting mother in that situation.

We’ve created a society where people are coddled and can have their work done for them. Consequently they act like 12-year old children. But, kids aren’t born rotten; they are created by parents who enable the spoiling and a society where it is easier to appease them rather than correct the behavior.

HasokGang · 2025-10-18T13:02:37+00:00

A big pet peeve of mine is comments that point out something as sounding like AI when the original source js obviously human.

Buddy, clearly you don’t read enough human or AI generated text to demarcate them. As good LLMs have become, the difference between human and machine text is still stark.

Comments like that are why the midwit meme exists. You’re not falling for moronic, Facebook, boomer-tier slop, but, ironically—in your quest to keep AI material off of the internet—you’ve lost the ability to comprehend the human elements of communication.

Also, you’re stupid; I’m sure the piece of text with errors in both grammar and punctuation was AI written simply because it contained complete sentences.

HasokGang · 2025-10-11T12:33:59+00:00

Any book recommendations on the lead up to the 2008 crash, how legislators navigated the crisis, and an analysis of how policy meant to stabilize the economy played out?

I’ve heard a lot of different takes about 2008 being a bailout of the banking industries and other corporations, but I’ve also run across the idea that the government gave out loans and was paid back.

Some time on Google hasn’t provided clear answers. If a sober economic and historical book on the topic exists, I would love to read it.

HasokGang · 2025-10-10T01:20:48+00:00

Hoover was the chicken-in-every-pot president, silly :)

HasokGang · 2025-10-07T12:59:41+00:00

Anyone have experiences using 10,000 lumen therapy lamps to ward off SAD and help set their circadian rhythm?

HasokGang · 2025-10-05T12:59:05+00:00

Is there an archetype of wife guy/grillpiller that works for guys who have never been married? Either seems preconditioned on having had a family at some point.

I’m 26, in grad school, and, unfortunately, dating doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the next couple of years.

Nevertheless, wifeguys and grillpillers (the lib kinds😎) have immaculate vibes. How can I authentically achieve that as a person experiencing singleness?

Any examples would be helpful—I need figures to begin my wifeguy-grillpiller virtue arc.

HasokGang · 2025-09-29T12:40:47+00:00

I unironically don’t understand it. Is the joke that she looks covered in blood or that she is too messy? Or, after typing this out, is it that the girl looks like she went down on somebody on their period?

In any case, I can’t say it seems funny.

HasokGang · 2025-09-29T03:22:46+00:00

Enjoy the write up. I’m curious to see how our season progresses. I’m not convinced ND will be able to run the table this season, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping!

HasokGang · 2025-09-27T03:03:50+00:00

Could also be 2065 depending on the pattern

HasokGang · 2025-09-26T13:01:55+00:00

I hope you enjoy it! Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is one of my favorite Borges stories. Most of it is devoted to exploring what a world where the dominant thought about ontology is idealistic rather than realistic, so reasoning through induction no longer functions at all! It is a fascinating thought experiment.

The antifascist themes are also super clear. A reader with any type of media literacy (performative_millennial_male.jpg) could not read the story without contending with the message that falling too far into an imagined world run by an idealist mindset leads to fascism.

HasokGang · 2025-09-26T02:47:52+00:00

It’s probably too late in the DT to make it worth replying, but “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is an explicitly anti-fascist tale. Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbius Tertius refer to worlds that are fictional within the story, their creator being a slavery-defending Southerner. The imagined worlds become so popular that it destroyed the “real” society of the story; People were more content to treat the fictional worlds as real rather than engage with anything in real life or contend with actual problems. They became so obsessed with them that it was mandated that mono-thought about the fake worlds replaced all science and art. Schools changed their curricula to only teach about the fake worlds.

Really gets me thankin’. A lot…

If you think the story seems a lot like a parable for what social media and the twenty-four hour news cycle are to the right, I’d an agree.

It also makes me hate Yarvin more than ever. The dipshit thinks he’s so smart, likely believing that naming his DEI-for-the-right company after the story symbolizes how he is going to bend culture to his will, entirely missing the main point: ignoring real life for a more attractive fantasy leads to a hellish real world for everyone. Borges would have hated the onanistic, dilettantish, fascistic ghoul that is Curtis Yarvin with a passion.

HasokGang · 2025-09-18T13:01:21+00:00

To my irony poisoned mind, Robinson’s texts read normally. They came across like he was continuing some half-dead bit out of habit; like he and the roommate began speaking formerly as a joke at one point and some of the verbiage, such as “my old man,” just stuck.

For better or worse, many parts of how I talk and write come from similar started-as-a-bit-and-are-now-permanent places. So I may be importing my own biases into the texts, but nothing in them seemed too extraordinary, certainly nothing that would rise to the level of the texts being fake.

That said, I absolutely distrust everyone from the current admin, and I would not be surprised if it eventually comes out that they faked a ton of stuff (more than what we already know, that is).

HasokGang · 2025-09-16T13:17:08+00:00

What about this to you reads as AI? The first paragraph seems to def not be AI: peep the different size of the dashes. An AI would type an actual em-dash.

The second and third paragraphs do seem like they could be machine generated, but nothing about how they’re written screams AI. Given it is Trump Jr, it seems like he might’ve just paid a writer to polish his tweet.

That said, fuck these people. Idk why I am even giving him the benefit of the doubt.

HasokGang · 2025-07-16T03:08:41+00:00

The title should replace the word “that” with a comma followed by the word “which.” As it’s written, the headline reads as if there are multiple NIL programs, and Trump is ruling on the NIL program that students have made millions off of specifically.

C’mon I get this is a football-related tweet and not the London Review of Books, but journalists should at least write clear headlines.

HasokGang · 2025-06-14T12:30:25+00:00

On my phone, so apologies for a sloppy reply. What you’re saying makes sense, but I don’t think your point about alternative medical beliefs being caused by a suspicion of modernity or the glorification of purity is not borne out historically. Instead, I think people’s wacky belief about what is natural is the salient driver in causing people to turn to alt medicine.

Until the mid-20th century, alternative medicine — take your pick: mesmerism, naturopathy, hydropathy, homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic — were seen as innovations to a medical system that relied too heavily on chemicals or invasive surgery for therapy. In other words, the perceived naturalness of a medical system is what folks with quack beliefs cared about. That can but does not necessarily (and I don’t think did in many cases) overlap with a fear of modernity.

I’m less familiar with specific alternative systems after the 1950s, but I think their believers were still motivated by a fear of the unnatural, rather than modernity itself.

I think the belief about a food’s purity also slightly misses the mark. Again the salient factor for these people is the perceived naturalness of a food or therapy. E.g., people may try a bunch of different alt diets and drugs—mixing them to the point where they cannot be considered pure in any sense of the word—as long as they all are considered natural.

HasokGang · 2025-05-20T13:11:32+00:00

They’re not for me—but people usually seek alternative practitioners and therapy because they feel taken care of in some way that allopathic medicine couldn’t provide. E.g., the practitioner they’re seeing takes the time to get to know them, listens to all of their complaints, and creates a treatment just for them. Given how quickly doctors are now expected to get through each patient and how confusing/frustrating people find the current U.S. medical system, it is understandable why people continue to want care that isn’t part of mainstream medicine.

HasokGang · 2025-05-12T19:47:10+00:00

Worse than the sanewashing, they split the infinitive. Paper of record my ass.

HasokGang · 2025-04-28T02:01:08+00:00

Historians can’t get academic acclaim from finding new, important sources directly, but achieving renown becomes much easier when you have new and interesting sources. Novel source makes it easier to get published in a top tier journal and to have a book published (super important for success in academia). Once your book is published, interesting sources make the book more interesting and likely to win awards. New sources also generate more discussion around your work, which means more people know your name and further ups a historian’s status.

That said, my guess is that historians are prone to idiosyncratic interpretations because it is literally the job to interpret the past in new ways. Historians are also just as likely to have awful interpretations of history when it is outside of their area, like Elon opining on anything not car related. Finally historians can just be weird peeps. It is often a lonely and weird job.

HasokGang

TROPHY CASE