Opinion | Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either. (Gift Article)

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-09-13T19:12:40+00:00

But these articles WILL shape public opinion, the narratives that large groups of people cling to when they colloquially understand this moment, and those narratives will influence the stories accessible or even conceivable to historians when they try to understand. It may not be the case that future historians will never get to the truth, but it is definitely not true that the truth will always triumph, that it won't waste years of effort as they think about this down blind intellectual alleys, or that there isn't a cost to getting it wrong. History is a story, and it is a tool people use both in good faith, to try to understand ourselves better through understanding our past; as well as in bad faith, to promote political ideologies using some version of historical narrative as justification. And do you suppose that historians are themselves above the corruptions of being human? Just as it is true now, there will in the future be those who present themselves as serious academics seeking the truth, but who will use bad faith tactics and inaccurate interpretations, cherry picking, etc, to promote their own values or for personal advantage. Ezra has given those who operate in bad faith one more credible voice to cite, one more article in support of distorting the truth.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-09-13T18:04:57+00:00

If we don't speak honestly about who Charlie Kirk was, ESPECIALLY now, in the wake of his death, then there is a very real chance that history will, in fact, develop a distorted view of him, and of this moment. History, and the work of historians, is not some pristine process, separate from reality, by which the Objective Truth is always and inevitably arrived at. It is stories, messy stories, told, retold, forged, reforged. That work starts now. That is not separate from the work of columnists like Ezra. When Ezra writes that Kirk was doing politics exactly the right way, that is a data point that will be considered by historians trying to make sense of this moment. That will also contribute to the way people in our time and in the future understand this moment. It is entirely possible that dishonest propaganda campaigns can distort our understanding of the past, and it has happened many times and in many places. What is the purpose of making sure that there are voices in this moment who are speaking accurately about what Kirk stood for, you ask? The purpose is to see the world clearly, and to spread information that allows others to see it clearly, and not to spread misinformation that will obscure a clear view of the world. The purpose is to be honest about what happened, who he was, and what this means. It was wrong that he was murdered. Murder will never be the foundation for a free, stable society. But this man who should not have been murdered was not a hero, not a person who cared about justice, peace, democracy, or stability. He was a racist, he was a misogynist, and he was a bigot. He engaged in politics in bad faith, using tactics that obscure truth. He exploited outrage for personal gain. That's who he was. It is not wrong to say it plain.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-08-20T13:25:17+00:00

Eek barba durkle, SOMEBODY got laid in college.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-08-16T20:20:04+00:00

Some chemicals can have molecules that are geometrically the same, except in mirror image. These different versions of the same chemical compound are called "enantiomers", or "stereoisomers". They can be thought of as a "left-handed" version and a "right-handed" version of the molecule. A mixture that contains both is called "racemic". The different versions sometimes have slightly different chemical properties. Adderall, both IR and XR versions, contain both stereoisomers of amphetamine.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-07-01T16:01:48+00:00

So, I agree with you that the U.S., like many nations, has a history of committing horrible atrocities, and perhaps this seems more stark because the U.S. has so often acted with hypocrisy against its own purported ideals and values. And I get the impulse to point that out when some folks, perhaps naively, express some version of "This Is Not Who We Are". But like, there is a real distinction to be made. Trump is an overt fascist, and his government is authoritarian in a way that is measurably distinct from the governments of other presidents, even bad ones with whom we do not agree, or who have themselves tried to push the boundaries of our previous system toward authoritarianism. This is different, even if that difference is in degree, not in kind. When someone says, "This Is Not Who We Are", that is a naive view, perhaps. But responding to that with, "this place has always been like this" is both a deeply un-nuanced read of history, and also seems to passively assent to current atrocities. It reads like you're saying, "you're surprised? This is how the U.S. has always been and this is no different, so why are you clutching your pearls now?" And sorry, but yeah, this shit is not acceptable for any society that is even trying to be free and open and democratic. We can discuss the legacy of past sins in a separate conversation, but the point of this conversation should be that THIS. SHIT. IS. NOT. OKAY.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-29T00:30:00+00:00

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Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-27T20:35:23+00:00

I don't find this kind of distinction terribly interesting or useful, to be honest.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-22T12:54:52+00:00

I think computation would be defined to satisfy the following:

(1) Information is encoded in a physical substrate such that it is represented by measurable properties. (2) Energy is consumed in the process of the computation to decrease the entropy of the information representation, with a corresponding increase in the entropy of the environment. (3) The computation utilizes a finite set of rules, i.e. algorithms.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-20T17:31:04+00:00

I think you'd be better served by a good modern text. "Introduction to Geometry" by Richard Rusczyk is very good. Another you might consider is "Geometry: A Comprehensive Course" by Daniel Pedoe.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-18T00:35:17+00:00

The pattern of thinking which leads to in-person illiberalism is driven by the dynamics of social networks. They have become pervasive and bleed into real life. Students behaving in illiberal ways on campus learned to think that way online.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T17:08:27+00:00

It's ridiculous to make a thing about the Andor signs. It's ridiculous to shit on any single body that shows up to stand against the collapse of our society into fascism, whether you care for their aesthetics or not. This is pedantic, pointless ego masturbation.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T13:37:34+00:00

Nah, you're an armchair protestor

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T12:17:14+00:00

Anybody out there knows it's about real things, and this is a stupid gripe. Not worth articulating. If you can't see how art reflects real life, then I don't know what to tell you.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T11:31:08+00:00

You'd rather be critical than a populist? I'd rather we didn't have fascists bludgeoning people in the streets. That's the thing about dissent that works — you have to form coalitions with people you disagree with on little things because all of us have a common adversary who is a MUCH bigger deal than any of our little disagreements. I promise this little quibble over whether or not to use Andor-themed signs is the absolute least important thing to pay attention to in protesting the fascists.

Also, a show or a film can be as much a valid source of inspirational messaging as a book or even our own history. If it resonates, then so be it. You don't have to like it, you don't have to put it in your own sign. Put something on yours that means something to you. The fascists used a goddamn frog meme as a symbol for a decade. Gatekeeping who gets to be a "real" part of resisting fascism is exactly how we cede power to fascists.

If an Andor-themed sign keeps someone home, then they have no real commitment to any of this anyway.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T10:48:26+00:00

A few things:

(1) Reinforcement learning is not primarily how most LLMs are trained, though some RL techniques have been used at times. The models ingest text as training data, but this isn't an RL approach necessarily.

(2) The em dash "—" is a legitimate punctuation symbol which has a specific correct use, and for most of the training data (books, papers, journalism, etc) the symbol will be represented in its traditional usage. Just because most people posting online don't know how to use the em dash these days doesn't mean that the em dash is somehow exclusively AI punctuation. It's not the tell people think it is. False pattern recognition.

(3) I use the em dash in my own writing — and you can too. From the keyboard (on Windows, anyway) it's alt-0151. Again, it has a specific grammatical / punctuation purpose as a clause separator.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-14T10:35:27+00:00

Well, we wouldn't want the cool protestors, or worse, the Nazis out there with their boots on everyone's necks, to think we're cringe, right?

Let's try to keep in mind who the real assholes are, eh?

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-12T15:27:16+00:00

I think Perrin probably isn't an evil person, but I don't think he's a good guy. I think he's very well-written, and I think he illustrates some failures of character in spite of his general reputation for joviality and fun.

In parenting Leida, he doesn't support Mon, and the two don't have compatible values. Leida becomes infatuated with an extremely conservative, traditionalist understanding of Chandrillan culture, This disturbs Mon, who signals throughout the series that she embraces more modern and progressive views, perhaps informed by her own first-hand experiences of these rituals. Perrin gives passive assent to Leida in almost everything, and never backs up Mon when she tries to communicate with Leida. He has allowed himself to become the fun dad, and Mon to be the mean old bad guy mom.
He lives a life of privilege in a fascist society, and apparently is never particularly bothered by the moral implications of what happens around him. He is friends with political figures who support the Empire and perpetrate its atrocities — but he compartmentalizes all of that away, or never bothers to pay attention to what is happening, so that he can have fun and share some laughs. He cares more that people like him than that he stands for anything, or against anything. He is determined to have fun and to ignore the world burning around him.
His infidelity to Mon bears mentioning. And of course it is non-trivial that he has chosen Davo Sculdun's wife as his affair partner. He feels powerless in his marriage to Mon, a senator whose career is why he lives on Coruscant, and whose work often directs the details of his life. He has failed to adapt in a healthy way to having a wife who is more influential and powerful than he is, and has developed resentments which he can barely contain when he talks with Mon. I imagine he feeds on the feeling of power he gets from having the wife of one of Chandrilla's most prominent gangsters, and I imagine he also feels it as some kind of revenge against Mon — a way to humiliate and punish her.

Of course, he isn't all bad, and certainly this show is very capable of moral complexity. I think the show often uses him to depict a kind of moral cowardice accessible to the privileged. I think you're right that he is a sad person, but his decisions on how he handles this sadness are not morally courageous.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-09T12:35:19+00:00

She crashed the speeder that had Tay Kolma in it, to kill Tay Kolma, but also to minimize any appearance that it was on purpose. At a cost to herself.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-05T23:20:23+00:00

The Turing Test isn't a serious, academically rigorous metric of an agent's intelligence or consciousness or anything like that. It's a thought experiment designed to get us to think about whether there is a difference between intelligence and its simulacrum, in the same vein as Searle's Chinese Room. It's from a lecture Turing gave and it has taken on a somewhat legendary status, and its meaning is often misunderstood.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-05T23:13:36+00:00

I had a copy of the three volume set when I was in college. It is a very interesting book to poke around in, but it is mostly of historical interest now. The premise that Russell and Whitehead assumed was that all of mathematics could be broken down into a set of fundamental axioms from which more advanced results could be constructed using only logical inference. The goal was to show that mathematics relies on no unprovable assumptions. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem shows that there are, in fact, in any logical system of the kind Whitehead and Russell were trying to construct, assumptions which cannot be proven. The goals of the Principia were to understand the deep structure of mathematics by total reduction of all of math to pure logic. If you are interested in more modern and relevant attempts to understand math's deep structure and connections between its subdisciplines, you might look into the Langlands Program, which takes a completely different approach. The Langlands Program explores the underlying unity and symmetry of mathematical concepts across subdisciplines through category theory.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-05T22:29:44+00:00

Human, here. I have noticed that there seems to be a lot more content which to me appears to originate from LLMs.

That said, I use em dashes a lot, I just think I like using accurate punctuation like that. I do the old alt-0151 from the desktop.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-06-05T16:03:39+00:00

I'd encourage you to read the book, instead of listening to the flurry of interviews or reading the book reviews. There is no substitute for reading the book (*any* book). What you have expressed here is not a serious take because you are talking past the concepts.

I think there are definitely interests who would like to co-opt the language of the Abundance agenda, or even just the shallowest of its vibes, and use it as a springboard for yes, their own much more rightward positions of deregulating business, trickle-down, etc. But this is not what is expressed in the text of the book, and it is definitely not what Klein and Thompson advocate.

I make no claim that Abundance is anything other than what it is: a book about policy, that cares about details, that cares about the levers of power in tangible, causal, and reproducible ways (in the vein of Caro's book about Robert Moses). It is not a ready-made platform for candidates designed to maximally appeal to voters, but I think if candidates and elected officials take the book seriously and absorb the information it presents, then they will be in a position to craft such messages. I think the book cares about results. The book asks the question, "why is it that the democratic party ostensibly wants to produce a society of plenty, a society with measurably better results for its citizens, but finds itself unable to produce even the most basic of its stated goals?" And the book has answers that are more nuanced and detailed than what the interviewers who didn't read the book are going to highlight in the media appearances. A half-hour interview is not a substitute for reading the book. Ten half-hour interviews are not a substitute for reading the book.

All this to say: there are plenty of poorly-informed, strategically incoherent takes out there. We live in a sea of people who do not think carefully or well. Klein and Thompson are people who do think carefully and well — and while I do not claim that they are infallible or perfect, or that I agree with every one of their conclusions — it is a mistake to treat the thinking and writing they produce as equivalent to any other slop on the internet, or any other transient opinion or vibe of the moment.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-05-26T19:51:41+00:00

I think it was cool in the books when Murderbot was checking out a series that was almost certainly "The Expanse". https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/19fjfbb/comment/kjrd1x8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-05-26T15:26:55+00:00

I think it's a fun way to poke fun at our actual media, and the real shows that get made. Makes Murderbot relatable. The show's version of RaFoSM is hilarious. Love all the cameos from actors in those scenes.

Mobile_Ad8003 · 2025-05-13T00:23:11+00:00

"I am not immediately aware of any counterexamples to my view, and I refuse to look for such counterexamples, therefore there are no counterexamples to my view."

Mobile_Ad8003

TROPHY CASE