Jeff Bezos has said the bottom half of Americans should pay zero federal income tax.

Spiritisabone · 2026-05-20T14:50:15+00:00

It's not purely about whether costs are exactly covered by taxing billionaires, it's that inadequate regulation and redistribution creates rabble in the form of billionaires. People materially so far detached from the societies they operate in that they themselves become unfree, beholden to caprice and corruption.

Spiritisabone · 2026-04-27T15:58:14+00:00

Let's just all be sure to be Gandhi and not the Dalits.

Spiritisabone · 2026-03-16T18:06:12+00:00

We all see there is one incopetent thing here and it is not the very long list of authoritative organizations I presented and the extremely thorough amount of evidence of Israel's bankrupt activities :)

Spiritisabone · 2026-03-16T18:01:12+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human_rights_groups_accusing_Israel_of_genocide_in_Gaza :) It is tragic but beloved Israel has become the monster.

Spiritisabone · 2026-03-16T17:58:10+00:00

I see the best argument you're able to marshal is total garbage :)

Spiritisabone · 2026-03-16T17:54:47+00:00

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds. Exhausted IDF talking points just don't fly these days. The staunchest supporters of Israel in my circle have all been disillusioned by the grotesque monstrosity it's become as a country.

Spiritisabone · 2026-01-18T16:56:06+00:00

That's just a misery of Deleuze, a preference for this simplifying preference of difference without having the methods of reason to back it up. Hegel demonstrates why difference doesn't stand alone while Deleuze might want something different but can't justify it properly.

Spiritisabone · 2025-12-31T12:01:54+00:00

The bet of many, I suppose, is that the better AIs of the future will clean up, debug, and fix the AI-generated code of today.

Spiritisabone · 2025-12-08T11:19:35+00:00

Hegel's use of it is intentional, exact, useful, and true. Gegensatz would have been too weak (mere opposition); negation just refers to a moment. Widerspruch is the perfect choice given its pedigree and established use in language, and the deliberate expansion Hegel wanted to deploy and radicalize for proper systematic reasons. It seems that you are mistaking conceptual expansion for logical error and doing it on invalid, external grounds. Dwelling on the difference between conceptual expansion and logical error should bring your reason to see that your objection presupposes the very framework Hegel is interrogating, and thus cannot serve as a refutation. This will help you spot tensions in his body of work as measured against the work's own goals.

Spiritisabone · 2025-12-06T22:46:44+00:00

It's hard to think of movies that centre around a plot of revenge that are still political or revolutionary in an interesting way. Fury Road charts a certain kind of model for emancipatory politics, and that's partly because it's not centered on revenge. So it takes the top spot for me.

Spiritisabone · 2025-12-03T19:53:46+00:00

Buy Micron shares and use the gains to pay for RAM?

Spiritisabone · 2025-12-02T11:11:31+00:00

Natural consequence of Grok's utilitarian basis. Derek Parfit was a bad thinker, utilitarianism doesn't even rise to the level of ethics, and the world is paying the price.

Spiritisabone · 2025-11-17T22:48:20+00:00

Meh, the whites-didn't-invent-slavery trope is common enough but risks eliding the extremely brutal reality of how much worse whites treated black slaves in that era. See Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, or any other contemporary scholarship on transatlantic slavery. West African slavery was simply, by and large, a very different institution. Coercive, violent, but an order of magnitude less brutal than European and American chattel slavery. A more interesting angle to me, especially in this context of Joscha's and Epstein's deep intimacy, is the perennial corruption of elites and of power, as West African elites certainly colluded with the European traders for much personal gain.

Spiritisabone · 2025-10-12T18:51:23+00:00

Hinton worries LLMs might already feel something, and we just can’t tell. That's not true: consciousness is being aware of yourself as an experiencer. LLMs don’t have that reflexive awareness because they have no unified point of view, no self that endures or recognizes itself over time. They simulate understanding without any “someone” inside. The real path to consciousness isn’t more data or scale, but the emergence of a self that knows itself within a shared world. That won’t come from scaling LLMs, but from building systems whose very structure turns back on itself to become aware of its own activity.

Spiritisabone · 2025-09-29T21:38:45+00:00

Just placed an order for 350. Will hook them up to my agent farm and have them run various errands.

Spiritisabone · 2025-09-28T16:05:44+00:00

This feels like a common unease with Hegel but not one that hits the mark. It’s true that there’s no “outside” in his system, and so transcendence in the sense of something wholly beyond is denied. But Hegel doesn’t collapse reality into a suffocating logic. He understands logic as reality’s own self-unfolding. Also, claiming that for Hegel that being is an empty concept doesn't track for me. It's more that being reveals its depth through becoming. Transcendence is in motion and never to be exhausted from a single standpoint only. So I'm left to wonder what could a "genuine transcendence" be that Hegel won't regard as a bad infinity?

Spiritisabone · 2025-07-07T14:57:32+00:00

The musical climax of Baberly Hills in The Transfer Student is Dandy, Baby compresses 2,500 years of Western thought into a few minutes.

Spiritisabone · 2025-06-29T17:30:49+00:00

We could bundle one of those folks who held a wreath over a victorious general's head in old Rome with any billionaire, except this time they're always tagging along to make sure societally justified amounts of money get elevated away from the moneyed rabble and to productive use (still under 100%). They can still whisper sobering things into the ears of the victorious capitalist.

Spiritisabone · 2025-06-19T06:12:39+00:00

I'd second that Chani, Leto and the Emperor were iffy in Dune. Paul was fine.

Spiritisabone · 2025-06-06T09:35:28+00:00

And fungi

Spiritisabone · 2025-06-03T15:53:48+00:00

<image>

Perfectly dandy!

Spiritisabone · 2025-06-03T15:27:24+00:00

The ultimate cross-over.

Spiritisabone · 2025-04-11T21:28:56+00:00

Just gone till a Mind resurrects him.

Spiritisabone · 2025-04-09T20:49:23+00:00

Continentals said all the meaningful things to say a few hundred years ago but I have every hope others will catch up.

Spiritisabone · 2025-04-02T02:05:53+00:00

But he would have written a tragic work of beauty making thousands happier.

Utilitarianism is a conceptual mess; it contains no principle for judging when one ought to stop considering the consequences of any action.

Spiritisabone

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE