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"To the carnival is what she said
A hundred dollars makes it dark inside"
-Tom Waits, Jockey Full of Bourbon
February 5. It's snowy and it looks like the Seattle protest is minor, so I'm staying home until things get worse, and moving on to some stray links.
Finland's Zero Homeless Strategy: Lessons from a Success Story. Homelessness is a hard problem and Finland has tackled it with a level of competence and dedication that is not realistic in most other countries.
A Hacker News comment thread on the Zizian cult, explaining how highly rational people are still susceptible to culty thinking.
You can volunteer reading cursive in old documents for the National Archives.
And a wonderful Ask Reddit thread that was removed by mods for no reason I can imagine: People who have a pet at home, at what point did you realize that the pet really, consciously, understood you?
February 4. Some feedback on the last post, about the Limits To Growth model. Simon writes, "There's no reason to assume human ingenuity: society was different back then... so the LTG model simply doesn't model it - much like a model predicting interest rates in the USA right now wouldn't apply to Sentinel Island." And a post on the ranprieur subreddit references this ten year old post, Models always crash, with some smart stuff about models vs reality.
New subject. 50501 is a subreddit about all the protests. I'm probably going to whatever local one they have tomorrow, and I want to be clear about strategy. Nobody thinks this is about influencing Trump. At this point he's moving with the relentless inevitability of a fire. It reminds me of this line from Thaddeus Golas: "When your consciousness is open, any action you take in reference to evil has no more significance than digging a ditch to channel floodwaters away from a house."
For me, the "protest" doesn't even have to be against something. It's about local solidarity, people of the city making other people of the city feel like this is our place, that we're going to be strong for each other in these dark times. Future historians will not say that Trump made America great again, but they might say he knocked America down and then other people rebuilt it not as bad.
February 2. Thanks Roger for digging up this 2013 blog post from The Automatic Earth, Quote of the Year. The quote is from one of the authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report, that "we are going to evolve through crisis (my italics), not through proactive change." The idea is, forget about reducing consumption to prevent resource exhaustion and climate change, because that's not what humans do. "We don't change course in order to prevent ourselves from hitting boundaries. We hit the wall face first, and only then do we pick up the pieces and take it from there."
That would have been a cynical take in the 1990s, and was unusual enough in 2013 to inspire that post, but in 2025 I think it's the conventional wisdom. Only wild-eyed optimists think we're not going to hit that wall.
Here's a Limits to Growth simulator where you can set parameters and plot some curves, all of them falling. The most interesting critique I've seen of this model, was where someone applied it to the past. I forget if it was the year 1500 or 1700, but the model made the same prediction: collapse within a few decades, which obviously didn't happen. Instead, human ingenuity found ways to keep the game going. For the same reason, here we are buzzing around in SUVs in 2025, when twenty years ago every peak oiler ran the numbers and proved that was impossible.
This leads me back to psychism. It's almost like the numbers will do whatever they have to do, to back up whatever humans want to do. If reality is a dream, then maybe the momentum of modern living pulled fracking out of a hat. But one way or another there are limits, if not in matter than in mind. What appears, to matter, like the conquest of inert nature, appears to mind like cutting ourselves off from the greater reality, turning away from God. If "progress" means replacing the nonhuman world with the human world, then the limit is how deeply we can go into our own obsessions, before we're too insane to maintain the complex systems on which our progress depends.
I'm playing a lot of Spirit Island, a game where you play nature spirits fighting colonizers, and there's something called a Fear victory: Even if the island is packed with towns and cities, if you get enough fear points, you win. So I'm wondering, what would that be like for the colonizers, to have all that success on the physical level, and still fail on the psychological level? Maybe they turn against each other in adversarial politics and compulsive tribalism. Everyone is cynical and opportunistic, or worn out and depressed. The rich flee to better islands, while public services are slashed and the streets are full of muttering homeless. Yeah, I live there.
January 30. Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Teilhard de Chardin wrote that all human progress is converging toward a point. They both got it backwards. I would say it like this: If you go down the path of right action, you eventually end up doing your own thing that no one has even imagined. If you go down the path of wrong action, you tend to slide into a deep groove of doing the same predictable stuff that others have done before you.
Examples of the former include Vincent Van Gogh and Mr. Rogers. Examples of the latter include drug addiction and wrongly running a country. Anyone who's not a Trump cultist can easily recognize what path he's on. How far he gets is anyone's guess. Two depressing Reddit threads, Those who currently work in US federal government, what's the is current mood like? And What do you make of President Trump sending illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay?
I don't want to dwell on that, so here are some Reddit threads on lighter subjects:
Does anyone else feel like f-it, I'm going to quit going to the doctor? A key comment: "Have you ever noticed that both doctors and lawyers go to school and get degrees in their specialty, but everyone says 'Listen to your doctor! Do whatever your doctor tells you!' and nobody says 'Listen to your lawyer! Do whatever your lawyer tells you!'"
What's a time you've said "f*ck it" and made a huge change in your life?
What saved you from your deep dark depression?
Has anyone experienced telepathy while tripping with a friend?
And the best and smallest thread, What has a Kid once told you that made you rethink life? My favorite: "Who decides what's a job?"
January 27. This year I want to start taking psychism more seriously, and one place you can see the difference between physicalism and psychism, is in how vs why. Under physicalism, the whole vast universe is how, and why is something that only appears on the tiny island of consciousness. Under psychism, it's exactly the opposite: Consciousness is fundamental, the whole universe is made of why, and "how" is something that only appears when you want to get something done in a mechanistic sub-universe.
One question a psychist can ask, that a physicalist can't ask, or doesn't have to, is why are there humans? If we're not a meaningless accident, if we're all the finger puppets of the One Mind, then what is the appeal of being a member of this strange, disconnected, long-suffering species?
One thing I've noticed about humans is the massive size of our learning curve. How long does it take a dog to become fully competent at being a dog? A year? How long does it take a gnat? An hour? I'm 57 years old, and just a couple years ago I was walking wrong, breathing wrong, and drinking water wrong. These are basic biological actions. A bug couldn't do them wrong, and it would be hard to train a dog to do them in a way that its ancestors haven't done for a million years.
Humans are an extremely soft-wired species. We have so little behavior set in stone, that we can build whole cultures of doing stuff wrong, and go very deeply into mistakes. Just look around. But it also allows us to try cool things that haven't been tried yet. Maybe God is getting bored and we're about to go extinct. But I like to think we're just getting started, and as soon as we burn through this age of the whole world trying the same flashy bullshit, we'll diverge into hundreds of lower energy but more enjoyable cultures.
January 23. Four threads from Ask Old People, all removed by mods for being too interesting. From today, Is this what the 1960s felt like? "In the 1960s, I felt as if things were getting better. This decade feels like the opposite."
What's the most positive trend you see in the young adults of today?
You can hoard a footlocker's worth of something for trading after the impending apocalypse. What is it?
Anyone else looking forward to death?
A deleted thread from Ask Reddit, What stops you from killing yourself?
And Chris sends this nice blog post, The Duty to Escape, about "escapist" fiction and why it's good to imagine different worlds.
January 20. The most important thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he's chaotic neutral. He plays the role of a lawful evil politician, and will do some lawful evil things, but his real mission in this world is to destroy institutions and inspire individuals to say fuck it.
I think he's actually going to tell the military to invade Greenland. One of two things will happen. They'll refuse, thus driving a wedge between the military and the presidency. Or they'll do it, driving a wedge into NATO. That's what Trump is, a driver of wedges, an arch-divider, an agent of the ongoing atomization of humanity. That's not necessarily bad. There's a general feeling that a lot of things need to be broken down right now.
The "deep state" is a propaganda term for a clunky bureaucracy that Trump wants to replace with old-fashioned corruption, defined as public officials using the office for personal gain. Not that that doesn't happen now, but it will surely get worse under a movement with so many grifters and easy marks. The rule of law will be replaced by "I know a guy". A more neutral way to say it is that the formal is being replaced by the informal, which sounds like a good idea, but remember the words of Bob Dylan, "To live outside the law you must be honest."
I posted this a few months back, a detailed argument that Trump is the Antichrist. I find it more helpful to think of him as the anti-Lincoln. Lincoln greatly strengthened the federal government relative to the states, and Trump is reversing that. Lincoln turned the Republicans from a third party to the dominant party, and Trump will reverse that. His charisma is the only thing holding together a coalition of billionaires and the working class, of authoritarians and people who crave chaos. Meanwhile the Democrats are a coalition of foreign policy hawks and cultural leftists, of plodding business as usual and forlorn hope for change, held together by fear of something that has now actually happened. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Make some popcorn and assume crash position. The enemy is within!
January 16. Stray links, starting with Inconvenient truths about the L.A. fires. They're not wildfires that swallowed the city. They're classic urban fires caused by extreme hot winds combined with buildings and landscaping that are not fire-resistant.
Why has it been so hard to arrest South Korea's impeached president? Because his private security officers are loyal to him and not to the constitution. This is something I learned from David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything: that ancient "kings" were not like modern heads of state. They were warlords who only had power within a few hundred yards of wherever they actually were. As modern political systems break down, we're going to move back in that direction.
A thread in Ask Old People, Have you had family or friends who chose not to "fight" cancer?
Great stuff in this 1979 Al Pacino interview. My favorite bit:
When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back. When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It's an extraordinary thing. It's wild turf up there. The time I was doing Pavlo Hummel in Boston, I made connection with a pair of eyes in the audience and I thought, This is incredible, these eyes are penetrating me. I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. I couldn't wait at curtain to see who it was. When curtain call finally came, I looked in the direction of those eyes and it was a seeing eye dog. Belonged to a blind girl. I couldn't get over it - the compassion and intensity and the understanding in those eyes... and it was a dog. What a profession!
Finally, Big Blood have a really interesting new album, Electric Voyeur. It's all played on handmade electronics that they've been building and practicing on for ten years. At the same time, it still sounds like Big Blood, with a clear evolutionary thread from recent albums, and from two older songs, "But I Studied" and "Sidewalk-Walk/Un-Nole". There's also an instrumental version, which almost sounds like a different album. My favorite track, from the main album, is Who Lives. This is my giant Big Blood page.
January 8. I'm starting to like January. October is still the best month, but January is when everyone hibernates after the holidays, and if your job isn't too taxing, you can get into some personal obsessions. I've been playing lots of solo games of Spirit Island. Anyway, a few more happy links, starting with another about the new year, Kakizome, Japanese way of new-years resolution. Instead of setting exact goals, you set a theme. "New Year's resolution feels like a path set on a map, and the theme feels like a compass."
Seattle Piano Recycling gives unwanted pianos new life. Basically, when they're hired to take pianos to the dump, they store them, make minor repairs, and then sell them for the price of delivery.
China has confirmed that solar panels in the desert are good for desert ecology.
Living proof that you can spend money on the poor: Utopia comes to Mexico City. "Utopia" is an acronym for putting nice public facilities in the poorest neighborhoods. This could never happen in the USA because the second poorest people demand that the poorest people be worse off.
January 5. After three negative posts in a row, here are some positive links for the new year. Quiet Mind is a nice explanation of mindfulness/meditation. "This is not rocket science. It is our own mind! The abilities to walk upright and to use symbolic language were attained by proto-humans with effort over many generations. Learning to use the mind well will occur in the space between thoughts."
From The Whippet, The Animal Crossing / Stardew Valley model for NY goals. The idea is to gamify personal improvement, but do it in a low-stress way.
Related, a sub-thread in a Reddit thread about health tips, Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly
From the Psychonaut subreddit, Shrooms showed me my "pipes were clean"
The "pipe" in this analogy represents our capacity to let emotions flow. If your pipes are clogged - if you have unresolved issues, repressed feelings, or mental blockages - those emotions can come out muddy or overwhelming when shrooms turn on the tap. But if you've been doing inner work and clearing out old debris, the flow can be more crystalline and uplifting.
And two more Reddit threads. I don't know what's up with the Ask Reddit mods, that they consistently remove the most interesting threads. What's the most meaningful expression of love you've ever seen or experienced? And What's the one random genetic trait you lucked out on? This is the one I most envy:
Got the joie de vivre. Life fuckin rules, even when it doesn't. My dad has it, his parents had it, their parents had it, etc. Honestly feels like a superpower to find joy in things every day, especially in the world we live in now.
January 1, 2025. It's possible that the next few years will be good for me personally. But in the realm of public events, every happy prediction I can think of is completely off the wall. Might RFK Jr legalize shrooms? Might AIs, while still arguably nonsentient, declare themselves gods and push progressive policies? Might enough competent people fall into homelessness that there's a homeless renaissance? Might the white working class finally support redistribution of wealth? Might Trump give us a UBI, just to have his name on it?
December 30. There's a lot of sympathy for Luigi Mangione, which I share. But I want to go darker, and sympathize with someone whose crime was unjustifiable, but not meaningless, Abundant Life school shooter Natalie "Samantha" Rupnow. I imagine that school shooters share my sense of the wrongness of this world, and the role of school in breaking our spirits to make us part of it. But they usually don't explain themselves. The best thing I've read on the subject is this 2004 essay, Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere.
"The simplest Surrealist action," wrote the leader of the Surrealists in 1930, "is to go out on the street with two revolvers in one's fists and blindly shoot down as many as possible in the crowd."
Rupnow, a rare girl shooter, also left a rare explanation, a "manifesto" titled War Against Humanity. You can see screenshots in this Twitter thread, and I don't see anyone saying anything nice about it. At worst, it reminds me of incel shooter Elliot Rodger, a troubled person trying too hard to be evil. While insisting she's different, she falls into negativity in a normal way.
But it also contains some nuggets and some honesty. I love this sentence: "This situation and the situation of a lifetime is a get the fuck out moment and don't come back." And surely we've all felt like this: "I hate looking at some of the people in the society, and seeing what they are and what they do with their lives." This bit is pure comedy: "If only some days we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn't mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged." Admit it, did you smile?
At the end is some teenage Nietzsche: "The wolf hunts its prey and continues life with no other bruises or scars. There is no predator and prey anymore, it is all filth walking. There's nothing more with filth, it simply can't die or make hunts real if all they want is value."
Wolves get bruises and scars of course. "Other" means non-physical, and it's true, being human is a decades long ordeal of emotional and psychic bruises and scars, a far outlier among all life on Earth. If you replace "filth" with "industrial society" or "disenchanted modernity", and add "quantitative" to value, you can see that she's only lacking clever words. Here are some clever words from Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, saying the same thing:
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Enveloped in a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.
And from the killer, the motive:
I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole
I once had this time when I was young
You made me dig for so long and now I can't leave it