Cynical insight from Spandrell:

… nobody cares about the public purse. It’s public.

Does ethnomasochism get any more abject than this?

The foreigners will teach us how, in their long journey, they see the horrendous politics of our country and how they will participate in changing it; and we will teach foreigners how we have tried for a long time to change it, this politics, and how we see their essential place in the future of the struggle.

That’s from communist pop star Alain Badiou. The entire piece is a philosophico-political clown show. Luckily it’s French, so it’s not really our problem.

BREAKING: North Korea's vice foreign minister says President Trump is "making trouble" with "aggressive" tweets.

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 14, 2017

This is where we are now.

"The goal of this demo was to show that building a Twitter replacement actually isn't that hard at all …

— urbit (@urbit_) April 12, 2017

If Web 2.0 is already bringing everything crashing down, Web 3.0 is going to finish the job.

I’d call it the Xenosystems Scenario, but it’s apparently already taken:

The architect of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee today talked about some of his concerns for the internet over the coming years, including a nightmarish scenario where artificial intelligence (AI) could become the new ‘masters of the universe’ by creating and running their own companies. …

Hard for me to imagine how this could possibly not happen.

If you’re comfortable translating the ruthless pursuit of excellence as ‘greed’, I guess this counts as trying.

(I’m qabbalistically joined at the hip with Ayn Rand, so objectivism on the topic is beyond my reach.)

In the near future, neural networks will be able to synthesize any number of tragic pictures as a pretext for any number of proxy wars

— Hey, I'm Wonka Here! (@niftierideology) April 7, 2017

This is true, and worth more thought than it’s received so far.

More game theory from Fernandez:

It will inevitably occur to someone that the advantage in an escalation trap belongs to the side which cares about America less since there is no point at which it will desist for pity’s sake.

This is how things get cold.

(I’ve adjusted the emphasis from the original, since it looked glitched to me. Apologies if I made a bad call.)

Here‘s the public (Twitter) record, compiled in chronological order from May 2013. Not much indication of ambiguity.

If a nose-dive back into neoconservative meddling follows from this, it’s hard to see what could ever count as a credible commitment again. Anything not on a blockchain will be senseless noise.

ADDED: Things are getting stupid quickly.

Retrieved from four years ago (by XS’s favorite HBD-blogger), and still perfect in its outrageous realism:

Daniel Freedman was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. For his doctoral thesis, he did adoption studies with dogs. He had noticed that different dog breeds had different personalities, and thought it would be interesting to see if personality was inborn, or if it was somehow caused by the way in which the mother raised her puppies. Totally inborn. Little beagles were irrepressibly friendly. Shetland sheepdogs were most sensitive to a loud voice or the slightest punishment. Wire-haired terriers were so tough and aggressive that Dan had to wear gloves when playing with puppies that were only three weeks old. Basenjis were aloof and independent.

He decided to try the same thing with human infants of different breeds. Excuse me, different races. …

You’ll never guess what happens next (although, actually, the readers here are almost certain to).

The dog-breed analogy is used quite often, but probably still not enough. It’s pitched at the correct cladistic level, obviously. In addition, since ‘labrador supremacism’ sounds immediately ridiculous it should contribute to chipping a little stupidity from the race discussion.