Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
people say Trump has really coarsened our politics, but pretty much everyone who interacts with him says “pardon me”.
the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.
[tech notebook] Sysadminning in Scala, documenting in Claude https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/08/sysadminning-in-scala-documenting-in-claude/index.html
The LLM is so positive, but that's why it's not predictive. Just because it seems to really like what you are doing (and offers such apparently perceptive compliments!) doesn't mean that anyone else will.
the richest people in the world want to make the rest of us feel so poor.
@delong i’m not sure it’s my favorite verse.
Enshittification as a macro phenomenon, @pluralistic riffing on #PavlinaTcherneva https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts ht @carolannie
@artlung it’s rough. you look at those further along the path and it is rarely reassuring.
@artlung (i’ve been very itinerant as an adult, within the US and abroad. i feel very similar, although recently — due to the times, but i think also my aging — am more sensitive to threat than excited by possibility. “home is no place” is very well put. i don’t think i’ve quite felt at home since my parents moved us from the house i grew up in, when i was 12 or 13.)
hate the post, not the poster.
@delong i am a cretin on these things, but reading the Tiberius Gracchus Wikipedia page, it is remarkable how current and parallel the crisis of his assassination seems.
the conflict between plutocrats and land reformers outstrips the willingness of partisans to work within republican norms and is ultimately resolved through murder. the republic, then, is doomed.
[tech notebook] Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/06/zip-a-dee-doo-dah/index.html
one of the difficult mercies of existence is that no matter how profoundly you fail, not only are you permitted another chance, it is obligatory that you take it, the alternative is justly forbidden.
@delong it works until it doesn’t, i suppose!
i think part of the worldview of the moderate Republican is it’ll be okay because the Democrats will clean up after our guys’ excesses.
i’m not sure they’ve cottoned to just what a degree of catastrophic success they’re now, um, enjoying.
we're for meritocracy, except half the population shouldn't be permitted to compete.
my identity is increasingly diasporist. it matters less and less just who or what it was a diaspora of. diaspora is a situation, a circumstance all its own, one that reminds a person of how desperately essential it is to treat “the other”, any and every, as human with equal rights and dignities.
i’ve become radicalized on crime, looking for some serious motherfucking tough-on-crime politicians, but tough on serious crime, the kind that causes massive rather than just particularized harm, the “nonviolent” (despite mass casualties) crimes of the rich and powerful.
this is quite a chart.
i wonder if it reflects a view that states will no longer act effectively against the use of cryptographic privacy to engage in criminal behavior.
hockey stick graph of ZCash, a coin that enables untraceable, cryptographically shrouded, transactions.