In America, guns are like alcohol is everywhere: prohibition might be desirable, but is nonetheless impossible.
Text-to-image prompt engineering is a kind of ekphrasis.
Nation-building neocons and Corbynistas share a similarity. The former are sure that we can create democracies over there, the latter that we can create democrats over here.
Whatâs called âhealth and safetyâ is often safety at the expense of health, a form of short-termism.
Kingsley Amis predicted, of university graduates, âmore will mean worseâ, but, in a true war against merit, worse will mean better.
Agreeable, less open extroverts go up into bubbles, while disagreeable, more open introverts go down into rabbit holes.
To believe that speech and violence are different and that the latter is wrong does not entail pacifism. Even in a world of amoral, self-interested foreign policy, within a democratic state, where speech pertains as a (the) viable alternative to violence, we can afford to be âdomestic pacifistsâ, a bit like Nassim Taleb saying âWith my family, Iâm a communist.â
The two aspects of trait âopenness to experienceâ â intellect and openness â could be thought of, respectively, as input ability and output ability. Intellect processes input ideas and openness outputs new ones.
People drink either because their lives are too empty or their minds too full.
Perhaps belief is operating on an oscillatory model, with the evolution of pagan gods into the God of monotheism (the big crunch), and now, following the âdeath of Godâ, a devolving back into paganism (the big bang).
Feminism is the only permanently justifiable form of identity politics.
Philosophy and poetry are self-help.
There is more utility in judging the living than the dead.
Hypercapitalism might be a pathology born of the Cold War â whatever the communists were doing, the West went as far as possible in the opposite direction.
A democrat canât move too far from centrism, because of the value he or she ascribes to what most people think.
The âhousing crisisâ is one of expense and will not be solved by building ugly orange boxes in fields, which make the houses people actually want more desirable by comparison and perhaps more expensive.
Western civilisation is also westward civilisation â Greece and the Holy Land, Rome, other bits of Europe, Britain, New England, California.
Maybe some people in the BBC would actually like it to be privatised â in the absence of patriotism, Reithian duties make no sense and are merely burdens.
The point of God is that he doesnât exist â believing in material, existent things such as money, power, idols and demagogues is dangerous, so ultimate belief must be in something from an ideal realm, i.e. an idea.
The people we listen to on podcasts and speak to online are becoming more real to us than the zombies we pass on the street.
Brave New World can feel more relevant than Nineteen Eighty-Four because, after the âend of historyâ, ideology is less important than (Huxleyâs focus) âthe advancement of science as it affects human individualsâ.
The desire, in Harold Bloomâs words, to rebeget oneself or become âoneâs own imaginative fatherâ is the desire to invert oneâs family tree and be the creator rather than the product.
The veneration of influencers is either an alternative to or a mask for ressentiment. Keep up with the Joneses or kill them and take their stuff?
Some TV programmes are great because the main character is a bit of a cipher â Raylan Givens in Justified, Seinfeld in Seinfeld â which puts the emphasis on supporting characters, world-building, and âfeelâ.
Gender-neutral parenting might be gaining ground due to people having only one child and not observing the contrasts first hand.
The thing at the bottom of the to-do list, which youâll do last or not at all, is the thing you ought to do now.
Jung had the idea of the collective unconscious. Perhaps the corpora/datasets on which LLMs are trained represent the collective conscious.
Relatedly, if the âsilent majorityâ possesses any wisdom, ChatGPT et al. are unaware of it.
In the modern history of pubs, thereâs one fifteen-year period when they were free from harmful pollution, namely the fifteen years between the smoking ban of 2007 and the normalising of playing videos from smartphones c. 2022.
In the 1760s James Otis attacked âTaxation without representationâ. The problem with the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments today might be the reverse, representation without the seriousness that comes with taxation.
The idea that âThe history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class strugglesâ is a conspiracy theory.
However, if Marxismâs relevance in the West declined with the industrial working class, perhaps it will increase again in the age of AI as an analysis of the relationship not between capital and those who labour but between capital and those who donât, the post-industrial non-working class.
Theology is what science would be if the universe were a work of art.
AGI will be achieved when the chatbots advance, in Coleridgeâs terms, from fancy, which âhas no other counters to play with, but fixities and definitesâ, to imagination, which âdissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-createâ.
The far right think culture is to race what gender in fact is to sex.
Having been fully explored and mapped, with AI the world is becoming a terra incognita once again.
Modernity means mobility.
The ideologies we need to compete in a democracy aim at the three goods we most desire: conservatism wants peace, liberalism wants freedom, including the freedom to create wealth, and social democracy wants wealth for all. Historically, liberalism is a luxury of a conservative society that has become sufficiently peaceful to permit enterprise, and social democracy a luxury of a liberal society that has become sufficiently rich to permit redistribution. The biggest threat to either of the second two goods is to attack the one or ones on which it was built. For example, the integrity of the nation-state is supposedly held dear by conservatives, but social democrats should also hold it dear because â aside from its being the largest viable forum for democracy â thereâs also no welfare state without a state or NHS without the âNâ.
The US has its separation of powers, while the British system is meant to be more Trinitarian, with the God Parliament comprising the three persons of Parliament the Executive, Parliament the Judiciary, and Parliament the Holy Legislature.
Relatedly, an intelligent designer creating a society from scratch would not give it a monarchy. True, but thatâs partly because, unlike constitutional evolution, an intelligent designer would not be capable of coming up with anything as ingenious as the Crown-in-Parliament.
Over time, dramas â even good ones â become more like sitcoms.
The way genes get themselves into the future is to build new bodies, but human genes also build conscious minds. The belief in an afterlife, in which we reunite with those to whom weâre genetically closest, could be an example of evolutionary excess or overkill â consciousness believes that it too can survive into the future because, with regard to fitness, thereâs no disadvantage in such a belief.
Itâs not that you canât dance to the Beatles or sing along to Bob Dylan, but there might be a link between their greatness and the sense of a barrier to joining in.
Some people are devolving into bovines and TikTok is their cud.
If there is such a thing as lifestyle inflation and inequality increases, then âkeeping up with the Jonesesâ becomes harder for the average family, so an increase in overall wealth could actually cause a decrease in average happiness. After Peterson we could call this not the wealth trap but the lobster trap.
Newbuilds resemble toy houses because theyâre the equivalent of workersâ cottages (i.e. small) but have miniaturised features (gables, porches) of more generous early-twentieth-century suburban houses.
The binary divide between polytechnics and universities, and maybe between secondary moderns and grammar schools, was a Chestertonâs fence. The purpose was for society to be able to do tech as tech and the humanities as the humanities.
Everyone is of equal value because everyone is unique, but unique means different, i.e. unequal, so paradoxically everyone is equal because everyone is unequal.
The antidote to AI might be the Gothic, with its lack of smoothness and symmetry.
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