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.
What’s called ‘health and safety’ is often safety at the expense of health, a form of short-termism.
Kingsley Amis predicted, of university graduates, ‘more will mean worse’, 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 ‘domestic pacifists’, a bit like Nassim Taleb saying ‘With my family, I’m a communist.’
The two aspects of trait ‘openness to experience’ – intellect and openness – 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 ‘death of God’, 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 – whatever the communists were doing, the West went as far as possible in the opposite direction.
A democrat can’t move too far from centrism, because of the value he or she ascribes to what most people think.
The ‘housing crisis’ 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 – 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 – in the absence of patriotism, Reithian duties make no sense and are merely burdens.
The point of God is that he doesn’t exist – 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 ‘end of history’, ideology is less important than (Huxley’s focus) ‘the advancement of science as it affects human individuals’.
The desire, in Harold Bloom’s words, to rebeget oneself or become ‘one’s own imaginative father’ is the desire to invert one’s 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 – Raylan Givens in Justified, Seinfeld in Seinfeld – which puts the emphasis on supporting characters, world-building, and ‘feel’.
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 you’ll 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 ‘silent majority’ possesses any wisdom, ChatGPT et al. are unaware of it.
In the modern history of pubs, there’s 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 ‘Taxation without representation’. The problem with the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments today might be the reverse, representation without the seriousness that comes with taxation.
The idea that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ is a conspiracy theory.
Theology is what science would be if the universe were a work of art.
AGI will be achieved when the chatbots advance, in Coleridge’s terms, from fancy, which ‘has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites’, to imagination, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’.
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 – aside from its being the largest viable forum for democracy – there’s also no welfare state without a state or NHS without the ‘N’.
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 that’s 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 – even good ones – 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 we’re genetically closest, could be an example of evolutionary excess or overkill – consciousness believes that it too can survive into the future because, with regard to fitness, there’s no disadvantage in such a belief.
It’s not that you can’t 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 ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ 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 they’re the equivalent of workers’ 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 Chesterton’s 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.
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