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@litano.bsky.social

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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
"congrats, happy for you" meme
Herman Remmele: “Herr Brüning has put it very plainly; once they (the Fascists) are in power, then the united front of the proletariat will be established and it will make a clean sweep of everything. (Violent applause from the Communists)… We are the victors of the coming day; and the question is no longer one of who shall vanquish whom. This question is already answered. (Applause from the Communists). The question now reads only, “At what moment shall we overthrow the bourgeoisie?”… We are not afraid of the Fascist gentlemen. They will shoot their bolt quicker than any other Government. (Right you are! from the Communists.)”
Megan Thee Stallion enters carried by two hunks. Megan Thee Stallion: The theatre is mother’s domain! Thanks gentlemen! I don’t know those guys. They were just two strangers carrying some cake. We come through with a bold set of nominees From the new to the old deuteronomies
Side-by-side comparison of Seward's draft of the First Inaugural and its final text. Seward: I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of the nation. Lincoln: I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Tweet from @onlymninthesky GARTH ENNIS COMING UP WITH A NEW COMIC IDEA: What if the Teen Titans all sucked each other off and got herpes. That’d be so fucking funny dude GARTH ENNIS SITTING DOWN TO WRITE THE COMIC: These poor fucking kids. They didn’t ask for this herpes. [sobbing now] They’re just kids,
If the result of this paper was a proof of the unit distance problem, that would be truly incredible. While I was still very surprised to hear of the this result, this was dampened slightly when I learnt it was a construction of a counterexample, and still further when I learnt that nature of the construction, being (with the benefit of hindsight) a natural, albeit highly non-trivial, generalisation of the original lattice-based construction of Erdős. On examining the construction, it becomes more clear how people had missed this before – it requires the confluence of several different unlikely events: that a good mathematician is (1) spending significant time in thinking about the unit distance conjecture in the first place; (2) seriously trying to disprove it, despite the oft-repeated belief of Erdős that it is true; (3) believes that there is mileage in generalising the original construction to other number fields, and so is willing to expend significant time in exploring such constructions3; and (4) sufficiently familiar with the relevant parts of class field theory to recognise that the appro- priately phrased question about infinite towers of number fields with appropriate parameters can be solved using existing theory. The AI met all of these criteria, and its success here echoes previous achievements: it often produces the most surprising results by persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore, combining superhuman levels of patience with familiarity with a vast array of technical machinery.
Four things to note: #1196 is a decently well known problem. It wasn't like Erdős-Straus level fame, but it is well known enough that I was familiar with it. Second, this is not a problem where no one had worked on it; there was a lot of prior work on it and closely related problems. Third, this is not example where the AI made small modifications to things in the literature or recognized that large parts of the problem were in an obscure paper. The approach the AI used is largely a different direction than the literature on this problem went. Fourth, and closely related to three, this proof does look like parts of it will inspire subsequent proofs because it really is going in a different direction which now looks likely to be a productive line of investigation for similar problems. I am not fond of putting words like "stunning" in titles which can be very clickbaity and feels like a hype word, but this really is in the direction where the word isn't unreasonable even if I myself would not go so far as to use it here.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect).
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like—what's going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
In a subsequent exchange with the outright extinctionist Daniel Faggella, Yudkowsky made this jaw-dropping statement: If sacrificing all of humanity were the only way, and a reliable way, to get … godlike things out there — superintelligences who still care about each other, who are still aware of the world and having fun — I would ultimately make that trade-off.
Quora question asking "Atheists, imagine you're a famous baseball player and are about to bat the winning hit. Accidentally, the pitcher tosses a Christian baby at you. Would you still hit the baby out of the stadium and win millions, or spare the Christian baby?"
Canada’s MAID law defines a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” in part as a “serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability.” As for what constitutes incurability, however, the law says nothing—and of the various textual ambiguities that caused anxiety for clinicians early on, this one ranked near the top. Did “incurable” mean a lack of any available treatment? Did it mean the likelihood of an available treatment not working? Prominent MAID advocates put forth what soon became the predominant interpretation: A medical condition was incurable if it could not be cured by means acceptable to the patient. This had made sense to Li. If an elderly woman with chronic myelogenous leukemia had no wish to endure a highly toxic course of chemo and radiation, why should she be compelled to? But here was a young man with a likely curable cancer who nevertheless was adamant about dying. “I mean, he was so, so clear,” Li told me. “I talked to him about What if you had a 100 percent chance? Would you want treatment? And he said no.” He didn’t want to suffer through the treatment or the side effects, he explained; just having a colonoscopy had traumatized him. When Li assured the man that they could treat the side effects, he said she wasn’t understanding him: Yes, they could give him medication for the pain, but then he would have to first experience the pain. He didn’t want to experience the pain.
But this lesson goes for me, too. Adorno’s lesson is that thought always goes beyond its object; it can never fully coincide with it. The concept of fascism is “wrong” in that actual reality never fully accords with our concepts. This is a necesssary and unavoidable part of intellectual activity: it’s always speculative and imaginative work. The temptation now will be to take the fascism analogy too literally and insist on its absolute validity. But this was never really my contention. Analogies are always imperfect and need to be refined. I ultimately thought the fascism thesis was what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “progressive research programme:” that is to say, it could make certain strong interpretations and even predictions about what was going on and it had a fairly good track record in that regard. There are other frameworks for understanding the present that might be more subtle, more sophisticated, and more accurate. But I do believe that this idea has earned its place in any serious consideration of the present. The work will now be to synthesize it into a broader horizon.
Onion article titled "Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had"
The cynic will admit that it's all great politics. Tell America that it is a great country that has simply lost its way for a spell. Tell the American people that they are a great people who are better than those hucksters who come to divide us. It has a marvelous aesthetic appeal. Swirl down those clouds of memory and forget that the country allowed itself to follow George Bush over the cliff not merely because it was shocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but because it was too pissing-down-the-shoes scared to do anything else. Forget about how eagerly the American people cheered the brutish and the nasty, how simple it was to sell raw animal vengeance dressed up as geopolitical wisdom, and how dumbly everyone followed until well after it was revealed that the people selling it didn't know enough about the world to throw to a cat. This was the era of complicity. Can Obama end it, thought the cynic, without admitting it ever existed? We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we'll think we got the better of the deal. We'll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster's trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self evident-- that all men are out to get what's ours. Obama will find this out, the cynic thought. He will discover exactly how much he overrates the country as a democracy and its people as citizens. It will happen. He may not even understand it until it happens to him, but it will happen. The cynic just happened to be there when it began.
Map of the "Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone" with a cartoon leg coming out of the Zone's name and kicking a betrayed-looking rat across the river into New Jersey.
Definition of territorial sovereignty reading "Territorial sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority and control that a ruler or state holds over a defined geographical area, as discussed in the context of modern states and their territorial boundaries."
Reason.com comment that reads: "My Hypothetical still stands, Mrs Osama Bin Laden, who managed to escape OBL's tortuous rule, shows up on Amurican Soil, September 12, 2001, and promptly gives birth to Osama Bin Laden Jr. So Osama Bin Laden Jr is a Full Amurican Citizen, with all the privileges that it entrails? Could even become President Osama Bin Laden Jr?? While Elon Musk, although a naturalized Citizen, can never be POTUS, because he wasn't born here?? Something's rotten in Denmark Frank"
The cynic doesn't believe that history is an arc, bending inexorably in any particular direction or another. An arc is a geometric figure tightly circumscribed by mathematical formulae. For the cynic, history is a river, wilder than most, with eddies and whirlpools and backwaters, and an original course to which it always seeks to return. What the cynic has learned over the past twelve years is the truth in Faulkner's observation that the past is never dead, it is not even past. Nothing ever sinks in the river for good. Everything is thrown to the surface again. He believes that the river churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface. He believes we can get caught in backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps. The cynic also believes that the river can run clear and fresh and soft. But not often. Most of the time, it seeks its original course, and occasionally, despite all the levees and dams and locks we apply to it in order to govern ourselves, it overwhelms them all and floods our pale attempts at civilizing ourselves. That, the cynic thinks, is what...
Technically, a Coup Trumpism having passed through a failed putschist phase before moving into a legal approach to power that would seem to recommend an analogy with fascism, but again, the critics will not countenance this dynamic. The current seizure of the payments system of the Treasury Department reminds one fascist journalist Curzio Malaparte’s observations in his 1931 book The Technique of Coup d’Etat that the most successful modern coups are not frontal assaults on the institutions of the state, or bold military uprisings, but seizures of the state’s technical “nerve centers:” …the problem of the modern coup d’ Etat is a technical problem…Not the masses make a revolution, but a mere handful of men, prepared for any emergency, well drilled in the tactics of insurrection, trained to strike hard and quickly at the vital organs of the State’s technical services. These shock troops should be recruited from among specialized workmen : mechanics, electricians, telegraph and radio operators acting under orders of technical engineers who understand the technical working of the State. I’m not sure Musk’s little groyper squad is a crack force in quite this way, but they are definitely attempting to seize the state's nerve centers. It’s almost as if Trump’s movement learned something and took a different approach.
Director Mike Nichols’s friend, Robert Redford, was very interested in playing the lead role in The Graduate. Nichols tells Vanity Fair he “interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men” for the part and recalls the conversation he had with Redford after he screen-tested for the role: “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
The cover of Ben Shapiro's awful political thriller True Allegiance.
Image of a map of NY with Harlem labeled "Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone." Coming out of the text is a cartoon boot, which is kicking a surprised-looking cartoon rat across the river into New Jersey.