Starting to despise the tone and phraseology of AI. It's like music composed as commercial jingles, maybe worse. Just sounds fake. And sometimes I can’t tell whether an account is actually AI or just a person who used it so much he’s started to adopt its style.

The left has zero ground to stand on re free speech or “cancel culture”. It’s basically just a discussion among everyone else where you draw the line between what’s government infringement and what’s legitimate private action taken for profit motive. Anyone on the left should just hope they are more 100x principled and just than they were.

One thing I like about Trump is he is a player character, he has his views and his vision. He might be wrong, he might be gauche, but he is a person. And he is trying to do things as he sees fit. Like he’s been talking about unfair trade practices and tariffs for decades. Whether that will help or hurt, I don’t know. But it’s his vision. This is actually an exception for politicians. Mostly they are NPCs, playing a role at the behest of someone else, part of a bureaucracy that is angling for “the greater good” as defined by itself, i.e., usually what perpetuates its own power. If you want a country that favors the individual, you are better off with a leader who is one, however flawed, than a leader who is not, however polished.

The constitution, the Bible, works of stoicism, Austrian economics, they are all just maps, provisional (and often useful), but not the territory. Once you familiarize yourself with the actual terrain, you might glance at the map as needed to re-orient yourself, but mostly it’s folded and put away.

One thing you discover when you have no job and can more or less do whatever you want is what you most want is to do what life requires, and that entails making peace with situations you used to avoid when you had someone else (or customers) dictating what to do. The irony is you are *more* bound by things than before, but because that bond is voluntary rather than coerced your goal is to appreciate its terms rather than to get it over with so you can do something else more pleasant.

Most of the political violence in recent years has come from the left, but I think that’s more due to ideological capture than anything inherent about left vs right. Because the left captured all the institutions — tech, media, academia — people on the left were able to live in a bubble. They were able to avoid the unpleasant cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering opposing viewpoints. It was like being in a very large cult. When this persists for long enough, it’s easy to become a fundamentalist of sorts, someone who views contrary viewpoints not just as incorrect but evil. It’s easy to see how this would happen — as your worldview gets ever more affirmed, it becomes ever-more painful to have it exposed to contradictions and internal incoherence. People on the right the last few decades were constantly told they were bad and wrong by the media. It was almost impossible for them to live in a bubble. When you don’t live in a bubble, you are exposed to cognitive dissonance all the time, and you have less absolutism and fundamentalism. Less existential dread when someone disagrees with you, more rigor in formulating your worldview. What the right should not want is to swap places with the left where their views become fundamentalism, dissent from them is verboten and their side gets radicalized when challenged. Free speech you disagree with has to be protected no matter what. Unfortunately, I think it’s just the nature of power that it corrupts, and when the right re-takes it (they have in the US, but not entirely as the institutions are still very much leftist), they’ll probably do stupid shit like outlaw mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination as “hate speech” or outlaw flag burning.