ohferfucksake

But He’s So Pretty and I Don’t Mind

By in education, ohferfucksake 2 Comments

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

I can only read the first four paragraphs, because I let my subscription to Smith-Ruiu’s Substack expire some time ago. On this evidence, I see it as money well saved.

One might argue that a concern with “the integrity of our institutions” is about honoring the best of countless previous human lives, and that squandering it on any individual, let alone a simple con artist, is — obviously, unquestionably — a stupid thing to do. And even leaving that Burkean argument aside, institutional integrity has present human beneficiaries. If a university knowingly protects fabricated scholarship because exposing it might devastate the fabricator, who pays? Honest scholars. Students. Other applicants who followed the rules. Researchers who rely on the literature. The institution’s future graduates whose credentials become marginally less trustworthy. The costs disperse, so none of them produces the emotionally overwhelming image of one dead man. But dispersed costs are still human costs.

Put one identifiable person on one side of the scale and an abstraction on the other. A human life vs. “institutional integrity.” Well, naturally the human being wins. But describe the conflict charitably and the picture changes: “One individual’s interest in avoiding the consequences of exposure vs. the interests of thousands of other people, living and dead, in maintaining a system in which fraud is investigated and standards mean something.” Now we actually have a moral problem. One might expect a professional philosopher to have an interest in such things.

Arday himself seems to possess remarkably little agency in this telling. He “only ended up” producing a fake dissertation because the university forced a storyteller into the mold of scholarship; then the exposure of that fraud had his death as its “direct result.” At each morally significant juncture, circumstances and other people act upon Arday, while the bean counters retain enough agency to bear full responsibility for their actions. The fabulous protagonist gets causes; the “little nerds” get culpability. And those “little nerds” he contrasts with the fabulous are, in large part, the people who keep the inheritance intact: checking citations, preserving records, refusing fabrication, teaching what they actually know, and doing their small part without expecting the institution to reorganize itself around their personalities.

Amusingly, Smith-Ruiu concedes that the bean counters are technically correct, but they’re evidently correct for the wrong reasons. Plagiarism, fabrication of data, DEI programs, even the fraudulent soft sciences themselves have no place in a university, according to him. So far, so conservative. But if higher education is really so debased that Arday’s dissertation was merely a simulacrum of scholarship in a field that should not exist, then why is the tragic injustice that Arday could not flourish within it? Why should this magnificent storyteller have wanted its professorships, titles, salaries, prestige, and symbolic capital? Why are we supposed to care either way that a conman came to a bad end in a den of thieves?

Let me put it this way. If Arday had been a colorless fifty-eight-year-old departmental administrator with a bad comb-over and clothing from Kohl’s who fabricated precisely the same material, I strongly suspect nobody would be writing elegies about his Promethean imagination. But he was not. He was young and photogenic, with “exquisite locks and threads and general self-display.” (George Santos’s self-invention, by contrast, looked tacky, ridiculous, and grasping. He did not receive the aesthetic subsidy of tragic grandeur. He was short, pudgy, and worst of all, a Republican. No paeans for him.)

Aside from the absurdity of seeing a philosopher pompously proclaim vacuous refrigerator-magnet slogans about “a single human life,” this is what repulses me the most: seeing one becoming so enchanted by charisma, style and transgression that the dull virtues begin to look contemptible by comparison. If all it takes to make those virtues seem petty is a handsome man in eyeliner, then perhaps the bean counters are not the people displaying the shallower moral imagination.

Fellatious

By in ohferfucksake

Beg your pardon?

A lot of people seem to think Kriss is a good writer, and you can see why here. He writes with panache, brio, and a lot of entertaining venom. But I’ve been encountering his writing off and on for the past decade, and the subject-beneath-the-subject is always the same: the scintillating brilliance of Sam Kriss.

He reminds me a bit of Edward Norton. I don’t mean in the sense that he’s one of the more talented practitioners of his craft among his generation, although you could argue for it. I’m thinking more of Norton as the narrator in Fight Club, particularly the famous scene where he viciously beats himself up in his boss’s office. In Kriss’s case, though, it’s more like he’s making an equally-shocking spectacle of sucking himself off.

I’m sorry to be crude, but I’m not sure how else to convey the carnal intensity of his self-importance. Look how brash this prose is! Look how full it is of blood and personality and righteous anger, anger directed at everyone from academia to the media to the individual voyeurs who gleefully enjoyed Arday’s fall from grace, pathetic small souls one and all, incapable of appreciating the greatness of his Promethean soul! But of course, this Promethean Arday is every bit as much a caricature of the man as the ones Kriss furiously condemns; it just happens to be one that’s useful as a prop in the neverending story of Sam’s brilliance. So, yes, I stand in disbelief as I watch him turn rhetorical somersaults through glass coffee tables and careen into bookcases, his head vigorously bobbing between his legs all the while.

The amusement fades when one asks what, beneath all the verbal vim and vigor, he is actually arguing. He plainly wants to condemn the public exposure and humiliation of Arday. There is a perfectly coherent argument available to him. One could say that the evidence of fraud and plagiarism deserved investigation; that journalists were justified in reporting it; that Cambridge had an obligation to enforce academic standards; and that none of this justified turning a human being’s collapse into mass entertainment. Wrongdoers retain a claim to humane treatment. Mobs are ugly. Cruelty does not become virtuous merely because its target has done something wrong.

But this argument is apparently too pedestrian for Kriss. It smells of bourgeois morality. One can imagine a clergyman or Rotarian saying it. He therefore has to find a more glamorous basis for objecting to what happened. Hence his attempt to transform Arday from compulsive fabulist into something like a trickster demigod whose lies represented imaginative largeness, self-creation, and resistance to the tedious literalism of modern life. This is where the essay begins gobbling its own knob.

A genuine prankster or performance artist stands, at least imaginatively, outside the social rules he violates. If Arday’s death was connected to the humiliation surrounding his exposure, that makes the romantic trickster interpretation harder to sustain. It suggests that the judgments of the supposedly-dreary bourgeois world mattered to him greatly. He was not serenely laughing at the bean counters. He appears to have been trapped inside the consequences of a public identity whose collapse he found unbearable. That makes him more tragic and more human, but also makes him less useful to Kriss.

Kriss accuses everyone else of turning Arday into a symbol. Cambridge made him the Inspirational Black Academic. The anti-DEI right made him the Fraudulent DEI Academic. Journalists and online spectators made him an object of fascination and ridicule. Kriss’s own sin turns out to be comparatively refined: he consumed too many articles, but more in sorrow and fascination than in vulgar voyeurism. He alone seems to have recognized what the others missed — that Arday was a gift, a figure of imaginative excess in a cramped world. The faux-collective confession thus leaves Kriss occupying his usual privileged location: inside humanity sufficiently to diagnose its sins, but outside it sufficiently not to share them in any vulgar form.

But he too needs Arday to be a symbol. His Arday is the Magnificent Fabulist, the chancer whose extravagant self-invention exposes the spiritual poverty of everyone who insists upon such dull concepts as factual accuracy. If Cambridge saw racial progress and the right saw DEI corruption, Kriss sees evidence that Sam Kriss possesses a more capacious imagination than the literal-minded plebs.

One way to see this is to notice the questions he is not interested enough to ponder. What did Arday’s family know? Did they believe his claims? Did anyone close to him tell him to stop? Did he tell different versions of his self-made myth to different people? Were people worried that something medically or psychologically was wrong? Banal normie that I am, my first instinct upon seeing a loved one accruing fame based on fabulism would be to stage an intervention. Did Arday have anyone like that in his life?

We don’t know the answers. That’s precisely the point. Anyone chiefly interested in the what and how would want to know them. They are the ordinary questions from which causal understanding is built. But banality is fatal to Kriss’s aesthetic. Perhaps there was no Promethean rebellion. Perhaps there was just family denial, financial incentive, self-deception, ordinary dishonesty, or mental illness. Perhaps Arday was neither saint nor trickster nor emblem, but a deeply flawed man caught in a web partly of his own making and partly maintained by people who found the web useful. But that would not furnish Kriss with an elevated platform from which to sneer at everyone else. His real subject, as usual, is not Jason Arday. It is Sam Kriss being less naïve, less literal, less provincial, less blinkered than everybody else.

In some versions of the myth, Narcissus drowns in his own reflection. I fear that Kriss may eventually succumb to, well, a more literal variant of autoerotic asphyxiation.

I’ve Been Around For a Long Long Year, Stole Many a Man’s Boards and Paste

By in ai, books, ohferfucksake

Well, almost. It is almost a metaphor, provided that we stand far enough away from the facts and squint until every discarded copy of “WebTV for Dummies” looks like an illuminated manuscript.

The underlying story is real. In 2024, Anthropic began an operation known internally as Project Panama. The company bought millions of used books, sliced off their spines, ran the loose pages through industrial scanners, and sent the remains for recycling. That’s the part of the story that warrants the melodramatic photograph of yellowing pages and perhaps a few mournful bars from the soundtrack to Schindler’s List. But what sort of books were they?

The article Gioia links to is titled “AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop.” Yes — old books from megasellers like Better World Books and World of Books. As it happens, I have extensive dealings with both of those companies on a business level. They both deal in general used books. They are not antiquarians. They do not deal in Shakespeare folios, medieval codices, signed first editions, presentation copies, or vellum editions of Montaigne discovered in the attic of a Loire château. They traffic in much of the same material you can find on the shelves at Goodwill or on Amazon. When your local library has a sale, the stuff that’s left over afterward might get sent to Better World Books, whose entire model relies on ex-library castoffs. Goodwills. Library discards. Are you getting the picture? These are books that no one wants, even on “fill a bag for $5” day.

Somewhere along the social-media telephone game, however, old books became “rare” books. Then rare books became “almost irreplaceable” works. Now we’re at “antique” books and “the devouring of all knowledge.” One imagines ChatGPT reclining after dinner, picking its teeth with the spine of a Shakespeare First Folio, while Claude wipes its mouth on incunabula and asks whether anyone would like the last surviving copy of The Canterbury Tales before it goes down the hatch.

“Ingesting” the contents! Like a cloud of digital locusts! Given other current trends of stupidity, I expect to read soon that the clankers are using the ink from priceless manuscripts to make their matzos.

In any event, by the time the story reaches the hysterical pearl-clutchers at Smugstack, the machines are no longer processing used-book inventory; they are putting literary culture itself through a hydraulic guillotine. Gioia may know a lot about jazz music, or even about lit-rah-chur, but like most artsy types, he doesn’t know shit about the reality and basic economics of the used-book market.

A book may be “rare” in the sense that few copies are currently listed for sale. It may be rare because it was published in small numbers, because demand vanished fifty years ago, because other copies are sitting uncatalogued in basements, or because nobody has yet thought it worth the trouble of listing one online. An obsolete service manual for a 1985 Singer sewing machine may be genuinely difficult to find. So may a regional telephone directory, a forgotten theological pamphlet, a Croatian dissertation on soil density, or a scholarly monograph on The Politics of Puerto Rican University Students. Scarcity is not the same thing as value. It is not even necessarily evidence of cultural importance. Sometimes there are few copies for sale because supply is low. Sometimes there are few copies for sale because demand is lower.

Used booksellers know this with a clarity unavailable to people who see books primarily as status symbols. A book may possess intellectual value while having negative commercial value. Someone, somewhere, might conceivably want it someday. But no one presently wants it enough to justify the shelf space, cataloguing, handling, warehousing, and shipping, things that all cost money. And eventually the book reaches the end of the line. It is then donated, pulped, recycled, thrown into a dumpster, left in a damp garage, or carried to the landfill after three consecutive library sales have failed to produce a buyer. That is the reality for most books. Several hundred-thousand tons of them per year, in fact. (And while we’re at it, there never was any farm somewhere upstate where Spot went to run and play to his heart’s content.) Ironically, the very mechanisms that keep so many old books in circulation at all — inventory software, price signals, reseller margins, warehouse rent, men with scanners elbowing through a library sale in search of profit, and a gigantic international platform for used books like Amazon — are also despised by the same ignoramuses who are currently accusing the AI companies of having tagged along with the Vikings during their raids on the monasteries. It’s almost like they don’t care about actual books so much as their their self-image as educated lovers of wisdom and guardians of knowledge.

No one writes a Substack lament when a library discards thirty copies of an outdated Windows manual. No one declares it a metaphor for civilization’s destructive relationship to knowledge when a thrift shop fills a dumpster with Reader’s Digest condensed books. No photograph of scattered yellow pages appears beside the words “almost irreplaceable.” But let an AI company buy the same dead stock, preserve its text, and recycle the paper, and suddenly we are watching the flames consume the Library of Alexandria.

What a pity that so many devoted readers never learned an elementary lesson: be skeptical of any story that flatters your prejudices so neatly.

I Wallowed In the Blood and Mud With All the Other Pigs

By in ohferfucksake, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

What do you mean “we,” paleface? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to comment on the latest viral outrage? You chose to talk about it in order to keep up with the “discourse.” This is what you do with your own free will and free time. You could change the subject, or if that fails to take, you could walk away and do something meaningful, like fix a wobbly chair in your house. I have no patience with this disingenuous passivity. If your water tastes like urine, stop pissing into your own aquifer.

I can’t even fault a media whore like Lemon for coming up with a cynical stunt to get more attention for his new Substack career. It wouldn’t work without so many willing marks playing their part. Political discourse on social media is nothing but professional wrestling for people who are too stupid to grasp the nuances of professional wrestling. The old stereotype was the toothless yokel screaming at ringside when the heel cracks the babyface over the head with a steel chair, but it’s been common knowledge for decades that pro wrestling is scripted, and most fans now know exactly what they’re participating in. The real marks in 2026 are the ones who yell at their screens about politics with all the earnestness of yokels yelling at the referee to turn around and catch the heel in the act of cheating. They should know, on some level, that the spectacle is fraudulent, and they still behave like the most gullible fan in the arena.

The point is never the “incident;” the point is the argument it manufactures. The boring baseline facts — private property, a religious service, people trying to worship in peace — get skipped like the opening act. Instead, everyone leaps straight to the proxy argument that never ends: immigration, ICE, Trump, “fAsCiSm,” the entire omnicause. The crowd doesn’t just buy tickets; it builds the ring, provides the refreshments, and generates the “heat” for free, then calls it “staying informed.” At least wrestling has the decency to wink. This stuff demands you keep a straight face while you’re being worked — and then applaud yourself for not being the sort of person who gets worked.

A Revenue-Shaped Silhouette of a Person

By in foolosophy, ohferfucksake, socmed, the geist of the zeit

A couple things here. First, I love that the quote-tweet scolds Bier for being rude to his long time “power users” — as if we’re talking about forklift operators or electrical equipment, not people compulsively pressing a little glowing rectangle to satisfy their incessant yearnings. The phrase makes me laugh and retch at the same time. “Power user” is a compliment only in the same sense that a casino might praise a “high-value customer.” It doesn’t describe a person; it describes a revenue-shaped silhouette of a person. And once you accept that vocabulary, the rest follows automatically: writers become “content creators,” readers become an “audience,” attention becomes “engagement,” and the whole human exchange gets translated into a spreadsheet dialect.

Secondly, I love the stereotypical autistic tech-dork attempt to capture “quality” in a mathematical formula (Bier is Twitter’s “Head of Product,” by the way). It’s not just wrong; it’s wrong in a very specific, very modern way. It tries to answer a question of taste — who is worth reading? what is good? — by reaching for the kind of proxy that makes sense to a product dashboard. Instead of the barbaric old method (read a person, notice whether you want to keep reading), we get a “definitive measure” that sounds like it came from an A/B test doc: followers divided by output, carry the remainder, declare the higher number “quality.”

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig spends a long, maddening, strangely compelling time wrestling with what “Quality” even means, and one of his central claims is that quality is recognized before it’s defined — a “preintellectual reality,” the “knife-edge” of experience that precedes the neat categories. You can analyze it later, argue about it later, build critical vocabulary around it later. But the recognition comes first. Bier’s formula is the exact inversion: skip the recognition, skip the reading, skip the actual encounter with the work; go straight to the numeric proxy and call it truth.

What’s most depressing is how easily everyone speaks this language now, even when they’re resisting it. “Power users.” “Account quality.” “Follower count.” “Engagement.” It’s a whole metaphysics of shallowness: not “writer” and “reader,” not “artist” and “viewer,” not “craftsman” and “student,” but accounts and metrics, like we’re all inventory in a warehouse and the only sacred thing is throughput.

Meanwhile, I’ve written roughly 3,500 posts over twenty years and had maybe a dozen or two steady readers at any given time. By Bier’s formula, that makes me some kind of low-quality account: too many words for too few head-nods. Fine. That’s the part the metrics obsessives can’t model anyway — the satisfaction of the thing done for its own sake, in obscurity, because it’s a practice and not a performance. Not everything is a growth funnel. Some of it is just the quiet pleasure of putting the next sentence where it belongs, and letting whoever finds it find it honestly.

I See the Better and Approve It, But I Follow the Worse

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake, socmed

Michael Sebastian:

I don’t advocate ditching podcasts, ignoring the videos on your phone, or deleting all your social-media apps (though showing some self-restraint would help me). But the decline in literacy, and its many symptoms, should worry all of us. “As you have probably noticed,” James Marriott wrote in his 2024 essay, “the world of the screen is going to be a much choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.” Such a world surely encourages the rise of authoritarianism and an illiberal society.

This compact nugget of clichéd anti-thought appears in an article titled “The Lost Art of Reading an Actual Book.” Yes, God forbid you actually stop the behaviors you claim to abhor in order to make time for the ones you claim to adore! You don’t want to read more; you want an alibi for not reading, served with a side of moral credit. Your revealed preference is perfectly clear: you prefer the algorithmic pacifier, the hyperkinetic feed that makes your brain dribble out of your ears, while you narrate your own surrender as if it were a weather report. “We should worry,” you say, as though the problem is ambient, like humidity, rather than the result of a hundred tiny daily choices you keep making on purpose. And the most embarrassing part is the adolescent tone: this airy, shrugging helplessness, like it would be extreme or weird to close the apps that are devouring your capacity for sustained attention. Do you even hear yourself? If you can’t resist the world’s gaudiest digital harlots, you don’t have a literacy crisis; you have a self-respect crisis. I swear, social media is the whiskey-and-smallpox of intelligent reflection.

His concluding sentence is, “The postliterate age is going to be super lame.” Jesus Aitch. The art of reading an actual book wasn’t lost; it committed suicide.

But If You Go Copying Pictures of Chairman Mao

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit

Late-stage leftism: when the only thing redistributing itself is the costume rack.

For the blissfully unaware, this cretin is Hasan Piker, leftist Twitch streamer, subject of glowing legacy-media profiles, and walking self-parody of revolutionary chic and other exhausted ideologies of yesteryear. No satirist could outdo the image of this dim, malevolent excrescence, rewarded beyond belief by the amoral market he’d like to abolish, buying a three-million dollar mansion in L.A., only to rant a couple months ago about how his slow Internet speed makes him “hate this country so fucking much,” calling it “emblematic” of America’s “violence,” whatever that means, before proceeding to trigger his dog’s shock collar for daring to get up and move around in the background. Comcast being Comcast: “violence.” Using a shock collar to torment a dog for no reason: not violence, and certainly not “emblematic” of life for countless people under the political systems he favors. Maybe he can cosplay as Malcolm Caldwell for his next act.

If the Only Tool You Have Is a Media-Studies Degree…

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit

In Vectors, James Richardson says, “To paranoids and the Elect, everything makes sense.” The trendy use of “psyop” is a perfect example of this. Not everything you dislike about the world is the conscious product of a committee of conspirators; most of it is just stupidity, laziness, or fashion — for example, the way every slack-jawed imbecile on Twitter recently decided to start squawking “slop” and “psyop” in unison like a flock of retarded parrots, without any directive from on high. “Virtue is found in weakness” is a “psyop” that traces all the way back to the Sermon on the Mount; the woke deep state didn’t have to get involved at all.

When I am king, I’m putting the “psyop” people in the same subterranean dungeon as the “slop” people. They can workshop their vocabulary together.

‘Cause I’m TRT, I’m Dynamite! TRT, and I’ll Win the Fight!

By in battling personal entropy, extraordinary popular delusions, ohferfucksake

There should be some compound German word for that sinking feeling you get when you realize how much disproportionate effort it will take to address the incredible amount of ignorance packed into such a deceptively short statement, but you’re resolved to do it anyway.

I started taking testosterone replacement therapy in January of this year, with levels of 282 (300-1,000 is considered normal range). I had initially refused it for various reasons, but especially because I had long heard that it was strongly correlated with an increased risk of prostate cancer. Given that my father has prostate cancer, I figured I was already at enough risk. But I spent several months reading up and doing more research, and it seems that the high testosterone/cancer link is nowhere near as clear as I’d thought; some evidence even points toward low testosterone being a bigger risk factor. Eventually I decided the overall benefits — improvements in fatigue, libido, mood, bone density, anemia, maybe body composition — justified the potential risk, especially since I’m already monitoring my PSA levels regularly.

I have noticed two benefits. One, I started losing a millimeter of fat around the belly each month when I went in for calipers/tape measuring. That started right away, and has stayed pretty consistent. I’d have to check, but I think I’ve exchanged about ten pounds of fat for a like amount of lean mass. I honestly don’t think it’s anything anyone would notice at a glance. I still have the same “shape” overall. I just look like “middle-aged guy who goes to the gym,” not “WWE wrestler/IFBB bodybuilder.” And two, I started to notice only last month that I was definitely recovering faster from the most taxing lifts, like squats and deadlifts. Squats in particular were always tough on me. I could count on three days, sometimes four, of tender hamstrings/adductors/glutes. Not excruciating pain, just hobbling gingerly upon standing up, and preferring to bend at the waist rather than the knees to pick anything up off the floor. Now, it’s one or two days to recover, and it’s not nearly as intense.

It is not a panacea or a fountain of youth. I still have to do the same amount of warming up and cooling down before and after workouts. I still do yoga, and still go for monthly massages with a therapist who does medical and sports-medicine massages, which are more akin to grueling physical therapy than someone gently kneading your trapezius muscles. I wear neoprene shorts for the beneficial warmth and compression on leg days and quicker recovery afterwards, one of the few training “hacks” which actually make a noticeable difference. (I recommend Nordic Training Gear for price, quality and insanely fast shipping from Sweden, and I’m saying that for free out of genuine conviction — no affiliate links or kickbacks.) I take supplements like curcumin and omega-3s and amino acids. I still need at least eight hours of restful sleep every night, and of course I follow a tailored meal plan from a dietitian. I can’t say I notice any difference in sleep quality from TRT, nor any noticeable surges of energy, horniness, or desire to pick a fight with traffic cones. My assumption is that my health baseline was already high, so TRT didn’t change much. Granted, it may be different for someone who starts it as a scrawny, sedentary depressive.

“But what about the gains?” you might ask. What about the massive strength increase and the new PRs? Honestly, again, it has been pretty subtle. An obvious confounding factor is that I got a hernia at the end of January and had surgery on it in May, so I spent from January to July doing almost no serious lower-body work at all. Still, my squat is only ten pounds heavier than it was last November. Even my deadlift, which had been stuck for a long time, only jumped to its recent new high thanks to a radical innovation: I loosened my lever belt one notch. It turns out lifting heavy weight is much easier when you can take in more oxygen before starting! Who knew?  (Trainers hate this one weird trick!) I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to have higher testosterone levels, but it doesn’t lead to sudden fifty-pound jumps in personal records either. You still have to do just as much hard work as before.

The boring truth is that >90% of being strong and healthy is the same old stuff that everyone already knows and no one wants to do: eat balanced meals, get plenty of deep, restful sleep and keep building patiently on your previous work in the gym. TRT can improve things a little on the margins, but as with most things, if you go into it expecting miracles, you’ll be disappointed.

As for the original tweet, lots of things “naturally” decline with age: bone density, muscle mass, red blood cell production, estrogen/progesterone in women. We don’t look at an osteoporotic 70-year-old and say, “Well, you were supposed to have fragile bones, so bisphosphonates and calcium are bad for society.” Same for HRT in women. The “supposed to” line is just the old naturalistic fallacy. A guy getting 100-200 mg of testosterone weekly from his doctor is not remotely comparable to a young meathead furtively taking several times that amount of various synthetic testosterone-derivatives from shady sources. Low testosterone is actually associated with depression, fatigue, low motivation, and worse cardiometabolic health. Normalizing that doesn’t turn men into bar-fight goblins; it often makes them less irritable and more stable. I feel pretty confident in predicting that even widespread TRT will not lead to 75-year-olds brawling in the street with their grandsons over access to nubile young women.

I Blew Up the Church, But I Did Not Break the China

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Technically, I think the church collapsed due to structural weaknesses (like trying to make moral behavior contingent upon acceptance of dubious metaphysical assertions, for example), but either way, what fancy-pants church is he going to where they use fine china? The ones I’ve been in for various events were serving potluck casserole on paper plates with plastic utensils and Styrofoam cups.

Oh, I’m aware he’s trying to make some deep metaphorical point about how morality didn’t exist until it was invented during the Council of Nicaea, but I’ve already given this more thought than it’s worth. I swear by all the fucked mothers of epithetical yore, this guy is one dumb motherfucker.

Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink?

By in ai, ohferfucksake

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI has a headline-ready story: in drought-stricken Chile, Google plans a data center that will use more than a thousand times as much water as a nearby city of 88,000 people. That’s the sort of detail that lodges in a reader’s mind. Unfortunately — or amusingly, depending on your temperament — it appears to be nonsense. When you work the numbers backward, her claim implies that the entire city survives on less than a sip of water per person per day. The more likely explanation is a simple unit error — treating cubic meters as liters — magnified into a three-orders-of-magnitude horror story. The same chapter seems to blur the difference between water merely withdrawn (and then returned) and water actually consumed, and to invite readers to see a large global withdrawal estimate as if it were all drinkable water being siphoned off by data centers.

I don’t think this is just a math problem. It looks like a case study in motivated reasoning. The story is too perfect: AI, already despised in many circles as a job thief and art thief, now shows up as a literal water thief, menacing poor communities in the “global South.” It plugs straight into an existing “climate crisis” narrative: Western tech giants strip-mine the planet, this time not for oil but for electricity and water. Once you want that story to be true, a ridiculous number like “one building uses a thousand cities’ worth of water” stops feeling like a red flag and starts feeling like a God-given symbol. The data becomes raw material for the morality play.

What bothers me more is what this says about our so-called expert class. Hao isn’t some random journalist writing a TED-talk of a book for the NPR crowd; she has an MIT engineering degree and a background in energy studies. The book had a fact-checking team. Multiple prestigious outlets blurbed and recommended it. Yet apparently no one along that entire chain stopped to say, “Wait a second; can any single building on Earth really use more water than a city?” The institutions that keep telling us to “trust the science” can’t be bothered to do high-school-level sanity checks on their own favorite cautionary tales. This is how you burn trust capital. And once you’ve burned it, you don’t get it back by scolding people for being “anti-science.”

Meanwhile, the influencer class is delighted. They thrive in exactly this kind of epistemological vacuum. Every time a credentialed journalist or public-health authority face-plants in public, another YouTuber or Substack crank gets to say, “See? They lied to you again. Here’s what they don’t want you to know…” The tragedy is that the average layman, watching all this, is not crazy or wicked for becoming cautious. When people say, “Let’s wait and see before we reorganize the economy around your latest ‘a study has shown’ crusade,” they’re not rejecting reason; they’re saying “look who’s reasoning.”

I don’t know how long it will take to rebuild institutional trust, or if it’s even possible in the old sense. It may be that for the rest of our lives, trust is going to be granular and provisional: this lab, not “science”; this reporter, not “the media.” In the meantime, we’re stuck navigating an information landscape where both the official gatekeepers and their self-appointed rivals are constantly auditioning for our belief. My main hope is simply that reality doesn’t present us with a genuinely Plague-level threat while we’re still busy not believing one another. Microbes and CO₂ don’t care about our culture war, and they don’t wait for our epistemology to recover.

The Fool Hath Said In His Tweet

By in atheism, nihilism, ohferfucksake, religion

It is untrue that religion should have provided morality — the converse! We prove religion true or untrue with morality.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

1. “The universe is cold and uncaring” — True, but melodramatic and self-pitying. Warmth and caring are social traits, so, as the cosmologist Johnny Lee noted, expecting “the universe” to relate to you in that manner is looking for love in all the wrong places.

2. “Just animals like all the others” — Again, true in a banal sense, in that we are biological beings, products of evolution, sharers of DNA with other animals, but still melodramatically dismissive. There are clearly relative differences between species, and even between individual members of species. The phrase implies it’s some kind of demotion or degradation to be “merely” an animal. The whining tone is undignified.

3. “And therefore” — I wince whenever I see a moron preparing to draw sweeping conclusions from dubious premises.

4. “There can’t possibly be anything like Right and Wrong” — Well, true in the sense that morality is not a gift from God, but egregiously stupid insofar as moral instincts are present even in “mere” animals; as Nietzsche wryly noted above, they predate religious concepts. Right and Wrong” with capital letters is just a demand for moral bullion from the Cosmic Treasury; alas, all we’ve got is the fiat-morality standard, backed by the full faith and community credit of our neighbors. Luckily, that functions well enough for our purposes.

5. “You genuinely are permitted to do whatever you want” — “Permitted” by whom? “Everything is permitted” equivocates between metaphysical permission (no cosmic judge) and institutional permission (what people, laws, and norms will tolerate). Technically, you’ve always been free to “do whatever you want,” but it has never been the case that you are therefore free from earthly consequences.

6. “There will be no final accounting.” Yes, that at least does follow from disbelief in monotheism.

7. “And yet almost no atheists admit to it.” Strange; I can’t imagine why anyone would object to being caricatured.

And this is the “tamest, most obviously true thing” he’s ever posted.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V

By in ai, ohferfucksake, technology, the geist of the zeit

Adam Aleksic:

The unnerving thing is that now, with hundreds of millions of people regularly engaging with chatbots, English-speaking humans are starting to talk like the inhuman communicator on the other side. For example, ChatGPT uses the word “delve” at higher rates than people generally use when writing or speaking English. As Florida State University researchers Tom S. Juzek and Zina B. Ward have found, this likely results from small biases and errors in the human feedback process compounding over time. Employees of AI companies checking over large language model (LLM) outputs are often low-wage workers from countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, where “delve” is used at higher rates than in American or British English.

Indeed, a study reported in Scientific American last month found that people have started saying “delve” more in spontaneous, spoken conversations. This isn’t AI’s doing anymore; we’ve started internalizing its biases and repeating them by ourselves. I say “we” because even those in the anti-“delve” faction aren’t exempt. We might avoid using the most well-known ChatGPT giveaways, but so many words are appearing with unnatural frequency that we can’t possibly avoid them all. Are we also supposed to stop using the chatbot-overused “inquiry”? Or “surpass”? There’s too much to keep track of.

“AI is making us all speak and write alike,” says the umpteenth journalist in the last month to reference the same study in the same tone of hand-wringing concern about bias and diversity. Lawd’ve mussy! Can you imagine how horrible it would be if an entire class of people got trapped in a media silo and started mindlessly imitating one another?

What Hath Dawkins to Do With Wokism?

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Sometimes I envy the stupid their certainties. The midwit moron hath said in his heart, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” and who can deny the satisfaction he receives from reducing complex phenomena down to a Twitter-friendly slogan?

“New Atheism” was a media phenomenon. Like everything else created and nurtured by journalists and media-savvy intellectuals, it was a narrative. Whether narratives are true or not is never important. They exist to give vacuous people something to chatter about until the next narrative comes out. But okay, fine, let’s humor this idiotic statement. How did New Atheism travel back in time to create identity politics, or postcolonialism? How did it create the Great Recession of ’07-’08, and by proxy, a large class of disaffected, downwardly-mobile young adults who channeled all their angst into the status competition we call wokeness? How did it inform Barack Obama’s “whole of society” approach to social change? What did it have to do with the new social media platforms that allowed performative radicalism to become trendy among a younger generation? Here we are, following the baby-boomer template to the letter. We had our cultural revolution, which is — right on schedule! — petering out into Manson Family-style cult psychosis. The energy behind the street protests and riots has dissipated. We’ve had a Republican Restoration. I suppose millennials are going to rediscover New Age navel-gazing next, and maybe there will be a trans Jonestown or something. None of this is new. All of this was done sixty years ago, and with better music. Doesn’t this strange cultural repetition suggest something much more fundamental than a passing media fad from the mid-’00s?

Religious, i.e. Christian, belief has been declining in the US for decades. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris were the fleas riding on the back of an elephant, getting credit for steering it. If anything, most of the liberals and leftists who would later become woke attacked New Atheism at the time for being Islamophobic, or even neoconservative, thanks to Hitchens’ and Harris’ support for the Iraq war. But sure, people just stopped believing in God around 2006 because of a couple of bestselling books, and wokeness was the inevitable consequence. I wish people had the decency to be embarrassed when they say something so goddamned stupid in public.

You Are No Eagles

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

Like many of you, I’m enjoying the vibes as the Great Awokening wheezes to an inglorious end. In the near future, I hope to spend many beautiful afternoons in the cemetery urinating on its grave. My enjoyment is tempered, however, by the knowledge that stupidity is bipartisan and eternal. This ridiculous species never learns anything for very long. We don’t like to draw measured conclusions and proceed carefully. We prefer to jump on the pendulum and ride it over to the other end. And so here we are, competing to see who can be the most aggressively stupid in the name of being anti-woke. Consider the tangled web of motives and impulses that underlie even the simplest human acts. Consider further the decade-long cultural spasm we conventionally call “wokeness.” How dumb do you have to be to reduce that down to one simple source? Off the top of my head, I can name resentment, radical chic, and status competition among the downwardly-mobile as more fundamental motivations than “empathy.”

Some friends of ours have been having a tough time lately. They had to shutter their small business shortly after the birth of their second child. The husband went back to driving trucks while the wife went back to school for her nursing degree. A few weeks ago, the wife’s brother-in-law died unexpectedly, so her sister (and her young child) are moving in with them. I have empathy for them. It doesn’t amount to much more than keeping in touch with them and looking for any opportunity to be of help, but it’s there. They’re good people who work hard, and I want to see things work out for them. Empathy in this case is quiet, unobtrusive, and patient.

By contrast, let’s take last year’s anti-Israel demonstrators and activists, or the spoiled rich kids who put on their anarchist underoos and rampaged through cities during the Summer of Floyd. Who is naive enough to think that any of them give a wet, sputtering shit about actual Palestinians or inner-city blacks? They’re doing what humans have always done: look for a convenient excuse to rationalize the inherent delight in anti-social, destructive behavior. It’s a performance aimed at an audience of their peers. What did “empathy” have to do with any of that? What does it have to do with the metastasizing mediocrity of DEI? “Empathy” is the respectable Sunday suit that resentment, radical chic, status competition et. al. wear in public, but no one should be fooled by that.

One thread of continuity between woke radicals and whatever sort of “new right” is taking shape is the urge to dismantle the things that make life civilized, more or less. It’s stunning to watch soft, weak people strive to unleash the worst elements of human nature out of some deranged conviction that they’ll be on top of the food chain in the aftermath. As some philosopher warned, he who is not a bird should not make his nest above the abyss.

Teach Your Children Well

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit

There may be several tragic things about this generation — smartphones, SSRIs, helicopter parents, Taylor Swift — but the fact that they want to LARP as revolutionaries before taking up their inevitable careers as corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, and campus diversicrats is not one of them.

When he proclaimed the death of God, Nietzsche lamented the fact that his shadow would linger for centuries more. As the Boomer generation shuffles closer to the grave, I likewise fear that we will be struggling to escape their shadow for a long time. Nothing against any individual Boomers, of course. Some of them, I assume, are good people, even if they’re not bequeathing their best to posterity. But I swear by the shimmering feathers of Quetzalcoatl, how much longer will we be cursed to watch these endless reprises of 1960s student radicalism? Can we just raze Columbia and salt the earth so that no derivative demonstrations ever grow there again? I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Marx, but the idiocy of this tweet has made a strange bedfellow out of that belligerent, unwashed, boil-covered excrescence of a man: the first time we saw the most privileged generation in history act out a collective temper tantrum, it was a tragedy. Now, it’s just a farce.

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