Quotulatiousness

April 22, 2026

Reflections on the life extension of the A-10 – “we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR admits that there clearly still is a role for the “Warthog” in modern combat … under the right conditions:

Gotta admit I’ve changed my mind about this. I was in the camp that loved the Hog but was grudgingly prepared to concede that its time had passed — not survivable in a modern threat environment stiff with drones and MANPADs.

But damned if the A-10 didn’t turn out to be an effective tool against small-boat swarms in the Straits of Hormuz. And not so expensive to fly or ammo up that you end up with a nasty shot-exchange problem either — not something you can say for putting the F-35 on that job.

The Hog has demonstrated that there is still a tier of missions in between the envelope of an attack helicopter and a fast fighter for which the Hog is excellently fitted. Still. In 2026.

Of course you need to have done SEAD to lower the odds that it will be popped by competent air defense, but the US Air Force is very good at that mission. As it keeps demonstrating.

I was wrong. The Hog deserves its extension. And we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11. Maybe not a manned A11, but a functionally similar instrument with a big fucking gun and the ability to fly low and slow and loiter on a patrol area.

In conclusion: “Let me sing you the song of my people: BRRRRRRRRRT.”

April 18, 2026

Another proof of the value of open source

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a pre-computer (pre-electronics) proof that open source is more secure than closed source:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

There’s an old, bad idea that’s been trying to resurrect itself on X in the last couple of days. Which makes it time for me to explain exactly why, in the age of LLMs, open-sourcing your code is an even more important security measure than it was before we had robot friends.

The underlying principle was discovered in the 1880s by an expert on military cryptography, a man named August Kerckhoffs, writing long before computers were a thing.

To start with, you need to focus in on the fact that cryptosystems have two parts. They have methods, and they have keys. You feed a key and a message to a method and get encrypted information that, you hope, only someone else with the same pair of method and key can read.

What Kerckhoffs noticed was this: military cryptosystems in normal operation leak information about their methods. Code books and code machines get captured, stolen, betrayed, or lost in simple accidents and found by people you don’t want to have them. This was the pre-computer equivalent of an unintended source-code disclosure.

Cryptosystems also leak information about their keys — think post-it notes with passwords stuck to a monitor. What Kerckhoffs noticed is that these two different kinds of compromising leakage happen at very different base rates. It is almost impossible to prevent leakage of information about methods, but just barely possible to prevent leakage of information about keys.

Why? Keys have fewer bits. This makes them easier to keep secret.

Remember: this was something an intelligent man could notice in the 1880s, well before even vacuum tubes. Which is your first clue that the power of this observation hasn’t changed just because we’re in the middle of a freaking Singularity.

Security through obscurity — closed source code — means you’re busted if either the source code or the keys get leaked. Open source is a preemptive strike — it’s a way to force the property that your security depends *only* on keeping the keys secret.

What you’re doing by designing under the assumption of open source is preventing source code leakage from being a danger. And that’s the kind of leakage with a high base rate.

As far back as 1947 Claude Shannon applied this to electronic security — he did critical work on the voice scramblers that were used for secure telephone communications between heads of state during World War II. Shannon said one should always design as though “the enemy knows the system”. The US’s National Security Agency still uses this as a guiding principle in computer-based cryptosystems.

If you’re doing software security, always design as though the enemy can see your source code. I’m still a little puzzled that I was apparently the first person to notice that this was a general argument for open source; as soon as I did, my first thought was more or less “Duh? Somebody should have noticed this sooner?”

Now let’s consider how LLMs change this picture. Or…don’t.

An LLM is like a cryptanalyst with a superhuman attention span that never sleeps. If your system leaks information that can compromise it, that compromise is going to happen a hell of a lot faster than if your adversary has to rely on Mark 1 meatbrains.

But it gets worse. With LLMs, decompilation is now fast and cheap. You have to assume that if an adversary can see your executable binary, they can recover the source code. If you were relying on that to be secret, you are *screwed*.

Leakage control — limiting the set of bits that can yield a compromise — is more important than ever. So security by code obscurity is an even more brittle and dangerous strategy than it used to be.

Anybody who tries to tell you differently is either deeply stupid or trying to sell you something that you should not by any means buy.

April 12, 2026

The two kinds of enshittification

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR explains the differences between the two kinds of enshittification we’re seeing these days:

It may be time to start distinguishing between classic two-sided enshittification and a more general single-sided variety.

When Corey Doctorow originally defined the term “enshittification” he was describing a very specific thing that can and does happen when a platform like Amazon or Google acts as a two-sided market-maker. They start by reducing friction for both buyers and sellers, get everybody locked in by the higher cost of doing volume business anywhere else, then start charging tolls on both sides and injecting spamware that nobody wants. Eventually even their search function becomes completely shitty.

The increasingly horrifying “agentic” train wreck that Windows 11 has become isn’t a two-sided platform in the same way, but the feel of its late stages is depressingly familiar. It’s so stuffed with bloatware, spamware, and spyware that its nominal function as an operating system to run programs for its users feels almost like an afterthought.

I’m going to call this “single-sided enshittification”, and point out that both kinds stem from the same fundamental disconnect. They’re both things that happen when the dominant revenue stream from a product is disconnected from the needs of its original users.

In both cases, an important factor, though not the only one, is the attack of the adtech vampires. So very much of the ugliness in enshittified platforms is downstream of the easy money that they offer product owners for allowing them to sink their fangs into the information stream.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. But if there is one, it starts with identifying the problem correctly. Enshittification — it’s not just for two-sided platforms anymore.

From the comments on the original post:

March 22, 2026

QotD: The treason of the scientists

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
    Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.

    And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.

One of those people is me.

I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.

I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.

But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.

And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.

Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.

Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.

Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

March 14, 2026

QotD: “Bludgeonspeak”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m coining a term today: “bludgeonspeak”.

Bludgeonspeak is the use of invented terminology, or historical terminology that has been hijacked and corrupted, and then emptied of all meaning except as an attempt at moral blackmail.

Here are some notable bludgeonspeak items in 2025: “racist”, “fascist”, “homophobe”, “transphobe”, “islamophobe”, “far-right”. Also, the term “genocide” might not be quite there yet, but it’s being pushed in that direction pretty hard.

Some bludgeonspeak terms, like “fascist” and “racist” and “genocide”, used to have substantive meanings which have been destroyed by persistent abuse. It may be appropriate to recognize and use those meanings if you are reading or writing or speaking about history.

Others, like “homophobe”, “transphobe”, and “islamophobe”, were bludgeonspeak from birth. There are no circumstances in which these have substantive meaning, and it is unwise to treat them as though they do.

The only way to win is not to play. When somebody throws bludgeonspeak at you, call it out. State that you will not be controlled by their language, and you refuse to be assigned to a category you reject.

The key thing that people who employ bludgeonspeak don’t want you to grasp is that these words only have the power over you that you allow them.

Once a term has been generally recognized as bludgeonspeak, it not only loses its power as direct moral blackmail, it can no longer be used as a social attack.

So: learn to recognize bludgeonspeak. Shut down the people who use it by refusing to give it power. And educate other people about this manipulation tactic, so that they too can reject it.

You can prevent semantic manipulation. All it takes is the will to do so.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-04.

Update, Ides of March, 2026: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

February 11, 2026

QotD: Delusional takes – “There are no white people in the Bible”

Filed under: History, Italy, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Responding to an image posted here.]

Oh boy, I get to post more Damned Facts that will offend people who richly deserve to be offended.

There were lots of white people in the Bible. And you don’t need to get into any definitional questions about the genetics of ancient Judea, either.

Greeks and Romans were white — that is, pale-skinned Caucasians. We know this from art, from sequenced genomes, and from contemporary descriptions of what they looked like. Herodotus described the Pontic Greeks as being blonde and blue-eyed.

Here’s the really Damned Fact: brownness in Mediterranean European populations was a late development. Post-Classical. Caused by …

… the Islamic invasions, post 722 CE. Resulted in Europeans of the Mediterranean coast becoming admixed (to put it very, very diplomatically) with Arabs and Africans. That’s why there’s a really noticeable gradient in Italy between lighter-skinned Northerners and darker-skinned Southerners; it’s all about how long various regions were under Islamic domination.

The question that usually comes up is, was Jesus himself “white”?

It’s possible. We can’t go by the artistic evidence, because Byzantine art deliberately confused Jesus with stylized depictions of the Emperor in his glory (there’s a really famous example of this in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople). And those Greek emperors may well have been depicted as a bit blonder and more blue-eyed than they actually were, because that was considered beautiful. Dashboard Jesus is a late polyp of this tradition.

But until we find actual genetic material we’re not going to know. Imperial-run Palestine was a swirling cauldron of different ethnic groups, and the genetic boundaries didn’t necessarily match up neatly with the religious ones. Knowing that his parents were part of the Jewish people doesn’t necessarily help much.

The two most likely cases are that Jesus looked like a current-day city Arab, or he looked like a Philistine — that is, Greek with some local admixture; a lot of coastal Lebanese still look like that today. But full-bore pasty-skinned Euro can’t be ruled out.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-10.

February 3, 2026

QotD: Are men funnier than women and if so, why?

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    critter @BecomingCritter
    genuinely why are men funnier than women? do you have a theory?

I didn’t have a theory of this until you ask the question. Now I do.

A lot of ethologists who have studied differences in behavior between men and women have noted that men have much better-developed methods for resolving physical conflict and threats short of lethal violence.

To put it a different way, women in conflict basically have two settings: either peaceful or unhinged screamingly vicious. Men have more intermediate gradations, and rituals about how they move among them.

Men having better developed senses of humor might best be seen as part of their instincts for social de-escalation.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-01.

January 25, 2026

Why does Microsoft treat its users so badly? Because it can

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR considers the situation most Microsoft users find themselves in these days:

Between the forced updates, the spyware, the adware, OneDrive constantly attempting to suck up all your data, and infinite dark-pattern subscription traps, I’m gathering that many Windows users are now nostalgic for the days when the shit only seemed to be up to their ankles rather than lapping at their nostrils.

The information asymmetry of closed-source software inevitably fucks the user over. I know, I know, I sound like a broken record. I’ve been banging on about this for going on 30 years now and even I get tired of my own rant sometimes.

That’s not why I’m posting today. Instead I want to publicly contemplate an unobvious question: just why is Microsoft treating its users so badly?

“Because it can” is not really a responsive answer. Corporations don’t do evil things because they like being evil, they only do evil things because they think they’re profit-maximizing.

So I understand about the dark-pattern subscription stuff and the adware. That’s slimy, but it’s revenue capture. There’s at least a cold-blooded trade-off you can imagine some product planner making between revenue line-go-up now and pissing off people who won’t be customers later.

But what is Microsoft maximizing by doing things that drive users away from it without any revenue capture? What model of reality, or failure of decision making, do you have to have to think it’s a good idea to push forced updates with work-interrupting reboots that can’t be blocked or delayed by the user?

It would have been trivial to have a pop-up that says: An update is available. Do it now, or defer it until ? The fact that that didn’t happen can’t be ascribed to revenue-line-go-up fever. These are two different kinds of ugly.

And that second kind makes me think that there’s nobody left in product management at Microsoft with the ability and authority to veto bad ideas because they will anger the users.

It looks to me like nobody over there is thinking strategically about customer retention anymore. By the time you get to the point where nobody squashes forced-update reboots, nobody can seriously raise the question of whether adware is going to drive away so many users that Windows market share will tank and take all that lovely subscription revenue with it.

This is where I point out, with weary inevitability, that it’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. With nobody keeping an eye on the long game and user retention, the petty money grabs will only accelerate. Microsoft will keep flogging that donkey until it dies.

The irony here is that if Microsoft were an efficient maximizer of long-term profit they would be doing less of the shitty enraging crap that they are now.

How much less depends on how good their judgment is. You can be actively trying to keep a critical mass of your user base happy enough not to bail out and still fail. But at least Microsoft would be trying. Right now, there’s damn little evidence that they are.

January 7, 2026

“All of that operational brilliance was always there; it persisted through the Stupid Era”

Filed under: Americas, China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I missed this Chris Bray piece when it was published a few days ago, but it’s still fully relevant. In it, he discusses the contrast between the faltering and visibly failing military operations like Operation Craven Bugout, sorry, I mean “Operation Allies Refuge”, in 2021 as the US and allied forces abandoned the Afghanistan mission leaving behind billions in military equipment and untold numbers of pro-western Afghans to the “mercy” of the Taliban and the recent brilliant military success in Venezuela:

For years, I’ve been shouting two related messages. First, “we’re in a contest of persistence between elite cosplayers and low-status producers”. Institutions that advance leaders on the basis of their ability to engage in au courant symbol-chanting are crushing the people in those institutions who do the work, and therefore hollowing out the institutions. Second, and so closely related you could just call it the same point in different words, “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down”. The “making stuff” people are mostly just fine; the “running stuff” people are mostly insane.

After years of dismal military failures, like the bafflingly inept withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years of ineffective warfare against the Taliban, the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro was operationally brilliant. It required perfection from everyone in a giant list of moving parts, executing a detailed plan with absolute precision. If you haven’t watched the briefing from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, who was ritually denounced by the idiot media and the Democratic Party as an unqualified choice for the job, take some time to watch at least some of it. You aren’t used to seeing competence and clarity from an American institutional leader, so it’ll bring back some parts of your consciousness that may have gone to sleep for a while.

With 150 aircraft in the air, launching from something close to two dozen points of origin, every asset arrived in place and on time, while the lights went out below them. From the transcript:

The “pathway overhead” was that the US military switched off the Venezuelan military. They pressed the off switch on another nation’s command, control, and communications systems. Venezuela spent 2025 posturing at the US Navy, displaying their power as a warning against American aggression:

Similarly, “Experts had warned that Venezuela’s layered air-defence network could complicate US air operations”. Apparently not. At the designated moment, it all just went away.

I’ve talked for years about “recipe knowledge”, about the ability to know the steps that will produce a desired outcome. If I want to produce X result, I have to perform steps A, B, C, D, E, and F, in that order. If I skip Step C, Result X doesn’t occur, even though I’ve performed all the other steps.

We’ve just watched a military that apparently lacked the recipe knowledge to destroy the Taliban, or even to withdraw from a failed war in an orderly fashion and without leaving a bunch of weapons behind, demonstrate a shockingly high level of recipe knowledge. A failing institution isn’t a failing institution. Brilliant planning, flawless execution, ruthless competence.

There’s no way in hell that a single year of top-down intervention reversed years of hard decline. All of that operational brilliance was always there. It persisted through the Stupid Era.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the article:

This, right here, is the meta-message of the Venezuelan raid. Competence collapse isn’t a purely military pathology, nor is it solely an American affliction. It applies to every institution in every Western country. We’ve been living with the frustrations and humiliations of this imposed decline for decades now.

With one decisive act, Trump has demonstrated that decline is a choice made by a small, false elite – and that if that elite is removed, decline can be reversed.

Removing the elite is the fix-everything switch in the presidency, the US military, and the Venezuelan government.

And now the whole world sees it.

A related post from ESR on the social media site formerly known as Twitter explores one of the more geographically distant ramifications of the US operation in Venezuela:

    The Watcher On The Web @WatcherontheWeb

    “ThIs Is GoInG tO cAuSe ChInA tO aTtAcK tAiWaN”

    Yes retard, the country that just got shown all it’s calculations based on weapons systems which depended on being able to use RADARS to engage US aircraft/ships are essentially worthless and billions of dollars in investment and research have been wasted is going to feel VERY brave in launching an assault against a fortified island nation armed with US weapons, US fighters, backed up by the US navy and Japanese defense force …

    I’m sure they are just giddy with excitement to try and pull that off. Practically chomping at the bit

This is an extremely important point that I’ve been thinking about ever since we got an unexpected audit of Venezuela’s air defenses. Russian SAM-300s and BUKs, Chinese anti-air radar, all proved completely worthless against U.S. gear and operators.

I guarantee you that if you are a Chinese military planner contemplating how to get an invasion army across 100 miles of the Straits of Taiwan, you are shitting your pants right about now. Because you have just learned that if you had tried to bust that move yesterday, your nice shiny new invasion fleet would have gotten absolutely gacked by U.S. airpower and missiles that you wouldn’t see coming BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING RADARS DON’T FUCKING WORK.

Also, the Soviet anti-air missile designs you cloned turn out to be about as useful as so many busted shopping carts.

Some of your guys are going to be saying “That’s impossible. The fix must have been in. Air defense must have had orders not to engage.” Which is an extremely cheering thought, but …

… isn’t that what the Americans would want you to believe? The only thing better than having complete technological dominance of an adversary is having complete technological dominance of an adversary who’s been conned into believing it isn’t true and walks blithely into getting utterly wrecked by it.

Yep. Before this went down I was figuring a very high probability that the Chinese make their move on Taiwan in 2027. Now? I guarantee you that their confidence in their previous risk assessments has evaporated. They no longer know what they’ll be facing, and there’s a significant possibility that mainland China’s domestic air defenses are worthless too.

Now I’m going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: “thermobaric bombs” and “Three Gorges Dam”. A China that’s naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history.

Now I think there’s pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

Update, 8 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 4, 2026

“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”

Filed under: Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:

Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.

The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.

It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.

Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.

However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

    How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
    By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

    The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

    Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money …

    And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

December 28, 2025

“The Singularity is upon us”

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ESR is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI:

Yes, I’m still 12

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.

Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone.

We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream.

We didn’t have version control. Public forge sites wouldn’t be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.

You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.

Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day.

Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test … and I’m still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!

This meditation isn’t supposed to be about me, though. It’s about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I’ve lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world’s knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn’t have said “never” (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn’t have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.

We’ve come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I’ve lived through and learned was just prologue.

November 29, 2025

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 17, 2025

QotD: Turns out Judaism isn’t the peaceful exception among Abrahamic montheisms

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Yevardia @haravayin_hogh

    Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
    Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
    For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.

Quoted thread is absolutely fascinating.

Like many American gentiles who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I have a fondness for Jewish culture as it manifested in this country. The food, the humor, the intellectual tradition. I read Mad Magazine as a kid and “The Joys of Yiddish” as a young man and cheerfully adopted some Yiddishisms into my idiolect.

It’s always been slightly difficult for me, though, to reconcile my fondness for the Jewish influence on American life with what I believe about monotheisms in general and Abrahamic monotheisms is in particular. Which is, basically, that they are pits of evil. Infectious insanities that bring mob violence, horror and death whenever they have actual power.

Judaism looked like an at least partial exception, a monotheism with a curious lack of horrific violence in its backstory. I thought this might be explained by its absence of coercive power ever since the destruction of the Second Temple — 2000 years of oppression by others teaching Judaism the virtue of tolerance the hard way.

Now comes Israel Shahak to tell me it wasn’t like that at all. That until historically recent times – basically, post-1800 — Judaism wasn’t tolerant and rational. Not even close. These are virtues of the secularized Jew, in reaction to traditional Jewish shtetl and ghetto communities that could best have been described as violently evil religious despotisms.

Shahak says gentiles — and many Jews — don’t know how terrible life was under pre-modern rabbis because Judaism has done a bang-up job of expurgating and sanitizing its own history.

Nobody talks about the fact that until the 19th century, rabbis routinely used the self-governance afforded them by a lack of state interest in universal secularized justice to abuse, torture, and often murder Jews they found to be in violation of religious law. I certainly had no idea of this, despite being quite well read in history and comparative religion.

Thought control, too. We think of Jews as readers and scholars, but it turns out the pre-modern rabbinate deliberately kept communal Jews ignorant of history, geography, science, and indeed all secular literature.

Shahak brings the receipts, with extensive quotation from primary sources. Even his critics — and there are many — can’t accuse him of making up these reports. They claim he misinterprets the evidence. But they can’t make the evidence go away.

In a way this comes as a relief to me. I no longer have to wonder why Judaism looks like an exception to the general evil of monotheisms. Because it isn’t one — like Christianity, it looks benign only to the extent that it’s been denatured by modernity and secularism.

On the other hand … I miss the Judaism I thought I knew. I’m disturbed that the evidence was so effectively suppressed, and that it took reading excerpts from Shahak to clue me in.

Damn shame copies of Shahak’s book are so rare that you can only find them for over a grand each. I’d like to read the whole thing, but everybody should read the excerpts in this thread.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-15.

October 26, 2025

QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift of American Jews towards conservatism is going to gut the Left, which has historically relied on secularized Jews to supply a much larger share of its leadership and backing donations than their single-digit-percentage representation in the general population would suggest.

I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.

(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)

All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …

That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.

Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.

October 11, 2025

Antifa declared a foreign terrorist organization

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR claims a win from his earlier analysis posts on Antifa in the United States:

For those of you who have been tracking my intelligence analysis posts about Antifa, I now get to claim a correct prediction.

The President of the United States has declared Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

Providing aid to an FTO is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). This declaration unlocks the legal tools required to go after Antifa’s funding network and allies, both foreign and domestic.

Those of you who are watching as USAID was unmasked as a left-wing slush fund won’t have any trouble understanding how the funding network functions. Allies of revolutionary Communism and nihilism at large charitable foundations direct money to smaller foundations which act as pass-throughs to others. After enough layers of this to maintain deniability (because the federal statute specifies “knowingly”), direct enablers of terrorism collect the money and use to fund things like a bullet ripping through Charlie Kirk’s neck.

There’s some rake-off along the way, of course. Can’t have all those elite failsons and faildaughters going without sinecures, after all. They have expensive habits to maintain.

Following the FTO declaration, the government can now gin up a case for seizing the assets of anybody in the funding chain, all the way back to the initial donors. The usual doctrine that “knowingly” extends to those who should have known, and who willfully failed to perform due diligence in order to avoid criminal exposure, applies here. Precedent for this was well established by organized-crime prosecutions 50 years ago; it’s why we have RICO laws.

It remains to be seen how much political will there is to actually bring down this hammer. In the maximal scenario,

(1) Trump issues a loud public warning to all charitable donors that they’d better cut ties to any organization that doesn’t provide them with full transparency about where the money is going.

(2) Left-wing dark money outfits like Arabella and the Tides Foundation get sent formal spoliation-of-evidence warnings, followed swiftly with audits by people with zero sense of humor.

I wish I were confident that all of this is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of obstruction from Democrats and screaming by the media — the people who keep telling you that Antifa doesn’t exist because they want to keep their army of brownshirts intact. The administration could lose its nerve.

But at least it’s possible now. The political conditions for it are better than they have been in my entire lifetime.

Update: Fixed messed-up URL.

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