Behind the Bastards

Long termism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute and an FHI linked organization directed by Hillary Greaves and the Forthought Foundation run by William McCaskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI.

Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes and acronyms, long termism is one of the main cause areas of the so-called effective altruism movement, which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasts of having a mind boggling $46 billion in committed funding.

It is difficult to overstate how influential long termism has become.

And much like you have caucuses in the American Senate, in Britain we have these groups. And they wrote this book called Britannia Unchained, which I don't know if people are probably not familiar with, right?

like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

I think it's a reference to that book by that Trump staffer in The Room Where It Happened.

The Room Where It Happened is the White House memoir of John Bolton, former national security advisor.

The Wilderness which is now shamefully outdated It was published in like 2016 when the election started out. It was about how that giant 16 candidate Republican primary slate came about and the book was definitely written with the angle that like the Republicans are gonna lose this election Let's try to figure out how things got so fucked up, but that didn't happen

They should have sat on that a little bit longer

He also told his listeners to watch 2001 A Space Odyssey because it included secret messages hidden by the Illuminati.

I think that Scott explores it in a very interesting way in Chapter two of Against the Green.

So as he says, enter the domus.

Just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves.

The domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and green stores, people and domesticated animals and hangers on like mice and rats and corvids, all co-evolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.

The spectrum of subsistence modes that we have utilized, whether it be hunting, foraging, pastoralism or farming, have existed and complement each other in a sort of harmony for millennia.

Like when he watched the 1998 X-Files movie and recognized huge chunks of Behold a Pale Horse served up as entertainment, which he found very exciting.

Now Fred Lee, the economist who kind of like started us along this track in his famous book Post-Keynesian Price Theory found 71 pricing studies and they form an appendix called Appendix B in his book which ought to be legendary but it's not because all this stuff is very obscure.

The 71 studies from very different - like book-length studies from very different people with very different political and economic commitments. Some of them are business school literature. Some of them are empirical studies commissioned by states or by corporations on how corporate management works.

Some of them are by Marxist economists. Some of them are by neoclassical economists. And they all converge no matter what the biases of the people involved upon this same kind of similar cost plus administered prices model.

And so like the interest rate is a price. It's a very important price too because - We should back up for a second and explain when you say the interest rate, you should explain what that is because I think it's underexplained.

But the main upshot of Steve's - of Fred Lee's administered prices theory and then by extension Steve's theory about inflation is that inflation is not about money.

But the very next year, Frederick Forsyth published another book called The Dogs of War about a group of European mercenaries who carry out a coup against a brutal island dictator.

And the book bore a striking resemblance to all of the planning for the failed 1973 coup.

And like very little of the book actually involved any action or fighting or the coup itself.

Almost all of it was just a detailed step by step guide to how to like, here's how we go about getting end user certificates.

It's famously still seen today as like a step by step guide for how to carry out a coup.

This is where I do my Woody Allen..."you know nothing of my work" shtick because I had this novel "Makers" in 2009...2008...it's why Brie Pettis went out and founded MakerBot and it's credited with like kickstarting the homebrew 3D printed revolution blah blah blah blah blah...and it was a very bullish novel about 3D printing...the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet...

I think the problem with 3D printing was that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two large firms that had bought all their competitors including MakerBot and when those patents finally expired the big one was the laser centering of powder patent expired there just wasn't a big bang and I think it's because the supply chain for it still had a lot of proprietary elements and so producing the powder and producing the components that allowed for that remaining a very high bar and so we just didn't see the kind of new industry emerge that we would have hoped for...

To judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu lands and in the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by Sufi communities, Men have lived together in heart unions and soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years.

Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry and fear after work. What do men do? Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer unities that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat. Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all.

Bly urges men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said, 'I could carve a better man out of a banana.'

Bly believes that inside of every such male, there's a wild man yearning to get out a radiant inner king just waiting to confer masculine pride and sureness of purpose.

Bly insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave.

So I'm going to quote now from Tom O'Neill's book Chaos, which is a history of the Charles Manson murders, as a spoiler for where we're headed here.

That August, with the President's approval, CIA Director Richard Helms authorized an illegal domestic surveillance program codenamed Chaos.

It struck me that the Tate-LaBianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the 60s.

Dreams From Our Founding Fathers

it's rather how his entire reading of American history is enveloped in both unquestioning fealty to the founders and an insistence that the role of slavery and race more broadly in that history does not seriously change anything about how we should understand the birth and development of our country.

For Obama and his teachers, the problem of slavery exemplified the need to adapt and improve the Constitution.

But the Santas would be reformers who misunderstand the role of slavery in our history are themselves the root of the problem in our politics.

there is a consensus among historians and legal scholars that Dred Scott v Sanford, which turned on the question of whether a fugitive slave could sue for his freedom after he crossed into a free state was wrongly decided because Taney declared that African-Americans could not be considered citizens.