read that sentence back in a mirror to me

This isn’t a joke either. Read it back in the mirror. To ME. What do you think you see when you look in the mirror? WRONG.

People are still subscribed to the subreddit. When a post gets made, it goes on their reddit feed. Lots of mobile users in particular will just have seen it pop up while doomscrolling.

Smart, funny people create good times

Good times attract unfunny morons

Unfunny morons create bad times

Bad times attract smart, funny people

Very glad to see the sub being run exactly as it was always supposed to be.

Jerking it for hours in an empty hotel room, bathed in the natural understanding that at home your partner is doing the same

Ahhh Jaan Tallinn, the Diet Coke of batfuckery. Jaan “Diet Batfuckery” Tallinn.

The Valley Spirit never dies. / It is called the Mysterious Female.

The entrance to the Mysterious Female / Is called the root of Heaven and Earth

Endless flow / Of inexhaustible energy

(trans. Stephen Aldiss and Stanley Lombardo)

These people really need the Tao Te Ching

Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.

I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.

That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.

This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).

People like TW are the perfect distillation of the booksmart Slate Star Codex fan class, who are so completely sealed in their bubble that they aren’t even in touch with major parts of themselves anymore. They lose, or never developed, the capacity to even simulate a coherent theory of mind which would make appropriate sense of what the other person is saying. Brains like a Frank Gehry building with a roof made from sheer enthusiasm supported by warped tent poles of Scott Alexander heuristics sticking out at odd angles from each other.

Wow, I went looking for something else and found a deeply sad illustration of exactly what I’m talking about:

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1772398359745012139