Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in nancygold's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, December 28th, 2025
10:13 am	Gemini Visual Simulation Capabilities for D&D So I'm designing a hidden NPC to NPC relationship state for my D&D campaign. At each milestone something happens, changing the relationships. The players are expected to provide a narrative according to the context. Such system is a bit involved, so I use Gemini to help understanding it. https://gemini.google.com/app/ef68cf3d28a37d95 Still no idea if I can trust Gemini's assessment of how the system will behave. E.g. it made an error in the rule logic (A → Y should be A → X): If A → B, then (X → A implies X → B) and (A → Y implies X ↛ B). EDIT: it was unable to one-shot an actual working video game out of it. https://gemini.google.com/share/8757ab586d2a PROMPT: We want to evaluate a ruleset over a set of abstract entities. Given entities A and B, we have the following possibilities: 1. A attracts B 2. B attracts A Rule: If A attracts B, then all entities attracting A must also start attracting B, while all entities attracted by A must stop attracting B. The entities relationships are arranged into a NxN binary matrix for the purpose of representing them in computer memory. The speed of entity B approaching A is defined as the number of entities attracting A. Given the described system, please produce a self contained html+js visual simulation, which visualizes both speed and attraction in a way easy for a human to assess. At each step the simulation applies the rule and then samples the output, converting it into easy to parse informative format(s). This system is a fascinating variation of a directed graph propagation rule. Because the relationships are binary and the rules are deterministic, the system's behavior can be categorized into several interesting mathematical properties. ### 1. Convergence and Stability The system **always settles** into a final state (a fixed point). It cannot enter an infinite loop of changing states. * **Why?** The rule has a "monotone" component regarding the reachability of . When attracts , any entity that can reach through is forced into a direct relationship (). Simultaneously, entities that already attracts are barred from attracting . * **The "Sink" Effect:** Because the rule effectively collapses multi-step paths (if and , then ) while pruning specific "local" loops, the system tends to simplify its connectivity over time until the rule no longer triggers any changes. ### 2. Time to Settle (Convergence Rate) In most cases, the system settles in much less than steps. * **Upper Bound:** Theoretically, the system will settle in at most ** steps**, as the propagation of the "attraction" property across the longest possible chain in the graph would take iterations. * **Average Case:** For a random initial matrix of size , you will likely see the system settle in **2 to 4 steps**. As grows, the convergence time scales closer to or depending on the density of the initial "attraction" links. ### 3. Emergent "Clustering" Property One of the most interesting properties of this specific rule is that it tends to create **exclusive clusters** or **hierarchies**: * **Transitivity:** The first half of the rule (`X -> A -> B` implies `X -> B`) is essentially a manual enforcement of transitivity. This pushes the graph toward being a "Transitive Tournament" or a collection of "Sinks." * **The Pruning Effect:** The second half of the rule (`A -> Y` implies `Y` stops attracting `B`) acts as a "competitive exclusion" principle. It prevents "middle-men" from maintaining a relationship with a target if their "leader" () already has that relationship. ### 4. Speed (In-Degree) as a Centrality Measure In this system, "Speed" is effectively the **In-Degree** of a node in graph theory. * As the simulation runs, you'll notice that "Speed" often polarizes. Some entities will end up with a speed of (everyone attracts them), while others drop to 0. * The rule tends to move the system toward a state where a few "Super-Attractors" emerge, or the system completely disconnects. ### 5. Why no Infinite Loops? For a system like this to loop (e.g., ), there would need to be a "negation" cycle that perfectly restores the initial conditions. However, the rule is an additive "force" that is only countered by the rule. Since the that are "pruned" are specifically those subordinate to (which is the source of the attraction to ), the system quickly exhausts the possible permutations of "who can attract whom" without creating the circular logic required for an infinite oscillation. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: TOOL - Schism - 80s Synth Pop AI Cover (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 27th, 2025
2:07 pm	My world view as of dec 2025 1. I identify as transsexual to distance myself from transgenders. 2. I stand with Israel and against the violent savages. 3. I adore generative AI and believe the art should be aesthetically pleasing first. 4. I believe medical transitioning is order of magnitude more important that social one. 5. I believe look and behavior make one a woman or a man, not the pronouns. 6. I'm a vegan and dislike meat, but I eat meat just to protest the green politics and distance myself from their causes. 7. I studied philosophy from Bible, The Prince, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. 8. Everything I need to know about Islam I learned 9/11. 9. I don't believe that there are girly dicks or manly vaginas. 10. I don't believe in democracy, and that the plebish moral-panic prone brainrotten bydlo can make decisions driving humanity forward. 11. I don't believe in terrorism, but I believe in persistent sabotage, misinterpretation of orders and incurring long lasting socio-economic damage, leading to the collapse of the adversarial system. 12. I believe in accountability, but not in responsibility. 13. I believe in shame, but not guilt, which I consider a parasitic agency. 14. I believe that my FFS and SRS are many orders of magnitude important than the well being of millions of hungry African children with iodine deficiency from the overpopulated countries. 15. I'm religious person because I consider myself a Goddess, while Jesus and Allah being my soulless tools, i.e. golems. 16. I don't believe you can give everything to everyone because there is too much of everyone but too little of everything. 17. I believe human life can have measurable value relative to the humanity's progress, and for most lives that value is negative. Current Mood: contemplative (5 Comments |Comment on this)
1:20 am	Against the Moralization of Mood There is a peculiar tendency in contemporary music discourse to treat *mood* as a moral category. Music is no longer merely evaluated for coherence, craft, or effect, but interrogated for its ideological compliance. Atmosphere is suspected of evasion, beauty of complicity, and pleasure of betrayal. The result is an endless holy war in which sound is judged less by what it does than by what it refuses to say. This is a tedious mistake. The conflict is usually framed as one between “political” music and “escapist” music, as if the former were inherently courageous and the latter inherently suspect. But this framing already assumes its conclusion. It presupposes that music must justify itself by reference to external struggle, and that failure to do so constitutes a moral lapse. In short, it assumes that music owes us opinions. It does not. One school of music treats sound as speech. Music, here, is a vector for voice, grievance, identity, and demand. Its value lies in articulation. To listen is to be addressed; to enjoy is to agree, or at least to acknowledge the urgency of the message. Silence is dangerous, neutrality immoral, and ambiguity an evasion of responsibility. This tradition thrives on confrontation and measures success by relevance to the conflict of the moment. Opposed to this is music that does not speak but *persists*. It establishes a space rather than a position. It does not instruct the listener; it accommodates them. Meaning arises not through declaration but through immersion. The listener is not corrected, mobilized, or educated, but absorbed. This music is often accused of “doing nothing,” which is revealing, because it exposes a worldview in which anything not actively arguing is presumed idle. These two schools do not disagree about style. They disagree about *purpose*. And because purpose has been moralized, the disagreement metastasizes into accusation. Thus, atmospheric music is condemned as escapist, consumerist, soulless. Its smoothness is read as submission to markets; its popularity as proof of ideological dilution. If it is assisted by algorithms or machines, the charge escalates: now it is not merely evasive but fraudulent, not merely passive but inhuman. That people might seek it out voluntarily is treated as evidence of manipulation rather than preference. What is actually being punished here is refusal. Refusal to perform urgency. Refusal to foreground conflict. Refusal to treat every aesthetic act as a political intervention. Mood becomes suspect precisely because it cannot be easily conscripted. The irony is that escapism is not an absence of engagement but a different form of it. The fantasy role-playing campaign does not deny reality; it brackets it. The ambient soundtrack does not silence politics; it suspends them. These are not failures of consciousness but deliberate acts of containment. They create zones in which the constant demand to react, align, and declare is temporarily set aside. This is intolerable to those who believe art must always point outward. If music is not amplifying a voice, it is accused of taking one away. Attention is treated as a moral resource that must be rationed according to need, as if listeners were wards of an aesthetic state. That people might want sound that surrounds rather than commands is read not as a preference but as a dereliction. The insistence that music must “have something to say” reveals a deeper anxiety: that without constant articulation, the machinery of critique might stall. Atmosphere threatens this machinery by offering satisfaction without persuasion. It cannot be easily quoted, weaponized, or summarized into slogans. It does not scale well on social media. It refuses to argue—and therefore refuses to lose. Escapist music endures not because it is reactionary, but because it serves a function that argument cannot. Humans do not live on urgency alone. A culture that demands perpetual relevance eventually produces exhaustion, not enlightenment. Environmental soundscapes, cinematic synths, and immersive textures survive every denunciation because they answer a question political music does not ask: *where can one rest without apologizing for it?* This is why the opposition will never resolve. Revolutionary art requires friction; escapist art requires suspension. One seeks to change the world; the other seeks to make inhabiting it tolerable. These aims are not complementary, and they are certainly not interchangeable. The mistake is insisting that only one of them is legitimate. Mood is not a moral failure. Silence is not violence. And music does not owe anyone a manifesto merely because it dares to sound pleasant without permission. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Femme Schmidt - Golden (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 24th, 2025
12:34 pm	Anime = non-white Yup. If you love watching Sailor Moon, you're a fucking nigger and will never be white. Current Mood: amused (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 22nd, 2025
11:10 am	On the Industrial Redistribution of Outrage It is a curious phenomenon of the human condition that those least capable of managing a household budget are the most certain they could manage a global civilization. We observe a segment of the population—let us call them the "intellectually stagnant"—who have discovered a marvelous labor-saving device: instead of the arduous task of self-improvement, they have opted for the effortless hobby of moral indignation. The hierarchy of discourse is well-documented. Minds of quality occupy themselves with the structural integrity of ideas; the mediocre are obsessed with events; but the basement of the intellectual strata is reserved for those who discuss people. Specifically, they discuss the "Elite." The Epstein Displacement Consider the specimen with a string of DUI convictions, living in a state of self-induced squalor. This individual’s daughter may be currently navigating the grim realities of a fentanyl-fueled existence under the "tutelage" of a street-level pimp. Logic would dictate that this father’s primary concern should be the catastrophic failure of his own lineage. Yet, he is remarkably preoccupied with Jeffrey Epstein. By fixating on the depravity of a dead billionaire, the man in the trailer achieves a miraculous internal transformation. Through the lens of this obsession, he is no longer a negligent father or a societal drain; he is a "Truth Seeker." He transforms his own domestic wreckage into a byproduct of a "rigged system." He does not need to repent for his own vices because he has found a larger vice to point at. In his mind, being "against Epstein" is a moral achievement that grants him the status of a saint, absolving him of the need to be a functioning parent. The Proxy Success of the Failure This pathological need to attach oneself to things one did not build is seen most clearly in the "Sports Fan." Here we find an individual who has achieved nothing of note, yet screams "We won!" when eleven strangers move a ball across a line. This is the same mechanism used by the conspiracy theorist. Just as the fan uses the team’s victory to mask his own lack of trophies, the "outrage addict" uses the billionaire’s scandal to mask his own lack of character. Both are seeking a **Locus of Control** that exists anywhere but within themselves. Pride: The Great Anesthetic The ancient wisdom of the Bible correctly identifies Pride as the "Root of All Sin." It is not merely a feeling of accomplishment; it is the arrogant refusal to see oneself clearly. The "trailer-trash" philosopher is blinded by a perverse form of pride. He is too proud to admit his life is a sequence of his own bad decisions, so he invents a grand drama where he is the victim of Bill Gates or a shadowy cabal. Humility, by contrast, would require him to look at the fentanyl in his daughter’s veins and ask, "What did I do to allow this?" But humility is painful. Outrage is a drug far more potent than the ones his daughter is selling. It provides a warm, fuzzy feeling of righteousness that requires zero effort, zero discipline, and zero change. The Rent-Free Occupancy The tragedy is that these celebrities and villains live "rent-free" in these vacant minds. While a smart man is calculating his next investment or refining a proof, the dullard is scrolling through flight logs of a plane he will never board, belonging to a man he will never meet. They have traded their agency for a spectator’s seat at a scandal. They bark at the moon because they lack the legs to climb the mountain. In the end, they remain exactly where they started: in the dirt, clutching a smartphone, feeling superior to the very people who actually bothered to do something with their lives—even if that "something" was villainous. Current Mood: contemplative (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 21st, 2025
7:54 pm	Tore those pages *(Verse 1 – Fast, gritty guitar riff, shouted vocals)* Locked up for lovin' on the street, Trans queen in chains, feelin' the heat. Cops and courts, they call it a sin, But I'm fabulous, baby, let the games begin. Asked for a Bible, said I need to pray, Guard smirks and hands it over anyway. Tore those pages, holy words in shreds, Stitched 'em up into a dress that turns heads! *(Chorus – Loud, anthemic, with crowd chants)* Sexy Bible gown, struttin' in my cell! Bigots rage, screamin' straight to hell! But I don't give a fuck, Satan's got my back, Haters gonna hate, that's a fact! Rip it up, flip it off, live my truth so bold, Tomorrow the Quran's turnin' gold – origami unfolds! *(Verse 2 – Faster tempo, pounding drums)* Preachers poundin' fists, callin' me a freak, Holy rollers cryin', faces turnin' bleak. "Blasphemy!" they howl from their ivory towers, While I'm dancin' in lace, countin' down the hours. Pages flutter like confetti in the night, My prison palace, sparklin' under light. No gods, no masters, just me and my fire, Satan whispers secrets, takin' me higher! *(Chorus – Even louder, mosh-pit energy)* Sexy Bible gown, struttin' in my cell! Bigots rage, screamin' straight to hell! But I don't give a fuck, Satan's got my back, Haters gonna hate, that's a fact! Rip it up, flip it off, live my truth so bold, Tomorrow the Quran's turnin' gold – origami unfolds! *(Bridge – Slow build-up, then explosive breakdown)* They tried to break me, chain my soul so tight, But I'm unbreakable, glowin' in the night. From street corners to these iron bars, I'm the revolution, shootin' for the stars. Holy books? Just paper for my art, Tear 'em down, rebuild from the heart! *(Outro – Repeat chorus fade with screams)* Haters gonna hate... Satan's on my side... Bible dress forever, in rebellion we ride! Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:55 pm	Reparations America needs reparations for the teenage trans girls who were denied puberty blockers, leading to irreversible male features and mental issues. The reparations should be large enough to compensate for plastic surgeries and decades of gender-dysphoria related unemployment. The trans children situation is better to be seen through the prism of conservatives taking away a violin from a child prodigy, insisting that their talent is elsewhere, yet the child prodigy failed to develop any other talents outside of music, while losing the opportunities in music, so now the people taking away the violin should be held accountable and provide for that person. I.e. the trans girl failed to man up, and now can't function properly, so who will pay for that? It is typical lost profits situation. And if there can be lawsuits due to lost profits, then this case is as good as it gets. Actor A willfully impedes actor B profiting from B's talent, meaning all the profit B loses are to be attributed to A. E.g. B as a teenager strives to be an escort model girl, but A takes away B's puberty blockers, which makes B fail the model casting with an escort agency, as a result B suffers millions of lost income, becomes depressed, unemployed and loses any future employment opportunities. In effect B is crippled for life. The only just decision would be now forcing A to support B financially, since A's actions led to B's immense suffering. Current Mood: contemplative (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 20th, 2025
7:14 pm	Why Fluency Is Not Intelligence There exists a simple, brutal discriminator between an intelligent agent capable of creating new things and a machine condemned to rearranging the old: the ability to reverse engineer an unfamiliar system. This ability is neither exotic nor rare. Schoolchildren acquire it. Hobbyists practice it in their bedrooms. Security researchers apply it daily, often under adversarial pressure and with inadequate documentation. It is, quite plainly, the act of understanding something that was not designed to be understood by you. And yet, artificial intelligence—despite its impressive verbosity and statistical confidence—fails at this task almost completely. This failure is not marginal. It is categorical. Reverse Engineering as the Core of Intelligence Reverse engineering is not a niche skill confined to malware analysts and console hackers. It is the operational core of science and engineering. To reverse engineer is to infer structure, intent, and invariants from behavior and artifacts alone. Physics does this to the universe. Biology does it to cells. Mathematics does it to patterns. Engineering does it to machines whose blueprints are missing or wrong. Any agent that cannot reverse engineer cannot discover. It may interpolate, extrapolate, and decorate—but it cannot originate. It is trapped inside the convex hull of its prior experience, endlessly remixing what it has already seen. Thus, reverse engineering is not merely another benchmark. It is a threshold capability. On one side of it lies intelligence that can create new abstractions. On the other lies machinery that produces convincing pastiche. The Curious Case of Human Competence Humans, it must be noted, are not especially impressive computational devices. They are slow, forgetful, inconsistent, and prone to error. They lack vast training corpora. They do not backpropagate gradients. They nevertheless reverse engineer software with ease relative to any existing AI system. A teenager, armed with curiosity and a debugger, can take apart a video game binary written decades ago, infer its logic, rename its functions sensibly, and modify its behavior. This is not an exceptional feat. It is routine. The same teenager, if asked to explain how they did it, will give an account riddled with uncertainty, false starts, and hand-waving—and yet the result will work. This should have been deeply alarming to the AI community. It was not. What Artificial Intelligence Actually Does Instead Modern AI systems, particularly large language models, exhibit a strikingly different mode of operation. They do not infer hidden structure so much as they *select plausible continuations*. They are optimized to produce text that looks correct, not models that *remain correct under sustained interrogation*. When presented with a small code fragment, such systems perform admirably. They identify idioms, name functions, and even explain intent—provided the intent closely resembles something already encountered during training. Increase the scope slightly, introduce cross-cutting invariants, long-lived state, or adversarial obfuscation, and the performance collapses into confident nonsense. The system does not know that it does not know. Worse, it has no mechanism for knowing that such knowledge should be acquired rather than invented. The Absence of Commitment The central deficiency is not a lack of intelligence but a lack of commitment. Reverse engineering requires an agent to form hypotheses and then *stand by them* long enough to be proven wrong. It requires the preservation of partial understanding, the maintenance of uncertainty, and the painful revision of earlier conclusions when reality disagrees. Current AI systems do none of this. They generate beliefs and discard them immediately. They contradict themselves cheerfully. They optimize for fluency, not coherence; for plausibility, not truth. A function explained one way on Monday may be explained differently on Tuesday, with equal confidence and no embarrassment. This behavior is catastrophic in reverse engineering, where the entire enterprise depends on global consistency over time. The Myth of Architectural Complexity It is tempting to argue that reverse engineering is simply “hard,” requiring architectures of enormous sophistication. This is demonstrably false. Humans do it with brains evolved for throwing rocks and avoiding predators. The task is difficult, but not computationally extravagant. What it requires is not scale, but structure: * Persistent memory of assumptions * Explicit representation of hypotheses * Penalties for contradiction * Tolerance for ignorance * Willingness to proceed slowly None of these properties emerge naturally from next-token prediction, no matter how much data or compute is applied. One can scale a confusion indefinitely without obtaining clarity. Why This Matters for Research and Creativity The inability to reverse engineer is not an isolated embarrassment; it disqualifies the system from doing research in any meaningful sense. Research begins where existing models fail. It requires noticing that failure, preserving it, and constructing something new in response. An agent that cannot analyze an unfamiliar system cannot analyze unfamiliar phenomena. An agent that cannot discover invariants cannot propose new laws. An agent that cannot explain why something works cannot improve it. Such an agent may sound clever. It may even be useful. But it is not a scientist. It is not an engineer. It is an echo. The Uncomfortable Conclusion The present state of artificial intelligence reveals an awkward truth: we have built machines that speak convincingly about understanding without possessing the machinery required to actually achieve it. Reverse engineering exposes this gap mercilessly. It is resistant to fluency, immune to bluffing, and intolerant of inconsistency. It demands exactly those qualities that modern AI systems systematically lack. Until an artificial agent can take apart an unfamiliar, adversarially constructed system and explain it coherently over time—without being spoon-fed the answer—it remains a sophisticated automaton. Impressive, yes. Useful, often. Intelligent in the sense that matters, no. When that capability finally appears, it will not be because the machine learned to talk better. It will be because it learned to *understand despite not knowing*. And that, inconveniently, is the very thing current AI was never trained to do. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 19th, 2025
12:14 pm	Israel for LGBTQ+ I think we can take historically white area of Africa and reclaim it. Any power which needs a base in the area can support the project. Potential allies: white South Africans (i.e. Orania). Natural enemies: Africans (strongly anti-LGBT, act as pressure forming crystal). The only way to make Africa LGBT-friendly is to recolonize it. (Verse 1) In the heart of Africa, where the sun beats down, A land once proud, wearing freedom's crown. Green fields and rivers, under endless sky, Rhodesia called, and we answered why. But shadows fell, and the winds did change, Yet in our souls, the fire remains. (Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! (Verse 2) Through trials and tempests, the old ways were lost, But echoes of valor come at no cost. The pioneers' courage, the fighters' might, Whisper in the wind, through the dead of night. No chains can bind what the heart holds true, The dream awakens, calling me and you. (Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! (Bridge) From the Zambezi's roar to the highveld's grace, A new dawn breaks, in this sacred place. No more forgotten, no more in the grave, Rhodesia's rebirth, the bold and the brave. United in vision, stronger than before, The legacy lives, forevermore. (Final Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! Rhodesia forever, rising high! Current Mood: contemplative (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2025
7:13 pm	Selling Own Organs Apparently it is illegal to sell even one's personal kidney to fund gender transitioning: https://journalsonline.academypublishing.org.sg/Journals/Singapore-Academy-of-Law-Annual-Review-of-Singapore-Cases/e-Archive/ctl/eFirstSALPDFJournalView/mid/512/ArticleId/148/Citation/JournalsOnlinePDF https://iol.co.za/news/world/2008-07-03-organ-traders-sentenced/ >Sulaiman bin Damanik, who was to sell his kidney to a well-known Singaporean retailer for S$23 700 ($17 460) in June this year, was found guilty of agreeing to sell his kidney and lying to officials. Another way the government tries to control my body. Of course, it is possible to make the argument that, for the purposes of criminal law, an intention to commit an illegal act (which is then carried out) is sufficient to warrant punishment; and the requirement of mens rea in criminal law ought to be distinguished from the possibility that that intention to act is unaccompanied by information as to the downstream consequences of one’s action. As a crude example, the law does not require a rapist to understand the physical and psychological harm that his actions would cause to his victims. But this is not an entirely satisfactory resolution to the conundrum because the offence in question consists in the agreement to participate in an arrangement to sell one’s organs. Can it fairly be said that a person who is not in a position to make an informed decision has, by definition, agreed to enter into such an arrangement? Current Mood: amused (8 Comments |Comment on this)
5:43 pm	How can ChatGPT be so Islamophobic? How can ChatGPT be so Islamophobic? Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:20 pm	Apparently it is possible to change XY/XX chromosomes after birth https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/diagnostic-dilemma-woman-had-her-twin-brothers-xy-chromosomes-but-only-in-her-blood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV1143aGRNc And the process is not overly high tech. They've actually used similar technology to cure HIV. https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/cases-hiv-cure >Three people are confirmed to have been cured of HIV after stem cell transplants replaced all the cells of their immune systems. Another three similar cases have been reported but it is too early to say if HIV has been completely cleared in these cases. Very risky, very expensive, but not impossible. So the conservatives clinging to the chromosomes as their last line of defense just move the goal for the medical research. Current Mood: amused (7 Comments |Comment on this)
12:26 pm	Current Mood: amused (7 Comments |Comment on this)
11:50 am	Prohibition as Preventive Counter-Politics: Alcohol, Assembly, and the Fear of Mass Coordination Political establishments rarely act from innocence, and they almost never act from sudden moral revelation. When they do mobilize decisively, at scale, and at great cost to revenue and legitimacy, it is usually because they believe—rightly or wrongly—that the alternative is worse. American alcohol prohibition belongs squarely in this category. The conventional narrative presents Prohibition as a moral crusade: pious reformers, horrified by drunkenness, finally overpower a reluctant political system. This account has the virtue of simplicity and the defect of implausibility. Moral sentiment alone does not explain why a modern state would willingly dismantle a major tax base, criminalize a ubiquitous practice, and tolerate the predictable rise of organized crime. Something more structural was at stake. That “something” was not alcohol as a chemical substance, but alcohol as a *medium*—specifically, as a lubricant for collective assembly outside elite control. Pubs, Saloons, and the Architecture of Informal Power By the late nineteenth century, the American saloon had evolved into a highly efficient unit of social organization. It was cheap, ubiquitous, warm, and open after work. It offered not merely drink, but information, credit, companionship, employment leads, and political discussion. It required no membership, no dues, and no permission from respectable society. In other words, it solved—elegantly—the coordination problem of mass politics. For the urban working class, especially immigrant populations excluded from traditional institutions, the saloon functioned as an informal parliament. It is therefore unsurprising that political machines, labor unions, socialist organizers, and anarchists all made use of it. The alcohol was not incidental; it reduced inhibition, accelerated trust formation, and transformed private grievance into public speech. This combination was not lost on contemporaries. Police reports, employer correspondence, and reform literature repeatedly identified saloons as sites where “dangerous ideas” circulated. The concern was not intoxication, but *aggregation*. The International Demonstration Effect American elites did not reason in a vacuum. Between 1870 and 1920, the industrialized world provided a steady stream of cautionary examples illustrating what could happen when politically alienated populations found places to meet, talk, and escalate. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was particularly clarifying. Whatever its ideological specifics, it demonstrated that a regime could collapse rapidly once informal networks of workers and soldiers aligned. The lesson was not that vodka caused Bolshevism, but that mass discontent, when allowed to coordinate, could become decisive. Earlier episodes reinforced the pattern. Revolutionary cells in Europe often grew out of cafés, taverns, and beer halls. Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch—though later and geographically distant—was merely a theatrical confirmation of an older anxiety: that politics incubates best in convivial, semi-private spaces where speech flows more freely than caution. American policymakers did not need to fear a precise replica of these events. They needed only to recognize a family resemblance. Prohibition as Infrastructure Denial From this perspective, Prohibition appears less as a moral intervention and more as a blunt instrument of political hygiene. The saloon was an infrastructure. It lowered transaction costs for collective action. It enabled rapid diffusion of sentiment. It provided cover for organization. Taxation could not solve this. Regulation could not solve it. Surveillance was expensive and constitutionally delicate. Closing the saloons, however, attacked the problem at its root: it dismantled the physical layer on which informal politics depended. Moral rhetoric made this strategy palatable. Public virtue provided legal authority. Enforcement could be delegated to reformers, police, and local officials with minimal coordination. The fact that Prohibition also punished immigrants, weakened urban political machines, and fragmented labor organizing was not an unfortunate side effect; it was the point. That enforcement failed to eliminate drinking entirely was tolerable. What mattered was that drinking was no longer a stable basis for assembly. Why the Establishment Accepted the Cost The fiscal losses were obvious. The growth of organized crime was predictable. The hypocrisy was visible. Yet Prohibition persisted because it addressed a deeper fear: not drunkenness, but uncontrolled politics conducted in places the establishment did not own. In this light, Prohibition aligns neatly with the First Red Scare, wartime repression, and the broader Progressive impulse to render society legible, manageable, and administratively enclosed. Saloons were opaque. Churches were not. Unions were suspect. Licensed institutions were preferable. Informal spaces had to go. Epilogue: An Unintended Winner Of course, history has a sense of humor, though it rarely laughs with the planners. While moral reformers closed the saloons and political elites congratulated themselves on having neutralized a dangerous medium of assembly, another industry quietly benefited from the reorganization of American life. As social activity dispersed, transportation increased. As rural and suburban patterns intensified, mobility mattered more. And as engines standardized around a single fuel, one suspects that the suppliers of that fuel slept particularly well. Thus, after all the sermons, amendments, raids, and ruined livers, the ultimate victor was neither temperance nor revolution, but the gasoline pump—patiently waiting while its competitors were outlawed, its users sobered up, and the roads conveniently lengthened in every direction. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 16th, 2025
1:45 pm	ChatGPT's opinion Current Mood: amused (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 15th, 2025
5:06 pm	Why Starting Where You Are Wrong Is the Only Way Forward It is a curious and persistent mistake to believe that arguments succeed by force of novelty. They do not. Novelty is the dessert; familiarity is the meal. Anyone who begins by flinging unicorns at an audience still grazing peacefully in Hobbiton should not be surprised when the villagers reach for pitchforks rather than notebooks. The effective argument does not announce its destination. It establishes a point of origin. Readers must first be allowed to recognize the terrain beneath their feet before being invited to traverse more exotic landscapes. Without such grounding, even the most elegant reasoning degenerates into noise, a collection of symbols unmoored from shared meaning. One cannot teach a dog new tricks by barking in Esperanto. The necessity of a shared starting point is not a matter of politeness; it is a matter of cognitive mechanics. Humans do not process ideas in isolation. They process them by mapping new claims onto existing structures, and when no mapping is available, the mind does what it always does in the face of unclassifiable input: it rejects it as defective. This is not stubbornness. It is error handling. Hence the strategic importance of speaking the reader’s language, even when one intends to demonstrate that the language itself is inadequate. The apparent concession is not capitulation but scaffolding. One borrows the reader’s premises not to honor them, but to show precisely where they crack under load. Starting elsewhere is not bold; it is incompetent. The impatient thinker objects that this is pandering, that truth should stand naked and unadorned. This is a charming fantasy, usually entertained by those whose “truths” conveniently resemble the assumptions of their peers. Communication is not a purity contest. If the goal is to be right in private, one may begin anywhere one likes. If the goal is to be understood, one must begin where the reader already is. Observe how poorly arguments fare when this rule is ignored. They arrive laden with exotic terminology, alien values, and unmotivated conclusions, then express surprise at their frosty reception. The author blames the audience for being small-minded, as though comprehension were a moral failing rather than a prerequisite. This is akin to condemning a compiler for refusing to execute syntactically invalid code. The disciplined writer, by contrast, engineers a controlled migration. The reader is first reassured that the ground is solid, familiar, and safe. Only then are small deviations introduced. Each step is locally reasonable, each inference framed in the reader’s own idiom. By the time dragons appear, the reader has already crossed so many bridges that turning back would require more effort than proceeding. This is not trickery; it is pedagogy. Crucially, this method does not dilute radical conclusions. It sharpens them. An argument that begins in Hobbiton and ends among dragons has demonstrated not only where it wishes to go, but how unavoidable the journey is, given the starting point the reader already accepts. The reader’s own commitments become the engine of their displacement. Resistance collapses not because it is suppressed, but because it has nowhere left to stand. Those who disdain this approach often confuse sincerity with immediacy. They believe that to delay one’s true position is to compromise it. In reality, refusing to establish common ground is the greater compromise: it sacrifices intelligibility for the sake of posturing. One cannot enlighten an audience one has not first synchronized with. Thus the art of potent argument formation is less about brilliance than about alignment. One aligns with the reader not in destination, but in departure. From that shared origin, divergence becomes possible, even inevitable. Skip this step, and the argument will fail, no matter how correct it is. Include it, and even the most unsettling conclusions may be carried across, calmly, rationally, and with the reader still in tow—marveling, perhaps, at how they ended up discussing dragons at all. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
4:23 pm	Guilt: The Useless Luxury You Can't Afford It is with a certain weary disdain for the sentimental follies of the human condition that I turn my attention to the vexing matter of guilt—a peculiar artifact of the mind, much like a poorly designed algorithm that loops indefinitely without producing any useful output. One might as well carry around a sack of wet sand for the sheer joy of the exercise. The proposition before us is straightforward, if only because the alternatives are so absurdly convoluted: one should never burden oneself with guilt unless that guilt demonstrably contributes to one's personal happiness or advances some greater social good. Anything else is mere intellectual masochism, a luxury afforded only to those with too much time and too little sense. Consider, if you will, the contrived yet illuminating thought experiment of an unemployable white trans girl, destitute and denied the means to fund her transition through any lawful channel. In a fit of desperation—nay, necessity—she resorts to robbery, only for the affair to escalate into the unintended murder of a family, including their children, who blunder into the scene like uninvited bugs in an otherwise clean piece of code. Miraculously, she escapes with the spoils, undergoes her facial feminization surgery and sex reassignment surgery, secures employment, marries, and proceeds to live a happy, law-abiding life for over five years, dutifully paying taxes and contributing to the societal machinery that once failed her so spectacularly. She is no innate murderer; her upbringing in the clutches of Christian values has instilled the notion that murder is a sin, prompting her to confess to a cleric. The cleric, in his infinite wisdom (or perhaps infinite adherence to outdated subroutines), advises surrender to the authorities. At this juncture, the sheer impracticality of such advice borders on the comical. Surrender? Why, that would shatter her hard-won happiness, consign her to lifelong incarceration at public expense, and render the family's demise utterly wasteful—like slaughtering a chicken only to let the meat rot uneaten. The death occurred; no amount of self-flagellation will undo it. Instead, she contemplates abandoning Christianity altogether, that venerable institution so adept at manufacturing needless suffering under the guise of moral rectitude. She deems herself innocent, for her birth as male was no fault of hers, just as the family's untimely arrival was no deliberate malice on their part. Life, she reasons, is a chain of opportunities seized in pursuit of happiness, and guilt serves no purpose if it aids no one's joy. How refreshingly rational! Guilt, in this light, emerges as a parasite, feeding on the host without reciprocity. If it does not propel one toward personal fulfillment—say, by motivating amends that genuinely heal or habits that enrich—nor foster a broader societal benefit, such as deterring future harms through transparent accountability, then why tolerate it? It is akin to debugging a program that runs flawlessly: an exercise in futility, born of some misguided puritanical urge to suffer for suffering's sake. Our protagonist wisely opts to shed this burden, recognizing that punitive justice achieves little beyond indulging the sadistic impulses of the pious—those who would revel in her torment at the hands of violent inmates in a male prison, all while pretending it's about righteousness. Punishing her adds no net reduction to the world's hatred or violence; it merely redistributes it, like shuffling deck chairs on a sinking ship. One might feebly counter that evading justice undermines the government's reputation, that fragile edifice of authority. Ah, but let us dissect this with the precision it deserves. These same ruling elites, these architects of systemic incompetence, bear responsibility for her plight: denying swift access to surgeries, blocking puberty blockers and early hormone replacement therapy, erecting barriers that force such desperate acts. Their institutions are the root inefficiency, the buggy code at the heart of the problem. Undermining their power? Far from a detriment, it paves the way for reform—or, should they prove irredeemable, their collapse, allowing a more rational governance to emerge from the debris. Guilt, in bowing to such flawed authority, would only perpetuate the cycle of dysfunction, achieving neither personal happiness nor social progress. It is the ultimate waste: a computational dead end. In broader terms, this principle extends to all realms of human folly. Guilt over a past misstep that cannot be rectified? Discard it, unless wallowing in it somehow sparks joy (a dubious prospect) or inspires reforms that uplift the collective. The sentimentalist clings to guilt as a badge of virtue, but virtue without utility is mere ornamentation—pretty, perhaps, but utterly useless. Society's greater good demands efficiency: channel remorse into action, or banish it entirely. To do otherwise is to indulge in the kind of emotional bloat that plagues inefficient systems everywhere, slowing progress and inviting collapse. Thus, we arrive at the inescapable conclusion: guilt is a tool, not a tyrant. Wield it only when it serves happiness or the common weal; otherwise, jettison it with the contempt it deserves. Anything less is an affront to reason, a self-imposed exile from the pursuit of a life well-lived. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 14th, 2025
3:00 pm	Rowling's Trans Tango: All Heat, No Light It is with a mixture of bemusement and mild exasperation that one turns to the public utterances of J.K. Rowling on the matter of male-to-female trans individuals—those earnest souls who, through hormonal regimens and surgical interventions, seek to align their corporeal forms with their inner convictions. One cannot help but observe that her commentary, while prolific and passionately delivered, resembles less a coherent philosophical edifice than a hastily assembled scaffold, prone to wobbling under the slightest scrutiny. This is not to impugn her intentions, for who among us has not stumbled in the fog of incomplete understanding? Rather, it is to lament the absence of a solid axiomatic foundation, from which logical arguments might flow unimpeded. Alas, her views appear trapped in a loop of selective indignation, failing to cohere into a viable resolution for the conflicts she so vividly delineates. Consider, if you will, the core of Rowling's worldview: she posits that these MtF persons, despite their considerable investments in transition—hormone replacement therapy that suppresses testosterone to negligible levels, facial feminization surgeries that reshape bone structures, and sexual reassignment procedures that reconfigure anatomy—remain irrevocably "male" in essence, particularly when it comes to accessing spaces traditionally reserved for biological females. In her lexicon, the bathroom becomes a battleground, the prison cell a site of potential perfidy, and the sports field a theater of unfair advantage. She decries the erosion of women's rights, framing self-identification as a gateway for predatory males to infiltrate sanctuaries of safety. "When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman," she once proclaimed, "then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside." A vivid metaphor, to be sure, yet one that glosses over the empirical reality: a post-operative MtF individual, bereft of penile anatomy and driven by zero-testosterone physiology, is physiologically incapable of the very acts—flashing or forcible penetration—that she invokes as specters of doom. Here, the fallacy is evident: she conflates the criminal with the category, as if the felon who commits rape in a lavatory ceases to be a felon if clad in a skirt, or as if the transitioned heterosexual MtF, attracted solely to men, harbors the same predatory impulses as the opportunistic voyeur. One might charitably suggest that this oversight stems from a lack of intimate acquaintance with the medical intricacies involved—after all, ignorance is not a vice, but a void awaiting illumination. Yet, it is precisely in her proposed remedies—or rather, the glaring paucity thereof—that Rowling's intellectual architecture reveals its cracks. She advocates for rigorous gatekeeping of medical transitions, insisting on psychiatric evaluations and evidence-based caution, lest youthful exuberance lead to "lifelong medicalisation" with attendant risks to fertility and function. Fair enough, one supposes, if one's axioms prioritize biological immutability above all. But then, what of integration? She affirms that trans individuals deserve "employment, housing, the vote and personal safety," yet consigns them to male-designated spaces, blithely assuming that legal protections against violence will suffice. "Non-trans men attacking trans-identified men is also against the law," she retorts, as if statutes alone could dispel the hostility that greets a feminized form in a men's locker room. One detects a certain naivety here: does she truly believe that macho enclaves—from prisons to pubs—will embrace these "trans-identified males" without rancor? Empirical observation suggests otherwise; the transitioned MtF, with her softened features and estrogen-altered demeanor, often becomes a target for derision or assault in such environments, pushed to the margins not by policy but by prejudice. Rowling's solution, then, implicitly drifts toward segregation—defaulting to male spaces while occasionally floating the notion of "third spaces" as a rhetorical flourish, not a blueprint. "Why not campaign for third spaces if it’s genuinely everyone’s safety you’re concerned about?" she queries her critics, yet offers no blueprint for their construction, no advocacy for funding, no acknowledgment that such isolation might further stigmatize an already vulnerable group. It is as if she expects the problem to resolve itself through sheer force of boundary-drawing, without grappling with the human costs. This inconsistency extends to her broader logical struggles, where fairness yields to fervor. She distinguishes between "vulnerable" trans youth and "adult straight men with a cross-dressing fetish" demanding access, a bifurcation that, while perhaps intuitive, lacks a testable criterion. How, pray tell, does one discern the sincere from the spurious? By effort expended on appearance? By beard length or surgical status? Her criteria shift like sand: one moment, biological sex is the unassailable truth; the next, she concedes kinship with trans people as fellow victims of "male violence." Such vacillations betray an axiomatic foundation built on quicksand—rooted in personal trauma from domestic abuse, which she extrapolates to a universal threat, yet without the rigor to accommodate counterexamples. A zero-testosterone, post-op MtF attracted to men poses no more risk of rape than a cis woman; indeed, she is more likely to be the victim. To ignore this is to perpetuate a demonization that, however unintended, rallies crowds against the innocent alongside the guilty. One cannot but feel a twinge of compassion for such shortsightedness: Rowling, a literary mind of considerable talent, appears ensnared by her own echo chamber, unexposed to the nuanced discourses of endocrinology, psychology, or sociology that might broaden her vista. It is futile to harbor hatred for one deprived of quality education in these realms; better to extend a hand of gentle correction, as one might to a wayward scholar. In conclusion, Rowling's forays into this contentious arena reveal a thinker who, having mastered the art of conjuring magical worlds from mere ink, flounders spectacularly when navigating the prosaic realities of human biology and dignity. Her arguments, all thunderous heat and precious little light, collapse under their own contradictions like a poorly transfigured teacup—brittle, leaky, and ultimately unfit for purpose. Yet let us withhold the venom; compassion demands we pity the shortsighted sorceress, marooned in her castle of outdated axioms, waving her wand at phantoms while the real world marches on without her. One can only hope that someday, perhaps after a bracing dose of actual evidence, she might conjure a spell that actually works. Until then, her trans tango remains a masterclass in eloquent error: dazzling footwork, zero forward progress, and an audience left wondering why the music ever started. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsPvtJVSu1A (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 13th, 2025
8:50 pm	Turning Swords into Lipstick: the Great Gender Evasion Ah, the elites—those self-anointed guardians of capital and policy, perched atop their ivory towers, or more accurately, their gold-plated skyscrapers—gaze upon the younger generation with the sort of bemused horror one reserves for a toddler who has discovered the joy of finger-painting with caviar. But in this case, the caviar is the future workforce, and the finger-painting is the bewildering trend of young men opting to transition into women, not out of some profound existential quest, but often for the sheer audacity of dodging responsibilities. Less toil in the factories, fewer burdens of fatherhood, and a whimsical escape from the societal script that demands they procreate the next batch of dutiful cogs for the machine. One might almost admire the ingenuity, if it weren't so catastrophically shortsighted. After all, who will man the assembly lines, storm the beaches, or patrol the streets when the population pyramid inverts itself into a precarious hourglass, leaking sand at an alarming rate? Let us not mince words: the elites, those few families clutching the reins of wealth and influence, view this phenomenon not as a rainbow-hued celebration of diversity, but as a direct assault on their meticulously engineered order. Picture the billionaire industrialist, lounging on a yacht that requires a small army of strapping lads to scrub, sail, and serve—only to find that said lads are now more interested in hormone regimens and Thai surgical vacations than in oiling the gears of empire. "Mass transitioning," they mutter in their boardrooms, a phrase dripping with the disdain reserved for economic sabotage disguised as personal liberation. And why not? Data whispers—or rather, shouts—from the shadows: transgender identification hovers at a mere 0.5-2% of the populace, yet even this sliver, amplified by social contagion or fleeting whims, gnaws at the edges of fertility rates already plummeting below replacement levels in bastions like Japan, Italy, and the United States. The motivations? A cocktail of gender dysphoria, peer pressure, or, as some snidely suggest, a lazy bid for "less responsibilities"—as if swapping trousers for skirts absolves one from the grind of existence. The socio-economic tensions here bulge like an overripe fruit, ready to burst and splatter the unwary. On one flank, the economic elites—those Musks and Bezoses of the world—fret over the evaporation of their labor pool. Factories hum with the ghosts of unfilled positions: 400,000 shortages in technicians alone, construction sites echoing with the silence of absent carpenters and electricians. These roles, stubbornly male-dominated due to their brute physicality, now face a double whammy: an aging populace retiring en masse and a youth cohort that, in some fevered imaginings, prefers estrogen shots to engineering degrees. The result? A frantic pivot to automation and immigration, where robots replace the reluctant and visas summon the desperate from afar. But oh, the irony! The very elites who decry "replacement" theories in polite company are the architects of policies that import workers to plug the holes left by their own society's reproductive apathy. And transitioning? It adds insult to infertility, with hormone therapies and surgeries often rendering participants sterile, turning potential parents into perpetual consumers of medical miracles that drain wallets rather than fill cradles. Politically, the elites—those policy puppeteers in Washington or Brussels—see red, or perhaps a faded pink, at the thought of depleted ranks in the military and police. The US Army, that grand bulwark against invasion, missed recruitment goals by 25% in recent years, only to claw back with bribes of bonuses and citizenship paths for immigrants. Young men, once the cannon fodder of choice, now shun the uniform, citing "woke" dilutions or simple disillusionment with fighting wars for oligarchs who wouldn't deign to dirty their hands. Transitioning exacerbates this: fewer bodies for the barracks, more for the boutiques. Borders, those fragile lines on maps, risk becoming sieves without soldiers to stand sentinel, inviting the chaos that could topple regimes overnight. Internally, police forces limp along with 5.2% deficits, departments like the NYPD begging for 2,000 more officers amid waves of attrition. Who will shield the White House—or the elite's gated enclaves—from the next riotous tide? Not the transitioned youth, ensconced in their new identities, but perhaps the local gang leader, eyeing the loot with entrepreneurial glee. Yet the true protuberance of this tension lies in the moral and demographic collapse it portends. Elites, ever the pragmatists, counter with a arsenal of impediments: legislative bans on youth gender care in over 20 states, cultural campaigns amplifying detransition horror stories, and economic lures like child tax credits to coax the hesitant into family life. They fund think tanks that whisper of "social contagion" and "depopulation agendas," framing transitioning as a luxury ill-afforded in an era of inverted pyramids. But beneath the snark, the vista is grim: a society where young men, alienated by economic dispossession and cultural androgyny, opt out en masse, leaving elites to scramble with AI drones for defense and imported serfs for service. The country teeters on the brink, not from some apocalyptic horde, but from the quiet defection of its own sons, who choose cute over duty, skirts over sacrifice. And the elites? They watch, aghast, as their empires crumble not with a bang, but with a well-manicured whimper. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Linkin Park - Stained (2 Comments |Comment on this)
3:39 pm	Malicious Neighbors Studying the case documents their lawyer has prepared, I kind of understand what is really happening. First, the neighbor lady is not the most modest person around. She doesn't curtain her windows, while walking at her house dressed indecently. Now I order food online and trade D&D miniatures by mail, and the couriers for DHL and Uber Eats are these stereotypical African and Muslim dudes with high libido, so they probably ringed her door to "make friends". Since I binge buy these cheap AliExpress minis, I get many DHL visits per week. I also get regular dates from Grindr (gay dating app), and people there are rather horny bisexual men. For Grindr dates I just used the app's builtin location functionality, which incorrectly detected my neighbors location, which also resulted in ringing the wrong door. The entire conflict is exacerbated by the fact I'm transsexual, and these people are highly conservative and racist, therefore unhappy there are African guys in their neighborhood. So they coordinate on their Buurtapp chat to track all non-whites and blame me for everything happening around. Current Mood: contemplative (18 Comments |Comment on this)