Interesting Stuff
The Strength of Forgiveness - This is a moving essay from a really good writer about Charlie Kirk, the response of his wife, now widow and the emptiness of an ideology without redemption. It’s a long essay, but the point that stood out to me was that the unforgiving nature of leftist cancellation scare many, but in a sense makes the entire ideology and the power it yields fragile. The fear builds resentment, which builds resistance and eventually hits an inflection point where the whole thing may crumble. Indeed, that’s the main point of the essay, that the murder of Kirk may really be that inflection point.
Group Madness - It’s easy to think that smart people, at least as a collective, know what they’re doing. But as this article shows, that’s far from the truth. The article reminds us of ridiculous proposals that were very popular for a time, like distributed manufacturing, paperless office and even object oriented programming. Smart people are just as susceptible to groupthink, rationalizations, wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. Perhaps more so, because their intellect, and perhaps the fiat money it attracts, lets them continue in their folly.
Civil War Origins - Don’t worry that the latter half of the article is behind the paywall, the first half is interesting enough. The normie conception of the Civil War is that it was a fight over slavery. The more historically knowledgeable conception is about whether newly admitted states would do so as slave states or free states. This article gives more context to the cultural influences at the time, which definitely played a role, but is not really mentioned in history books. Namely, one John Brown, and what happened in Haiti. The defiance that the South showed in Abraham Lincoln’s election was largely due to the strange, perhaps glory-seeking man and the spin the supporters of abolition put on his death. I won’t spoil what happened, please go read the whole thing.
Theranos - The story of Theranos is supposedly a pretty open and shut case of corporate fraud… or is it? The article argues that the kind of people involved, particularly on its board and the crazy heights that the company hit before its fall suggests that something much more foul was afoot. It’s the first of a 3-part series written in 2021, and suggests that given the unusual number of military people involved and the relative lack of medical people, that this was a government operation the whole time. Much like the Epstein story, I suspect there’s a lot more here than a simple fraud story.
IQ and War - I honestly hadn’t considered the effect of IQ on war, as I had thought that so much of the inequality of war was mostly negated through more and more powerful weapons. Yet the argument presented here makes sense and the evidence pretty powerful. Of particular note was the experiment in Vietnam that’s referred to in the piece, Project 100, derisively called McNamara’s Morons, which was an attempt to use lower IQ soldiers which the US military hadn’t used before in war. The results of that experiment really speak for themselves.
What I'm up to
Treasury Orange - I talked on this podcast about Bitcoin Treasury companies, why I don’t invest in them, specifically why I don’t think they’re moral for me to d so. We talked a good deal not just about that but about the OP_RETURN controversy and a bunch of other topics.
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - Later this week, I will be speaking at this conference in Raston, VA (alongside Yeonmi Park and EJ Antoni) to a bunch of college students October 3-4. I’ll speak about the trucker protests as a launching point for embracing non-governmental, politically neutral, moral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - In a few weeks, on October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I will be doing a debate with Peter Todd about the OP_RETURN controversy and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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