Connecticut, USA
Joined October 2020
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SonicSyrup retweeted
What a bind Cornell finds itself in! Enjoy it!
To retain its credibility as a progressive school, sympathetic to every manner of oppression that its pampered students allege they suffer from, it needs to embrace Jane Doe’s phony gang rape narrative. It must never ever disbelieve a “survivor.” It must also accede to the larger claim that females are unsafe at Cornell and beyond.
And so, as Cornell’s students indulged in the pleasures of property destruction, President Michael Kotlikoff validated Doe’s account and apologized for Cornell’s alleged negligence. “My heart aches when I think of what she experienced,” he said in his weepy October 3 video. “I am deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024 and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community,” he said in his October 13 campus-wide email. Cornell needed “systemic change,” according to Kotlikoff. Cornell must be a place where “safety is not an open question.” Apparently, at present safety is an open question. He even suggested that Doe was just one in a line of “other survivors” of Cornell’s rape culture.
So far, so good. Such rhetoric may not fend off further rioting, but it at least shows students that they continue to determine what is true and what is false.
But here is the catch: What if people outside this loop of co-dependency between self-engrossed students and fawning administrators—to wit: prospective applicants and their parents--actually believe Kotlikoff’s statements? What if they decide not to apply to a school where their safety is an “open question,” and which does not respond with sufficient rigor and seriousness to “campus rape?” Without the tuition dollars pouring in, Cornell would have to go on a diet and pare back its billowing student services bureaucracy!
So at the same time that Cornell’s leadership is pandering to its student mob, it is signaling to prospective applicants and to the massive college admissions industry not to take Cornell’s self-flagellation seriously. Cornell wants to reassure parents that their children would be safe at the school, Kotlikoff told the New York Times. Cornell’s admissions officials sent a letter to high school guidance counselors noting Cornell’s fulsome student safety and sexual violence infrastructure. Kotlikoff has personally reassured parents that the school takes sexual assault seriously—as the draconian punishments (two expulsions, two suspensions, and one ban from campus) meted out to the Cornell 7 demonstrate--despite the delusional received wisdom that Cornell did little to nothing in the case.
This dilemma of needing to play to multiple audiences has afflicted universities since the start of the campus rape hysteria. Fortunately, truth has long been malleable on college campuses, which embrace the idea that there is no such thing as a stable reality outside the play of rhetoric. So the adults on campus, such as they are, are adept at affirming contradictory propositions. Nevertheless, if applications to Cornell drop, expect the school to cut the BS and insist, truthfully, that there are few safer places for a young female to be than on the Cornell campus. And the student neurasthenics will just have to chant their victimhood by themselves.
SonicSyrup retweeted
Fourteen moves in eight days
The psyop to create hysteria to manipulate Congress into regulating AI.
Almost everyone involved is affiliated with Coefficient, Open Philanthropy, Anthropic, and/or OpenAI -- all who serve to benefit financially from creating regulation.
SonicSyrup retweeted
Woke." It destroyed or distorted or deranged lives, careers, relationships, professions, academic fields, businesses, media, the arts -- and now its disfavored proponents would like to say: Sorry, wow, we overplayed that.
Thus the perpetrators come forth robed as their own judges.
They are rather lenient with themselves, of course. They have sentenced themselves to -- doing better next time! And they believe, truly, that they deserve the chance. Have they not won our trust by acknowledging they lost it? And admitting that they, in their haste or their excitement, perhaps deserved to lose it? For a time? A time which they hope is over now, just as it was getting started.
As for those who judged them harshly and long ago, the ex-woke admit these people had a point -- but they made it prematurely, on poor evidence, well before the suspects had confessed. Which smacks of intolerance. Of prejudice. But the ex-woke feel generous now, conciliatory, and they will let this uglyness pass.
For all their faults -- and see, they have them! Look! -- they're finally a conscientious bunch. It might take time, but they police themselves. Now that's a mafia you can trust! A self-correcting, self-debugging gang! And isn't that so much better than the alternative? A cartel you have to fight?
See what trouble we're saving you?they say. All you had to do was show some patience. You might even want to be grateful to us now. For our humility, belated as it may be. (It's hard to stop a train.) And as for the casualties of our excessive phase...
Well, enjoy a moment of quasi- victory. Here, as the gift of your gracious persecutors who now stand guilty by our own judgment, we offer you, our victims, a peace medallion of shining symbolic gold-toned plastic, totally yours to keep.
So please accept the terms of our marginal, fractional surrender and our bestowal on you of semi-respect. We think you should. Because you can be sure we'll remember if you don't--and you know what we're capable of.
This thing's not over yet.
SonicSyrup retweeted
In 1930, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses, a book that still feels uncomfortably prophetic. His central target was not the poor or the working class, but a new kind of human being he called the “mass man”.
The mass man, Ortega argued, is defined by attitude rather than income. He is the ordinary person who is perfectly satisfied with himself, demands nothing higher of his own character or intellect, and yet insists that his mediocrity be treated as a right. He does not defer to excellence, competence, or higher standards. He regards them with suspicion or resentment. What previous ages saw as the privilege of the few - political influence, cultural authority, the right to shape society - the mass man now claims as his due, without any corresponding effort to rise above the average.
Ortega believed this type of person had been produced by the very success of modern civilisation. Rising living standards, mass education, and liberal institutions had given ordinary people unprecedented power and comfort. But they had not produced a corresponding sense of responsibility or humility before higher achievements. The result was a revolt: the mass man refused to accept the authority of superior knowledge, culture, or character. He demanded that everything be brought down to his level.
The danger, Ortega warned, was that a civilisation cannot survive if its central actors no longer respect the standards that made it possible. When the average begins to dominate without aspiring to anything beyond itself, excellence is undermined, institutions decay, and politics becomes an expression of resentment rather than responsibility.
Ortega’s diagnosis remains unsettling because it is not a complaint about poverty or exclusion. It is a warning about self-satisfied mediocrity armed with power.
SonicSyrup retweeted
Something is at war with us, “us” being regular citizens who want things to work and to be left alone. We’re slow to react because we think in terms of nations. Our enemies are mafias that wear our governments like a cloak to defeat our eyes, and fly our flags to disarm our minds
SonicSyrup retweeted
On the consequences of the moral credit system created by the western negative canon:
SonicSyrup retweeted
Grasping the concept of extension, you can’t help but apply it to different technologies and come up with strikingly McLuhanesque conclusions. Try it. For example, a rocket ship is obviously the ultimate extension of the foot, and the nuke is the ultimate extension of the fist. Is AI the ultimate extension of humankind? (The answer is “yes.”)
2067journal.ca/why-mcluhan-m…
SonicSyrup retweeted
The editors of Public Square Magazine interview me on Fidelity Month.
publicsquaremag.org/sexualit…
SonicSyrup retweeted
Please do no harm in the name of Henry Nowak, nor in the just cause of our raped children.
The officials, police, judiciary, and the political and media class whose poison and complicity permissions these crimes are responsible for their actions.
As hard as this is to hear, these are not servants of the British public but of an insane ideology presented with a religious zealotry in every aspect of modern life.
They are captive to a cult which has been designed to capture us all, and whose technique has been refined for over a century of liberal democracy.
These people are not victims of the rape and murders caused by their diseased political beliefs.
They are victims of a belief system designed to make them believe that what they are doing is the highest good, as they deliver us all into evil.
If we are to @RestoreBritain we must understand the depth of the crisis we will inherit.
We must seek to heal the sick and remove the sickness transmitted through every aspect our lives and which is sinfully presented as virtue.
There can be no justice in this rotten state until we root out the cause of the terrible effects of liberal idolatry that seeks to replace our people, our culture and the beliefs which inspired our civilisation with itself.
This is not just a war on our people. It is a revolutionary war on our entire civilisation. This revolt against all that is good, just and true must be recognised and it must be reversed.
Where we can, we must heal the sick and help the wounded - even when these casualties are found among those who identify and act as our enemies.
Our cause is the restoration of natural justice to our lives. If this mad cult is not stopped it will destroy us all in a spasm of universal vengeance.
Do not go mad along with it. Demand sanity instead.
Those who do not belong here must leave in an orderly and humane fashion. Those among our people who have misused their power to destroy us must repent, and the worst among them must be brought to a meaningful justice.
We must have justice or we shall have anarchy. To restore the dignity of our people and to secure our future in our homeland will require a vast and painful national effort.
This requires the recognition that we have been wronged on a level so profound it is almost impossible to name within the limited vocabulary of experience we have inherited from this degrading liberal political economy.
The national emergency is grave. It is the result of an unjust war which is waged by a rotten State against us all, friend and enemy, to fold us like final demands into the envelope of a globally standardised dystopia.
The task ahead of us is to destroy this evil.
It can be done.
It must be done or we are done for.
SonicSyrup retweeted
Poor Americans who attend church regularly are happier than rich Americans who never go.
Behavioral scientist William von Hippel thought he'd made a coding error. He hadn't.
"Regularly attending services has a bigger impact on your happiness than wealth," he writes. "Money buys a fair bit of happiness but connection gives you more bang for the buck."
What's happening? Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name.
Von Hippel is direct about the cost: "I suspect that wealthy, educated urbanites are paying a steeper price for their lifestyle than they realize. Many of us have paid too great a price in connection for our increased autonomy."
SonicSyrup retweeted
This high school teacher in Alabama is describing a dynamic that’s already in plain view.
Wealthy kids are prohibited from playing with tablets and don’t get smartphones until 15-16. Low-income households, on the other hand rely on these devices as babysitting aids.
The result is apparent by kindergarten. Teacher after teacher has told me, “We can tell which kids have their own iPads from how distracted and anxious they are.”
SonicSyrup retweeted
If I could make everyone read this, I would. I couldn't agree more with this model.
A MIT professor who built the world's first neural network machine said something about intelligence that nobody in Silicon Valley wants to admit.
His name was Marvin Minsky.
He co-founded MIT's artificial intelligence lab with John McCarthy in 1959. He built SNARC the first randomly wired neural network learning machine in 1951, as a graduate student at Princeton. He won the Turing Award.
He advised Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Isaac Asimov, who was not a modest man, said Minsky was one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than him.
In 1986, after decades of building machines that could think, Minsky published a book about something far more unsettling.
How humans think. And why we are wrong about almost everything we believe about it.
The book is called The Society of Mind. It has 270 essays. Each one is a page long. Together they build a single argument that most people, when they first encounter it, reject immediately because it is too uncomfortable to accept.
The argument is this: you do not have a mind. You have thousands of them.
What you experience as a single, unified self making clear-headed decisions is not a thinker. It is an outcome. The result of hundreds of tiny, specialized, mostly mindless agents competing, negotiating, overriding, and occasionally cooperating with each other beneath the surface of your awareness. You do not decide things. You are what is left over after the arguing stops.
Minsky was precise about this.
He wrote that the power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single perfect principle. He called this the trick that makes us intelligent, and then immediately added: the trick is that there is no trick. There is no central processor. No ghost in the machine. No unified self sitting behind your eyes, calmly evaluating options and choosing rationally.
There is only the parliament. And the parliament is always in session.
This reframing destroys the standard explanation for every failure of self-control.
The reason you procrastinate is not laziness. It is that the agent in you that understands long-term consequences is losing an argument to the agent that wants comfort right now, and neither of those agents has a decisive vote. The reason you change your mind the moment someone pushes back is not weakness. It is that the social agent, the one that monitors status and belonging, just outweighed the analytical one. The reason willpower fails is not a character flaw. It is that you sent one small agent into a fight against dozens, and you called that discipline.
Minsky had a specific line that breaks this open completely. He said: in general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.
The things you do with the most apparent ease, reading a face, walking through a crowded room, understanding a sentence, catching a ball, are not simple at all. They are the products of staggeringly complex agent networks that run so smoothly, so far below conscious access, that you experience them as effortless. The things that feel like work, the logical arguments, the deliberate choices, the careful plans, are actually the clumsy surface layer, the small fraction of mental activity you can observe at all.
You have been taking credit for the wrong parts of your own intelligence.
The practical implication is the one that most productivity advice misses entirely. If your decisions are not made by a single rational self but by whichever coalition of agents happens to win the moment, then the game is not about training yourself to be more disciplined. The game is about designing the environment so that the right agents win without needing a fight.
This is why removing your phone from the room works better than deciding not to check it. This is why writing one task on an index card works better than building a sophisticated system. This is why commitment devices beat motivation every time. You are not strengthening your will. You are changing the conditions of the argument so that the outcome you want becomes the path of least resistance.
Minsky spent his entire career building machines that could imitate intelligence. What he discovered in the process was that natural intelligence, the kind running inside every human brain on earth, is nothing like what we think it is.
It is not a single flame burning in a single chamber.
It is a city. Loud, chaotic, full of competing interests, with no mayor.
The people who understand this stop trying to win the argument through force of will.
They learn to build a better city instead.
SonicSyrup retweeted
Passengers on a commercial flight captured the launch of Artemis II on camera
The plane happened to pass near the launch trajectory at the exact moment of liftoff, giving passengers a rare view of the rocket launch right from their windows.
SonicSyrup retweeted
He did evil things--and doing evil things corrupts and deforms one's character. One integrates the evil one does into one's very self. So, yes, he made himself an evildoer, an evil person. Still, he was our brother--a fellow human being. He was made in the divine image and never ceased being so. It was not for us to hate him, though it was right 1) to hate the evil he did, 2) to stop him from doing it, and 3) to support his justly being punished for his crimes. It is now for us, including those of us who have spent much of our lives fighting against people like him and what they stand for, to hope that he repented, and to pray for him to be judged mercifully. I know that's a lot to ask. But it is, in my opinion, our duty.