Immorality
-
Orange Gangster
The term “gangster empire” seems pretty apt. The orange baby has, throughout its adult life, functioned like a crime boss (or at least like what normal people understand a “crime boss” to be. Source material: Lucky Loser. “We have now entered a new phase of Western-led global savagery — prefigured by the genocide in Gaza… Continue reading
-
Just the latest version of nonsense
The Pessimists Archive posted an article about how modern refrigeration really started in the US in the late 1840s, when the inventor Dr. John Gorrie served ice to guests in the summer, in Florida. He got a patent on his new process a couple years later. But this was Florida, which has been…well, Florida…for a… Continue reading
-
A dying empire and its assassins
Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from? “The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.”… Continue reading
-
“I’m from the government, and…”
It’s difficult to fully understand complex structures. That’s kind of tautological; “complex” already means “difficult to understand”, at least in part. But never fear; I have a point, and it’s this: in the same way we understand the complex physics of the universe by using simplified models that are “close enough” in most cases, we understand the… Continue reading
-
Lest we forget
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: LEST WE FORGET THE HORRORS: AN UNENDING CATALOG OF TRUMP’S CRUELTIES, COLLUSIONS, CORRUPTIONS, AND CRIMES. by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte Continue reading
-
Originalism is always fabrication
Ben Thompson, whose site Stratechery is interesting, well-written, and afflicted with tunnel vision about “the web” being collection of business deals, just posted this: The original web that we know and love was the human web; that’s why advertising was the preferred business model, and Google was the big winner. Nonsense. I can’t tell whether he means personal… Continue reading
-
Which amendment was that?
ICE gestapo monsters left a 12-year-old standing alone, unaccompanied, on a sidewalk after snatching their adult companion. It seems to me this sort of thing could escalate into exactly what that amendment about “a well regulated militia” was supposed to be about. Not good. Continue reading
-
“Like a business,” they said
The idea that the US should be “run like a business” has been popular with the republic party for decades. Like many of the slogans they parrot, the actual thinkers in the party almost certainly don’t agree with it, but recognize it as a convenient talking point that will convince their base. Now they’ve got… Continue reading
-
Not just the Principia Mathematica
From Bertrand Russel in 1940: “The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and… Continue reading
-
There are jobs, and then there are jobs
The regime of the orange baby, and the baby itself, seem to believe (or at least say, which isn’t the same thing for it) that making products — toys, for example — arbitrarily more expensive for US consumers is a good thing. Maybe, the baby spitballs, it will mean that “the jobs” move to the… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Thought Experiment
- Can any good come of any of it?
- What is it about Florida?
- Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
- Fashionable or able to fashion
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences