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3 stars
How Feminism Ends | American Affairs
I’m not sure how much I agree with this piece. But it made me think.
I realized, recently, that I have been in pain for most of my life. The beginning was subtle. In middle school, I acquired knee pain and hip pain along with braces. Later, I began finding strange bruises on my legs, getting horrible cramps after eating anything of note, and then getting worse cramps after I got my period (obviously). In high school, I developed a vague, formless fatigue of the type my mom had, and found myself constantly buying new supplements for the various “deficiencies”—in iron, Vitamin D, or “female vitality”—that might be causing it. I got an IUD put in and out, which hurt both times. I got tested for Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a vague autoimmune disorder that women often think they have, which came back negative. My mom used to say that “women’s bodies are just more complicated,” which is a nice way of saying that there is nothing particularly wrong with me. Regardless, I have wasted thousands of hours of my life booking doctors appointments, remembering them, Ubering there, going to the pharmacy, picking up pills, avoiding walks, avoiding work, wondering whether I have reached some theoretical limit of self-maintenance, with my acupuncture and YouTube self-massage tutorials and nightly stretching routine (for the hip pain), and realizing that however much time I spend managing pain now, I am still young; it will probably get much worse.
And I’m boring you. Sorry. I know that female pain is boring. I know that writing about female pain is played out. There is already an essay called “The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which was published all the way back in 2014. That was, coincidentally, the same year that we all decided that being a woman has nothing to do with having a female body—the vessel that causes all of them so much pain.
The female body is the unsolvable problem of feminist theory. It cannot be explained away. It can only be managed.
Here are some facts about female bodies: They are 16.5 percent smaller on average, by weight, than male bodies. If you take an average female and put her in a subway car with a hundred males, the female will be weaker than ninety-eight of them. She will, likely, be scared. If a female wants to have a child, then she will have to grow that child in her own body—or hire a surrogate female to do it for her, which is risky and expensive. If she wants to avoid artificial insemination (which is also risky and expensive), she will have to find a male to join her before her early thirties. Males, on average, find females most physically attractive when they are around eighteen—and they are much more sexually motivated by visual stimulation than females, a trend which cuts across mammalian species.
Once a female decides to have a child, she will be out of commission for months—if she comes back any faster, she will be hailed a “superhero.” Even then, heroic or not, all she gets for her effort is the opportunity to return to a relatively underwhelming baseline—the same position as any male.
These are simple, boring facts. Every year, seventy million new minds are born into female bodies, and will rediscover them all over again. But they alter your behavior. I know they have changed mine.
The 2010s were supposed to be the end of feminism—in that the project would reach its perfect, inevitable conclusion. Girls were supporting girls. Taylor Swift had a squad. Hillary Clinton was about to become the forty-fifth president of the United States. But toward the end of the decade, something snapped. The project hit a snag. By 2021, cool girls online were bragging about becoming “tradwives” and staying at home with their boyfriends. Part of feminism’s branding problem was that, when allowed to compete fairly, women were not measuring up in a few key professional fields—which led to broad-scale affirmative action on the basis of gender, to preserve the illusion, for men and women alike, that history was still lumbering along as planned. And in the meantime, something funny happened. We all, collectively, decided that women don’t exist. They are . . . undefinable. An ether. An essence. Even the acceptance of transgender “women” into the group cannot fully explain the obfuscating haze that has settled over the female sex—you can have a biological male called “Caitlyn” and still understand that only half the population can get endometriosis. Today, feminist theorists seem to relish explaining how women have nothing in common and no shared interests—that they are a formless, ever-evolving mass whose boundaries will never be defined.
I put 4 Million Suns in a Black Hole over New York | Epic Spaceman [YouTube]
This is a video on the scale of Black Holes in the Universe. I've been making it for four months now so I'm really happy to finally get it out to everyone, I hope you enjoy it! Black Holes are fascinating and there's so much to say about them, from atoms to neutron stars, gravitational lensing, supermassive black holes, quasars, the secrets of the Universe even time travel. So I couldn't cover quite everything here, which means there will definitely be more on them in the future. It's also an area where we're still learning a lot so it's quite possible the largest black hole crown will go to another black hole soon, even bigger than the one in TON618.
Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it | Ars Technica
MiMi Aung could barely contain her excitement as she drove up Oak Grove Drive, the leafy thoroughfare leading to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Aung had spent her formative years in Burma and Malaysia, two countries without a space program. A career in aerospace seemed beyond her reach. Yet here she was, at 22 years old, with a job interview to possibly work on the Deep Space Network. Aung dreamed of helping NASA intercept and amplify faint signals sent back to Earth from humanity's farthest-flung spacecraft, including the Voyagers.
"I remember it like it was yesterday," Aung said.
On that day in 1990, the math-loving engineer interviewed with prospective managers and visited facilities in the lab. It felt like home immediately. An energetic and enthusiastic person by nature, Aung spoke rapidly and asked a million questions. "You're like a kid in a candy store," one of the managers remarked. She was. Aung couldn't help herself. More than anywhere in the world, this is where she wanted to be.
She got the job. Over the next quarter of a century, Aung would work on the Deep Space Network and various other programs. Eventually, she became a manager, supervising the Guidance, Navigation & Control systems that help fly spacecraft.
In 2014, she was given a choice. Aung could remain as a manager—a plum position in the hierarchy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)—or take over a fledgling project to develop a small helicopter that might one day fly on Mars.
A Reckless Age | News Items
We’ve traveled from the age of anxiety to an age of recklessness. The president of the United States is running for re-election to perform duties he will no longer be able to perform. The previous president of the United States and leader of the opposition is running for re-election to avenge a defeat he has yet to acknowledge. The people who served in many of the highest positions in his administration, including the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, his chief of staff (among many, many others), describe him as unfit to hold high office.
That’s the choice. Everything you need to know about the two major political parties in the United States is described by the choice. It is the best they can do. […]
It would be nice if recklessness of this kind was confined to politics, but of course it’s not. We see it in our media (most everywhere), our financial markets (most everywhere), our technology companies (especially), our academic institutions (also especially), to name but four. And those four pale in comparison to the reckless pursuit of artificial intelligence; the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind, unregulated, barely understood, much of its code freely available.
2 stars
Love And Liberty | Astral Codex Ten
Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK’s birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing.
I propose Valentine’s Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything.
Love operates on the non-aggression principle. To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force. Otherwise, anything goes.
(except prostitution - the significance of which could be an entire post of its own)
Love is unfair. Some people go on dozens of dates with supermodels, then have happy marriages with their perfect partner. Other people die alone, through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills, or with less money, or disconnected from the social networks that would allow them to meet good partners. Usually when something is this unfair, we demand it be made fairer, maybe through redistribution. In love, nobody demands this - except incels, who are universally loathed for it.
Love is unsafe. A mistake in love will ruin your life. Usually when something is this dangerous, we regulate it. Here are some common-sense regulations on love that could be part of your chosen party’s platform at the next election:
Nobody is allowed to date without a license. These work like drivers’ licenses; you have to take a short class, and pass a short test demonstrating that you understand consent and basic relationship skills.
Dating licenses can be revoked for sufficiently serious crimes - eg cheating, domestic abuse, or persistent alcoholism/drug use.
Three month waiting period for marriage.
Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life.
After three messy breakups, you have to take a remedial relationship skills class before you can date again.
You can’t use race as a criterion for choosing partners. If someone thinks you rejected them because of their race, they can sue for unlawful discrimination.
Am I joking? The last one yes, but I don’t know about the others. Probably some of these policies would make the world a better place overall, at least as a first-order effect. So why am I against them? Why is everyone against them?
Creating video from text | OpenAI
If you haven’t seen this yet…well, watch some of the demo videos. Crazy.
We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.
His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. | Texas Monthly
Austin Riley spent decades raising exotic animals in the Texas Hill Country. In a split second, the animal he thought he knew best changed his life forever.
The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid | The Hustle
Glantz stared at the dregs pooling at the bottom of the wine bottle beside her.
She typed out an ad on Craigslist: “Professional bridesmaid - w4w - 26 (NYC). Let me be there for you, this time, if: you don’t have any other girlfriends except your third cousin, twice removed, who is often found sticking her tongue down an empty bottle of red wine,” she wrote. “You need someone to take control and make sure bridesmaid #4 buys her dress on time and doesn’t show up 3 hours late.”
And then she went to bed.
The emails poured in. Hundreds of notes from brides in need. Interview requests from reporters who’d seen the ad. Marriage proposals of her own.
In the ten years since that hazy night, Glantz has parlayed what began as a Craigslist lark into a fully fledged, six-figure business as the country’s most prolific professional bridesmaid.
Why North Korea Survives | Persuasion
Relatively overlooked in recent debates over whether the Kim regime might be preparing for war with South Korea—more than it is usually, anyway—is the simple but surprising fact of North Korea’s continued survival. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is among a handful of regimes that survived not only the collapse of communism in the 1990s but successive waves of democratization since.
The keys to North Korea’s survival are multifold, as the Kim family cannot continue to rule unless it succeeds in managing multiple threats to regime survival simultaneously. And understanding how North Korea has survived as long as it has should help to shape the policy of the United States and its allies. Here are some of the techniques that have been particularly prominent (and, from the perspective of survival, effective) in the first decade of Kim Jong Un’s rule.
Why Isn’t Solar Scaling in Africa? | Asterisk
The World Bank designed the Scaling Solar program to set Africa on a course to sustainable energy. Instead, it shed light on how a lack of transparency in the climate and development industry hampers progress.
It's time for the White House to put up or shut up | Silver Bulletin
Shielding Biden from public appearances might be a rational strategy -- and that's why it's a bad sign.
A bunch of handy charts about climate change | Noahpinion
One big difficulty in addressing climate change is that there are a lot of bad sources out there, throwing around a lot of bad information. Lefty climate activists — the people most inclined to spend their time and effort trying to do something about the problem — tend to get their information from quasi-leftist sources, who tend to make silly claims like “100 companies cause 70% of global emissions”, or “the richest 10% of people are responsible for half of emissions”, and so on. Then there are the right-wing types, who used to be into denying climate change, but who nowadays tend to throw up a giant cloud of FUD — for the non-finance types, that’s “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” — about green energy. The whole thing can get absolutely exhausting. The result, I think, is that much of the populace sort of tunes the whole climate debate out.
What’s really frustrating about this state of affairs is that there actually are quite a few excellent sources of information out there.
Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring | After Babel
“How can you do this to our children?” the senators asked, in a variety of ways. The response from the social media executives was usually some version of “But Senator, we spend X billion dollars each year to create industry-leading tools to find and remove such content.” That phrase, “industry-leading,” was used six times during the hearing; five times by Mark Zuckerberg, and once by Shou Chew from TikTok. […]
But as I watched the hearing, I kept thinking about how content moderation is to some extent a red herring, a distraction from larger issues. Yes, it must be done and done better, but even if these platforms could someday remove 95% of harmful content, the platforms will still be harmful to kids. The discussion of online harms can’t just be about making an adolescent’s time on Instagram safer, not even 95% safer, because so many of the harms I describe in The Anxious Generation are not caused by bad content. They are caused by a change in the nature of childhood when kids begin to spend many hours each day scrolling, posting, and commenting. Even if Instagram could remove 100% of harmful content and leave only photos of happy girls and young women enjoying their beautiful lives, the effect on adolescent girls would still be devastating from the chronic social comparison, loss of sleep, addiction, perfectionism, and decline of time spent with their real friends in the real world. Even if social media companies currently enjoy protection from lawsuits based on the content that other people have posted (Section 230), they absolutely must be held legally responsible for the hundreds of design choices and marketing strategies they have used to hook tens of millions of children.
Coming face to face with inmates in El Salvador's mega-jail | BBC
Hundreds of eyes are upon us. With shaven heads, dressed in pristine white, and heavily tattooed, the prisoners know they are being watched and return the gaze from the other side of the bars.
We are in Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism), a maximum security jail built a year ago by the Salvadoran government to imprison "high-ranking" members of the country's main gangs.
A gargantuan complex constructed in the middle of nowhere, it symbolises President Nayib Bukele's controversial security policy more than any other project.
Critics of the president have called it a "black hole of human rights", where international guidelines on prisoner rights are flouted.
1 star
Bad Omens: When the Astrologers Got it Wrong | History Today
Europe panicked when astrologers predicted a huge flood in 1524. When it failed to appear, astrology had to defend itself.