March Miscellany

Links, life updates, and a friend's psychotic seventh-grade writing

Media I’m Consuming

1. Scott Aaronson’s wonderful blog, Shtetl-Optimized. Recent pieces of note:

• Hymn to be recited for the next thousand mornings. Staying principled and reasonable in the age of Trump is extremely important, and Aaronson absolutely nails it.

  Then and now the ideologues say: don’t you realize you need to pick a side?

  What they don’t understand is that I have picked a side.

• Toward a non-constant cancellation function. Aaronson recognizes that some degree of cancellation will always be good and necessary—for example, preventing avowed racists from holding important government jobs—and proposes a consistent, rational framework for deciding when it makes sense.

• On Columbia in the crosshairs. Seven measured and sensible thoughts on Trump’s threat to withhold $400 million in federal grants from Columbia University.

2. Sticking with the theme, from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Trump makes ‘anti-Semitism’ hyphenated again.” Apparently, this is a big deal to some people! Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s antisemitism envoy, writes, “The only people who push for the hyphen are those who wish to create a racial category of ‘Semitism’.” …Which is *problematic*, I guess?

It seems like the whole debate is based on the idea that some pro-palestinian activists will try to say, “Arabs are Semitic too, so how can I be an anti-Semite??” But I think the ones who say things like that are obviously being disingenuous and unserious, and we can just ignore them. Also it seems wildly unlikely that Trump is trying to enable pro-palis to escape accusations of antisemitism. Fundamentally, this seems like a great thing to not care about, though I do still prefer ‘antisemitism’ for aesthetic reasons.

3. This is one I first saw on Instagram, and initially assumed to be just totally made-up propaganda:

makichyan.arshak

A post shared by @makichyan.arshak

As it turns out, it’s kind of happening! Of course, the whole situation is a little fuzzier than “Why media are silent about this?” For one, that link points to the Times of Israel, who are media (Zionist media, in fact) and clearly are not silent about this.

More importantly, it’s somewhat misleading to frame this as an attempt to displace Christians in particular. Israeli tax law has exemptions for religious organizations, but crucially not for their commercial properties. For a while, Jerusalem’s government just hasn’t been enforcing this for the Christians (though Jewish and presumably Muslim institutions haven’t been exempted), but they recently signaled that they’ll be taking the Patriarchate to court unless it pays up.

Last time they tried this, in 2018, the Christians retaliated by closing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for three days, and the municipality relented (under pressure from the Netanyahu government). It’s not clear why they’re trying again now, but similar actions to collect tax debts have been taken by other Israeli cities in recent months.

Armenian-Israeli academic Bedross Der Matossian argues against the move in JPost. I can’t even find an argument in favor, and the municipality says that “a dialogue is taking place with the churches to collect debts for the commercial properties they own.” I think it’s foolish of the city to upset the status quo like this, but it’ll probably end in a settlement that’s mostly inoffensive to both parties.

4. Scott Alexander has an old SSC article with writing advice. I found it significantly more interesting and helpful than Zvi Mowshowitz’s recent version, which is just way more scattered and uncertain. I also think Scott is simply a better writer, so I trust his tricks more.

5. Also from Scott Alexander: Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025. I really like the concept, have a couple ideas in mind already, and am totally planning on entering.

6.

Dissident Teacher

writes (two years ago) that Your Kids Aren’t Learning. At all. As one of those Kids, I can tell you now: yeah, I’m really not learning. At all. School is a joke at best, and a massive human rights violation at worst.

Zvi Mowshowitz

is great on this with School is Hell.

7.

Simon Laird

argues that Wild Animal Suffering Debunks Utilitarianism, loosely in response to my piece on why shrimp welfare might feel so unintuitive. I thought his argument was silly and exaggerated, and we had a short back-and-forth about it.

8.

Amos Wollen

debates natural law theorist Dr. Brian Besong on sexual ethics. The discussion is derailed when Amos asks Dr. Besong to imagine “a chewing gum that didn’t have any nutrients or make you salivate,” and Dr. Besong refuses to. Eventually, they agree that chewing on a plastic straw might be a suitable corollary, but don’t come to any conclusions. The debate is suitably summarized:

And then they did another one!

Bentham's Bulldog

joined in, and everyone seemed very ready to have a serious discussion about straw-chewing and masturbation until Dr. Besong spent ten minutes admonishing Amos for being too glib about the first round on his blog. Luckily, Amos was able to move past this, and, long story short, I hold absolutely no new sympathies for natural law theory on account of the debate.

9. Today is St. Patrick’s Day!

Glenn

’s linkpost discussed the drinkiness of the holiday:

Liberal indulgence of food and drink was a central component of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. The 17 March usually falls within the period of Lenten abstinence, but Patrician tradition has decreed that the faithful are, for that special day, free from this constraint. Hence they could […] drink freely as they commemorated the life of the apostle of Ireland.

But the second-most well known feature of the holiday has to be the legend that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland. …It may not shock you to learn that this absolutely isn’t true at all. The only snake-ish reptiles Ireland’s had since the Ice Age are called, disgustingly, slowworms, and are believed to be a non-native 20th-century introduction.

Ew.

The Wikipedia page notes that “due to their secretive habits [slowworms] are difficult to observe.” What are the slowworms hiding??

Turns out that Ireland has no snakes because of weird Ice Age effects. It was too cold up there for too long, and soon after the glaciers receded, the land bridge between Britain and Ireland vanished. The Irish did get one native lizard species though—the viviparous lizard—which was probably just a faster colonizer than any nearby snake species.

Of course, the Catholics now say that “snakes” should be thought of as an analogy for the wicked pagan beliefs that St. Patrick really did drive out of Ireland.

Also maybe of interest (though I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole myself) is the “Two Patricks” theory.

10. I’m listening to old episodes of the

Blocked and Reported

podcast, because I love it and they don’t post new ones nearly often enough. Right now, I’m in the few weeks between the 2020 election and the January 6 riot. Jesse and Katie are making some really impressively correct predictions, and also admonishing the “Trump is a threat to democracy” narrative waaay too much (which I can only say with the benefit of hindsight). Interestingly, the two of them completely dismissed the possibility of a Trump run in 2024, which I think was probably misguided even then.

11. I can’t stop hate-reading the Michigan Daily. I really think the kids still aren’t alright. If we were right to be worried about the illiberal ideas being passed around on campus a decade ago, we should probably still be somewhat worried. Also, since when are college newspapers filled exclusively with awful prose? Seriously, these people cannot form grammatical sentences.

From “The presidential term limit should be changed”¹ by Gabe Efros:

Another reason to limit presidents to one term is that it allows for bolder action on existing issues to be taken sooner. For example, at the end of his presidency, former President Joe Biden lifted the United States’ state sponsorship of terrorism for Cuba.

Have a stroke yet? No? Here’s Meredith Knight in “Turn your listening ears on: Trump is coming for K-12 schools next”:

What Trump can do, and is doing, fatally affects the American education system. His cuts will lead to less accessibility, funding and visibility at a time when our education system needs to have forward progress for the sake of its students. The flurry of executive orders creates smoke and mirrors about Trump’s aims to reduce education in constituents, privatize education and wheel back federally guaranteed aid for students.

I promise you, I’m not cherry-picking! Most articles are entirely written like this. I guess it serves to reinforce a particularly depressing claim from Your Kids Aren’t Learning:

I cannot stress this enough: wealthy AP students with professional parents living in safe neighborhoods have poor command of grammar, small vocabularies, and a strong proclivity to try to hide all of that by using the passive voice and the thesaurus.

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Media I’m Creating

I’ve been blogging a lot over the last couple months.

One recent post got quite a bit of attention, and also earned me around a dozen new subscribers. That seems like not a lot, but means ~15% growth for me, which is exciting!

I’m very glad that all you new people were interested enough in the things I’ve written to sign up, and want to point you to a few slightly older works that I think might be worth your time:

1. Contra Glenn on Ukraine. Why it’s good to support our allies, even if pursuing peace is the ultimate goal.

2. On Getting What You Deserve. Moral desert is a dumb and incoherent concept.

3. Biff Loman as the Übermensch. What to do when AGI dissolves the meritocracy.

4. In Defense of the Ivy League. Why I like meritocracy and elitism so much.

5. Dialogue on Abortion. In the genre of “take opposing ideas seriously,” but extra Socratic (and rationalist).

6. In Five Years. Straight-up speculative fiction.

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What Else I’m Up To

I’ve got one kinda big project in mind for the blog, which hopefully I’ll start tomorrow. I’m not gonna say exactly what it is, for two reasons:

• Builds suspense!

• Whenever I say I’m gonna write something in a linkpost, I never actually write it.

Anyway, see the last two linkposts for lists of all my old ideas, which I theoretically am still committed to.

Outside the blog, I’ve got exactly two things on my plate:

• The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad! I made it to the Invitational Round last Thursday:

  But my site coordinator really sucks at her job—the site was very much uncoordinated—and so we started the test an hour and a half late. We still were given the full four hours, but the “sore throat and sniffles” didn’t help me much. Also, computational linguistics is hard! I’m not so confident, I mean to say.

• A new slate of college decisions were released on Friday. I was waitlisted by the University of Chicago, and accepted to Fordham (which is in New York City!). Interestingly, Fordham also offered me a full-ride Presidential scholarship, which puts me in an awfully indecisive place. I’m sitting on Yale, St. John’s College, and Michigan acceptances for $90k, $50k, and $30k a year, respectively, or Fordham who’ll pay me $20k over four years to attend. I’m now officially soliciting advice from internet strangers, I guess. Tell me what to do!

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My Friend’s Psychotic 7th Grade Writing

Ansel de Jong

, cuber extraordinaire, participated in an activity called National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) every year he was in middle school. He wrote something on the order of 150,000 words in total, and we’ve together been going through it recently.

This is a favorite excerpt of ours. It comes from pages 41-42 of his seventh-grade work, which runs to 71 completely filled pages.

Ansel always wrote, inexplicably, without paragraph breaks, so the following has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Enjoy!

Jorus felt bad about killing that guy, but it was okay. He had tried to steal a professional cyclist’s bike after all. That was not something that could be easily forgiven.

In fact, it would not be forgiven.

But it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman dressed as a man. As if it wasn’t bad enough already, he had killed a woman. A 19 year old woman at that. Jorus felt bad, and couldn’t help but wonder why the girl wanted a bicycle like that anyway. It didn’t really fit her. Her legs were far too short.

He felt ashamed that he hadn’t noticed that it was a girl originally. it was the wig that had sold it as a boy. Underneath was pretty blond curls, that were free of blood unlike the rest of her body. The wig had preserved the hair, as if it really mattered.

She was dead anyway.

Jorus leaned down, and pulled out her eye. He put it in a Ziploc bag, and ran to catch up with the others. The eyeball would come in handy another time.

When the team got back to the bus, they made sure to clean the bike as fast as they could. They didn’t want to let the blood harden onto the frame. That would make it difficult to get off.

Unfortunately, it was already pretty hardened, but they were able to scrub it off without too much effort. After about ten minutes of tough scrubbing, the blood stains had finally come off. They were no longer noticeable on the carbon frame that Matthieu adored so greatly.

Jorus went back inside, and sat down. He could still hardly believe what had happened. He had killed someone.

He went to his room, and pulled out a pair of tweezers.

He had almost forgotten the eyeball in his pocket. He pulled it out of his pocket, and unzipped the bag, pulling it out of there too. He set it down on a paper towel, and went to work.

The last time he had dissected something, it had also been an eye. It had been a sheep eye however, and it was not a recently killed sheep. It was a preserved sheep eye.

The human eye that Jorus was dissecting had a lot more parts visible. He started off by peeling off the cornea. It was oddly squishy, despite its small size. The next part that Jorus took off was the iris. He made an incision, and cut around it. It fell right out, and it was cool to see the pupil in the middle.

Jorus put a little stick through it, and sure enough, it was completely a hole. Jorus had always had a hard time believing it in school, but it was somehow actually true.

Jorus got bored of the eye, and opened up the window, throwing it out. Some kid walked up to it, and ate it. Jorus was pretty sure that the kid thought it was candy or something. Maybe he just wanted to be a cannibal. That was always a possibility.

It was unlikely, but it was definitely possible.

1. No it shouldn’t, by the way.