is countertransference as a megastructure.

when Trump claims to be “an innocent man” and his followers believe him, i don’t think the meaning of that is to deny that he did what he is accused of. instead the claim is that, by virtue of being Trump, by virtue of his nobility and the nobility of his intentions, his doing this does not constitute a crime where it might if others did the same. 1/

in the conservative imaginary, the protection offered by the state must be about persons rather than actions. it is futile, naive, to try to prevent or deter crime. we must catch and punish criminals. there are good guys and there are bad guys, and the edifice of law is a pretext by which we get the bad guys. going after the good guys, unless what they’ve done shocks the conscience in its harm to other good guys, is always a miscarriage of justice. /fin

in reply to self

either we are integrating or we are disintegrating.

@poetryforsupper 🥺

on getting a locally run LLM up and running. blog.dshr.org/2023/06/a-local-

This comment on economists' and policy makers' betrayal of welfare economics by adopting "cost-benefit analysis" (or the potential-Pareto criterion) is fabulous. downloads.regulations.gov/OMB- via @SteveRoth

@SteveRoth (The pedant in me can't help but point out that even *with* compensation, we must impose as a normative matter interpersonal comparison of welfare in order to make claims of welfare improvement. Absent unanimous agreement to a policy — with which or without reasonable compensation, will rarely be forthcoming, as people have idiosyncratic attachments or play holdup games — even with compensation we can't "scientifically" know the compensation is adequate.)

in reply to self

it would be a scandal if government agencies could not have information available for purchase by every other stalker and marketer. if you don’t want the government to have surveillance data, regulate it to prevent it from becoming a commodity for sale on the open market.

the whole pronoun thing will blow over once they realize theirs are brah/brah.

“The novelist Upton Sinclair observed, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’

Well, the opposite is true, too.”

from @BCAppelbaum nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opinion

Chilling on a summer day in Constanța.

@ Teatrul National de Opera si Balet - Oleg Danovski

celebrates our miserable current state of of hatred, conflict, and social division as a feature rather than a bug. "Diversity is our strength" precisely because social division sabotages the political prospects of social democracy, despite ongoing massive public support for social democratic change. If you take for granted as "truth" that impotent government is essential to prosperity and flourishing, conflict among the plebes is to be encouraged. richardhanania.com/p/diversity

if you are using contemporary LLMs, you want prompts that amount to linguistic one-way functions. they should generate output that would otherwise be difficult or annoying or time-consuming to produce, but is trivial to verify.

don't you just want to unlock new features?

do we love our apps?

I have been told things you would never believe.

Back the blue!*

* As long as they ignore our crimes, but beat the crap out of them for theirs.

Ovid superintends his exile.

A sculpture of Ovid surveils Piata Ovidiu (Ovidiu Square) in Constanța, Romania. A sculpture of Ovid surveils Piata Ovidiu (Ovidiu Square) in Constanța, Romania.

“Too many limits on national policy autonomy can also produce a backlash against the global economy. One consequence of the erosion of national sovereignty under hyper-globalization was an increase in economic anxiety and the sense of a loss of control among many citizens. These are circumstances that exacerbate xenophobia and out-group hostility.” @drodrik project-syndicate.org/commenta

Kind of an aside, but Dems getting tough on Pharma's rape of the public purse would help defang some social issues. Both anti-vax and anti-trans activists lean on claims that what they deride as quack, harmful medicine is, with Dem's political contrivance, pushed on the public for Pharma Profit$.

These arguments would be less plausible if Democrats were plainly not on the side of Pharma Profit$.

see @pluralistic on Dem's latest, unpersuasive, version of "getting tough". pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/com

much of superstition is just reading reality like a novel.