> I just got a call from my lawyer. He’s advised me that 13% of Americans don’t understand the use-mention dichotomy, and that I should play it safe writing this blog post. The editorial staff apologizes for this inconvenience.
Ironically and somewhat unexpectedly, it's not the 13% you'd expect. I mean, there's some overlap, but realistically it's just the lowest eighth of the Sanity / IQ grid.
> To focus the example a little bit more, consider how mad liberal Californians get when you call someone the n-word.
You don't even have to *call* them that. You just have to point out that they're using language *equivalent* to that, and they will lose their shit. And *you* will be the bad guy for pointing it out.
> “Legibility” is an extremely important concept that I will cover in the future, but if you want to get a head start, Scott Alexander wrote about it before he turned into a cucked communist.
Scott Alexander had a blog before he was born? How did *that* even work?
Scott was cool until the Kolmogorov Complicity article, which is widely considered amongst me and my friends to be him admitting that he's going to start lying so that woke people don't murder him.
One thing I'll say in his defense is that just based on what he's shared in public that people have done to him, if I was in his shoes, I would have deleted the blog years ago. People quite literally showed up to his house in Berkeley and threatened him in person because he doesn't ban people like me and my friends who have opinions that are not California compliant.
Scott has written some decent stuff, I will grant. He has had the occasional flirtation with Truth and written some marvelously impassioned pleas against Wokism, in its infancy. But he has, IMO, *never* lived the Litany of Tarski or the Litany of Gendlin. He has *always* been ruled by the fear of the crowd over truth.
He's like, 3% Yudkowski, and even Yudkowski flinches more than he should.
"If Day" is the single most hilariously Canadian thing I have ever heard of. Because obviously nobody would have been stupid enough to try that in America, because the people pretending to be actual German soldiers in a time of war invading America would have gotten shot by random citizens. Which would have put rather a damper on the festivities.
> because the people pretending to be actual German soldiers in a time of war
At the time, the city must have been somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 ethnically German, at least if us Russian Mennonites count as German. Which, based on how many of our churches got firebombed in the 30s, I think most Canadians counted us as German.
That brings a really strange angle to this whole thing. I can't help but wonder if they staged this in Winnipeg, and not a different city, to send a message to anyone who might have sympathies to the home country.
Which is even more hilarious if anybody knows what the single most important belief to a Mennonite is. Our people are so committed to political pacifism that to this day, the church condemns the militiamen who protected our families as they fled the communist revolution, because they shot communists but murder is a sin.
The idea that Mennonites in Canada would be a Nazi fifth column is absolutely hilarious and absurd, but maybe made sense to the authorities of Canada at the time.
Oh man, I just got to thinking, I should write about the Winnipeg General Strike some time. It is the closest that North America has ever come to a Communist revolution.
~20% of the city stopped working for six weeks, and 2 corpses, 30 ER rooms, and 100 prison cells later, they all went back to work. Now, kids in school in Manitoba learn about how this brave event is responsible for all the worker protections that exist in the world, and it was evil fascism on the government's part, and there's no possible way that a massive violent strike in 1919 could be related to communism, that's just silly
To be clear, everyone in the city knew this wasn't real. I mean come on, Winnipeg is the most landlocked city in the entire planet. The nearest ocean access is the Arctic, over a thousand miles away. It would quite literally not be possible for the Nazis, with the technology and logistics they had, to invade Winnipeg unless they came up from Minneapolis. And they wouldn't get to Minneapolis until they already conquered the entire eastern seaboard.
The logistical burden of travelling east/west between Winnipeg and Toronto (there is no meaningful economy, industry, or population between these two points) is so vast that I believe it would make it impossible for the government of Canada to put down an armed rebellion if Alberta decided not to wait for the vote to separate, and that's in 2025. In the 1940s, with the tech and infra that existed, this invasion would have killed ten times as many Germans as General Winter did in Russia.
They despise America and also believe they are better in all ways as human beings.
They obsess about American culture and practices.
They copy every trend in this manner you’ve described accurately (zero context) while vigorously championing Canadian sovereignty (in the context of not being American)
Many of them believe they just voted in an American Referendum somehow.
I grew up in Canada. I moved to the United States in 2012. I've been here ever since.
I am convinced that the fundamental thing that explains Canada is that they have a massive inferiority complex towards the United States and so they will go out of their way to performatively hate the United States because they feel insecure.
It was quite frankly shocking to me how much they don't understand the US. Americans don't understand Canada at all either, but that's more understandable; Americans have no reason or motivation to do so
Half of the original intention behind this blog was to explain American shit to Canadians, and Canadian shit to Americans, but that's probably a fool's errand
I mean, for fucks sake, it was frankly shocking how many Canadian friends and family I had to talk to to explain the tariffs: He's not serious, he's just fucking with you to get negotiation leverage. Stop taking everything he says seriously, and stop getting mad about it.
They did not listen, for they do not want to hear the truth
I’ve gone through this also and learned my lesson. There is no good faith discussion to be had.
It’s a problem of strata of thinking you see. Our thinking is beneath them.
What happens is that I introduce logical alternative points of view carefully so as not to offend. I try my best.
It doesn’t work.
They get belligerent because : (a) my arguments do provide a logical challenge , but (b) they are based on lower order thinking of base low tier humans.
This breaks the computer. They get belligerent. I react to that and things go downhill.
Fair enough, but if you're someone like me, who doesn't own a firearm in Canada, that's not very helpful.
Granted, my opinion on the subject is "someone who isn't me, may or may not have received his first rifle, when his friend came over to his house and just dropped the bag off and said 'I don't want it anymore, I bought a better one'. And this is still an unacceptable infringement on gun freedom, because if he lived in a different state, this wouldn't be legal". So as far as I'm concerned, "all guns are illegal in Canada" is de-facto true.
A few years ago, (S)omeone (W)ho (I)sn't (M)e may or may not have met someone who fled Canada to America, only for his personal life circumstances to force him back into Canada against his wishes.
When SWIM was facing similar pressures (I mean, he still is), with knowledge of his friend's background and cultural context (which I will leave out for his privacy), he asked him a question:
"Should I be forced back into Canada, are you aware of any ways in which I could guarantee my own safety, in a self-defense circumstance"
His reply was something like "you know, the US/CA border is really, really long, and it's difficult to patrol mountains on foot". For both of their safeties, SWIM didn't ask any followup questions
This is to say: There are still some Canadians who understand the price of freedom, and are willing and able to make it happen. I have not joined them, because I like not going to jail. But I'm glad he's willing to risk biting that bullet; someone has to.
In the mean time (THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE), if you want to do your part, get really into computer-aided design, and 3d printing. Metal detectors can't tell what the files on your computer are, and if occupied Frenchmen can make grease guns in their garages without the Nazis finding out, you'll be fine.
My personal take is that the real value of the second amendment is not that you have guns, but that 30% of your neighbours do. The culture is more important than the equipment. There are ways to defy the government and acquire acceptable equipment, but if you're the only one who does it, you'll win the battle and lose the war.
> In the mean time (THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE), if you want to do your part, get really into computer-aided design, and 3d printing. Metal detectors can't tell what the files on your computer are, and if occupied Frenchmen can make grease guns in their garages without the Nazis finding out, you'll be fine.
Oh, gods above and below, we really need to get together for a beer some day. :D :D :D
It's so insane to me, how much the culture has changed there.
I have a really relevant reply to this, but I want it to have higher visibility so I'm going to go quickly write a bonus post for today, and link it here in lieu of replying directly to you. Wait one moment please
I was actually not really familiar with Feynman until I read some of his books in my early 30s, but I really wish I had encountered him a kid, because he would have been a role model.
He's the only engineer in history who was cool. He drank, he smoked, he picked up a different chick at the bar every weekend. As a kid I thought that's only what sports assholes get to do, not scientists. Wish I had known better
I'm most of the way through his autobiography. Yes, he was a rake, which made him endearing as a physicist. His quotes are priceless as are his talks about science.
You may not be old enough (I sure am) to remember him at the Challenger explosion hearings, holding up the O-ring that caused the disaster.
As a teenager, I remember reading Day of Trinity and his exploits on the Manhattan Project.
Honestly, I think my favourite Feynman vigniette, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's been reading my comments for a while, is "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America" https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm.
Basically, a South American college invited him to give a talk about physics, and he gave a lecture about how all of them are retards wasting time going through the motions without ever bothering to understand them.
Feynman had that kind of autistic fearlessness where, if he saw some bullshit out there, he just said, "hey that's some bullshit", no matter the consequences.
'American people have instead internalized that “you can’t say that word”. And this prompts an extreme amount of performative outrage when people hear it.'
Performative outrage like producing bowdlerized versions of Huckleberry Finn. An act which has always genuinely outraged me.
I'm sure I've dropped this hundreds of times before but one of my favourite quotes of all time, which applies extremely strongly to all the woke bullshit in modern America, comes from that book.
"All right then. I'll go to Hell". If you're going to call me a Nazi for doing the right thing, fuck it, I guess I'm a Nazi then. IDGAF about words, I'm doing the right thing.
(In the context of the book, to remind people, he's responding to a nosy church lady who says he's going to hell for being friends with a black guy)
You know, it's kind of ironic, that all of my favourite moments from literature that I studied in highschool are all basically about being woke to black people, and now I find they poignantly apply in the ironically reversed situations
My other favourite quote I remember is from Cry, the Beloved Country, which is about how Apartheid is racist. The main character, talking about his own African people, repeatedly says variants on "my fear is that when [the white people] finally turn to loving, we will have turned to hating".
Cargo cults actually happened.
Ty. Duly noted
> I just got a call from my lawyer. He’s advised me that 13% of Americans don’t understand the use-mention dichotomy, and that I should play it safe writing this blog post. The editorial staff apologizes for this inconvenience.
Ironically and somewhat unexpectedly, it's not the 13% you'd expect. I mean, there's some overlap, but realistically it's just the lowest eighth of the Sanity / IQ grid.
> To focus the example a little bit more, consider how mad liberal Californians get when you call someone the n-word.
You don't even have to *call* them that. You just have to point out that they're using language *equivalent* to that, and they will lose their shit. And *you* will be the bad guy for pointing it out.
My lawyer also advised that it would be wiser to say 13% than 2%
At least two of you will be joining me in the camps after we lose, it seems. 🤣
> “Legibility” is an extremely important concept that I will cover in the future, but if you want to get a head start, Scott Alexander wrote about it before he turned into a cucked communist.
Scott Alexander had a blog before he was born? How did *that* even work?
Scott was cool until the Kolmogorov Complicity article, which is widely considered amongst me and my friends to be him admitting that he's going to start lying so that woke people don't murder him.
One thing I'll say in his defense is that just based on what he's shared in public that people have done to him, if I was in his shoes, I would have deleted the blog years ago. People quite literally showed up to his house in Berkeley and threatened him in person because he doesn't ban people like me and my friends who have opinions that are not California compliant.
Scott has written some decent stuff, I will grant. He has had the occasional flirtation with Truth and written some marvelously impassioned pleas against Wokism, in its infancy. But he has, IMO, *never* lived the Litany of Tarski or the Litany of Gendlin. He has *always* been ruled by the fear of the crowd over truth.
He's like, 3% Yudkowski, and even Yudkowski flinches more than he should.
"If Day" is the single most hilariously Canadian thing I have ever heard of. Because obviously nobody would have been stupid enough to try that in America, because the people pretending to be actual German soldiers in a time of war invading America would have gotten shot by random citizens. Which would have put rather a damper on the festivities.
Another thing worth pointing out:
> because the people pretending to be actual German soldiers in a time of war
At the time, the city must have been somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 ethnically German, at least if us Russian Mennonites count as German. Which, based on how many of our churches got firebombed in the 30s, I think most Canadians counted us as German.
That brings a really strange angle to this whole thing. I can't help but wonder if they staged this in Winnipeg, and not a different city, to send a message to anyone who might have sympathies to the home country.
Which is even more hilarious if anybody knows what the single most important belief to a Mennonite is. Our people are so committed to political pacifism that to this day, the church condemns the militiamen who protected our families as they fled the communist revolution, because they shot communists but murder is a sin.
The idea that Mennonites in Canada would be a Nazi fifth column is absolutely hilarious and absurd, but maybe made sense to the authorities of Canada at the time.
Oh man, I just got to thinking, I should write about the Winnipeg General Strike some time. It is the closest that North America has ever come to a Communist revolution.
~20% of the city stopped working for six weeks, and 2 corpses, 30 ER rooms, and 100 prison cells later, they all went back to work. Now, kids in school in Manitoba learn about how this brave event is responsible for all the worker protections that exist in the world, and it was evil fascism on the government's part, and there's no possible way that a massive violent strike in 1919 could be related to communism, that's just silly
When I learned about this as a kid, I thought it was really cool, but in hindsight, it's one of the most fucked up things I could think of.
The Canadian government terrorized the citizens of my hometown to terrify them into giving money to the government.
Reminiscent of The War of the Worlds broadcast.
To be clear, everyone in the city knew this wasn't real. I mean come on, Winnipeg is the most landlocked city in the entire planet. The nearest ocean access is the Arctic, over a thousand miles away. It would quite literally not be possible for the Nazis, with the technology and logistics they had, to invade Winnipeg unless they came up from Minneapolis. And they wouldn't get to Minneapolis until they already conquered the entire eastern seaboard.
And that, of course, didn't happen.
To put this in perspective: https://files.catbox.moe/0uznnx.png
The logistical burden of travelling east/west between Winnipeg and Toronto (there is no meaningful economy, industry, or population between these two points) is so vast that I believe it would make it impossible for the government of Canada to put down an armed rebellion if Alberta decided not to wait for the vote to separate, and that's in 2025. In the 1940s, with the tech and infra that existed, this invasion would have killed ten times as many Germans as General Winter did in Russia.
All true. But requires logic to be applied.
Logic - a rare and precious commodity indeed.
And sadly, no longer taught in our schools - or homes.
Interesting piece.
I emigrated south from
Canada in 2000. It’s so myopic and provincial.
They despise America and also believe they are better in all ways as human beings.
They obsess about American culture and practices.
They copy every trend in this manner you’ve described accurately (zero context) while vigorously championing Canadian sovereignty (in the context of not being American)
Many of them believe they just voted in an American Referendum somehow.
It’s so bizarre.
I grew up in Canada. I moved to the United States in 2012. I've been here ever since.
I am convinced that the fundamental thing that explains Canada is that they have a massive inferiority complex towards the United States and so they will go out of their way to performatively hate the United States because they feel insecure.
Also paired with that complex is the problem that they do not understand the United States whatsoever.
It was quite frankly shocking to me how much they don't understand the US. Americans don't understand Canada at all either, but that's more understandable; Americans have no reason or motivation to do so
Half of the original intention behind this blog was to explain American shit to Canadians, and Canadian shit to Americans, but that's probably a fool's errand
I mean, for fucks sake, it was frankly shocking how many Canadian friends and family I had to talk to to explain the tariffs: He's not serious, he's just fucking with you to get negotiation leverage. Stop taking everything he says seriously, and stop getting mad about it.
They did not listen, for they do not want to hear the truth
I’ve gone through this also and learned my lesson. There is no good faith discussion to be had.
It’s a problem of strata of thinking you see. Our thinking is beneath them.
What happens is that I introduce logical alternative points of view carefully so as not to offend. I try my best.
It doesn’t work.
They get belligerent because : (a) my arguments do provide a logical challenge , but (b) they are based on lower order thinking of base low tier humans.
This breaks the computer. They get belligerent. I react to that and things go downhill.
Goes nowhere.
Existing handguns and semi automatics are still legal in Canada, you just can’t buy new ones or transfer them.
Fair enough, but if you're someone like me, who doesn't own a firearm in Canada, that's not very helpful.
Granted, my opinion on the subject is "someone who isn't me, may or may not have received his first rifle, when his friend came over to his house and just dropped the bag off and said 'I don't want it anymore, I bought a better one'. And this is still an unacceptable infringement on gun freedom, because if he lived in a different state, this wouldn't be legal". So as far as I'm concerned, "all guns are illegal in Canada" is de-facto true.
Yeah I am by no means saying it doesn’t suck. It sucks big time.
Incidentally, and just throwing this out there.
A few years ago, (S)omeone (W)ho (I)sn't (M)e may or may not have met someone who fled Canada to America, only for his personal life circumstances to force him back into Canada against his wishes.
When SWIM was facing similar pressures (I mean, he still is), with knowledge of his friend's background and cultural context (which I will leave out for his privacy), he asked him a question:
"Should I be forced back into Canada, are you aware of any ways in which I could guarantee my own safety, in a self-defense circumstance"
His reply was something like "you know, the US/CA border is really, really long, and it's difficult to patrol mountains on foot". For both of their safeties, SWIM didn't ask any followup questions
This is to say: There are still some Canadians who understand the price of freedom, and are willing and able to make it happen. I have not joined them, because I like not going to jail. But I'm glad he's willing to risk biting that bullet; someone has to.
In the mean time (THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE), if you want to do your part, get really into computer-aided design, and 3d printing. Metal detectors can't tell what the files on your computer are, and if occupied Frenchmen can make grease guns in their garages without the Nazis finding out, you'll be fine.
My personal take is that the real value of the second amendment is not that you have guns, but that 30% of your neighbours do. The culture is more important than the equipment. There are ways to defy the government and acquire acceptable equipment, but if you're the only one who does it, you'll win the battle and lose the war.
> In the mean time (THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE), if you want to do your part, get really into computer-aided design, and 3d printing. Metal detectors can't tell what the files on your computer are, and if occupied Frenchmen can make grease guns in their garages without the Nazis finding out, you'll be fine.
Oh, gods above and below, we really need to get together for a beer some day. :D :D :D
Can confirm that Canadians are utterly losing their shit over this with exactly zero sense of “humour” anywhere in sight.
https://sobanthestranger.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-make-blazing-saddles
Reply bonus post is up
It's so insane to me, how much the culture has changed there.
I have a really relevant reply to this, but I want it to have higher visibility so I'm going to go quickly write a bonus post for today, and link it here in lieu of replying directly to you. Wait one moment please
If we could only raise one person from the dead, I vote for Richard Feynman.
I was actually not really familiar with Feynman until I read some of his books in my early 30s, but I really wish I had encountered him a kid, because he would have been a role model.
He's the only engineer in history who was cool. He drank, he smoked, he picked up a different chick at the bar every weekend. As a kid I thought that's only what sports assholes get to do, not scientists. Wish I had known better
I'm most of the way through his autobiography. Yes, he was a rake, which made him endearing as a physicist. His quotes are priceless as are his talks about science.
You may not be old enough (I sure am) to remember him at the Challenger explosion hearings, holding up the O-ring that caused the disaster.
As a teenager, I remember reading Day of Trinity and his exploits on the Manhattan Project.
Honestly, I think my favourite Feynman vigniette, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's been reading my comments for a while, is "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America" https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm.
Basically, a South American college invited him to give a talk about physics, and he gave a lecture about how all of them are retards wasting time going through the motions without ever bothering to understand them.
Feynman had that kind of autistic fearlessness where, if he saw some bullshit out there, he just said, "hey that's some bullshit", no matter the consequences.
'Here in America'
Does this mean you've made it back to Texas?
Yes. Until August, if I don't get a job
Wishing you the best.
I appreciate that, although if you want to wish me a software engineering job or a us citizen to marry, I would appreciate that more 😅
Well, I previously offered myself up as marriage fodder, but I'm not sure water bears count.
You did? I swear I've been DMing three or four people from Eugy's corner of the internet, and I forget who said what 😅
It wasn't a DM. But also, I heard they look ascance at obvious attempts to circumvent immigration laws. As well as interspecies unions.
'American people have instead internalized that “you can’t say that word”. And this prompts an extreme amount of performative outrage when people hear it.'
Performative outrage like producing bowdlerized versions of Huckleberry Finn. An act which has always genuinely outraged me.
I'm sure I've dropped this hundreds of times before but one of my favourite quotes of all time, which applies extremely strongly to all the woke bullshit in modern America, comes from that book.
"All right then. I'll go to Hell". If you're going to call me a Nazi for doing the right thing, fuck it, I guess I'm a Nazi then. IDGAF about words, I'm doing the right thing.
(In the context of the book, to remind people, he's responding to a nosy church lady who says he's going to hell for being friends with a black guy)
Yep. Huck the hero.
You know, it's kind of ironic, that all of my favourite moments from literature that I studied in highschool are all basically about being woke to black people, and now I find they poignantly apply in the ironically reversed situations
My other favourite quote I remember is from Cry, the Beloved Country, which is about how Apartheid is racist. The main character, talking about his own African people, repeatedly says variants on "my fear is that when [the white people] finally turn to loving, we will have turned to hating".
Prescient, that