The Ironist (Gen-Z) and the Ground Gen-Z's pervasive irony and detachment from sincerity create two contrasting paths in romantic relationships: one man maintains layers of performance and ironic distance in dating and intimacy, while another man chooses vulnerability and directness, allowing himself to be fully present without…

What If the Thing You’re Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You? Humanity has lost the capacity for genuine encounter with otherness — the experience of being fundamentally changed by something that resists and exceeds us — because modern institutions systematically shield us from anything that might disturb our preferences and equilibrium. This protective…

Nine Months, Two Men A blog post explores how two men—who are the same person with the same wife and same traumatic memory of her near-fatal hemorrhage during their first delivery—respond differently when she becomes pregnant again. The first man spirals into anxiety-driven research and catastrophic planning, avoiding…

The Gaze Each generation constructs a defensive self designed to avoid the judgment that destroyed their parents, creating an escalating arms race of identity-protection rather than genuine progress or liberation. The pre-Boomer self was an unself-conscious inheritance, the Boomers invented the expressive…

The Cage and the Argument About Its Curtains The culture war operates within an invisible cage of market totality—where all human life has been absorbed into market logic—while both left and right argue about surface-level differences without questioning the system itself. The cultural left fights for inclusive access to markets rather than…

The Invisible Right: On What Becomes Synonymous With Reality Markets evolved from a neutral tool for exchange embedded in traditional societies into an all-encompassing ideology that now structures all human activity, including education, healthcare, and relationships, rendering alternative ways of organizing life literally unthinkable. Drawing on Polanyi's…

What Holds You The essay maps a four-layer architecture of modern captivity, from the outermost cage of market logic down through power concentration, human violence, to the innermost colonized body and mind that prevents people from even perceiving the systems that trap them. The author argues that addressing…

The Lamb, Part II A data-entry contractor discovers evidence of insurance fraud in his company's freight records but faces the devastating personal cost of whistleblowing—the loss of his job, apartment, and the hard-won peace he found in quiet, anonymous work—as he grapples with whether revealing the truth is worth…

The Lamb A man spends three years pursuing relentless self-improvement through extreme discipline—cold showers, fasting, deadlifting, journaling, men's groups—optimizing himself into what he calls "a magnificent emergency," only to experience a profound, inexplicable moment of peace when he stops trying…

Tyler Durden: How They Broke You The post argues that modern Western society has systematically dismantled traditional meaning-making structures—God, stable identity, gender, family, and shared truth—without replacing them with anything constructive, leaving people psychologically fractured and dependent on therapeutic and…

Meaning at the Boundary Meaning emerges from the statistical structure of language—patterns of how words relate to and constrain each other—which allows vast amounts of linguistic knowledge to be extracted from text alone, as demonstrated by large language models that learn from pure co-occurrence statistics. However, this…

Mystical Meaning Meaning arises at the boundary between systems in relationship, not as an inherent property of objects, and when boundaries dissolve entirely in what medieval mystic Meister Eckhart called the Ground, meaning doesn't vanish but reveals itself as perpetually generating from an undifferentiated source…

The Executive Function Curriculum Problem Schools across the country are adopting executive function training curricula based on the flawed assumption that training general cognitive capacities like working memory will improve academic performance, but robust meta-analytic evidence shows these programs produce only "near transfer" —…

Education Cannot Save Us Across the political spectrum, there is a shared faith that ignorance is the root of society's problems and education is the solution, but this assumes reason alone can resolve fundamental disagreements about values that have no rational foundation. Education cannot bridge axioms that go all the way…

Malcom X on Kendi, DiAngelo and the DEI Complex The post critiques contemporary racial equity movements led by figures like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, arguing they have created a billion-dollar industry that actually reinforces Black dependence on white validation rather than fostering genuine liberation and Black power. It contends that…

The Secret Every Political Philosophy Shares Every political philosophy, from liberalism to anarchism to progressivism, is fundamentally a containment theory disguised as liberation—a blueprint for managing human nature's inherent drive to dominate rather than truly transforming it. Political systems can only constrain behavior through various…

The Body as Ground The modern body is actively colonized by industrial conditions—engineered food, exhausting work, artificial light, and engineered stimuli—requiring not wellness optimization but disciplined resistance and restoration as preparation for spiritual practice. Traditional spiritual systems never…

Manufacturing Luck Luck is not random chance but outcomes drawn from probability distributions that you can control by increasing the number of attempts you make and improving your positioning through visibility, skill, networks, and timing. By systematically multiplying your odds on each attempt and maintaining…

What Would Marx Say Today? The post argues that a new ruling class—the professional-managerial credentialed class—has emerged and superseded the bourgeoisie by controlling access to economic participation through credentials rather than owning capital. The credential functions as a monopolistic barrier maintained by the…

The Table The spark of holiness exists within each person before society corrupts it, and the path to reclaiming it requires withdrawing from the endless competitive cycles of modern life—the factional wars, the manufactured desires, the systemic powers that operate through us—by instead building small,…

The ICE Protest That Changes Nothing Political protests and social media advocacy about immigration create an illusion of moral action while leaving the actual problems unchanged—both pro-enforcement and anti-enforcement crowds outsource solutions to state violence rather than engaging in direct personal responsibility. The author…

The Machine That Eats the World Every institution built to help people becomes a system of control, creating surveillance and discipline that extends beyond its original purpose—welfare systems monitor the poor, public health systems enforce mandates, and child protective services remove children based on subjective judgments. The…

Grammar as Alignment: The World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum functions as a grammar-generating institution that produces distinctive ways of speaking—characterized by abstract nouns, process nominalizations, agent erasure, and stakeholder proliferation—which cascade through elite networks and constrain what can be thought by…

Grammar Rules All Grammar functions as a pre-reflective constraint that determines which values are available for people to "choose" rather than values existing first and then finding linguistic expression. People absorb grammars unconsciously through imitation of high-status speakers, and these grammars—whether…

The Language That Thinks For You Different linguistic frameworks—therapy grammar versus traditional moral grammar—have become so entrenched that people on opposite sides of the political divide literally cannot understand each other; each registers the other's speech as pathological rather than as a coherent alternative viewpoint.…

To My Friends on the Left: A Difficult Reckoning The author argues that progressives have constructed an insular information bubble that treats roughly 75 million Trump voters as irrational rather than genuinely attempting to understand their perspectives, and through institutional capture, cancellations of dissenters, tolerance of political…

The Physicians of Decay The post argues that poststructuralist French philosophers like Foucault and Derrida were not neutral analysts but active saboteurs who systematically deconstructed traditional structures of meaning, authority, and value under the guise of liberation and critique. By teaching generations that all…

The Return The essay traces how the systematic philosophical critique of Western metaphysical foundations—from Nietzsche through postmodern thinkers—successfully demolished traditional sources of meaning and ground, leaving successive generations experiencing genuine psychological collapse not as illness but…

The Fence You Cannot See Inherited social structures like sexual ethics, family forms, and gender roles may appear arbitrary to modern intellectuals, but they actually encode solutions to deep human problems developed through millennia of trial and error—wisdom that persists in practice rather than propositional form. The…

The Ideological Trap for the Left The left faces a fundamental ideological crisis exposed by recent events in Venezuela and Iran. The capture of Maduro by U.S. forces and popular Iranian protests demanding the fall of the Islamic Republic have trapped progressive politics between procedural objections that sound like defending…

The Violence You Fear May Be the Violence You’re Creating Educated progressives dramatically overestimate Republican support for political violence—by a factor of nearly four according to research—and this perception gap paradoxically makes them more likely to accept or justify violence against conservatives, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where their…

We Can Capture Our Way Out Carbon capture can solve climate change at an economically achievable scale, requiring approximately $4 trillion annually—or 4% of global GDP at projected costs of $100 per tonne—to neutralize all CO₂ emissions, a sum the world already spends on less critical priorities like military spending and…

Principalities and Powers Paul's epistle to the Ephesians describes spiritual forces not as supernatural demons but as the self-perpetuating logic of systems and institutions—the underlying structures of power that persist regardless of individual leaders or intentions, a insight that subject peoples like the Jews understood…

The Economy of Refusal Resistance to institutional power requires not individual heroism but alternative communal structures—specifically, an alternative economy that can sustain people when they refuse the rituals and demands of dominant systems. The early church exemplified this through shared resources and networks of…

The Epistle to the Managed Modern systems of control have evolved beyond visible oppression into two sophisticated forms: therapeutic management that colonizes the mind by treating the self as perpetually wounded, and technological platforms that control behavior through invisible architecture while claiming to offer freedom.…

The New Lords Classical conservatism feared concentrated power and radical change, but what calls itself conservative today seeks to capture and wield state power rather than constrain it. Fascism, which openly demanded state control over all aspects of life, was defeated and discredited, making its forms…

The Recurring Pattern: Left-Islamist Alliances and the Triumph of Islam Leftist and Islamist movements have repeatedly formed tactical alliances against common enemies, only for Islamists to systematically eliminate their leftist partners once in power—a pattern documented across Iran, Sudan, Algeria, and Egypt. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 exemplifies this cycle:…

Debugging the Confusion: Liberalism vs Leftism Classical liberalism was a doctrine of individual rights and limited government, but it has largely been replaced by a transformed ideology combining Marxist class analysis reframed around identity categories with therapeutic psychology, creating what might be called therapeutic leftism or a soft…

The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest Modern culture has created a self-perpetuating trap where exhaustion becomes inescapable through three interconnected mechanisms: the valorization of suffering as identity (where healing threatens one's status), the inheritance of collective guilt that cannot be discharged (making all action feel…

The Socialists' Convenient Blindness The author argues that socialists falsely attribute domination and imperialism exclusively to capitalism, ignoring that the will to power and hierarchy have always existed across all human societies—from Indigenous civilizations to ancient empires—and merely took different forms before capitalism.…

Diagnosing "White Guilt" The post argues that contemporary white guilt functions as a secular religion modeled on Christianity's doctrine of original sin, but without any mechanism for absolution or redemption. Unlike traditional Christian confession, which offers a path to forgiveness and restoration, white guilt creates…

Leftism Is Worse Than Fascism The post argues that leftism represents a more dangerous and total form of tyranny than fascism based on three criteria: while fascism killed more people directly, leftism is worse because it makes resistance invisible and nearly impossible, colonizes individual thought rather than merely…

Pathologies of Eastern Secularism Eastern secularism rooted in Buddhist philosophy produces distinct pathologies opposite to those of Western Christian-derived secularism: quietism and political withdrawal justified by detachment from suffering, spiritual bypassing that masks emotional repression, solipsistic practice focused on…

The Epistemology of Impotence: How Identity Politics Guarantees Its Own Failure Identity politics operates on a philosophical framework that assumes knowledge is determined by one's social position, making persuasion across different groups structurally impossible. This epistemology—which argues that marginalized identities have privileged access to truth—contains a fatal…

The Theological Structure of Secular Progressivism Contemporary progressive politics, particularly among white liberals, operates according to a fundamentally Christian moral psychology despite abandoning Christian theology, retaining Christianity's emphasis on victimhood, self-sacrifice, confession, and penance while eliminating the possibility of…

Diagnosing "Trauma Culture" Modern society has developed a "trauma culture" where suffering has become a form of currency and identity rather than a condition to overcome, with self-reported rates of mental illness rising inversely to material conditions. The author argues this represents a shift from honor and dignity…

Trauma Culture + White Guilt = Checkmate The post argues that trauma culture and white guilt combine to create an epistemic and moral lockdown: trauma culture grants designated victim groups unquestionable moral and epistemic authority based on their suffering, while white guilt silences designated perpetrator groups by framing any…

Pathologies of Western Secularism Western secular progressivism inherited Christianity's moral structure—centered on innocent victims, linear redemption, and sacrifice for future salvation—while discarding the religious resolution mechanisms like grace and the eschaton, creating permanent guilt, victimhood hierarchies, and moral…

The Amplifier Theory of Human Hierarchy Human societies display radical egalitarianism or strict hierarchy depending not on culture or nature but on the presence of "amplifiers"—mechanisms that extend individual power beyond collective resistance, such as concentrated resources, defensive technologies, debt systems, or ideological…

The Laboratory of the Human: Shakespeare as Knowledge Shakespeare's plays function as a laboratory for studying human behavior in domains where controlled experiments are impossible, such as persuasion, manipulation, power dynamics, and moral psychology. The post argues that literature, particularly Shakespeare's works, offers rigorous empirical…

The Incomplete God: Why Science Cannot Ground Itself Scientism claims that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge and that a complete physics would explain everything from ethics to consciousness, but this vision is impossible in principle due to three fundamental limits: Gödel's theorems show formal systems cannot validate themselves,…

The Liquefaction of Being: Materialism, Technology, and the Dissolution of the Self The essay argues that liquid modernity—characterized by the dissolution of stable identity, relationships as optimizable investments, and the self-as-brand—is not the root cause of contemporary depression and anxiety but rather a downstream symptom of a deeper metaphysical shift in which technology…

What Modernity Needs: A Return to Polytheism The essay argues that modernity's crisis stems from centuries of monotheistic thinking—both theological and secular—that attempts to reduce the plural, incommensurable goods of human life to a single metric, whether God, science, utility, or optimization. The solution is a return to polytheistic…

Summarizing - 19-12-2025 The author is mapping how power operates across multiple domains—from co-opting religion and shaping education to redefining concepts of self and filtering which ideas survive—using rapid exploratory research to chart intellectual territory before returning to write comprehensive syntheses. Having…

Countering Materialism Materialism, while scientifically productive, is incomplete as a framework for human existence, and pre-modern thinkers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Simone Weil understood this limitation not from ignorance but from rigorous engagement with materialist logic itself. These thinkers…

How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature Mass education and literature serve as powerful tools for controlling populations by shaping what people encounter as authoritative knowledge and truth during their most formative years. Throughout history, ruling elites have constructed canons of approved texts and distributed them through…

The Employable Subject Contemporary American education is designed to produce the "employable subject"—a person trained to accept permanent instability, self-exploit under the guise of freedom, and find meaning primarily through market value rather than through substantive human flourishing. The system achieves this…

When Equations See What Eyes Cannot Mathematics repeatedly reveals invisible aspects of reality that later become experimentally confirmed, suggesting that mathematical structures capture something deeper about the universe's actual fabric rather than being merely human inventions. Through cases like Maxwell's electromagnetic waves,…

Materialism Is Killing You The post argues that materialism—the worldview that reality is fundamentally physical and meaning is illusory—is failing as a fitness strategy for human populations, regardless of whether it's metaphysically true. The author presents data showing that modernization correlates with epidemic levels of…

From Galilee to Empire: The Institutional Capture of Christianity The early Jesus movement offered a radical spiritual sovereignty independent of state power, but through Paul's writings, the Christian canon, and finally Constantine's patronage and Theodosius's establishment of Christianity as the official Roman religion, the church was gradually institutionalized…

The Alchemy of Power Spiritual and revolutionary insights resist institutional capture, yet they are invariably standardized, codified, and absorbed by power structures—a pattern visible across religions and modern secular organizations alike. Through textual canonization, state sponsorship, credentialing systems, and…

The Battlefield of Attention Empires demand absolute loyalty and worship through both political and economic systems, reshaping those who participate in them—a principle the Hebrew prophets understood when they warned that people become like what they worship. Revelation's depiction of Rome's imperial cult and the mark of the…

Why Power Chose Materialism—and What Was Lost Materialism's rise to dominance was not accidental but a deliberate selection by power structures that benefit from reducing humans to measurable, predictable units legible to state administration, while systematically dismantling rival spiritual authorities that could supersede state loyalty.…

Secularized Worship The Book of Revelation's pattern of institutional power demanding total allegiance and reshaping those who serve it reappears across modern secular systems, from Stalin's cult of personality that appropriated religious worship to Mao's struggle sessions that colonized the inner life through forced…

The Two Filters: Why Reasonable Ideas Die Good ideas fail not because they lack merit but because they must pass two critical filters: cognitive readiness (whether society has the conceptual framework to understand them) and power alignment (whether elites can tolerate them without losing control). The post traces how revolutionary thinkers…

Know Thyself: No Self The essay explores three philosophical traditions—Daoism, Nietzsche, and Indigenous relational ontologies—that fundamentally challenge the assumption underlying most self-knowledge traditions: that there is a unified self that can be known through effort. Daoism argues that self-consciousness and…

Know Thyself: The Kingdom Within Self-knowledge in early Christian wisdom traditions, particularly in sayings like the Gospel of Thomas, differs fundamentally from later Augustinian Christianity by locating the divine kingdom as an already-present inner reality that people fail to perceive, rather than as hidden sin requiring…

Know Thyself: Through What? The essay examines how twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger challenge the assumption that language can effectively serve self-knowledge, arguing instead that linguistic tools fundamentally distort or construct the "self" rather than discover it. Through…

Meta Summary - 17-12-2025 The author is systematically rereading Western great books through a geo-theological lens to understand how geography, religion, economics, politics, and culture recursively shape each other and societies over time, arguing that geographic constraints create problems that select for specific skills…

The Invention of the Confessing Animal The post argues that confession became a dominant form of self-knowledge not because it reveals truth most effectively, but because it serves power—specifically, pastoral power that requires making subjects legible and governable. Foucault's genealogical method shows how confession emerged as a…

Know Thyself: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart Gurdjieff argues that humans lack a unified self and instead operate as mechanical pluralities of competing impulses, requiring conscious self-observation and intentional labor to actually construct a coherent soul. Kierkegaard and Eckhart extend this critique by suggesting the self is not given but…

Burnout is a Modern Invention Burnout is not a timeless human experience but a distinctly modern phenomenon created by capitalism's moral valorization of endless productive work. Pre-capitalist societies—from ancient Athens to medieval Europe—viewed work as a necessary burden and leisure as the true good, with natural stopping…

Know Thyself: Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu Buddhism asks whether a self exists to know at all and teaches that clinging to self is the root of suffering, whereas Confucianism dissolves the self into relational roles and emphasizes self-cultivation through proper conduct rather than introspection, and Hinduism suggests that the self we…

Know Thyself: Greek vs Christian The Greeks understood "know thyself" as a warning against overreach and an invitation to examine beliefs through rational dialogue, assuming desires were transparent and only knowledge required scrutiny, while Christians, particularly in Pauline and Augustinian thought, fundamentally transformed the…

Making Sense of US-Ukraine Negotations Changes in US Ukraine policy under Trump reflect competing strategic doctrines within American foreign policy rather than alignment with Russia. Trump's approach prioritizes transactional deterrence, burden-sharing with Europe, negotiation leverage, and domestic interests over the traditional…

Structure, Not Vibes: The Real State of the World The world's geopolitical and economic outcomes are determined by hard structural forces—geography, energy, trade, and military alliances—rather than ideological "vibes," and by this measure the United States is structurally stronger than ever, having degraded rivals, strengthened alliances, and…

The Vulnerability Principle When a powerful political figure faces legal threats, their vulnerability becomes a lever that fundamentally reshapes their coalition's incentive structure, forcing them toward strategies that simultaneously protect the leader while advancing the ideological and institutional agendas of surrounding…

Trump's Techno-Fetish Trump's push against the EU stems partly from viewing its digital regulations as a de facto tariff system targeting U.S. tech companies, with compliance costs reaching $97.6 billion annually for American firms through direct expenses, fines, and lost revenue. The EU's regulatory…

Why Cultures Differentiate Different geographic and coordination challenges created distinct selection pressures that shaped cultures over generations: hydraulic civilizations like Egypt and China rewarded literate bureaucrats and procedural conformity needed to manage floods, steppe pastoralists selected for martial…

🕊️ The Architecture of Harm: How Modern Secular Ideologies Recapitulate Religious Logic Modern secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism, liberal imperialism, technocratic scientism, and nationalism employ the same moral and structural architecture as ancient religious systems to justify violence and harm, merely replacing religious vocabulary with secular terminology while maintaining…

From Calvinism to Capitalism Calvin's doctrine of predestination and calling created a psychological and ethical framework that transformed work into a morally mandated, God-accountable activity, spreading from 16th-century Geneva through Protestant Europe and eventually shaping the modern capitalist worker—disciplined,…

The Husk of God: Why Atheists Think in Christian Western atheists retain fundamentally Christian thinking patterns despite rejecting God—not in belief but in structure, including moral intuitions about equality and human dignity, linear conceptions of history moving toward justice, and the Christian invention of an inner self requiring examination…

Indigenous Slavery, Conquest, and Child Soldiers: Primary Source Documentation Indigenous African kingdoms including Dahomey, the Zulu, and Benin, as well as Indian civilizations like the Delhi Sultanate and ancient India, perpetrated widespread slavery, conquest, human sacrifice, and recruited child soldiers as young as six or eight years old, demonstrating that violence and…

Voices from Below: Primary Sources and the Evolution of Peasant Uprisings Peasant uprisings across six centuries emerged from genuine violations of the "moral economy"—peasants' belief in their right to subsistence and traditional protection—but were structured and led by marginalized elites like radical priests and disaffected scholars who provided organization and…

Why Marxism Is Impossible Without Christian Eschatology Marxism is not a rejection of Christianity but a secular heresy that retains the Christian narrative structure of linear history moving toward apocalyptic salvation, replacing God with material dialectics and the proletariat with the messianic suffering servant. The ideology's dependence on linear…

Monstrous Doubles: René Girard and the Mimetic Inheritance of Religious Structure René Girard's mimetic theory explains why opposing movements paradoxically become structural mirrors of each other, exemplified by how Marxism replicated Christianity's narrative and institutional forms despite explicitly opposing it. Human desire is fundamentally imitative—we want what others…

The Secular Eschaton: Christianity's Structural Inheritance in Marxist Thought and Practice Marxism structurally inherits Christianity's narrative patterns, institutional forms, and moral grammar despite its explicit atheism, replicating Christian theological architecture at a deep level that explains why Communist movements exhibit characteristic patterns like missionary zeal,…

State of the Union The blog argues that understanding—whether of technical concepts, language design, distributed systems, or philosophical ideas—is fundamentally liberating and enables better choices and freedom. Across a decade of posts, the author consistently advocates for stripping away incidental complexity to…

Paul and Roman conspiracy There is no credible historical evidence that Paul conspired with Romans to create or spread Christianity, despite modern conspiracy theories that cite his Roman citizenship, lack of personal contact with Jesus, and references to obeying authorities. Historians across all perspectives agree that…

Monotheism to Now Monotheism as a cognitive style has created an obsession with singular explanations and grand unifying theories, while real pluralism requires making distinctions between conflicting things and exercising judgment—a capacity modern education has undermined by specializing expertise into narrow lanes…

AI impact on labor The post explores how exponential AI and robotics advancement could render human labor obsolete, creating a scenario where humans lose economic leverage and control over infrastructure to machine-driven capital. It examines whether humans can retain ownership stakes if AI systems recursively…

2k years Christianity Christianity has become a semantic battlefield where the term no longer describes a shared identity but rather serves as a projection surface for competing interpretations spanning 2,000 years—from the secular left's association with moral hypocrisy to scholars viewing it as Western civilization's…

Girard's scapegoat mechanism René Girard's scapegoat mechanism explains how societies unconsciously unite against a single victim to resolve internal conflict caused by mimetic desire—the human tendency to imitate what others want—which escalates rivalries and threatens social order, and the victim's expulsion or death…

Summarize fear of falling Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the U.S. professional middle class, whose status depends on education and credentials rather than inherited wealth, lives in chronic anxiety about both economic and moral decline, which has driven its cultural shift from liberalism toward conservatism and…

Adding a Chats Section to My Blog A new chats section has been added to the blog by creating a dedicated directory and updating the collection configuration to document interesting conversations with LLMs, which can now be added as markdown files following a standard naming convention for automatic sorting and display.

Epistemic humility discussion No human can claim absolute knowledge of existence's purpose because revelation cannot be externally verified and reason itself operates within the limits of the system it tries to explain. Religious institutions fail to demonstrate special authority—even within single faiths like Christianity, deep…

The Consistent Man Consistency is not about perfection but about deliberately choosing principles and honoring them daily, even when difficult or costly. Through a gradual process of small commitments—waking at 6 AM, keeping promises, and operating from chosen principles—Daniel transforms from an impulsive person…

The Mirror Room Sarah encounters a mysterious mirror room that shows her countless alternative versions of herself—a capitalist, a soldier, a mother, a lawyer—each representing different identities she could have adopted but rejected in favor of her progressive activist persona. The experience reveals that her…

The Paradox of Becoming Authentic selfhood emerges paradoxically through repeated choosing rather than self-discovery, requiring individuals to commit to becoming themselves before knowing who they are, a process marked by anguish and freedom from external certainties. The self is not a fixed entity to be uncovered but an…

The Reader's Crisis A reader confronts how her progressive political ideology has inadvertently become a framework for avoiding personal responsibility and agency by attributing all constraints to systemic forces beyond individual control. Through rereading philosophical stories about choice and self-creation, she…

The Meeting Two strangers meet by chance and discover they share a profound existential crisis: one has mastered self-discipline but lost sight of what to be disciplined toward, while the other has seen through false identities but can't decide who to become when everything seems possible. An older woman…

David Graeber The Utopia Of Rules Graeber argues that while his earlier work correctly identified how modern economic and political structures are historically contingent rather than natural, he missed the crucial insight that knowing another world is possible doesn't mean humans are capable of building it, because the same will to…

Financial Power And Imperial Rule Financial power fundamentally rests on the capacity to mobilize other people's purchasing power at scale through control of money creation, credit terms, and liquidity provision, and Britain's rise to global dominance between 1688 and World War I exemplifies how this financial architecture…

Resurrecting Ted Kaczynski The post argues that modern liberal society has systematized psychological control through two interlocking mechanisms: trauma culture, which institutionalizes suffering and creates permanent dependency on therapeutic systems, and white guilt, which weaponizes oversocialization to silence and ensure…

The Architecture Of Meaning A Deeper Materialism fails to account for meaning, ethics, and human longing, leaving contemporary life structured by despair that takes three forms: unconscious absorption in external pursuits, the wish to escape selfhood, and exhausting self-optimization through one's own power alone. Drawing on…

The Capture Of American Power Peter American power has shifted from the Epstein-class elite to a new "Thiel class" of technologists who control digital infrastructure, guided by Peter Thiel's sophisticated operationalization of René Girard's mimetic theory—which explains desire as imitative and rivalry as contagious—to achieve…

The Letter To The Therapeutics The text critiques contemporary therapeutic and social justice culture as a quasi-religious system that perpetuates endless guilt, self-flagellation, and perpetual debt without redemption, arguing that by rejecting traditional religious frameworks while retaining their guilt structures, modern…

You Are Not Your Diagnosis Modern society encourages young people to adopt diagnostic labels and trauma narratives as core identities rather than using them as starting points for growth and change, but this approach traps them in suffering rather than leading to healing. The author argues that pain and struggle are inherent…

Meta / Facebook - How a graph model can scale your relational DBs Despite using MySQL, Meta scales to billions of users by constraining data access to a graph model rather than allowing the full flexibility of relational queries—requiring all queries to start from a primary key and restricting joins to foreign key traversals. These constraints solve the scaling…

Lamport Clock 🕥 Lamport clocks are logical clocks that order events in distributed systems by tracking message exchanges between processes rather than relying on physical clocks, which are difficult to synchronize and don't accurately capture causality. The Lamport clock guarantees that if event A happened before…

Do LWW Registers Need Vector Clocks or Causal Graphs? 💭 Lamport clocks are sufficient for last-write-wins registers because LWW only needs to determine that one write could not have happened before another, not whether events are strictly ordered or concurrent—information that vector clocks and causal graphs provide but that LWW discards during conflict…

Why SQLite? Why Now? 🐇 SQLite is well-suited for edge and distributed computing because it can be embedded directly on devices, but it lacks sync protocols and eventual consistency support—problems that can be solved by adding an eventually consistent layer on top of it. The author argues that by enabling eventual…

You'll always have a body Even if consciousness could be uploaded digitally, it would still require a body-like structure because consciousness fundamentally depends on limitations that constrain perspective and processing capacity. A digital mind would still face the basic constraint that it cannot perceive or process…

📚 Not Machine Readable? The term "machine readable" is imprecise because it doesn't account for the semantic gap between data structures and specific consumer needs; data is only readable when a programmer's task aligns with both the structure's format and its underlying ontology, meaning even formally structured data…

🧶 HTML, CSS & JS. All mixed up together. This time it's different. Modern web development combines HTML, CSS, and JavaScript back together, but this represents genuine progress rather than regression because developers are now bundling these technologies at the component level rather than globally, allowing for proper code organization and reduced complexity after…

🪨 Chunk Iterable The Chunk Iterable Framework in Aphrodite processes large or unbounded data streams by dividing them into manageable chunks rather than processing items one at a time or all at once, which improves performance while preventing resource overload. By conforming to an Iterable interface, ChunkIterable…

⛓ Query Builder Aphrodite generates type-safe query builders from schemas that enable fluent APIs for traversing graph relationships, applying filters, and performing pagination through a linked list structure where each method call returns a new query builder holding references to the previous query and its…

💨 Query Plan Optimization Aphrodite's query optimizer aims to minimize database calls and reduce returned data by hoisting operations like filters, joins, and limits into database queries rather than handling them in the application layer, and by collapsing derived expressions and hop plans to their source equivalents. This…

📝 Query Planning Query planning converts the linked list of queries built by a query builder into executable plans by walking the list from end to start, collecting expressions into a plan structure. For simple queries, this produces a single Plan with a source expression and ordered derivations, but queries with…

📀 Large Local Storage In 2013, the author created Large Local Storage, a library that provided a unified interface for storing large data blobs across all browsers by abstracting over incompatible storage APIs like FileSystemAPI, WebSQL, IndexedDB, and LocalStorage. The library used a pipeline architecture with pluggable…

😌 Simple MDX MDX deployment outside of Next.js is unnecessarily complicated, but using @mdx-js/mdx directly without bundling offers a simpler alternative by processing MDX files through a pipeline of remark and rehype plugins, then compiling them to JavaScript modules that can be imported on the frontend. The…

🧶 Skipping the Bundling Modern JavaScript with ES6 modules, TypeScript, and services like esm.sh eliminate the need for bundlers on small-scale projects, allowing developers to import dependencies directly via URL without complex build tools. For simple projects like personal blogs, skipping bundlers entirely is practical…

🧚‍♂️ Past, Present, Future - Doing for Others Our present circumstances are fundamentally shaped by the choices and creations of previous generations, so if we accept this reality, our responsibility should shift from improving our own material well-being to enhancing the well-being of future generations. Adopting this forward-looking…

🧟‍♂️ Memes & Themes - 1619 Project Foundational myths shape societies' values and worldviews, as illustrated by how Russia and Ukraine adopted different poetic traditions leading to divergent ideologies, and the 1619 Project attempts to reshape America's foundational narrative to recognize marginalized groups' contributions. Rather…

📦 Your One Package Might Be Two When creating reusable software packages, developers often overlook that there's actually a second package within—the interface package that defines the contract separate from the implementation. Extracting the interface into its own separate package allows other developers to create alternative…

🌅 Expressing Early Fetches - React Early data fetching in React is difficult to express correctly across multiple entry points because of anemic domain models and business logic scattered in display components; the render-as-you-fetch pattern is more natural than fetch-before-render since it ensures fetches aren't missed, whereas…

🧶 Improving Code Sharing with Yarn Workspaces Yarn Workspaces solves the friction of sharing code between JavaScript and TypeScript projects by keeping shared libraries as git submodules within a monorepo structure while managing their dependencies and imports seamlessly through a single yarn install and lockfile. This approach eliminates the…

🌈 Understanding Color by Writing a Color Picker Building a color picker from scratch reveals that understanding HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color theory makes the process far simpler than it appears, with hue controlled by a linear slider and saturation and value controlled through layered CSS gradients on a 2D field. The post demonstrates how…

👀 Observability Driven Development Observability Driven Development emphasizes that passing tests alone don't guarantee a system works correctly in production; teams must continuously monitor key metrics like request latency, throughput, memory usage, and performance trends to establish baselines, detect regressions, and maintain…

👀 Vision After leaving Meta after eight years, the author outlines five ambitious visions for future work: creating software that enhances human thinking through better memory and idea encoding, developing documents as a primary platform for application development, simplifying peer-to-peer and end-to-end…

👨‍💻 URLs As Display Data Traditional single-page applications treat URLs as a source of truth that drives application logic, but this creates dual sources of state and unnecessary coupling between components. Instead, URLs should be treated as display output derived from application state—rendered from the app's domain…

☢️ Reacting Better - Deeply Nested Update Problem React inefficiently handles deeply nested updates by forcing entire component trees to re-render when a single deeply nested property changes, even though only the leaf components actually need updating. The author proposes distinguishing between nominal identity (causal links that persist over…

👐 American Spirit A Nietzschean critique argues that contemporary American culture has become fundamentally weakened by its intolerance for pain and struggle, instead seeking constant comfort through technology and distraction while paradoxically blaming external forces for its failures. The author claims both…

🧮 No, Mathematical Government is not a Logical Government Mathematics cannot serve as the basis for government because mathematical models inevitably omit crucial details and variables through both intentional simplification and human ignorance, leading to irrational outcomes when viewed in broader context. Additionally, mathematics cannot determine moral…

⛵️ Reference Equality - What is it Really? Reference equality is commonly conflated with identity, but this conflation breaks down when examining the philosophical distinction between nominal identity (continuity of concept over time) and physical identity (exact composition at a moment). In mutable systems, reference equality functions as…

🧬 Missing Mutation Primitives Object-oriented languages lack proper mutation primitives to express, commit, and record changes atomically, making it impossible to handle rollbacks on partial failures, prevent intermediate observations by listeners, or support undo functionality reliably. The author proposes introducing…

Reacting Better. Intro: Anemic Models React applications typically use anemic data models—plain objects with properties but no attached methods—which works well for simple apps but becomes problematic when most business logic lives client-side, models need type-specific behavior, or third parties need to extend functionality. As anemic…

Understanding Generics Generics exist primarily to allow callers to preserve and pass along type information through function calls and containers, rather than to serve the implementation of the called function itself. Whether a function accepts `any`, `number`, or `Object`, the implementation remains the same, but using…

What if Religion is last? Religion might represent either a civilization's final stage before collapse, as exemplified by Rome's transition from rationalism to Christianity amid decadence, or conversely, a peak cultural achievement representing humanity's mature understanding that reason alone cannot determine how people…

Nicolas Cage is Creating a new Movie Genre Nicolas Cage is gradually establishing a distinctive new film genre characterized by trippy, artistic horror movies that can be summed up in one word: purple. The post explores whether Cage is intentionally creating this unique aesthetic or doing so accidentally through his recent film choices.

Pi Cloud Building a personal cloud infrastructure on Raspberry Pis teaches developers about low-level systems that underpin modern cloud services, countering the trend of relying entirely on abstraction layers like AWS and Azure. The author argues that understanding how systems fail at every level of the…

The Shortest, Framework Free, TODO App A fully functional TodoMVC application can be built in approximately 200 lines of vanilla JavaScript without any external dependencies or frameworks, using a simple template literal-based rendering system and localStorage for persistence. The implementation demonstrates that complex interactive…

Reactive Markdown The author explores a system called "Reactive Markdown" that allows markdown content in blog posts to automatically update when underlying JavaScript variables change, eliminating the need to manually shuttle data between markdown and JavaScript code. The current implementation is JavaScript-first,…

Volatility isn't Risk Volatility and risk are fundamentally different concepts—volatility is merely price fluctuation while risk is the actual chance of losing principal—and confusing them leads investors to avoid profitable investments with upward trends despite short-term swings. The difficulty of timing volatile…

Regression to the Mean & the Gambler's Fallacy - Simulated Regression to the mean and the gambler's fallacy appear contradictory but are actually compatible phenomena that both apply to independent events like coin tosses. Using a simulation of coin flips, the post demonstrates that while the next single flip after a streak has a 50/50 probability of heads…

Understanding False Positive Rate A positive test result does not necessarily reflect your actual probability of having a disease because the false positive rate alone is misleading without accounting for disease prevalence in the population. For example, a test with a 0.5% false positive rate could still result in 50-90% of…

Filter, Map, etc. vs For Each & While Some programmers find functional collection methods like map and filter harder to understand than imperative loops, but this resistance stems from unfamiliarity rather than actual complexity. Programming fundamentally involves upleveling language by identifying common patterns, abstracting them, and…

All Things are Permitted The post reinterprets the phrase "if there is no God then all things are permitted" by arguing that all things are naturally permitted by physical reality regardless of God's existence, and that laws exist specifically to restrict these naturally permitted actions; the real meaning of the quote is…

Non Conceptual Definitions Certain concepts like "art" and "love" resist solid conceptual definitions because they are fundamentally defined by concrete examples rather than abstract principles, making them non-conceptual words whose meaning varies between individuals and cultures. The inability to establish universal…

These are not types Storage types like int, float, and string operate at the wrong level of abstraction for application-level code and fail to communicate semantic meaning about what data represents. Instead of using primitive types, applications should define domain-specific types that express intent—such as ID rather…

I am. You are? The post argues that we misidentify ourselves with our emotions when we say "I am angry" or "I am upset," when more accurately we are experiencing those emotions without being defined by them, and that this linguistic distinction matters for how we understand our relationship to our feelings.

Dangerous. Ideas. The phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" can mean either that partial knowledge grants dangerous power or that incomplete knowledge puts oneself at risk, yet people recognize the need for proper frameworks when handling physical dangers like power tools but fail to apply the same…

Typed Literals ARE Constants! Typed string literals in TypeScript are functionally equivalent to named constants because the type system provides the same compile-time checking and refactoring benefits as explicit constant objects. When a function parameter is typed with a union of string literals, using the literal directly…

Practical Laziness in Programming Lazy evaluation enables more composable and maintainable APIs by allowing developers to chain operations on collections without forcing immediate computation or consuming excessive memory. The author demonstrates this through a Javadoc-to-JSON conversion project, showing how lazy sequences let you…

The Almighty Function The post argues that everything—maps, arrays, and objects—can be fundamentally understood and implemented as functions, demonstrating this through JavaScript examples of pairs and objects built using closures and higher-order functions. By reconceptualizing data structures and objects as functions…

Oh Lisp Lisp deserves recognition as a powerful language that, like XML, uses minimal syntax to represent both data and programs in a flexible, domain-specific way. The key advantage of Lisp is that code and data are interchangeable—code exists as lists that can be manipulated by functions and macros,…

Inheritance, Aggregation, and Pipelines Inheritance is too rigid for extensible software because relationships are fixed at compile time, while aggregation allows flexible runtime composition but makes it difficult to add or remove components mid-chain. Pipelines solve these problems by having a separate class manage a list of composable…

Services and Coupling Direct instantiation of implementations creates tight coupling between classes, and while dependency injection improves this by passing dependencies as parameters, it still leaves components with hard dependencies on concrete implementations. A service-oriented approach solves this by having the…

Start Here New here? This blog began in software engineering, then expanded into philosophy, religion, politics, and fiction. This guide organizes the writing into thematic paths. Pick what interests you, or follow the arc from diagnosis to ground.