Happy to be able to cross-post to Threads, but now that I’ve been fiddling with micro.blog settings I see that Bluesky crossposting stopped working for me around 2 months ago. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

A few good links for the weekend:

• Nassim Taleb — Meditations on Extremistan (I will come back to this soon)
• Vukovar (Enter the demon)
• How the Impressionists Became the World’s Favorite Painters, and the Most Misunderstood (in my backyard, will see)
• The joy of clutter

Speaking of blogs of old, Joel Topf’s Precious Bodily Fluids has been online since 2007. As most, he went from writing several times per week to every few weeks to not even every month as life moved to Twitter but he just published a new post that includes Neal Stephenson’s treatise on the Hole Hawg and for that alone is worth a shout out.

Much like the Nobel family tree one could, I suspect, construct a blogging family tree, and Dave Winer would be at the root of it all. Kudos.

From The End of the Modern World by Fr. Stephen Freemen:

Modernity is a rhetorical device. The modern world does not produce wonders or even Apple Phones. Those are the work of technology, something with roots in the ancient world (cf. the Antikythera Mechanism). Modernity is simply the place where the myth was invented — not technology.

And from a 2018 blog post comment (↬John Naughton):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes (sic) but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

M. John Harrison in an unpublished interview from way back before Sunken Lands… came out:

If people didn’t have Joseph Campbell’s artful wish-fulfilment (sic) fantasy to place them at the centre of events and keep them enchanted with their own reflection, they might dump their wish to be princess of all they survey, and instead channel their dissatisfactions into making a better world for everyone.

This line of thinking is why I am a grateful reader of Harrison’s and… not a Campbell fan.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.

Today’s Chris Arnade Walks the World newsletter features a guest post by Lilly Lynch, whose writing I’ve followed on and off for almost a decade now. Georgia has never been on my list of must-visit countries, and is even less so now after reading her post. So it goes…

Some light weekend reading, from beautiful to ugly:

• A Madonna Who Shows the Beauty in Going Overboard
• Italian mannerism, David Lynch, and Lars von Trier
• The News Systems of Survival
• It’s Time to Talk About America’s Disorder Problem
• The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

I 100% stand behind Chris Arnade’s latest article: No, the world doesn’t hate America. Duh.