Notes

Gatekeeping

April 23, 2025

I’ve briefly argued with somebody who thought that Hiroshi Kawamata’s adaption of Anne of Green Gables into an animation will “expose” the classic book to a modern audience, and somehow, that’s bad. I rejected the idea because of its stupidity; shouldn’t good and pure things be what we try to project into the future so younger people can inherit them and pass them on? According to him, today’s people are not deserving of the classics, or incapable of even comprehending them, and therefore should limit themselves to the slop that’s mass produced today. This is the exact kind of vile thinking that hurts tradition and the quality of not only our people but also our living. With a few exceptions, such as parts of nature we really don’t want human presence around, it is good for good things to become popular, or at least more accessible in some way, because then it embeds more permanently into our heritage. I see similar gatekeeping with music, games, even food and restaurants, and all of it is stupid. I understand the satisfaction of being part of a niche, but I decline to feel irritated when my niche becomes successful, because while we may feel like that out of a desire to preserve, it is ultimately born out of self-centeredness.

Goodness

April 23, 2025

There are a lot of “black and whites” philosophies—what academics call dichotomies—and I’m fascinated the one that speaks of whether humans are good or bad, because it provides so much insight into systems of ideas that are affiliated despite sounding separate. See, some consider humans to be inherently bad, but can be made good, while some others consider humans to be inherently good, but can be made bad. Capitalism is an instance of the former; it assumes that humans are naturally self-centered, and it renders that self-centeredness conducive to the formation and maintenance of a society via money and property. Someone can surrender their autonomy for a time to receive the medium through which they can fulfill their selfish desires, and criminality is simply someone unwilling to obey the rules to gain an unfair advantage. Socialism, on the other hand, assumes that humans are naturally cooperative, and self-centeredness is actually the result of a very competitive society that pits worker against worker; criminality, in turn, becomes a side-effect of that intense competitiveness, and all ills can be resolved through resolving class differences and wealth disparities. Whether one or the other is right is a debate that rages on to this day and I’m badly placed to even have an opinion on the matter, but if you think carefully, you will see why some things which seem opposed end up related.

Take, for example, Christianity. It is a religion of intense charity, tolerance, and brotherhood; it rejects self-centeredness over self-sacrifice. It is normal to assume that it would be associated with socialism and other ideologies that also preach against egotism and for the equity of people. Yet, while some Christians have been socialists and communists in history, Christianity has mostly been supportive of capitalism. Part of it has to do with socialist states of the twentieth century promoting fervent atheism, but that is not always the reason cited. You can look at, for example, Pope Pius XII’s decree against communism, or G. K. Chesterton’s belief that Catholic encyclicals condemned socialism. It seems bizarre that Christianity, denying self-centeredness, would promote capitalism, promoting of self-centeredness, but it ceases to be confusing when you realize that capitalism and Christianity both align on the dichotomy of human goodness. Capitalism assumes that we are naturally evil and self-centered on the basis of human nature; Christianity shares that belief on the basis of sin. It is this similarity of belief that creates the weird, subtle connection between capitalism and Christianity.

Does this mean Christians should be capitalists and reject socialism? No, because that subtle connection doesn’t mean anything beyond being an indicator of mode of thought. Someone that is capitalist and believes that human beings are naturally evil is more likely to agree with Christianity on that basis, and likewise, someone that is Christian and believes that human beings are naturally evil sinners is more likely to agree with capitalism’s similar assumption of human nature. Now, this shouldn’t be taken as a statement of support for socialism either, but simply an observation of how a Christian—someone that should practice intense charity—can come to embrace an economic system that is, at its core, devoid of it. Whether that subtle alignment on the nature of humanity should factor into your ideology is entirely a personal decision.

Em dashes

April 24, 2025

I found that an abundance of em dashes (—) correlates highly to LLM-generated text. Em dashes are a useful, arguably underrated form of punctuation, and I do make use of them from time to time, but LLMs tend to insert em dashes where semicolons would be more appropriate. Almost every single output by popular LLMs just spam em dashes wherever at the expense of commas, semicolons, colons, and shorter sentences altogether. As I read more and more AI bullshit, I feel that I’m growing increasingly capable of detecting it, but the em dash sign is such a strong indicator that you can approach this detection almost mechanically.

Google Dockey

April 27, 2025

The most vile part of today’s neo-puritanism is how there is no longer any mechanism for society to move on from shock. I read up how headliners and controversies from celebrities were handled in the pre-Internet age, and it usually involved a three-step process where first, the shocking information was disclosed to the public through television or newspaper, second, the celebrity acknowledges, debates, or refutes the information, and third, the celebrity eventually does some compensatory act that the public generally finds redemptive. Afterwards, regardless of whether we found that the celebrity purged themselves to the extent we wanted, society digested what happened and moved on. The controversy lasted for a time then expires, even though it’ll always remain documented in biographies for people to find out.

We don’t really have this mechanism anymore, do we? Today’s controversies are made timeless by the Internet. Shocking revelations are presented without time or space, rendering them immortal and subject to being shocked back into relevance when somebody decides to remind everyone else that hey, this person did that. If they catch you enjoying a song or a book from someone that once did something very controversial, you can’t tell them to “move on”, or that at least you’ve moved on. If you decide to press on with your enjoyment of what they made, that necessarily constitutes unconditional support of the person and complete agreement with what they’ve done. You remain a jurist of the court of public opinion, but no longer able to cast a judgement of your own. You must abide by what everyone else voted for.

The other nasty evolution of neo-puritanism is how blunted the efficiency of responses and discussion became. I remember a time where when controversies and hit pieces were revealed, there was ample time to talk of them and elaborate them. You always had a few blindly believing the headline but at least most would do a little intellectual investment into the what’s-whats and produce an opinion thereafter. Those opinions would be influenced by some of the independent discussion that occurred after the news broke out, which is conducive to making rational and elucidated conclusions. This, however, no longer exists, or at least ceased to exist in an efficient and useful form. Nuance isn’t possible anymore when you must either believe or refute what’s been presented, with no possibility of further developing the evidence and positions held by the hit piece.

And then, there’s the culture and protocols it created, which are funny more than anything else. Breaking out a controversial factoid before was magnifying a rumor that spread too far, rashly edited and printed onto the covers of magazines just in time prior to next week’s distribution. Today, it’s a formal ritual involving the well-margined, typeset writing of a Google Docs, or the careful production of a website entirely dedicated to the controversy, almost complete with peer-review, journal publication, and ISBN identifiers. Examining somebody’s conscience, solely to cast them out of their comforts for the sake of the alleged hurt, is now a pseudo-empirical research process more than a rumor-gasp-headline publicity event. If it fails at popularity, it will be re-hashed again with different variables.

The bar for evidence has been significantly lowered too, with people immediately and uncritically believing in, for relevant example, Discord screenshots that most now somehow believe cannot be falsified in any way. Strangely enough, when it was harder to edit pictures, people used to be less gullible and believing of content they saw on the Internet. Now, with image editing and content generation available to everyone, you can post a screenshot of a couple messages, and for some reason it’ll be widely taken as truth. When some of today’s philosophers say that we live in a post-truth world, we think that it’s because it became too easy to dispense “alternative facts”, but maybe it’s also because we no longer hold reasonable suspicion of what we’re told. It’s no wonder conspiracy theories have grown so widespread.

Marble

May 2, 2025

Why is it that the tellers of a story always want to write what’s next? I write bits of fiction and I found that, after a while, I exhaust my creativity and become unable to extend the story forward. I can keep vomiting more words out, but it’ll bad. When I’m satisfied with my story, I sometimes feel like there should be more to it, but really, most of the time, it shouldn’t be. The goodness of a story is a quantity that dilutes when it grows too wordy; it is a marble that you chisel into form, but if you keep on subtracting from the rock, it eventually turns to nothing.