This is almost exactly what happened in the US a hundred-plus years ago. The fallout vastly improved medical education overall, but also ossified the field into a modern fortress of protectionism that hurts the public by ignoring the supply part of supply and demand, but also hurts the clever (and typically already privileged in most ways) young people who manage to get med school, by saddling them with huge amounts of debt and grinding them into powder for the first decade of their career. I also subscribe to the theory that the hypercompetitive selection process results in too many doctors who are not well-rounded or particularly good at processing information outside their fields, but are told over and over again that they’re too smart to have any blind spots. If you have the right credential and especially if you’ve made enough money with it, society does the Dunning-Krugering for you.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

Also sounds like an org that wants its event, which depends on visas for its players to happen at all and on visas for its fans to be a commercial success, to get special treatment from the Orange Menace.

Apart from all the deflection and Putin and Gilded-Age foreign policy policy theories, which may well be right, I think President Dingleberry also found out that Greenland is 1% larger by area than the Louisiana Purchase, which would make him the president that most embiggened America. How can you you deny MAGA if he literally made it greater (in size) than any president prior to him?

It’s also possible he has only ever looked at a Mercator and thinks Greenland is literally the size of Africa or South America.

There are biting midges, and I presume they’re very annoying, but most don’t bite and they’re all different from mosquitoes.

I wonder if this has to do with actual growth of the faith, or consolidating in light of shrinking temple attendance, which is different from and more exclusive than church attendance . Western Europe in particular can’t be fertile proselytizing ground these days.

Oh, and my personal experience is a couple of decades out of date by now, but ExMo here. Happy to field questions. I’m no fan of the church, but I try to be somewhat even handed when discussing with folks.

Even the AI generated animated eagle at the bottom of the page is like, “WTF is this? Why are you even looking at this bullshit? This is all a terrible idea.”

Gee, I wonder which political party they belong to…

More than a dozen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and hundreds of municipal officials have been arrested in recent months for alleged corruption…

Yup, there we go.

It’s always sad to lose a friend, but even with a new administration, nobody can really trust USA anymore, USA is currently descending deeper into a authoritarian regime, and resistance is effectively being systematically removed. As it is, there seems to be little hope that USA will ever become a functional democracy.

I hope that a better US administration will come after this one and that it will improve the things that can be improved easily (tariffs, visas, rhetoric, and other transactional policies), but at this point Trump has poisoned the well and it will take a generation of good (or at least understandable and workable) behavior by both US parties to rebuild a fraction of the trust and soft power the orange idiot has squandered in barely half a year.

Oh hey, it’s that magic time period somebody clearly explained to Donald once when he was younger!

I’m not going to claim to fully understand the nuances, but the sea ice will melt at about -2C and glacial melt will deposit ~1C water into the system. If the deep water is steady at 3C or 4C, sending it up could accelerate melting of both.

Nope.

That is, instead of sinking into the depths, surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that had been trapped for centuries.

I had to look up that last part, as it seemed counter-intuitive, but apparently deep ocean water bottoms out at 4 degrees C.

Utahns generally don’t like to draw attention to themselves as firebrands (e.g. Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch), so methinks the Senator is planning to get into the 2028 presidential primary.

Yup. I joked that we’re still on Constitutional Republic version 2.27, and not only is the next point release long overdue, but we should really have upgraded to version 3 or 4 by now.

I think a huge part of the problem is that it’s run on Gentlemen’s agreements but we pretend it’s not. The UK’s “Constitution” is a hodgepodge of laws and court cases and things that probably closer to treaties than anything else. It’s a mess, but they know it’s a mess so there’s a very real sense that the gentlemen’s agreements are important and as real as anything else.

In America, we worship our Constitution like a holy text, but so many of our institutional controls depend on Judicial Review (which is not technically mentioned in the constitution), on following along with the presumed intent, and on fudging around the edges when it’s obvious the machinery of the state would grind to a halt if we had to amend it every time a novel situation arose. Yet, nevertheless, we have an entire school of thought built around the idea of shallow surface readings. The “originalists,” not to put too fine a point on it, are fucking idiots.

If you get the idea that the only important thing is the blackletter text agreed to by a gaggle of 18th century provincials, many of whom were intelligent and well-intentioned, but all of whom were elites and either slave-owners or okay with hanging out with slave owners, then you have a recipe for considering stupid shit like presidential immunity or having a speaker of the house who’s not a Congressperson and who can become president despite already serving two full terms, because it doesn’t explicitly say you can’t. It’s childish and dangerous, and their ascendancy in the judicial branch is a travesty.

I do unironically believe the Mercator projection has influenced how much he talks about Greenland.

Yeah, I guess just assuming ill intent and fascism makes it a simpler discussion that’s still perfectly reasonable.

I assume certain short-term things will get better with anyone less crazy than Trump, but I agree the US is no longer reliable for anything long-term, and no other country should deal with us on the assumption that we’ll give up certain short-term advantages for a long term stability within our sphere of influence. It’s not even that the US was “good” (though I imagine the next hegemonic power could easily be worse), but across administrations, the US was generally intelligent about how to leverage its influence but retain enough goodwill to continue to do so indefinitely.

I like to idly game this out because it truly reflects how narcissistic and uninformed he is. So, he’s talking about admitting Canada as a single state. Lets assume somehow that happens, even though the Canadians themselves would undoubtedly push for as many states as possible if joining the US were the only option.

You’ve now got a new largest state by both population and area, and one that has ridiculous reserves of resources and a coast-to-coast infrastructure. It instantly becomes the most important state. It’s also full of millions of people who didn’t want to be Americans and who’ve had a hundred years of more progressive governance than the US. Congratulations, Republicans, you’ve just skewed the Senate and completely fucked yourself in the House for a generation or more. You’ve also got 8 or 9 million Francophones who weren’t even entirely sure they wanted to be CANADIANS, much less Americans, to say nothing of being Americans in a MAGA world. This is how real troubles begin.

So, in return for dubious “improvements” to the trade deficit, and certain (what?) administrative conveniences (I guess) for a military that already had basically all the access anyone would ever need, as well as a giant buffer territory you’re not politically committed to defending with the same gusto you would your own soil, you completely upset the balance of power in Congress to your own party’s detriment and add a huge population that hates their situation. Brilliant.

Although, I guess if you’re just done with free and fair elections then a lot of these concerns evaporate…