State of the Discussion

OK, I think comments are back at the archive, please poke around and let me know if there are other things. Next task is to link up with Andrew's stuff, still not sure about how comment approval works, so please feel free to comment to help me figure it out.

Kirk used his notions of civil discourse and open debate as cover for his bigotry. When I hear "Prove Me Wrong," I can only wonder why a normal person would need someone to prove such horrible ideas wrong.

No worries, the setting is that once people are approved, they are good to go and it transferred people who were already in the comments. Unfortunately, because we made the archive site, people who haven't commented here have to get approved, so it shouldn't be too onerous.

I'm working my way through getting the comments back in, which is tedious, but I am glancing at old posts and names so it's nostalgic at the same time. It's pretty astonishing to me that a simply text file contains all this, and when it is parsed, all these conversations spring up. Though (and it may be fatigue) I thought that I saw a post in the text file with one author, but appeared with another author on the blog, so I'll do some checks to make sure that authorship is correct.

Partly checking on how things work here.

the idea that the algorithm made him is not an argument I want to make,

I get really tired of the suggestions that people have no agency. Sure, if you immerse yourself in crazy, it may make you crazy (or crazier). But nobody forced you to go there. And nobody forced you to play out computer games in the real world on real people.

One could as well argue that Kavanaugh raped a girl while he was in college because he was immersed in a frat boy culture which encouraged that kind of behavior.

None of which is to suggest that the algorithms used by web browsers and search engines are not deeply problematic. But you're still responsible for your own actions.

Morning all,
Hartmut, if it happened then, I think that post was lost.

GftNC, it looks like the comments are showing for posts up until Sept 2004. The comments are in the database, but aren't appearing. I'll work on fixing that this week.

DaveC, about the SASE, I'm worried that the new Trump tariffs are going to disrupt that, so I think we may have to go back to smoke signals.

Charlie Kirk organized a hate campaign against my sister's Christian church for the "crime" of being woke. They were subjected to weeks of death threats and had to hold their events and services at a different church for a couple of months.

That was maybe five years ago? Charlie's role in American politics is to popularize fascism by sticking a smiley face on it. He was an overt hater when younger, but more recently promoted a persona of the nice reasonable guy who talks about traditional values, patriotism, the importance of family blah blah to suck people in and then dishes up the openly racist stuff once they are inside a ways. He is heavily recruiting within the evangelical movement.

I have paid no attention to Kirk either, beyond what various liberal blogs would say about him, and now his canonization as a "free speech" advocate. Thos elevation has required everyone to ignore the content of his speech, which is a requirement for what I'd call free speech absolutism, exemplified by the Nazi march through Skokie IL back in the 70-s supported by the ACLU. There's an assumption in absolutism that the answer to free hate speech is more speech, which rests on an assumption of relative equality of speech. Don't like Kirk's speech? Ask your dad and a few billionaires for money to start your own Turning Point, and see if you can get MSNBC (or whatever they're called now) and the Democratic party to hype it.

Kirk's speech is an example of how speech can be leveraged into power, which is where free speech absolutism gets very fuzzy. Now you're defending Kirk's right to weild power, not just speech, and Kirk, like Rush Limbaugh, was very good at his chosen profession of using speech, and weilded a lot of power within the Republican party.

I knew barely anything about Charlie Kirk, but reading some of the absolutely appalling things he has said and advocated, I was truly revolted. This doesn't of course mean that I rejoice in or welcome his assassination; the political and ideological polarisation in America is quite terrifying enough, without bringing murder into it. What really scares me is the moving of the Overton Window; because of Kirk and people like him it seems increasingly possible to insult people's character and intelligence on the basis of their race and attract millions of fans and followers as a consequence. And, on the same Overton Window issue, normalising discussion of whether women should have the right to vote really scares me:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/douglas-wilson-evangelical-hegseth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.l08.9djO.hh9sD539663c&smid=url-share

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/13/womens-suffrage-week-in-patriarchy

In trying to work out how to navigate the archive site, I clicked on the Andrew Olmsted stuff. A couple of things (this is not a complaint - God knows that would be ridiculous from someone as clueless as me), just feedback about stuff you may already know about:
1. Both "hilzoy's Final Post" and "Andrew's final post" seem to go to the same post, called "Remembering Andy Olmsted".
2. Since I couldn't find the long thread of the comments, I went into the calendar archive, and as far as I could see none of the posts include the threads of comments. Am I missing something obvious, is this the new normal, or is this going to change?

I have a couple of suggestions regarding the commenting infrastructure.
First of all, I would like to see ongoing support for cuneiform, just like the good old days.
Also, having a requirement for comments to be sent with SASE could give the stamp collecting subject matter a big boost.
DaveC

Hey Hartmut, glad you made it! If you can find that post in the wayback machine ( http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/obsidianwings.blogs.com ) and take a screenshot, I can see if it didn't get transferred over or what.

According to Gemini, the default allowed tags are usually the following:
anchor, blockquote, strong or b for bold, em or i for italic and a couple of others.

We really need to bring GIGO back into daily conversation and peoples' general awareness.

Not just the concept that original premises shape the reliability of output from the very start, but a concept of being extremely skeptical about the reliability of any information that really turns your crank.

I just watched a video where the watchlist was referenced. Since I hadn't paid much attention to him before, I may be influenced by some post-death whitewashing.

Hollywood star or celebrity (Robin Williams seemed to have been a favorite) took time out of their schedule and ‘outside the glare of the spotlights’, carried out some profoundly charitable action.

I've encountered such "just so" stories on YouTube. Recently, there's been a spate of AI-narrated videos on the Axis prisoners of war experiences in POW camps in the U.S. during and after WWII.

I hadn't paid much attention to Charlie Kirk. While I didn't agree with many of his ideas and policies, he seemed to be an open and honest advocate for them. He appeared to be all in on freedom of speech, unlike the many freedom of speech hypocrites on the Right.

I've been seeing stories of people using local electric grids being overwhelmed because someone set up an AI (LLM) data center in the area. They are incredible users of electricity.
"HighYield x SemiAnalysis deep-dive into AI Datacenters, Gigawatt Megaclusters and the Hyperscaler race to AGI. How AI Datacenters Eat the World."
How AI Datacenters Eat the World