Invented Case Law

This is disturbing:

How far away are we from lawyers on both sides arguing based on invented case law and the judge allowing it because his case law is also invented?

AI invents things. I ask it for simple book lists, and 40% of books on them are invariably completely made up. I asked for a list of Mexican presidents since 1990, and was horrified to find Porfirio Díaz on it. AI does this with the simplest tasks. It creates very biased narratives that aim to please the person who wrote the prompt. That gigantic, wealthy law firms use AI to write their briefs is extremely disturbing.

It’s annoying to me that people refer to the fake texts generated by AI as hallucinations. AI is not human. It’s an algorithm that creates plausibly sounding texts that might of might not coincide with reality.

Unable to Accept Reality

Every single news outlet on the Dem spectrum today came out with the line that SPLC’s payments to racist organizations were completely normal payments to “informants.” That these “informants” would get sums ranging in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars isn’t taken into account when this explanation is advanced.

I can’t imagine finding out that TPUSA kicked back $250,000 to a BLM chapter and trying to find a justification. I’d condemn them heartily and with ease. But the Left seems unable to demonstrate the same intellectual agility it demands from everybody else.

You were wrong about this organization. Acknowledge it and move on. But no, they’ll keep inventing the most pathetic excuses instead of accepting reality.

Positive News

Some positive news in addition to those from yesterday:

A lot of money and effort goes into convincing us that everything is terrible and nothing works. In reality, things are getting better in several areas of life.

That there is no actual organized racism in our country is excellent news. That criminals are brought to justice is also excellent news.

The Saddest Loser

At this point, it’s clear that the British government is simply trying to see if the population has any boundary at all or is it completely browbeaten.

Great Britain is the clearest, most tragic loser in World War 2. On Germany the jury is still out but the Brits were defeated into oblivion. First, they lost their role on the would stage. Then they lost their self-respect. Soon they’ll lose the country.

God’s Punishment

I’ll spare you the trouble of having to read this drivel. This British pensioner blames “the situation in the Middle East” and a bunch of other things instead of her own incapacity to figure out a reasonable price for the house.

I pray that the Lord decides to punish me for my sins in some way that doesn’t involve robbing me of all intellectual capacity in old age.

Example of Identity-building

I’ll give an example of what I mean by identity-building. For years, decades even, I was a person who wanted to establish a habit of going to the gym. I kept failing at it, and failure to go to the gym became part of my identity.

And then, after years of the most abject failure, I did figure it out and now I go three times a week with zero effort or exercises of willpower. To the contrary, I love going. It’s my favorite thing. Trying to white-knuckle it instead of tackling it through the side of identity was a mistake.

Here’s what I did. An existing strong part of my identity is that I like to gamify everything. I’m also into productivity tracking. Yes, it’s very neoliberal, duh. So I started doing a challenge where I have to reach 10,000 steps a day. I had to sneak in those steps sometimes in the most bizarre conditions. I find it massively entertaining because nobody knows that I’m doing it. I have an 8 to 4 office job. It’s totally a quest to do the steps every day. I’ve managed to do my steps during blizzards, on intercontinental flights, and during all-day diversity trainings. This is so much fun that I didn’t even notice how I became an active, on-the-move person instead of a clinically sedentary one. From there, it was a short journey towards enjoying physical activity and wanting more of it. I downloaded an app, built a graph, and now I have a new game related to weight-lifting.

Of course, many people aren’t into gamification like I am. They have to figure out their own path of integrating things into what actually is their identity.

Identity-building

Something that you do for 2+ years becomes your identity. If you are getting ready to find time to learn Italian, or failing to lose weight, or trying unsuccessfully to quit gambling, that becomes your identity. You become a person who fails at this thing you propose. And it becomes doubly difficult to achieve because now you not only have to do the thing itself but undo this whole identity you created around the failure and start a new identity-building process. The brain won’t relinquish the identity unless there’s another one to take its place. Even then it’s going to be hard because familiarity is very pleasing to the brain.

In short, you are wasting your time planning to learn, start, quit, etc if there’s no identity building happening previously.

My Saint

I was named after this original Ukrainian drone operator, one of the first Ukrainian Christians, and a very hardcore woman:

It was her grandson who Christianized the entire Kyivan Rus.

The End of the Thaw

The thaw is over. Amazon started banning Vauban Books publications. It also deletes negative reviews of ideologically compliant novels.

Censorship is about to rev back up. This is so tiresome but seemingly unavoidable.

Farmed Out

We have a program that is run by a professor who is notorious for having the most terrible temper. He’s a very recalcitrant, intransigent person, feared and hated on campus. People have to be assigned to teach in his interdisciplinary program against their will.

I approached him to request to be assigned to his program. The guy was very confused. But I don’t care about his pissy temper. I crave something different. I’m already signed up for International Studies, and now I’m farming myself out into this interdisciplinary thing. I don’t see any future in my department, unfortunately. And I’d rather choose my future (yes, the neoliberal way) than passively await its arrival. That I managed to stave off the inevitable by six years is already a miracle.