We would never think to exclude any other population from a wedding. The elderly? The poor? A race? The very idea is absurd and offensive.

Yet we are all too comfortable excluding the children.

Why?

Think deeply about this. You will find a deeply uncomfortable truth. https://t.co/aya4V3EMUd

— Old Hollow Tree (@OldHollowTree) May 14, 2025

This cloying, stupid “inclusive” language has buried us all on its treacly flows. And it always leads to accusations of racism because that’s its only destination.

I’m very indifferent to the subject of weddings. Or any mass sociability events. But nothing will truly improve until we liberate our brains from the addiction to inclusive mentality and appeals to racism. People can’t even say whatever they want about an imaginary wedding without accusing some imaginary interlocutor of mwah rayceesm.

OK, but what did this professor respond? How does he explain the need to do these assignments without AI?

As for the “students complained” part, yes, students complain. They also breathe. How is this interesting?

Instead of this directionless moaning, people could talk about how they change their teaching as a result of AI. How did the professor change his assignments? What new learning goals did he formulate?

Yes, we’ll have to adjust our teaching in response to AI. Let’s maybe discuss that instead of expressing shock that reality exists.

I’ve already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here.

And I won’t stop there.

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) May 14, 2025

OK, now I believe he sniffed something. If only that substance were available twenty years ago.

Have you been invited to a “childfree” wedding?

Did you attend?

How did you react? https://t.co/ZC8znk6yP6

— Old Hollow Tree (@OldHollowTree) May 14, 2025

People react too much to utterly inane things. I most likely wouldn’t be able to go to such a wedding because we don’t do babysitters. But I respect people’s wishes to have a quiet wedding with no children screaming or running around. By the way, women are physiologically set up to get flooded with anxiety when hearing a child cry. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism. I can understand a woman not wanting to feel like a pool of anxiety at her wedding.

Again, I wouldn’t go for practical reasons but I wouldn’t be upset either way. There’s a lot of drama created over nothing.

I don’t like historical novels because it’s almost impossible for an author not to project his subjectivity onto people who lived centuries earlier and to avoid botching vocabulary in painful ways.

Juan Manuel de Prada, however, gets as close as it’s possible to transmitting the Zeitgeist of 16th-century Spain and writes in a language that does justice to the events he describes. The Diamond Castle is a novel about St Teresa of Ávila, the great Spanish saint, mystic, and author. It’s fashionable to condescend to St Teresa, ascribing her mystic experiences to the sexual frustrations of a nun. I have always despised this approach that reduces a person of extraordinary greatness to genital obsessions. Prada finds the courage to accept St Teresa’s religious beliefs as not only sincere but valuable. He writes about the saint’s conflict with the Princess of Éboli and gently, without a drop of didacticism shows that a life which pursues nothing but sexual joys is empty and thwarted.

This is an excellent novel that brings to life the intense religious ebullience of the era. Like everything by Prada, it’s extremely well-written. If you love the Spanish language, you can’t fail to enjoy the novel. I always get touched to tears when I see somebody inhabit the language like Prada does.

Prada also has a light touch as a novelist. Nothing in The Diamond Castle feels like he’s making a point. You have to tease out the meaning, and that is unusual for historical fiction. Only too often its authors beat you over the head with the Very Important Lesson they want to transmit.

This is a novel where people sit around and talk about their love of God for 500 pages, and it’s not boring. I’m not a Catholic and much of the doctrine is alien to me but still it’s not boring at all.

What a great novel and what a wonderful life where such books exist and we can read them.

I don’t know from tariffs but I simply want to go to work and not have people make these speeches in my vicinity, is that too much to ask? I’ve listened to 26 years of Alon Mizrahi-type speeches. A prison sentence for murder would be shorter.

One thing in life you control completely are your feelings. If you don’t “feel the way you expect”, then start feeling whatever it is that will be more pleasing.

It’s like it’s the baby’s job to provide the mother with feelings. The baby is somehow controlling the mother’s feelings better than the mother does.

I have no idea how these people go through life with this utterly incongruous, weird worldview.

A serious question: outside of pure dislike of demographic change, what is the argument that "the West is failing?"

Tighten up the immigration laws, sure. But, the USA, UK, etc objectively seem to be world-leading nuclear powers with some of the wealthiest and happiest humans…

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) May 13, 2025

I despise these people so deeply. I try not to, I know it’s uncharitable but it’s hard because the moment you give them a millimeter, they start devouring everybody else’s lives. Their argument about absolutely everything is “you are a racist.” Their brains are completely untrained because they’ve been allowed to make careers and move into mansions on the strength of their willingness to repeat that accusation with the insistence of a metronome.

“We are failing” precisely because we have allowed people like Wilfred (whoever he is) to hold us hostage. They insult and berate us while we silently seethe at best and pitifully agree with the insults at worst.

My sister left Ukraine when she was 16. Unlike me, she’s very sociable. Knowing people is her whole job. She has crowds of acquaintances. And she speaks more languages than I do.

But her two best friends are Ukrainian. It took her a long time to figure out what was missing from her friendships. And then she met these Ukrainian friends and now can finally be herself.

What I’m saying is, people are not widgets. You can’t reshuffle them like playing cards and expect great results.

1910 with 2025 technology would be a paradise you cannot even imagine https://t.co/2vk13NIJ5P

— Curtis Yarvin (@curtis_yarvin) May 12, 2025

I mean, yes. But the question is, could the technology have been achieved without the liberalization that accompanied it? And can the technology exist without having a liberalizing effect?

Yarvin knows that this is a major question, and he’s written about it a lot. He believes that yes, both things are possible. I’m not persuaded because there should be some major limiting factor to stop the technology (including of the medical kind) from being all about extreme self-indulgence.