Matt is making an important point:
An abyss will form between people who have limited intelligence, detachable body parts, and a flat inner world vs those who will have the discipline to develop a true depth and, most importantly, help their children develop it. Fake food, fake art, fake news, fake relationships and a life of raging, unschooled emotionality will await the former. An iron self-control will be required of the latter. The prize in this game will be remaining fully human.
OT: Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
https://x.com/NobelPrize/status/1976573830337327267
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I like her but what is it with awarding people who haven’t achieved any of their goals? She’s failed at everything. Are we going to award the literature prize for people who haven’t published any books but really want to?
Honestly, I believe that it would make much more sense to award it to nobody this year. If Trump does manage to push through the Israel deal and make it stick for a while, then he should get it. But this year nobody achieved anything in promoting peace.
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I like her but what is it with awarding people who haven’t achieved any of their goals?
What can we expect from a prize awarded to Obama simply for being voted into office?
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“what is it with awarding people who haven’t achieved any of their goals?”
There’s a long tradition of awarding it to people who hadn’t yet achieved much both to bring attention to their cause and to hopefully give them some protection against repressive governments. Lech Wałęsa had mostly failed when he was awarded but the prize helped protect him and the Solidarity movement.
I have no problem with that. The literature prize is about the past, what someone has written and published. The peace prize (at its best) is about the future and envisions peace as a longterm goal, not an accomplishment like publishing a scientific paper or a book.
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https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1976650156876698045?t=b7twaPj9r0mv8aTpUgq5ow&s=19
The same people who vocally oppose Venezuelan dysfunction spilling into this country are weirdly opposed to Venezuela solving its dysfunction. I just can’t even with these people.
Besides, the idea that Trump is happy with the Nobel committee and is in cahoots with them in awarding Machado is on the outer reaches of insanity.
This is to our conversation about fake reality.
The point you made is great, though, and I’m grateful for this perspective.
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“The prize in this game will be remaining fully human”
But the price of remaining fully human will be terrible…. ignoring the massive squirming mass of degraded humanity or trying to undo the damage.
Neither will be easy.
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Ignoring will be the way. We are already on our way there. Neoliberalism does nothing better than stratify. This is its biggest play for stratification. It appeals to the best in people but always manages to bring out the worst.
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And I used to think financialization of the economy was bad. AI is even more fake than wall street.
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AI is going to restrict everybody’s use of air conditioning and other electric appliances, in order to provide companies with bulletproof interfaces between us and them (the impenetrable customer service telephone tree, with no actual humans behind it), so that you will never again be able to solve a problem with your insurance, your water bill, an online retailer, the school district, code enforcement, or any other large entity, by phoning or showing up in the office in person.
You’ll get a very realistic facsimile of a person, that uses a bazillion megajoules of electricity in a faraway server warehouse, plus 300 gallons of water for cooling (you will have to limit flushes to save water, because there’s a shortage), to avoid solving your problem and make it impossible to reach a real human to whom you might explain it.
And it’ll also generate creepy pictures and slop video.
I’m rooting for intractable fire safety issues at the server farms. They seem inevitable, given the crazy water needs to prevent overheating.
-ethyl
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I already saw people posting AI images from real estate websites that completely misrepresent the properties on sale. There’s no immediate practical goal to this beyond habituating people to the wholesale falsification of reality. People are already sharing AI videos like they are real, and they don’t seem to care that the videos are fake and unrealistic. “Look at how this brave kitty defended a baby from a bear!” It seems inconsequential but that because we are in the early stages. Once 60% of our information about the world is fake, that will have terrible consequences.
So far most people I know can tell the difference. But at this point I think it would be good to ban everyone over seventy from the internet, because they are having a hard time with it.
I hate the fake RE ads. I check the listings every day, because that’s unfortunately where we are in life right now. It’s so stupid. What are you gonna do, look at this fake listing of a fake house full of fake furniture, and then go look at the actual house which is a burnt out shell, and be influenced by the digital dollhouse, after you’ve wasted your time looking at the charred studs and collapsed ceilings?
My overall impression of real estate agents is… they’re not very bright. This is a shiny new toy. They’re gonna use it until they attend a seminar that tells them not to.
I see your larger point though. When it comes to class divides, this is like the advent of cable TV, only 100x worse. Apocalyptic. And there will be no way to avoid it, because even if you avoid/ignore all of it, you’ll still be relying on people who don’t, and can’t.
Still hoping the energy/water/firehazard issues are insurmountable at scale.
-ethyl
OT: Looks like Peru has just thrown out their presidente again. It wasn’t even the Brazilian mining company this time. AFAICT the reasoning was, Boluarte has failed to deal with organized crime. El Comercio says:
https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/mundo/congreso-dina-boluarte-presidenta-peru/
“El Congreso de Perú destituyó este jueves 9 de octubre de 2025 a la presidenta Dina Boluarte, tras aprobar cuatro mociones de vacancia que declararon su “permanente incapacidad moral” para liderar el país.”
I’m kind of jealous. I wish we had more capacity to boot elected leaders for corruption and “permanent moral incapacity”. Not jealous of Peru’s political dysfunction though. Sigh.
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Oh wow, I didn’t know. Thank you for linking this. I’m preparing a lecture on Peru for next week and I have to include this.
That’s the thing with Latin America. Things happen fast. You prepare something and it becomes outdated before you can teach it.
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“start offering Korean and Japanese at my department next year”
The Korean program where I work has become something of a flagship… very lucrative and the students do cultural outreach things with performances (with no talk of ‘appropriation’….. so far).
I only later found out that the conflict in the workplace that led to its dissolution and reconstruction into three units was masterminded by a jealous administrator who wanted to take it over to bankroll his own unimpressive programs….
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Clarissa what would be the easiest and quickest way to screen out the former group when looking at dating app profiles? It’s shocking how stupid many people seem to be and the terrible choices in what they post
Amanda
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Not Clarissa, but obviously: don’t use dating apps. 100% that is the quickest way to screen them out.
-ethyl
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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