The way to get good at sex is the same as the way to get good at any other process: Once you're done, roll out the whiteboard and together do a no-fault analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what could've been done differently.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) May 1, 2025

I also suggest inviting your mother to go over the breakdown and give helpful suggestions.

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.” pic.twitter.com/Y9ClAqsbOA

— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) April 30, 2025

Leaving aside the deeply boring part about Zuckerberg’s AI bots, what I don’t understand is the need for 15 friends. Does the average American have no family? No job? No household tasks?

How can one squeeze regular outings with 15 friends into a normal life?

Even if you take them in batches of five, it’s three outings a week to maintain weekly contact. Who is with the kids while you are out with these batches thrice weekly? Who makes the dinner and folds laundry? Who packs the lunches and changes the bedding?

Or is the idea that these friends would agree to meet once every two weeks? Good luck finding 15 such accommodating bastards.

And then there are the text messages. Each friend needs to be buoyed up with strings of 6-7 messages at least every three days. You need to see, read, and watch each friend’s links and memes and react to them at least minimally. There are doctor’s appointments, kids’ milestones, profligate cousins, husbands with back pain, drama at the knitting circle, etc. And then the diagnoses begin. And the surgeries. And the cancer scares. And the actual cancers. Nobody who is regularly undergoing this with three friends would agree to 15. I’d enthusiastically consent to immediate euthanasia if forced to do this for 15 people, batches or no batches.

Of course, Zuckerberg is an individual who says things like “having demand for 15 friends”, which makes it clear that only months of serious torture would induce anybody to be his friend. But this comment still struck a nerve. I constantly feel guilty for not being able to give enough to my friends, and the idea that I’d want to populate my life with fifteen and then perish with guilt altogether is not pleasant.

Daily, there are fresh updates about the rich criminal history of “Maryland Dad” who was “mistakenly deported.”

Footage has surfaced of “Maryland Dad” being caught in the act of human trafficking in 2022. Since it was 2022, ICE refused to pick him up and he continued his gang activities, his wife-beating, and his abuse of her children.

It’s fascinating that a gangster who is in the country illegally and engages in all sorts of criminal acts is utterly and completely un-deportable. He beat that poor idjit wife for years. He was apprehended for a variety of gang activities. Yet he was never deported. Is there anything a person like Abrego García can do to get deported?

It’s also quite fascinating that US politicians would go to El Salvador and pose for pics over a wife-beating gang-banger. Apparently, “the era of #MeToo” was thrown away the moment it became convenient to move on.

Confucius said that the only people who are incapable of changing are the smartest and the dumbest. I’m neither, so I decided to embrace change in the form of heightened curliness. It looked better yesterday but now nobody will believe me.

My mother really slayed today. She’s undergoing her third round of chemo, and I called her at the hospital to entertain her with the story about Canadian concentration camps.

“Ah!” she said. “I know what we should do. I’ll take off my wig, and we’ll ask the nurse to snap a pic of me holding it. Then you can tell your colleague that Canadians scalped me.”

I’d do it if I didn’t fear that the colleague would take it seriously.

A colleague comes to my office.

“You know I was going to Canada for a conference,” she says. “You signed my travel request.”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s a good university. I’m sure you’ll enjoy.”

“Well, I decided not to go,” the colleague says. “I heard that US citizens are being detained in Canada and sent to concentration camps.”

“There are no concentration camps in Canada,” I reassure the colleague. “It’s a very peaceful country. You are not in danger.”

“No, I heard that it’s Trump.”

“Trump detains people in Canada?” I ask.

“No. Yes. I don’t know how it works. But I heard that if you go to Canada, you might not come back.”

“It’s OK, you’ll come back,” say I despondently, beginning to wish this weren’t true.

“I heard it had something to do with Trump,” the colleague perseveres. “That if you travel to Canada, you might disappear and then nobody hears from you again.”

“Well, I’m going to Canada two weeks before your conference,” I say thinking that I don’t get paid nearly enough. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know whom to blame.”

“Trump?” she asks hopefully.

“Sure,” I say. “Blame Trump’s Canadian concentration camps.”

After the conversation ended, I took the rest of the day off.

🔴 Small boat migrant avoids jail after punching female police officershttps://t.co/3QX6USHmlw

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 30, 2025

He repeatedly punched these policewomen and had to be dragged off one of them. He’s not going to jail but people who tweeted something un-PC are jailed. Can people of progressive political beliefs explain why this is reasonable or fair?

In the absence of a strong identity of their own, Canadians reacted to America’s shift to the right by shifting further to the left. The irony of the situation is that, in order to affirm their right to be their own country, they embraced an ideology that does not see the concept of “a country” as meaningful:

The only “anti-American” mode that Canadians can conceive is to shift left – i.e., a “nationalism” that ultimately coincides with the anti-nationalist trajectory of advanced liberalism.

https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/make-canada-conservative-again

Adolescents start the journey of becoming their own selves by rejecting the example of their parents. It’s a necessary stage in their journey towards adulthood but it’s not adulthood. They will only become adults when they make their own decisions without using their parents as a starting point.

Canadian national identity is still in this adolescent stage of confusing independence with what in reality is complete thralldom. There has never been a situation of US citizens making political decisions based on anything that happens in Canada. In this state of self-inflicted inequality, Canadian lamentations that Americans don’t take them seriously as a nation sound like a teenager’s pouting that mom and dad don’t respect him as a fully autonomous individual.

I had no idea that Grant existed before reading Deneen’s article today. This is a crying shame and also very typical of what I talked about yesterday. I’m obsessive, and this means that I read every syllable of everybody who mewled anything about neoliberalism at any point in time. Yet I never heard that Canada had its own Zygmunt Bauman thirty years before the actual Bauman.

Get a load of this, for example:

Grant recognized that liberalism was more radical [than even Marxism] due to its fundamental commitment of freedom that ultimately sought (and required) liberation from human nature itself. Grant was especially attentive to the close alignment between liberalism and an embrace of transformative technology. “The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value” (56).

Liberalism wants to liberate us from human nature. It wants to achieve the state where there are no negative emotions, unpleasant feelings, or conflicts arising from human beings coming together. It seeks a reality where humans are not constrained by our biology. Where we can choose and remake every aspect of our bodies. Even today it takes hard work to make this argument. In 1965, for a dude born during WWI to say something like this is extraordinary.

Grant argued very correctly that liberalism (I call it neo while he didn’t which is utterly insignificant) is more dangerous than Marxism. Yes, Marx was completely mistaken in that communism was possible. But at least Marx’s fantasy involved people coming together and becoming less selfish for the common good. It’s in the name. Yes, it’s a pipe dream, absolutely. But the dream itself is a lot less malignant than the solitary human god of neoliberalism with his sewn-on body parts and claims to being able to remake the world, vanquish death, and become eternal.

Reader V07 asked yesterday what Canadian national identity could be. Well, Grant offers an answer. “We were the first on the planet to catch the advent of a new era and analyze it presciently ” is a pretty kick-ass identity. We are the new hub of world philosophy. We create ideas. What’s not to like?

Why should Deneen, an American, try to reveal to Canadians their own intellectual greatness? I’m sure Grant wasn’t working in a vacuum. There must be a whole intellectual tradition there. It’s up to Canadians to find and describe it.

Patrick Deneen has written an excellent article on why the revival of Canadian nationalism pushed the country to the left and not to the right:

Canadian conservatism remains firmly under the control of the “Old Right” – the Right of Reagan-era fusionism, and even today heavily overrepresented by libertarian business interests. I encountered not just one, but several booths proudly sporting the visage of Ayn Rand as an icon of a “conservatism” — a label that Rand herself rejected, and a form of “conservatism” that many Americans now rightly suspect of not having conserved anything at all. Joining her on one banner – the “Ladies of Liberty Alliance” – was the libertarian, transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey, dedicated foe of conservatism. Such is the general state of conservatism in Canada.

https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/make-canada-conservative-again

Canadian conservatism has not been able to detach itself from neoliberalism, and that made it hostile to nationalism. Between the neoliberal Left and the equally neoliberal Right, people will always choose the Left because neoliberalism is so much more natural to it. If freedom and choice are your gods, then your side is quite automatically the one that celebrates the freedom to snip away body parts or identify as whatever strikes your fancy.

Deneen cites George Grant, a Canadian nationalist who warned in 1965 that Canadian (or any other) nationalism is doomed:

The United States is [simply] the most progressive society on earth and therefore the most radical force for the homogenizing of the world. By its very nature the capitalist system makes the national boundaries only matters of political formality.

Grant was a visionary who described the horror of neoliberalism over a decade before it started to dawn on anybody else how scary it was. He’s not known in Canada and zero national pride has accrued to the achievement of having the first philosopher in the world to have described the threat of the approaching neoliberalization. As usual, Canadian are silencing their own achievements and erasing themselves from history. The threat to their statehood is not in the White House. It is inside themselves.