The opposite to all ideology is openness to criticism, it is independent thought and intellectual and moral autonomy. In other words, it is the self taking responsibility for its brain.

The murder of Henry Nowak is just objectively 10 million times worse than what happened to George Floyd.

I really have to get better at buying whatever the President of the United States says to buy.

Chatbots are poor sources of truth but excellent sources of inspiration. They offer ideas, not answers. Like Croesus misconstruing the Pythia, it’s not the chatbots that hallucinate, but us, whenever we mistake the possibilities they offer for certainties.

1/ Most tail-risk funds bleed slowly… Until they don’t. Ambrus Capital turned volatility spikes into 25% in a single month and over 50% net in two years. 🧵

A lovely young woman with terminal cancer (due to VHL) decided yesterday to discontinue her chemotherapy due to the ghastly side effects she must face simply to extend her lifespan for a little while longer. In defiance of the inevitable, she's going to have a gathering in her hospital room with her friends and family for her last day, before turning off the ventilator to give herself the ultimate respite on her own terms. This thing we call nature is inexplicably cruel, dispensing a sort of cosmic caprice that is universally unprejudiced in its rationing of suffering... It is so neutral, it seems cold and heartless, not unlike a rusty, serrated knife twisted through the ribcage.

My latest The IRGC's Eschatological Gamble and the Arab World's Verdict How the Arab World Reads the IRGC In a certain sense, the Islamic Republic runs an eschatological project that happens to possess a government. What it actually builds toward, always, is Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment. For Khomeini, Karbala and Qiyamah formed a single continuous arc, a battlefield that time never closed, still accumulating its martyrs, still moving toward its predetermined conclusion. In ideologies centered on the end of the world, believers discover a profound certainty that removes all doubt about the future. This conviction serves as a divine promise. History does not remain truly open-ended, since God has already determined its final outcome. A normal Western politician carefully weighs risks and adapts to changing circumstances. But the true committed IRGC revolutionary, driven by this unshakable faith, inhabits an entirely different relationship with time. For him, the final victory is already secured. The present does not create the future, and merely confirms what was always destined to occur. But this orientation collides at every point with the mainstream Sunni worldview, which treats Judgment Day as a matter of divine concealment rather than political schedule. Sunni tradition forbids the forcing of providence and regards any state organized around accelerating the end of history as a deviation from Islam rather than its fulfillment. The Arab world reads the IRGC through this very lens, and what it sees is not a pious republic being tested, but a heterodox project masquerading as the fulfillment of faith, structurally incapable of assessing its strategic failures. zinebriboua.com/p/the-irgcs-…

There's a strange myth about science: that theory comes first, and that data cannot show anything new. But anyone who's ever done science knows the truth that there's a long conversation between data & hypotheses. Back & forth.. until the discovery. And if you think about it, it has to be this way! (Night Science recap, Day 6)

Update from the Gaza flotilla: activists are furious that a senior organising member of the Steering Committee is having sex with people on the boats “To have sex on the boat - while heading to a nation undergoing genocide - is a clear violation of ethics and power” Lmfao