Bruce Buchan
Scholar. Historian of ideas. Mostly Enlightenment & race, quite a bit on empire & colonisation, plus some corruption and a little piracy for good measure.
- Trump is literally a reverse-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit.
- Whatever their uses may be, I have neither seen, read, or heard anything to persuade me to use, recommend, or tolerate any LLM. I have however found considerable evidence to make me mistrust, despise, and wish destruction upon all the corporations who have forced LLMs upon the world.
- As a species, humans richly deserve the extinction we are working so assiduously to accelerate by cooking the planet. The many millions of other species we are burning with us are due an infinitely greater share of our attention, obligation, and our urgent action than our own.
- When I studied political science in the 1990s, we were taught that ‘conservatives’ were in favour of property and tradition, and an attenuated notion of the common good. Turns out in the 2020s that conservatives only favour their own advancement by excusing corruption and defending pedophiles.
- One of the things about democratic governments that most people do not understand is that they are based on the simple idea that given the opportunity, many humans will literally say and do anything for power over others. What they want is clear a pathway to power (or money, status, fame, etc). 1.
- No society or government is ever going to be free from these people, and none can prevent their regular rise in different spheres of life. All we can do is make pathways to power as crooked and perilous as possible by incorporating as many checks and balances on the single-handed abuse of power. 2.
- This is an unsexy but vital function of democracy. It is achieved in multiple ways, by dividing power among different branches of government; administering laws separately to executive power; having public elections; separating culture, art, and intellectual life from political power, etc. 3.
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View full threadThis is the ultimate lesson: Democracy depends on us being willing to hold our fellow humans to account as persistently, cleverly, tenaciously, and humanely as we can. Democracy is a struggle that never ends, because the alternative is what every opportunist desires: tyranny. 8.
