The Flying Dutchmen

This reads like suicidal empathy for terrorists, like defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But I’m sure you’ll correct me—without proposing what to do about radical Islamism.

Guess the writer?

It'd be cool if there were keyboard shortcuts. I usually press ctrl-i to italic and ctrl-b to bold, for example. I agree it'd be nice if there was quote blocks. Just my two cents, though. In both of my recent posts I had quote blocks. "line item" link adds the text "line item" to the text.

I recently listened to the audiobook of Gad Saad's "Suicidal Empathy" and have used that term in the chat before.

As far as the facts and the overall message of the book, I pretty much agree entirely. In terms of the presentation/delivery and general vibe, I hated it. If you admit that people have an issue with misplaced empathy, but then use sarcastic/cynical satire nonstop, can you really be surprised when it doesn't land with the people who need it the most? I didn't laugh once, but I did cringe quite a bit.

That said, it's a pretty non-stop onslaught of facts. It'd take a very long time to refute and/or put into question every one—there's hundreds, and lots of other empirical data from evolutionary biology. But, you know how I feel about empirical data, it's only useful for refuting old ideas, pulling part contradictions, never proving a theory.

Also the book is politically charged. In reality I think both the far-right and far-left may be suicidally empathetic in different ways. There were tons of tongue-in-cheek jabs at specific politicians, again, I didn't laugh once.

But, I don't even like the term "suicidal empathy" anymore! I've moved on to suicidal pacifism. Empathy is a claim about what someone else is thinking and feeling—I can't claim to know that, and I don't want to. It's pure psychologism. I have a hard enough time enjoying living in the moment instead of constantly second guessing some supposed real motivation that I'm not in control of. I think psychologism has creeped into our culture in really distasteful ways, people (well not you guys, lol) often talk about everyone else's trauma.

All that said, I would still recommend this book. Especially to those who disagree with the current government, it may be worth taking some of the ideas in the book seriously, despite the delivery. Particularly the idea that a society where people can't bring themselves to criticize or oppose something for fear of seeming intolerant is a dangerous and scary one.

Here's an AI generated summary:

Suicidal Empathy — Gad Saad (2026)

Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University, argues that Western liberal democracies are undermining themselves through a pathological misdirection of empathy — extending moral concern, tolerance, and accommodation to ideologies, movements, and actors that are fundamentally hostile to the values that make those societies worth preserving.

Core argument: Healthy empathy is calibrated and reciprocal. "Suicidal empathy" is unconditional empathy — extended regardless of whether the recipient shares basic norms of liberalism, pluralism, or human dignity. When a society cannot bring itself to criticize or oppose something for fear of seeming intolerant, that society has made a weapon of its own virtue.

• Key targets:

• Campus reactions to October 7 and the normalization of pro-Hamas sentiment in Western institutions

• list itemIslamist ideology receiving protection under multicultural frameworks designed for ethnic/religious minorities

• DEI and intersectionality frameworks that create hierarchies of protected victimhood

• Immigration policy that resists scrutiny of cultural incompatibility on progressive grounds

• Institutional cowardice — media, academia, government — driven by fear of being labeled racist/Islamophobic/etc.

Method:
Almost entirely empirical — crime statistics, polling data, survey research, policy outcomes. Dense with citations. The rhetorical mode is sarcastic and combative throughout, which is consistent with his broader "Saad Truth" brand.

Evolutionary framing: He grounds the argument in evolutionary psychology — tribalism, in-group/out-group dynamics, the adaptive vs. maladaptive deployment of prosocial instincts. Suicidal empathy is, in his framing, a misfiring of evolved social cognition in a novel ideological environment.

What he's not arguing: He distinguishes his position from nativism or xenophobia. The argument is about ideas and behaviors, not ethnicity. Though critics (and honestly the book's own tone) make that line harder to hold."

I posted recently about listening to the audiobook of 1984:

"Finally listened to 1984 (while doing renovation), after reading references and using various quotes my whole life. Great book, obviously…but.

The most absurd part of the book is the lower labor classes called the “proles”. Orwell writes them as dumb, passive, like trailer trash zombies or something. 85% of humanity as furniture? Gimmie a break.

He’s criticizing totalitarianism while sharing its deepest assumption: that ordinary people can’t think.

Also something Popper, who the world loves to ignore, railed against.
The important thing isn't that 2+2=4 (versus 2+2=5), it's a person's problem that that might be a good solution for. Like, two couples are coming to the party, how many cups do I need?

People aren't buckets to fill with the right information/knowledge/facts/behaviours."

This is consistent with Popper's view on Marxism—the "proles" (aka "proletariate") is a way to sneak in Plato's warped "philosopher king." If 85% of the population is dumb, it's the start of a justification to find the 15% of the people that can fill the 85%'s head with the right thing.

On that view, re: the image attached, here's a quote from Brivael Le Pogam:

"Sanders and AOC want to freeze the construction of all AI data centers in the United States.

We need to understand what's really happening. This isn't just another political battle. It's the final convulsion of a worldview that has unconsciously realized it's doomed.

Socialism isn't an economic theory. It's a moral structure that needs three things to exist:

1. Scarcity to redistribute
2. Victims to defend
3. A class of intermediaries to orchestrate it all

Remove just one of these three pillars and the whole edifice collapses. AI is removing all three at once."

AI is useful, but I'm not sure AI will remove any of those three things completely. However, I think it will help alleviate them. I also think that locals should be a part of the discussion about where data centers go, and how they fit into the local economy and culture.

But, I do think that the framing of the bill resonates with the logic of The Party in 1984, and I get the feeling that disagreeing with a national moratorium that puts a central body in control of it would violate the moral language (Ingsoc) therein.

I have to be honest, I still haven't watched the movie—it just looks like, ugh, gross cultural gender war stuff. I think men and women are good for each other, personally, and that we have created cultural solutions ON TOP of the biological solutions the evolution has provided us. Solutions that we aren't always that great at talking about, but directly relate to the bodies we...embody. [yingyang emoji]

ANYWAY, to be a hypocrite about not participating in the gender wars, I stumbled upon this article against feminism from a British political and cultural magazine with a left-leaning, progressive, and liberal political position called "The New Statesmen".

The article: https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/04/meet-the-angry-young-women-why-young-women-dont-want-to-date-me

It's paywalled, but here's an excerpt:

---

ANGRY YOUNG WOMEN by @emilylawford
and @Scarlett__Mag

It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. I asked how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny. If he doesn’t fancy you, he won’t bother. “I feel like a lot of it is quite sexually motivated with men.”

I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different political views. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.” Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends (though she was worried this made her a “pick me”, trying too hard for male attention). Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”

On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere have been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are nearly as extreme – just on the other side of the political spectrum. The “femosphere” spans a range of tones: there are misandrist dating coaches who urge women to reject men altogether, and more explicitly progressive content creators who cover global and domestic politics.

Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. Young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. Gen Z women are more likely to support causes such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism than young men. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

I spent the last few months in search of the new left-wing young women. It wasn’t difficult – they were everywhere. But it all felt impossibly bleak. They weren’t excited about their futures. They didn’t like the men they knew, or the idea of those they didn’t. Men were just a threat who had the potential to harm or trap them. This will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. Young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. And it’s getting worse. Women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

A significant majority of young women feel isolated from the rest of the country. The two main political parties aren’t reaching out to them specifically. Many women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. Many say they will vote for the Greens in the upcoming local elections, but few seem to believe that will make a difference. They don’t feel represented by mainstream politics, and they don’t think anyone cares.

---

It is interesting to me that kids are having less sex than ever (like has been a trend in Japan before it was a trend in America). I also do think that I have felt a lot of sentiment from women just straight up hating and distrusting men in general for being men, like, in principle. Like it's biology and there's nothing men can do, so count them out.

Big generalizations there, lots to push back on. The article focuses on Brits, not Americans or Japanese, so there's that, too.

@Josh said in Digital Copyright law, AI and knowledge creation:

Hates AI or hates copyright?

Hates AI. She thinks it just saturates too quickly or something? I dunno, it's not me, I just read her call it boring.

Law wise, seems like you guys have suggested some pretty pretty common libertarian views. Would you push back against being labeled that way?

How about straight up abolishing IP law?

I'd be in favor of that, companies would have to compete on distribution (speed, catalog, ETC) and access to the best remixes (supporting creators to move faster) [Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have supported this]. I think YouTube is WAY ahead in this even while navigating the existing copyright labyrinth. Can't think of another platform even close, really.

"Doing something to experience," you mean like the "experiences" on AirBnB?

Yeah, what Josh said. The training data is "agnostic," it's trained on lots of religious stuff through connections between how words are used on top of just having a bunch of holy books in it. I'd describe this sort of thing as "anthropologizing," making it into a study of human culture. LLMs may be a microscope for memes, so to speak.

“We investigate whether injecting biblical Psalms into a large language model's system prompt produces measurable changes in performance on standardized ethical reasoning benchmarks.“

Interesting! Thought Fidel would get a kick out of this. Thoughts?

Anthropic leaks “Claude Code,” there’s already a python clone

Interestingly on LINE we had talked so much about AI, about moving streaming and our complaints with the media industry, but we haven’t talked about copyright in the time of AI.

I know one artist who HATES it. Not just because it seems to hurt artists, but because it kind of instantly makes things boring.

What’s the point of copyright law? Is the law doing its job? Does it make sense? How should it be enforced regarding AI? Should changes be made? Regardless of the law, the choice to prosecute rests on the infringed, so what are the advantages and disadvantages of seeking litigation? How does that sort of logic apply on the small and large scale?

Related: KAIROS

@Josh said in Indiana Republican Primary 2026:

There are at least 100 blank spaces that say "Show Image". What is this?

Mostly links to references to references (e.g. Wikipedia, which I treat as a bad source, but hey).

Thoughts?

What do you mean by experience?

To me the there are two contradictory meanings. One is that experience does stuff to you (or the AI). If it's, like, a memory that can influence output or behaviour or whatever. I think AI has that. So do cats.

The other meaning, what people have, is a quality that adds to anything—so in the context of "experience" it's not what experience does to a person—it's what a person does to experience. Each time a person has or accesses experience it's a creative, interpreted, new/different unpredictable process.

I don't think that's the case for anything we know of except people. And I'd argue that by training an AI on existing data, it's actually moving in the opposite direction of creating something that can "experience" in the sense we mean people do.

So by "experience" do you mean what experience does to people/AI or what people/AI do to experience?

If you were voting in the Indiana Republican Primary in 2026, who would you vote for?

Looks the be a very important and interesting one. See this Claude Artifact on the topic.

Good faith argument: “an honest, respectful dialogue where participants genuinely seek truth or understanding rather than just winning.”

I don’t think this is really about “sides.” A significant number of Democrats and independents flipped towards Trump—myself included. The relevant question is: why?

At a basic level, I think it relates to the left’s increasing acceptance of anti-Westernism, environmentalism, and anti-humanism. Democrats were not always aligned this way. The Clinton administration was openly capitalist, incorporated environmental concerns without making them central, and culture at the time broadly reflected a humanistic cultural ethos (e.g., Friends, Seinfeld, The X-Files, Independence Day). I don't see that, even today, in most media. Though that may be changing (think One Battle After Another versus Project Hail Mary).

I’m not certain where the cultural shift occurred, but the obvious event was the September 11 attacks, combined with a general lack of tangible experience with Islamic cultures in the U.S.

On the intellectual side, there are issues around empiricism—particularly inductivism, Bayesianism, and what cargo cult science describes. These are difficult to communicate to lay audiences, but even educated people often demonstrate misunderstandings.

I had hoped listeners would take some of these issues from the podcast and also recognize the value of maintaining a good-faith demeanor. I think, to their credit, the podcast participants largely succeeded on that front. Which is why I recommended it.

⸻

What did you make of the criticism that Trump has been labeled a fascist for years—someone who would end the republic or trigger World War III—yet those predictions have not materialized? It seems that some commentators repeatedly forecast catastrophic outcomes regarding Donald Trump and then shift the goalposts. How do you interpret that? At what point will the goalposts be moved, or do you think the predictions have come true and now America and the world literally live in an authoritarian dystopia?

⸻

On ICE

The institutions responsible for enforcing immigration law were not functioning effectively, even as enforcement standards became more lenient. You may disagree with that premise, but it raises a practical question: what should be done about illegal immigration?

Is it the responsibility of the United States to serve as a global refuge? Prior to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), enforcement fell primarily to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Why was it unable to perform that role effectively? If ICE were abolished, what institutional structure would replace it?

My view is that ICE was created to address a problem on an unrealistically compressed timeline, which led to training and implementation issues. At the same time, delaying action likely would have exacerbated the problem. We’ve been somewhat insulated from this as expatriates in Japan, but:
• Unauthorized border crossings reached historic highs.
• Drug trafficking increased significantly, with Mexican cartels filling gaps left after the decline of Colombian networks.
• Prescription opioid abuse introduced a new dimension to the crisis.
• (again) The INS was widely viewed as ineffective.

⸻

On Crypto

I largely agree that many actors—including Donald Trump and his associates—have benefited from regulatory ambiguity in cryptocurrency.

That said, why were regulators so slow to establish clear guidelines until recently?

If everyone had waited for regulatory clarity before acting, those regulations would likely be worse. You cannot fully design rules for a system that has not been meaningfully tested—similar to trying to playtest a board game without actually playing it.

It is often difficult to distinguish between “problem creators” and “problem discoverers.” While there is significant focus on Trump, many others are experimenting with novel mechanisms in crypto—airdrops, hard forks, soft forks, and more. A lack of understanding does not inherently imply harm.

⸻

On Iran

This was not covered extensively in the podcast, but if I were to be a single-issue voter—if I had to identify one reason not to vote for Harris—it would be this:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2087

I would describe this as “suicidal pacifism.”

You expressed concern about entrusting nuclear authority to Donald Trump, yet in practice, that risk did not materialize in the way many predicted. By contrast, the government of Iran, who continued to endeavour to have their own nuclear weapons, has:
• Killed tens of thousands of its own citizens for dissent.
• Supported proxy groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
• Repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel.

Some argue Iran is not an imminent threat. I would agree and say it's worse—it is an ongoing, credible existential threat. The regime has functioned as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Meanwhile, Iran was selected to chair the UN Human Rights Council’s Asia-Pacific Group in January 2025.

The only nation to fully support America's test of Iran's reign of terror is Israel. Israel had over a thousand of their citizens hunted, raped, tortured, held hostage and murdered in horrific ways. You can look up the videos if you'd like, I recommend against that, though.

European allies have grown more distant. Japan has taken limited steps (with Sanae Takaichi expressing support), but remains constrained by domestic public opinion—often influenced by idealized visions of peace, a delusion on par with Imagine by John Lennon, while still relying primarily on energy imports from states like Iran and Russia.

If not the U.S. and Israel, which institutions—if any—are capable of addressing threats posed by a theocratic regime engaged in state-sponsored terrorism?

Follow-up question: What factors led to the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the clerical regime? I suspect this is directly relevant, because my personal understanding is that coercing tolerance on Iran lead to an intolerant force flourishing. (see also: Popper's Paradox of Tolerance)