ursaeinsilviscacant:

I had a phone conversation with my mother. She was previously supportive of my decision to move to the US to be with Rob but now she is afraid. She thinks Trump is going to abolish democracy and I will  “do something idealistic and stupid and get shot.”

I had a conversation with my mom where I said I wanted to go on vacation to Europe sometime, and she said not until they stop having terrorist attacks.

slatestarscratchpad:

Speaking of the FDA, according to rumor Trump is considering Jim O'Neill as FDA director. He’s apparently a colleague of Peter Thiel’s at Mithril Capital, and he’s on the board of the Seasteading Institute.

I am Facebook friends with a Jim O'Neill. I can’t remember how I became friends with him, but I used to get a lot of friend requests from people I don’t know who I assume are blog readers, and I would mostly accept. He talks about Mithril Capital and seasteading on his timeline. I think it is the same guy.

He’s posted a couple of papers by MIRI and is also friends with Eliezer, Anna Salamon, Mike Vassar, Alyssa Vance, Julia Galef, Will Eden, etc.

Provisionally, holy @#!$

Update: the other major candidate seems to be Balaji Srinivasan

postmarxed:

tchaikovskaya:

tchaikovskaya:

for real tho, how long are liberals gonna pretend that “scathing” award show speeches and op-eds count as real, tangible resistance to trump???

to me, that’s the equivalent of a general rallying the troops on the battlefield but then not telling them to actually charge at the enemy so they just go back to their tents and congratulate themselves over how psyched up they are

Someone needs to explain this to me. It sounds like the complaint is “some celebrities denounced Trump, but there’s still Trump!”

I mean, “X does not, on its own, defeat Trump” is true for pretty much anything. Protests. Fundraising. Publishing really great journalism exposing Trump’s faults. Analyzing policies. People have been trying all these things for a long time, they haven’t defeated Trump, and there’s no sign the next marginal one is going to do so either.

I think you have to think of these things as more drops in the bucket. Maybe if you do a thousand protests, a thousand journalistic exposes, a thousand well-crafted policy arguments, a thousand celebrity condemnations, and a thousand donations to relevant candidates and political action committees, that will have an effect.

I think a better question is whether the effects of celebrities are positive (even if very low) or negative. If positive, we should thank the celebrities for doing what little they can, even if it’s not as much as we’d like. I mean, they’re celebrities, not political campaign strategists. What else are they going to do?

The only argument I can see where this would actually matter is one that says that the average person (or average undecided/conservative person?) so hates rich Hollywood celebrities that the average celebrity condemnation actually helps Trump rather than hurting him. But I haven’t heard a lot of people make this argument seriously, and it seems like the sort of thing we’d need a lot more evidence for.

Is this the position that people are actually pushing when they complain about this?

ursaeinsilviscacant:

What made our wedding offbeat: Well, it all started because of a shark attack. We got engaged after Aaron was almost eaten!

We decided to celebrate the “attackiversary” by getting married on the same island where Aaron was almost killed, exactly a year later. Because of this, our wedding became more of a three-day-long celebration of life than a wedding.

i’m sure irl this was very romantic and sweet but this sounds like the wedding of the world’s least genre-savvy shark attack movie protagonist