Why should we study languages We study languages to conquer brown people, pit them against eachother, and order slaves around We study other languages because there are ideas that can be captured with one word or phrase in one language but require a paragraph or a book to describe in another language. We study other languages to interact with the most intimate and formulated thoughts of a people. Why should we study mathematics We study mathematics to develop more systematic and precise ways of killing brown people and stealing....

At some point, I will write an essay on how the ‘West’ weaponizes ‘rights’ to subjugate the world’s people and how they honestly believe that all of the resources of the world belong to them. But the following is honestly what I hear whenever I hear the common refrain from the United States regarding its 51st state. For the 10 year olds reading this, I never drop the hard R unless I am using a direct quote to make a point about history....

Mother India (1957) is a 10/10 movie that I will likely watch atleast a couple more times. Here are a few reasons. I have imagined myself as a young person during a famine many times throughout my life. Before watching this movie, I had never imagined myself as a mother during a famine. I look at a list of famines in Indian history and think I cannot imagine the strength Indian women have shown time and time again during the most difficult of physical/material circumstances....

On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched coordinated attacks on Israel from Gaza on the 50th “aniversary” of the Yom Kippur War. Israel is cutting off water, electricity, food, medicine, etc. to the Gazans (who basically live in an open-air prison) and indiscriminately bombing Gaza. It is a horrifying shit show and we will understand the full scope of the hellscape in the coming days and months. I spent some time as a 14-15 year old reading about reading about the nature of wars between Israelis and Palestinians, but was always daunted by the seeming need to parse through 2000 years of history to seriously justify having much of an opinion....

I have thought about this reddit post on r/DataIsBeautiful a fair amount. [OC] Visualization of livestock being slaughtered in the US. (2020 - Annual average) I first tried visualizing this with graphs and bars, but for me Minecraft showed the scale a lot better. byu/datekram indataisbeautiful We can’t seriously think that we can kill billions of animals every year “because it tastes good” and never face any consequence, right?? Right? Also a difference in scale is a difference in kind; eating meat is different from eating meat every day with every meal for decades....

On 27 September 2023, the Republicans held the 2nd presidential primary debate of this election cycle. Obviously these republicans are ghouls and none of them are “good.” Obviously they are just being debate lords and have no interest in using the dialectic as a methodology for arriving at a higher order truth. 99% percent of the horrible things said in this debate are “standard” republican talking points and I won’t say much about them because I know that they are ghoulish and ghouls gonna ghoul....

I visited Dubai for one week in October 2024. I joined my dad, who was working as an engineer with Emirates Airlines. My dad has been here on and off for maybe 20% of the past year or two. I came here because I wanted to understand the material, historical, and cultural conditions under which the United Arab Emirates became the richest country in Western Asia, such that it currently has a per-capita GDP exceeding that of the United States of America....

I have been something like a “professional Python developer/programmer” for ~5 years. I write in whatever languages I need to use and make the given task easiest, but I have been paid some good money to write a decent amount of Python. During this time, I have designed, written, rewritten, tested, deployed, debugged, and deprecated production Python applications that do real work for real people in the real world. In this post, I describe a few qualities that make Python pretty neat....

I work at an unreasonably large hedge fund. When discussing the trading/gambling implications of the upcoming Donald Trump 2024-2028 American presidential term, I heard the phrase ‘deregulation without growth.’ I think that is an accurate description of the economic consequences of Trump’s previous term and what is like to come in 2025, but incomplete. It is more like “cruel without meaning.” TLDR: When someone at a hedge fund says that they expect “deregulation without growth” it basically means “no market fundamentals will change; there will be no major changes to productive capacity, but we will be able to siphon off more money from productive means than we did last year....

I have a “type” of anime that I like. Broadly, I especially enjoy iyashikei (癒し系) anime and especially leaning into yuri (百合). Or rather, I believe that Iyashikei most accurately describes the kind of anime that I most enjoy and watch most frequently. Roughly speaking, I would define Iyashikei/my type of anime as that which does not have a “plot”, specific antagonist, interposonal conflict, or adversity-driven character development, instead relying on atmosphere, “vibes,” and representations of peace....