Category Archives: Adages

Moldbug actually says something well

An actually good metaphor from Moldbug (though I will give him some points for defining Effective Altruism as “Telescopic Philanthropy)  the below is about libertarianism
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-effective

Capitalism is cool. Spontaneous order is cool. Yet it is easy to ignore the fact that capitalism, as we know it, is not mostly made of spontaneous order. It is not a sea of self-employing economic atoms.

Capitalism is a sea of economic molecules. Some of these molecules are single atoms. Some are giant megacorporations. Between the molecules, all order is spontaneous. Within the molecules—raisins in the bread—all order is directed and monarchical.

Another de Boerism that should be a yard sign

From this post on feeling valid

I don’t mean to be a bummer here. But it’s important to point out that we’re born in terror, we exist for no reason, we experience confusion and shame as children, we busily prepare ourselves for lives we don’t want or can’t have, we are forced to take on the burdens of adult responsibility, we compromise relentlessly on what life we’ll pursue, we settle and settle and settle, we fear death and ponder our meaninglessness, we experience the horrors of aging, and when we die the only comfort we have is that we aren’t conscious to learn that there was never any heaven or God to give it all meaning. This is the inevitable reality of human life and it can never change.

Interesting threads on religion and hell

This one from Reddit, about things that people say are in the bible, but aren’t – particularly this nugget
I prefer:

Light a fire for a man, and keep him warm for a night. Light a man on fire, and he’s warm for the rest of his life.

And this article about the many and varied definitions of hell, which I remember my dad talking about 30 years ago or so (short version, the fire is everlasting, the suffering isn’t – at the end of days the wicked are just erased from existence)