December Links

2024 Lists

Before we get to what I’ve been reading the last month, I wrote some lists and list items:

• (New) Movies I Watched in 2024. I mostly watched older movies as usual. (If you’re interested in TV you can find all my TV reviews here - for shows I finished - and here for shows I gave up on.)

• (New) Music I listened to in 2024. I mostly listened to older music as usual.

• The 50 Best Covers of 2024. I wrote about a few of these.

• The Best Cover Albums of 2024. I wrote about two of these.

What I’m Reading:

• Yasmeen Abutaleb, Damian Paletta: Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (2021): It sure is an interesting time to be reading this book!

• Nate Silver: The Signal and the Noise (2012): Now that Silver is a pariah among many on The Left I am reading his first book.

• Blair Braverman: Small Game (2022): A fun novel about a survival reality show.

• “His Majesty The President”: Sorry to keep sharing so many things about the US but the general point about how the US is trending towards rule by the one while Americans continue to think they are an exception and a City on a Hill and all that is well taken.

• “The Anarchist and the Hockey Stick”: There is no universal scientific method. Related: “How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress towards a cure for decades” [2019].

• “Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House”: So I hate Brutalism mostly but like some other modernist buildings. That being said, I thought this was a good point: “Why should our entire built environment be optimized to amuse a sliver of one percent of the population, even granting that it amuses them very effectively? People mock kitsch art as “the kind of picture you’d put up at the dentist’s office”. But it serves this purpose fine. People don’t want to go to the dentist’s office and see a picture of the Virgin Mary in a vat of urine. You should keep the avant-garde stuff for the museums and let ordinary people living their ordinary life see normal pretty things.”

• “How Gay Marriage Ruined Democratic Activism”: “Science, not another post about American politics!” Yes, I’m sorry. But I think this is an interesting idea and I think there are some loud, online left wing voices in Canada who have made the same mistake.

• “Why did Silicon Valley turn right?”: More on the US, I’m sorry, but at least on ideas again, and ideas that impact us given how much you and I rely on technology developed or owned by these rich people who suddenly stopped liking liberal democracy and who are, potentially, now an existential threat.

• “Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars”: I only drive a few times a year, but when I drive at night, it does feel like somehow everyone’s lights are brighter than when I was younger.

• “Eat What You Kill”: This story, about a Montana oncologist, is just awful. In a normal country, this would be a massive news story. But the US is not a normal country.

• “I'll Take the Crypto Industry Seriously When Its Biggest Advocates Stop Saying "What Did You Expect?"”: Amen.

• A good Bluesky thread on the stupid media cycle on people leaving Twitter for Bluesky are somehow giving up on speaking to people with different opinions.

• “Loss aversion or mistakes?”: Are human beings irrational or are they just bad at dealing with complex information?

• “It’s not just tickets and fees: How Live Nation quietly takes your money at every possible opportunity”: Burn it all down! Until a US administration finally destroys this abomination (who knows when that will happen) Beyonce and Taylor Swift and equally big performers should form a competitor.

• “How a Strongman Gets Stronger”: “Fascism rides in on the wings of flattery and flourishes by making itself an immediate practicality. Recognize that and don’t fall for it. The strongman, addicted to praise, is fragile at his core.” The only reason Trump is so successful is because he is allowed to be. By the Republicans, by the media, by too many institutions to list.

• “Some Other America, One I Do Not Know”: On the pearl-clutching around social media celebrating the murder of that health insurance CEO. Related: The guys at Forever Wars had what I thought was a fair take on the killing and the response. I do understand that the health insurances companies are not the actual problem, but I don’t think many Americans are receptive to that message, and this is a system that could have been improved a long time ago if everyone involved wasn’t making so much money. And more on the same topic.

• “The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis Of Bag Culture”: If the sole point of viral fame is to make as much money as you can before you are no longer famous, then a rug pull may be the logical end.

• “The phon[e]y comforts of useful idiots”: On how to criticize AI and AI-skepticism.

• “Debanking (and Debunking?)”: This is an exhaustive explanation of what debanking really is what the crypto industry is complaining about when they claim they are being debanked. I do not like this guy’s writing style and I have trouble reading him all in one go, but I do appreciate how much he knows about how the (American) financial system works (which is more than seemingly anyone else).

• “Society's higher ups need better Q&A tools”: I like this idea. I don’t know that it would actually work. What I would love is to institutionalize this, make the PM compulsorily answer random questions like this in addition to media questions.

• “Mass hysteria was the inevitable outcome of the UFO craze” (and, by the same author, “UFOs are a soft sci-fi genre” [PW]): I’m not sure the cause is what he says it is, but I do think there is some relationship. Also: “It’s Time For A Little Recreational Mental Illness In New Jersey”

• “The Long March Through the Institutions DEBUNKED”: So I don’t entirely agree with this analysis of how the US federal government has “moved left” over the years (in part because I really don’t think it has!) but I do think it’s correct in how it refutes the incremental socialism theory nonsense. I wrote about this myself 5 years ago, not in response to someone like Rufo but just someone on Reddit.

• “The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed”: This is about the US, by the way. I was very pro liberalizing sports gambling and I think I was wrong. And the thing I was wrong about is phones. If sports gambling could only be done in the store or at an OTB, I think it would be a lot less horrible.

• “The end is nigh and here's why”: Is it reasonable to believe in the apocalypse?

• “Let's talk about billionaires selling hot dogs for $9”: Amen.

• “Casual Viewing”: I became a Zip customer (the Canadian Netflix, RIP) in 2004. My ex-girlfriend became a Netflix customer in 2010 (or even 2009 if that’s possible) and I watched it more than she did. I was an early adopter because these services had better selection than Blockbuster. But that has long changed with Netflix. I now prefer Tubi because it has way more stuff I want to watch. This is a pretty damning essay on why Netflix - and streaming in general - is bad for movies and the film industry.

• “Flat Earthers and Belief in Belief”: It’s good to examine what you believe and try to make sure your beliefs are based in some kind reality.

• “Welcome to the Human Doom Loop”: I haven’t seen most of you in person in a very long time and those of you I have it was because of an annual Christmas party.

• “The conservative-tech alliance is coming to Canada”: Well I hope not. And I wish I could somehow boycott Shopify. Alas.

• “Trump, Tech Weirdos, And The Republican Crusade For Cultural Dominance”: I’m not sure he even mentions Trump, actually.

• “Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all” [PW]: Honestly it felt this way 20 years ago.

• “Stand For Something”: I appreciate the moral clarity about this. I don’t think it’s…entirely fair if only because every US administration since I don’t know when (TR?) supplies weapons to regimes that kill their citizens and/or actively kills people in other parts of the world. Personally, I feel like Americans have always been comfortable with their country doing stuff like this. Gaza is just more in our faces due to social media and the sheer scale of the loss of life.

• “Jimmy Carter’s Law Day Address at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia” [1974]: I am of the school of thought that, given the nature of the position, there can be no moral or “good” US presidents. But if there was one former President who has done good in the world since he was president, it’s Jimmy Cater. This speech, which apparently helped his case for the presidency, is a good indication of the kind of person he was, and how different he was from most politicians.

What I’m Listening to:

• Behind the Bastards:

  • “The War of the Eggs”: A crazy story that seems all to emblematic of how humans treat resources.

  • “The Con Artist Who Invented a Country”: I first learned about Gregor MacGregor (descendant of Rob Roy!) from Revolutions. But this is a good refresher. (With the occasional, and typical bit of false information: No Robert, Curacao is not in or near The Bahamas.)

• Canadaland: Commons: “Crude”:

  • “The Billionaire Plot to Destroy Alberta’s Economy is Totally Real!”: This was fun because I remember the War Room. I thought it was pretty stupid then. Seems like it was pretty stupid.

  • “The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea”: I did not know about this.

  • “A Town, Annihilated”: Mandatory listening for Canadians. Reminded me I still have never watched the CBC documentary.

  • “Orphan Wells: Citizen Con”: This would make me insane if I lived in Alberta and owned land.

• Darknet Diaries: “Stacc Attack”: A really interesting one about a crypto platform hack. Not sure how much we can trust the guy at the centre, but it’s still interesting.

• The Decibel: “How Canada’s food inspectors missed a deadly listeria outbreak”: I had no idea that this happened. Did you?

• Dunc’d On: This has become my go-to replacement for The Lowe Post until Zach gets a new podcast.

• Reply All:

  • “The Case of the Phantom Caller”: A fascinating phone scam. It’s really only the kind of thing you would ever hear about if you know phone industry people if they didn’t do an episode about it.

  • “Long Distance”: A scammer calls one of the hosts and he…can’t let it go. This two-part episode is shockingly reviting given how stakes it actually is. One of their best ever.

  • “Minka”: This one is relevant if you have aging relatives.

• Science Vs.:

  • “Ozempic: Is It Scarier Than We Thought?”: I haven’t finished this one yet.

  • “Anti-Aging: Can We Be Forever Young”: You’ll be shocked to learn that the latest anti-aging crazes are exaggerated. One thing I get frustrated about with these discussion is nobody - nobody! - ever discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Everything decays.

  • “Ayahuasca: WTF is up with DMT?”: This is a really interesting episode about the potential of DMT to help people with depression.

  • “Personality Tests: Who Are You Really?”: Personality tests are astrology. I say that as someone who loves answering personality tests.

  • “Caffeine: How Much is Too Much”: A lot, actually. You’re fine. Nothing to worry about.

• 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s: The 2000s: I wasn’t going to listen to this series because I really didn’t hear much popular music in the aughts. But it turns out there are a few songs that I do know and am interested in. I hadn’t listened to System of a Down in forever. So the “Chop Suey” episode got me listening. I feel like I’ve been way too generous to their final two albums; they’re much worse than their first few.

• 30 for 30:

  • “The Longest Game”: I liked it so much I bought the book.

  • “A Streetball Mixtape”: The problem with the people who were there making the documentary is that they don’t have any perspective. I have no idea how accurate or important it is.

  • “The King of Crenshaw”: I listened to the first episode of this season and I decided I didn’t need to listen to a series about a rapper I’ve never listened to.

What I’m Watching:

• Dead Wax: I finished watching this channel for the time being. I liked some of the interviews a lot and found little of interest in others. There are better music YouTube channels out there but some of the interviews are really, really good.

• “Exploring Rabbit Inc.'s Former NFT and Crypto Project Gama”: This is from months ago - and I read about it back then - but it’s still right up my alley. Part 2.

• “Exposing the YouTube Sponsor "Honey" Part 1”: Someone was just recommending Honey to me the other day. Oops.