I’m not even going in depth or stating any opinion, there’s no ground to remotely have a reasonable conversation on this.

But there’s something that is quite obvious and one click away to verify, yourself.

The “narrative” is that Covid vaccines were “rushed.” While there can be an argument, since this idea is not entirely wrong. People were dying, you don’t want to take a vaccine carelessly, it’s all consequence of risk assessment, and it’s all within the domain of uncertainty. It usually takes more than 9 or so months before fully verifying a vaccine. The problem here is not what the narrative says or why, but WHOSE narrative it is.

This is the part that can be verified, objectively without any complexity or layers being added.

The CURRENT narrative is that Trump appointed RFKJ in order to pull things back in check.

So let’s see, both the “Covid vaccines were rushed” and “vaccines cause autism” sides. WHOSE sides these are.

Beside the funny slip, “vaccines shouldn’t be immune from scientific scrutiny.” Which is the old, textbook straw man: vaccines are not immune from scientific scrutiny and, if anything, one of the sector of science under the MOST scrutiny. This is the typical “far right grows through disaster fantasies”, or evoking threats that don’t exist in order to conceal the real one.

But again, the point here is not to comment on the validity of what is being said, simply WHOSE argument this is.

This is from April 2021.

“The science is unequivocal” seems quite a final statement. So where’s the immunity from scientific scrutiny when that same scientific scrutiny is unequivocal? Let’s move to the other part then.

This is also quite unequivocal, although you could argue this is merely anecdote rather than rule: he’s only speaking about his own case. Though you’d have to acknowledge that the discussion itself wants actually to use the anecdote FOR generalizing it as a rule. Because otherwise it would be pointless to debate what happens to Elon Musk’s kids. It’s none of our business.

But it is interesting here to scroll up.

This is the same date as the previous.

It shows a couple of important points:
1- Elon Musk DOES use anecdotes to deduce general rules. “So many people” he KNOWS. Leads to an universal truth, “failure to acknowledge that is a lie”.
2- He believes, at least over time, Covid vaccines started to have worse outcomes than the virus itself. (here’s another, if you want more of a direct statement)

It should be obvious that there’s ZERO science in all this deduction process. Again, I’m not even trying to analyze what is true and what is false. It’s enough to prove the PROCESS itself is completely wrong to prove the conclusion is wrong regardless (because being right through randomness has nothing to do with truth).

But it’s funny to go back and complete that post that I cut:

So many people he knew in very rare cases got serious side effects from allergic reactions that are easily addressed.

Something like that. But one is from 2021, the other from 2023, so you can argue that the serious side effects started to manifest later.

Or rather, the worm writhes and renegotiates his “beliefs”, as opportunity changes over time.

In any case, Covid vaccines were rushed, so the narrative wants, this has to be stopped and vaccines shouldn’t be allowed to escape scientific scrutiny. And Trump, through RFKJ, steps in to make all this possible.

But who was trying to “rush” the vaccines, I wonder, in 2020 when the topic was hot?

So is history ever rewritten to accommodate the interests of those in power.

Trump administration tried to FORCE vaccines being delivered before they were ready because it was politically convenient to ascribe to themselves the merit of that solution. Elections were close and Biden was starting to gain approval by criticizing Trump’s weak and slow response to Covid.

Trump administration tried to rush the Covid vaccine, Fauci stopped them.

It’s one click away, easy to verify.

Prosecute Trump and Musk.

Oh wait. I forgot they control the fascist state and that what they do is rewriting truth as it is convenient to them.

They are The Truth now.

It all closes in a perfect circle. One voice proclaiming itself The Truth. The self-making right. The true core of fascism. Now.

(edited from the future, now Elon Musk dispatches orders, the will of the people, seized and mastered, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.)

It’s what happens when you enable and give power to a deranged megalomaniac sociopath who’s merely having fun playing the “videogame” that is our collective lives.

We all are just children he bends and breaks for his own fun and hunger. Just another monster of man.

An amazing exchange worth highlighting.

Starts with Elon Musk replying “Ron is not wrong” to some other irrelevant message.

Some other dude replies to him “Ron is wrong.”

Another dude steps in to give his worthwhile contribution: “Ron Paul is basically never wrong.”

To which Elon Musk must reply again: “Ron is right.”

Human brains are fried, we’ll have to wait for bots to see some traces of intelligence again.

Worth commenting this because actually true without even caveats:

I’ve wanted to write about creativity and AI for a while, but let’s just slightly dip here.

It’s all quite correct in its simplification. The idea that the weather is not controlled by us, so if we verify an AI prediction being actually true, against the real world, as a form of science, this should give us a sort of proof that the AI works at a more fundamental level.

As with all AI problems, all the confusion and weirdness happens because we get the overall frame in reverse. It’s not simply that the way we predict the weather, and the way AI works, are all based on heuristics. It’s that human consciousness is all based on heuristics.

In this case this sort of evidence says that deep learning is not more fundamental than physics, but more fundamental than US.

Because even when looking at the weather, we are the filters of perception, the lens through which we observe. Of course the weather is “out there”, so it’s not a perception problem, as it can be verified. But our canons of prediction are wholly ours. We filter what’s relevant from what is not, and what we judge an accurate prediction. In the end it’s all filtered and biased by some human arbitrary canon.

It’s the same with the problem of creativity and copyright. We can all see that AI doesn’t invent anything: it simply regurgitates what it has been fed. It’s digital vomit, coming at a great cost. But the fundamental aspect that makes it look interesting and good to us, is the illusion of removing origins. As long you have the source, training material on one side, and output on the other, you see that AI has done nothing worthwhile. But the amount of data it gobbles up, and the complexity of algorithms mean that AI is GOOD at HIDING ITS TRACK. Obfuscating the trail between origin and end. To create the ILLUSION of being TRACKLESS.

What happens when you remove those tracks from perception? That the origins of things are gone, and so we attribute them ON THE SPOT, to the thing itself. If there’s no direct observable origin, then AI created it. AI “made” something new.

The trick to understand AI is not about figuring out its limits, to realize that there’s no “real” creativity there matching human beings. But to understand that we human beings don’t have the creativity we think we have. That we also are heuristic machines compressing data and re-elaborating something that is fed to us. What comes in comes out, just the same. The reason why we BELIEVE we have REAL CREATIVITY is because of how much we SUCK, through limited introspection, at tracking the origin of our own thoughts. We have no data on the data we use and we become, therefore we think OURSELVES origins. We think something special and magical happened inside us. That we became the ORIGIN of something. That we made it.

Same as AIs, we are heuristics machines that don’t have the creativity we think we have. And where that “feel” is itself born not out of an unique, special QUALITY, but it’s born of a FAULT: We are incompetent at tracking ourselves, therefore think ourselves SPECIAL. We celebrate incompetence. We make virtues out of sins.

AIs are simply teaching us we aren’t as smart and special as we think we are.

AIs still seem not advanced enough to match us, because they still need to become more stupid. Only then AIs will become truly human.

(well, then there’s the little problem of efficiency and energy consumption)

A little note that shouldn’t even be necessary, being the situation so plainly readable.

One of the bigger reasons why Elon Musk went “all in” with Trump is so that, given a win, he could convert all his previous investment as leverage. It’s all about leverage. Not in the sense that now Trump “owes” the victory to Musk, but that Musk controls the consensus, that he shapes the narrative and has a firm choke on its neck. The will of the people, lifting him up like an unholy prophet.

The MORE Musk invested before, the more he gains active leverage on Trump, to make Trump his instrument.

Right now it’s honeymoon. The message is that there’s an uniformity of vision and goals, between Musk and Trump. But we know how this is plainly just a message, and that the two are together out of expediency.

If you pull this together it’s quite obvious that the bigger threat to this right-wing government and hegemony doesn’t come from the “left”. As I said before, the left is just a puppet controlled by the right. It has no uses other than being ridiculed.

The threat comes from the inside.

There are of course plenty of pragmatic reasons for it not to blow up, and keep the honeymoon as long as possible. At a basic level, Trump and Musk interests ARE aligned. But this current unity is also quite fragile, because when the course changes from general propaganda to the small practical details and execution, interests will start to conflict.

On one side, we’ll never see any of this happening. Because it will all be behind the scenes. The constant bargaining to obtain advantage here and there, the annoyance due to Musk wedging himself into everything out of his competence.

And then it will likely break.

What does happen when the illusion shatters? Elon Musk’s main trait is that he is easy to read. He is predictable. He has promoted “X” as this source of “truth” and “democracy.” A source that he seized and controls. Whatever disagreement, whatever grudge he has, last one about the judge who forbid him getting paid more, turns into a public lynching. The will of the people.

The moment you upset Elon Musk, is the moment you cross the will of the people. And the people will rise up, against you. The same way his will blends with Trump’s, disappears and blends into the greater will of the people. It’s not two to one, but three into one. All three the same.

Elon Musk strategy is to camouflage himself and let people speak with his own disguised voice. To then re-broadcast and make his own. So that he dominates and controls without being seen.

The same strategy that was used to make Trump win, will be the strategy to take him down when he overstays his function.

Elon Musk made Trump win because Trump is expendable.

Because Trump is WEAK.

Elon Musk made Trump win so that Trump were to believe he was weak, so that he would have to continue to lean and depend on Elon Musk. Knowing that even a little sidestep would mean his own end. The stronger the victory the stronger the bond. But with only one being truly in control. The one who seized expediency to make himself irreplaceable. Because you can’t replace the will of the people.

Vox populi, vox Dei.

This is a little “sense of wonder” game I used to exhibit years ago when trying to impress on how scope can be so deep to become unfathomable.

It’s a simple invite to imagination, all played on maps.

We start from here:

I love the style and earthy colors. But besides that, it’s a little, abstracted section of a map. It opens to the sea, there are some unmarked islands, a river splitting in some ways across the mainland and a good number of towns along its path. Some small some bigger, according to those three different symbols, the empty red circle, the full circle and the square.

You see GOLOTHA, prominent near the bay.

All of that can be enough to be a WORLD. It does look incomplete, but it’s also quite a large playground. Imagine visiting all those towns, it’s a role-playing game, the supposedly large number of inhabitants and their stories. Imagine treading through unmarked territory, maybe find some lone tower, a dungeon. Such a nice and intriguing countryside.

It’s enough of a world that a party of players could spend a couple of years in it, with a good enough master, just getting to know it.

But it’s just a map, and it’s more than it seems…

Here’s some sleight of hands. You think we’re going large, but look better, we’re going closer, toward the smaller…

See on the upper right? There’s our GOLOTHA right there. Right under it there’s CHAKTA, as you expect from the first map. But if you go looking for OMNIS, to the right, you won’t find it. Are the two maps diverging? Nope, OMNIS is simply just slightly out of this territory, out of that rightmost margin.

You can see the main lump of land, with that large swamp called PERIS MOOR, and downward another big town SELVOS, inside DEVERSH BAY. See all those smaller towns around it? They are simply ignored in the first map above. They are so small that they’ve been abstracted away.

Now, pay more attention and you’ll understand that the area of this second large map corresponds almost precisely to the portion of the area of the first map, that drawn “square” block. See how the first map is divided not just by hexes, but also larger squares? Two big ones almost complete but with the bottom portion cut, and more partial ones above and to the sides? The bottom map represents almost precisely one square.

Yet this second bigger map, feels like a continent! Countless towns that would be impossible to visit while playing. This is already so big that defies the possibility of full knowledge. The possibility of being WRITTEN, so that it could then be READ. A world that goes beyond one person. A world that cannot be contained.

But we’re playing a game inside the game.

Sorry for the quality, but if you squint here you can see that this big map is divided by the same “square” outlines used above. I’ve marked an empty square to better assess its size, and then pointed to the arrow that TINY portion of land we’ve examined up to this point.

Well, as you can see, what looked already like incredibly vast land… is part of a MUCH bigger whole.

Let’s approximate and remove those spaces that are just water, and we can say the full map is comprised of 70+ squares.

SEVENTY OF THEM. Just as large and supposedly, potentially as densely detailed as the big map above, showing just one.

How would you even realistically or unrealistically visit this, with a party of players? How can you even WRITE about it, when it’s already daunting to even THINK about it.

How many LIFETIMES could be spent within a single fictional world?

But we’re playing game inside a game here…

Hello world!

See that whole previous map with its own seventy counted land “squares”, it’s now been abstracted down to ONE square. Look at the map here and you can find the continent-now-island right there on the upper left.

I’ve marked with a red square the minuscule-yet-daunting portion of land we started with. Can you feel the VERTIGO now?

Will you be a tourist in your next life? Or rather, an eternal deity of infinite curiosity?

When is that the real world becomes a little toy within a larger fiction?

But you can already see here, that’s not a complete map.

So I introduce you to… LYTHIA.

Here too, if you squint, I marked the original square we started with.

Good luck, fellow fictional traveler, you’ll need it.

How large can this world possibly be. What kind of delusions its inventor had to suffer.

See then, the world whole:

KETHIRA.

But it is just a game, we’re playing.

Remember this?

Let’s see how X promotes truth rather than click-baiting:

Of course you can’t have explicit, public rules for what regulates a declared free-speech, public space (because it’s not actually public, it’s private). You need “scoops” and privileged access to inside employees.

A number of semi-hidden rules like this one:

Nice graph without numbers, btw. Those were all the rage during COVID and Nvidia presentation slides.

Wait, what is this “reach” and “deprioritization” on a FREE SPEECH platform? But let’s expand the one we started with:

“Reply like a madman”, X rule to MAXIMIZE TRUTH.

Or maybe it’s the opposite and farming for engagement maximizes inflammatory action? What is the most likely outcome?

One of Elon’s groupies still a “crybaby” tho:

(thread with some actual data)

(or this, despite it’s quite superficial. But the bottom line is that people don’t simply leave X to send a message, but also because it doesn’t fucking work anymore. Objectively broken and a waste of time.)

But all this stuff is beside the point.

The platform is bent for political exploitation. The moment your “reach” to the “world town square” is regulated by a fee, a fee that however small is under the control of a political party, creates a feedback loop so that those who participate are already themselves filtered. Filtered out, because I’d rather starve to death than give a dollar to Elon Musk. And like me obviously many others.

So what is “free speech”? (without even going into “truth-seeking”)

We used to say, the medium is the message. Who controls the medium, controls the message.

Elon Musk’s magical trick has been to make people focus on the message: you can say everything you want! Free speech absolutism!

He wants to distract you, like magicians, while the substitution happens: he doesn’t need to control the message, because he has the control of the medium. The darkness that comes before. He shapes the discourse uphill, where you aren’t looking. He doesn’t need to censor the single, when he controls the statistically meaningful.

What you write is not what people see.

He gives you illusions, while he seizes the real.

Feeling very sluggish today, but there’s always Elon Musk to make me happy.

Oh! Please do tell, how is “modern” media NOT a click-maximizing and NOT a propaganda-maximizing machine?

I’ve become a fan of inversion and reversibility (and why it’s the ground of the real war no one even seems to acknowledge). But this one is so ludicrous that it is legitimately funny.

All an excuse for more Bakker quotes (if you don’t understand the connection it’s because you aren’t looking close enough).

Oh, this whole reply thread.

“It causes me great pain to see the original creators taken so carelessly.”

“The screenshotted text is even wilder. It completely slanders the very foundations of D&D and fantasy TTRPGs in general. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

“Unfortunately there is a lot of childless weirdos that are trying to reframe the history of gaming”

“This sort of bashing the original creators of D&D (Gygax and Arneson, #DnD) is disgraceful, but the tender leftists love doing it. Women are all through the MM in positive light: sylphs, dryads, and nymphs. #wotc is driven by trashy activism.”

(about this one above. LOL, you can’t be serious.)

“Incredible! It really is so shocking and incomprehensible that wotc would soil the names of men like Gary Gygax. Their narcissism is like a stench!”

“Grummz, not surprised. Elon Musk however…. Well, I’m glad he noticed. I shouldn’t be surprised though, he is an Alpha Nerd.”

“D&D is toast. Nobody plays fantasy role playing to be a gay dwarf baker. (Not making that up, literally a character depicted in latest material). It’s embarrassing. Pandering to the 1% of population that don’t even play the game. This will end badly for them.”

I guess I’m entitled to an opinion because as a kid D&D was a huge myth for me, and still is and I have great respect for Gygax and Arneson, and lots of my time goes digging into that history of the 70s.

And there’s nothing problematic with the following images shown as “proof”:

The only part I’d disagree is that this type of level commentary is probably ill placed and not suitable for a rulebook, but looking more closely this seems coming from a “making of” other book, where instead it is fully in-topic and well deserved.

I think this amounts to the same brainless way that people have to chop human beings into coarse binary categories of good/evil. That doesn’t have any contact with reality, since human beings are complex, instead. All of us are agglomerates of good and bad things. And even the good and bad of those things isn’t clearly good and bad, but itself an agglomerate of actual cause and effect.

What is the problem of recognizing there are aspects of the cultural world that spawned D&D that were problematic and easily lending themselves to criticism? And why the presence and legitimacy of such criticism would put D&D under a bad light, even?

If anything THE COMMENTS ABOVE condemn the people. Not the RPGs. Even with the (undeniable) sexism, those RPGs are fine. They are a cultural product with its own limits but also qualities. I’m AGAINST the idea that a cultural product HAS to have representation. Because I see cultural products as PARTIAL IN NATURE. So I’m totally fine if a piece of culture, whether it is a movie, a book, comics, or whatever, is sexist, or has a very limited representation. It’s fine. It shows a light on a part of the world, a limited point of view. It is partial by nature. As long of course it doesn’t become ideology. As long the intent isn’t to make partiality the rule.

The Theater of the Mind is a great place to debase and slaughter other people (and ourselves). Reality is not.

I don’t see anything wrong if you read a story of Conan and all the women are enslaved. Why? Because it’s fiction, as long it doesn’t want to be IDEOLOGY. And even when it is because it reflects indirectly an ideology that was absorbed and taken for granted, it can still be appreciated for the entertainment it offers WHILE also lending itself to criticism for those aspects that deserve it. It’s not all one indivisible thing to condemn or celebrate.

Nor I see anything wrong if now RPG spaces are wider, more accessible and more diverse. I don’t see anything wrong to analyze some previous work critically. I don’t see anything wrong if newer works are developed as consequence of that awareness.

Cancel culture, that I do not approve at all, erases the thing. Cancel culture is the very opposite of diversification. But that piece above doesn’t “cancel” anything. It merely reads critically, expanding the scope of what a new product should be. Nor it does anything to the “memory” of Gygax. Why Gygax himself wouldn’t recognize some base misogyny in his old work? I see it more as a consequence of naivety, because those RPGs were largely naive. And generally also quite harmless. They weren’t seized as IDEOLOGIES. They were simple, basic wishful thinking. Entertainment lending itself to some manly superficiality.

If you see all that as an attack to the person and memory of Gygax, well, it only speaks of you and your stupidity (and your actual, confirmed butthurt misogyny).

(also anticipating the criticism: no, I also don’t think that those people in the comments are misogynist BECAUSE they played D&D)