In his 2015 essay, The AI Revolution, Tim Urban introduces the concept of the “Die Progress Unit” (DPU). One DPU being the amount of progress a human being can withstand before it kills them.
For example, imagine transporting a simple farmer from the 1820s to the present day; mains electricity…
I’ve noticed a trend lately. In every conversation about discrimination or politics or social justice, every time it’s suggested that society is getting better, or that attitudes are improving or that humanity isn’t irredeemably evil, somebody will start talking about “some people”.
Those scumbags.
There are a lot of “white” things to keep track of lately.
White supremacy. White power. White privilege. White rage. There’s white silence and white tears and white fragility (this last coined by a white woman to help white people process their white guilt).
Some things are so obvious they should go without saying; the Star Wars prequels were a mistake, thin-crust pizza is superior to deep-dish, Amy Cooper is a racist.
I was so convinced that this last one didn’t need to be said, that even when the occasional blog post popped up…
February 22nd, 2020. Michael ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes straps himself into a homemade, steam-powered rocket and launches himself into a cloudless California sky. Like the four or five dozen spectators watching the launch, Mike believes that the Earth is flat and plans to record footage from high enough in the atmosphere…
There are certain things you’re not supposed to say in 2021. Or, more precisely, there are certain people you’re not supposed to offend.
Straight White men are fair game. There’s nothing you can’t say about people with this particular set of immutable traits. …
The universe operates according to certain unshakable laws.
If an object is acted on by a force, it will exert an equivalent force in the opposite direction. If a body is immersed in a fluid, it will experience an upward force proportional to the weight of the fluid it displaces…
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine was nearly blinded by a sequence of minor coincidences:
Let’s be honest; you’re not quite sure what critical race theory (CRT) is.
Don’t get me wrong, you probably know it began as a tool for examining how legal systems produce racial inequality. You’ve almost certainly heard of some of its offshoots, like intersectionality and “whiteness” studies. You might even…
Of all the stories of courage that define the civil rights movement, one of the bravest can be told in a single sentence:
Mamie Till looked down at the mutilated body of her only son and decided the rest of the world should see it too.
Race. Politics. Culture. Sometimes other things. Almost always polite. Find more at https://steveqj.substack.com
