Cola Scriptura @colascriptura - Tumblr Blog

(I don't mean to imply I'd agree with both, one, or neither of these gentlemen.)

A country with one video knows what happened, a country with five is never sure.

Somewhere out there, there's someone who was a little distracted while watching, who thinks the story is about Morpheus and Trinity and Neil.

OK this is the better version of it. Maybe 1 person in 5000 would understand this.

#but I assure you it's very funny #claude

Guys!

I had a thought (well Pliny had half of the thought, but I supplied the other half.)

What if everything Elon Musk does... actually makes some sort of sense? How, you ask? I'm glad you asked. Musk used to say that AI was dangerous and a threat to humanity. Yet now he is creating it? But why? Well. What if everything he does is designed to prove the point?

Musk does the following...

Everything he can to annoy all groups:

Ally with Donald Trump, everyone loves him right?

Reposts things of questionable accuracy on Twitter.

DOGE, we're calling it DOGE?

Nobody cares about AIDS medicine in Africa right?

Makes "anti-semitic comments". Makes a "Hitler salute".

Supports Israel. (We're not aiming for consistency here.)

Has like 50 children, nobody will get jealous.

At the same time, he is creating scary AI:

Grok 3 will apparently tell you how to manufacture nerve gas.

Totally trusts the user, you can give it any request.

Marketed as an un-woke AI, annoying leftists.

Is actually a super-woke AI, annoying the right.

It could all be part of a plan to get the public to fear AI and come together to stop AI.

"AI is dangerous," people will say.

"AI is in the hands of dangerous people, like Musk", they will say.

"AI is a left-wing menace!"

"AI is a right-wing menace!"

This could be the genius 420-dimensional Chess strategy that saves humanity. "Butler Jihad now!"

Do I believe this theory? Perhaps not, but I like it.

Prediction: if he really wants to scare everyone into thinking someone they hate/fear is in charge of AI, he needs to antagonise the right a bit more from this point going forward. He's still too popular on that side. Still, didn't he recently argue for a pro-immigration view? Maybe he's working on it.

Panic over, lads.

#israel

Wednesday went fine :)

Four and a half years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) I asked you to pray for me as I went through unspecified spiritual struggle.

Well, that turned out broadly OK (though the precise matter will be with me all my life, I guess).

<sanders.jpeg>

Anyway, once again I am asking for your financial, I mean -- uh -- pneumatic support. I'll be almost as mysterious as last time, but those of you who want to, could please pray I make it unharmed through Wednesday.

Thank you all.

That Hideous Strength

This is Book 3 of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, written in 1945.

Man, these dystopian novels with religious themes are awesome. I already considered the obscure 1907 novel Lord of the World to outclass Brave New World and 1984. Well, That Hideous Strength is sort of in the genre, except it's also like a fairy-tale.

The book follows Mark and Jane Studdock, as they each become entangled in very different conspiracies; Mark's being a government agency trying to take over Britain and run it on principles such as "efficiency", "rationality", "progress", "sanitation", "the extirpation of the eukaryotes", and that sort of thing; while Jane's is more like a Christian doomsday cult running a small zoo.

Mark's group is the NICE, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. (Curiously, Britain got a real NICE in 1999.) Although some of its members seem to be hapless bureaucrats, those who comprise the Inner Ring seem to wield extraordinary influence, and Mark soon finds himself manipulating the press for the sake of expanding the NICE's powers, such as its police powers... yes of course a scientific research body needs a police force - which for some reason is run by a lesbian with BDSM interests.

Jane, meanwhile, has been having prophetic nightmares, such as witnessing murders before they happen. Though disturbing, she learns to regard them more like news articles delivered directly to her brain. One thing leads to another and she finds her self inducted into a secret society led by a mysterious man who the astute reader (I flatter myself) immediately suspects is the hero Ransom from Books 1 and 2. Ransom still suffers from a wound he picked up on Venus fighting literally-Satan, yet "as lightning goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquillity of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture". Actually this reminded me of this scene from a fairly obscure movie. Perhaps Lewis too takes the view that the chosen must suffer. Anyway, Ransom is in persona Christi, and Jane is (slightly scandalously) charmed by him.

Meanwhile the various minions of the NICE are going about their business, taking their orders from a mysterious individual known as the Head, whose true nature is... well... there's a clue in the name. If one were to buy him a gift, one might consider a hat. (In some ways the book becomes less serious as it progresses; though this is an intentional feature of the modern fairytale Lewis is attempting. To start with it's something like a proto-1984, but later it's more like a Narnia book with different characters.)

It's hard to quite explain the NICE's ideology, but if you consider them to be Satanist Nazi Transhumanist Anti-natalist Aristocrats you might have the right idea. The plot comes to revolve around the hunt for a certain MacGuffin in the form of a person, and which side will locate him first. There's all the drama one might hope for in such a race. Then it builds up to a surprisingly bloody conclusion.

I really enjoyed this book. Reminiscent of the Narnia books in some ways, this seems like the point where Lewis really found his style. 10/10.

Perelandra

This is Book 2 of C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, written in 1943.

I started reading it about a year ago but found it rather tedious in its lengthy descriptions of everything. I'm a reader who wants action and dialogue, not descriptive walls of text. I eventually finished it out of a sense of duty (and besides, I want to get to the more famous Book 3).

The book again follows the adventures of Ransom, who this time is sent by God's angels to the planet Perelandra (a.k.a. Venus) to carry out a mission which he knows nothing about. He finds Venus to be a paradise, although the book suffers from the typical problem that it's hard for the human mind to conceive of paradise. The most I got from it was that the fruits there taste really good.

Ransom encounters one of the planet's permanent residents, a green lady who is the equivalent of Eve. Alas, they are soon joined by the villain Weston from Book 1, who has travelled to Venus by spaceship in order to... to... actually I can't remember what Weston's point was. It's irrelevant though, because Weston soon becomes literally-possessed by literally-Satan. Literally-Satan has two goals: (1) to disrupt God's plan by tempting Green Eve into sin, and (2) to torture the planet's frogs. The exact point of literally-Satan's bizarre side-quest is not really explained, he just does it. Some men chop wood, some men dig tunnels, literally-Satan tortures frogs.

Anyway, when he attends to his main purpose, literally-Satan engages Green Eve and Ransom in lengthy debate, in which he tries to get her to disobey the one command of God that doesn't really make sense -- to avoid sleeping on a certain island -- by suggesting to her that it's really God's will that she find some independence and disobey God in this one little thing. Ransom counters that the point of such a rule is precisely that she can find the value of obeying God for the sake of obedience itself.

This seems to last for days, and Ransom is losing the argument. So God speaks to Ransom in a vision and suggests to him that a better strategy would be to engage literally-Satan in hand-to-hand combat. Like the debate, the battle also lasts for days, but goes better than you might expect, and rather reminds one of Gandalf's fight against the Balrog: "From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought with the Balrog of Morgoth. Until at last I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountain side."

So Satan is defeated, Weston is incinerated in lava, Green Eve declines to sin, Venus is saved, blah blah blah.

5 out of 10 - honestly I think I've made it sound more fun than it was.

#unoriginal

Eliezer retweeting the Bee, truly we live in a timeline.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Cola Scriptura