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If hardline libertarian free market views are true, then it logically follows that we should legalize drugs. In that case, drug legalization wins by default. However, I do not make this argument, even though I argue for drug legalization. Why not? Because I highly doubt that such free market views are true. Moreover, many such views imply that we should not regulate drugs, AND that we should not regulate foods either. This seems to me almost surely false. I think we should legalize drugs in order to regulate them, much like how we already regulate food. As such, I do not agree with some extreme libertarian arguments for legalizing drugs, even while I appreciate their contributions to the broader case for legalization and critique of the drug war. We support different kinds of legalization.

JoJo's Database of all author interviews

The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fandom has created an organized database of ALL known interviews by the series creator Hirohiko Araki-- with links to the interviews themselves (most of them translated from Japanese, some as-yet untranslated, but all readable online). It is possibly THE most comprehensive author-interview database EVER created by a fandom.

I cannot praise it enough. I will eventually make a long post praising it at much greater length. It is an absolutely incredible achievement.

All the other fandoms' databases of interviews (if they exist at all) are drastically less thorough. I cannot find any comparable example.

The Lord of the Rings fandom has not done this for Tolkien--though there are some lists of citations of interviews, without links to the interviews themselves. The Star Wars fandom, even on the extremely detailed Wookiepedia, has not done this for Lucas. The fandoms of Dragon Ball and One Piece have not done this, even though they have some online lists of interviews. The famously autistic and thorough Thomas the Tank Engine fandom has not done this for the Awdrys.

The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fandom might stand alone in their achievement. They should be an inspiration to everyone else.

(NOTE: After posting on this elsewhere, I have heard the Revolutionary Girl Utena fandom may have made a similar achievement. I will look into this!)

A lot of culture discourse seems to consist in (A) "Disney is evil because they have a woke agenda that motivates them to ruin Star Wars" (where "woke" ≈ "features a Black woman") vs. (B) "Here's why the Star War sequels are good actually" (very questionable view).

The actual reasons why Disney is evil (which have nothing to do with wokeness) become at best a footnote in the discussion. But Disney IS extremely evil and extremely powerful, and its massive presence in our culture is overall bad. This fact seems like it should be more front-and-center.

I've come to have some respect for the oft-maligned genre of "power scaling" videos i.e. videos trying to figure out what all the DBZ power levels are (or other similar stories), and who would beat whom in a fight.

Like any video genre, there are better and worse instances of it. The better instances are thoughtful exercises in taking stock of a wide range of evidence, using a careful eye to discern what kinds of evidence are pertinent, and logically analyzing its implications. The better instances also avoid mistakes such as the assumption that the lore is entirely internally consistent, and they take care to acknowledge self-contradictory evidence and discuss how it messes with the analysis.

The vtuber Essie forgot what a lighter was called, so she called them "automatic matches"

I am finally rewatching the original Dragon Ball.

Mostly it holds up pretty well, except for the many jokes about sexually harassing Bulma (who is sixteen)

I speculate that technological improvement means that psychoactive drugs will become easier to manufacture over time, which will make drug supply & trafficking bans ever more unenforceable. If drug production shifts domestically, without even needing precursors from abroad, that will change the game for drug interdiction regimes. I need to look more into this possibility.

Ethics of piracy

I still find it shocking how few philosophy papers there are on the ethics of digital media piracy. It goes to show how out-of-touch the academic field is with what the people care about. LOTS of people commit digital media piracy, LOTS of people condemn it, and LOTS of people have strong opinions about it. Yet the arguments all around are mostly garbage. Philosophers aren't interested?? SERIOUSLY??? This is damning to the field of applied ethics in practice. Lots of work needs to be done.

People often use "Economics 101" as a pejorative term. But I never hear people use "Psychology 101" as a pejorative, even though it seems to be worthy of the same disdain if not more so. It has been shown how Psychology 101 textbooks frequently severely misrepresent a LOT of classic studies and cases-- including Phineas Gage, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Kitty Genovese murder, the Marshmallow Test, and many, many more.

While my number of tabs has always continually ballooned (it's over 1,000 again now), I successfully kept my number of *windows* below 14 for a year or so. Now, I have over 60 windows open. I would like to collate my tabs into a smaller number of windows.

Reform is pointless because it faces so many collective action problems. It won't work unless you unrealistically get lots of people on board with a specific set of strategies and minimal defection-- and it takes many years to achieve anything, and its gains are typically sabotaged soon afterwards. That's why reform pales in comparison to MY strategy, revolution-- which famously faces no collective action problems, doesn't require many years of hard work, and is never sabotaged soon afterward.

(Alternative version: The exact same post, but swap "reform" and "revolution." Works either way.)

Imagine trying to stop the mafia BEFORE legalizing alcohol. That's what it's like trying to stop the cartels BEFORE legalizing drugs. Absolutely irrational.

Someone should write a love story about a red-button leftist and a blue-button rightist.

ICE recruits are the people who would have signed up for the Klan a century ago. People reporting their neighbors to ICE are the same people who would have turned Anne Frank in to the Nazis.

Red squirrels, red pandas, and red foxes, are ALL orange-- not red. WTF?

Are there any other "red" animals (which are actually orange) that I should know about??

surveillance paranoia -when is it absurd?

I used to think it was ridiculous when random online commenters would say things like "The government puts a camera in your VCR to watch you," which was easily proved false (lots of hobbyists take apart their own stuff). But the actually real surveillance apparatus today is so fucked up it's beyond parody.

And the governments and corporations are trying to make it worse and worse all the time, often successfully. AI will likely skyrocket its awfulness in the coming years.

Many outrageous claims about surveillance are simply true. And many false claims cannot easily be proved false.

The same surveillance paranoia that was absurd and probably a sign of mental illness 20 years ago seems to approximate a good heuristic today. I cannot make fun of someone who believes stuff like this in today's world. At what point does it stop being realistic and become ridiculous? Can anyone say where the line is?

Hopefully the goals of my inquiry into Thomas the Tank Engine analysis will not require me to engage other media featuring sentient vehicles, let alone sentient non-vehicle items. I can't afford to extend my inquiry that far. I have to set limits somewhere.

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