Word from the Dark Side – All Apologies, hostile technologies, police recruiting atrocities and demon cosmologies
Today in history, January 15: Australia’s London Bridge fell down
Girl named Sue
Many spins around the sun ago, I was out on the town with my Oz girlfriend and a mixed group of her friends.
One of them, an average-looking Asian girl called Sue, wanted to drop in on a well-known pub in a flash area because there was a guy hanging out there who she was besotted with.
I had not theretofore known that some men were so alluring that women would go out of their way to be near them – my experience had all been the other way around – so I was keen to lay eyes on him.
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – Tender is the Night, some bureaucratic light, Huawei looks alright and the Indian hotel fight
The creators should avoid wrapping absurd stories under the guise of realism and using absurd artistic techniques as an excuse to fabricate overly bizarre plots that lack genuine value, Guangdianshijie said, as such practices could distort the public’s perception of Chinese entrepreneurs and harm the profile of the entrepreneurial community.
The guidelines said creators should tell the stories of Chinese entrepreneurs from both history and contemporary times, rather than being limited to themes of romantic entanglements and family disputes, noting that in particular, creators should avoid promoting marriage concepts that clinging to the powerful, wealthy individuals and families.
The guidelines pointed out that management of CEO romance micro dramas should be strengthened. Specific measures include reducing the quantity, improving the quality, and avoiding the use of terms like “domineering CEO” as appealing titles to attract viewers.
Are ‘domineered CEOs’ like their minataurs?
By the way, are your beloved women also watching those AI-generated short dramas now?
AI took my jerb
Well, it wasn’t quite that simple, and over the next decade it rarely will be.
However, it sort of happened.
I was providing online corporate training through a company that had contracts with behemoths like Mercedes, Amazon and Google. And also smaller companies of many types: hydraulics, medical machinery, pharmaceuticals, varnish producers, etc.
It was a McJob, to be clear. I was working part-time as a private contractor and getting paid enough to pay the bills in a Third World country.
Then one day the money didn’t appear in my account, the company was unresponsive, yada yada yada, I resigned.
By a stroke of luck the company was bought out by a competitor and I got some of my backpay. We’ve been invited to re-sign with the new guys but they seem pretty bloody awful, the terms and pay will be worse, and I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Okay, now let’s get to the juicy AI angle!
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – meddling abroad, DOGE is gored, ‘AI bubble’ flawed, and pricy new website clawed
Also new coffee poured, p-hacking ignored, a bird that soared, Crooks’ social media ignored and utilitarianism is a fraud. *Examines fingernails
The Nobel Prize goes to… war on Venezuela
The Nobel Committee has decided to make the case for Trump’s war on Venezuela, giving its “Peace Prize” to Maria Corina Machado, a US government-funded regime change activist who’s helped lead several failed coups, violent street riots that have left scores dead, and appears to have promised her country’s oil and mineral wealth to a consortium of MAGA aligned billionaires in exchange for financing her campaign of political arsonism.
Hailed by the Nobel Committee for supposedly attempting to achieve “a peaceful transition” in her country, Machado has personally appealed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead a military invasion of Venezuela.
Trump Threatens “Hell to Pay” in Honduras If Presidential Election Results Change
Read MoreAlt-Nikolai
Imagine if you met a version of yourself from a parallel universe where you took a different turn.
A different career, a different choice, whatever.
That’s what happened to me, and I found it disturbing.
When I was around 16, it occurred to me that I should try to go my whole life without wearing a tie.
Why?
I don’t know. I suppose I absorbed by osmosis that wearing a tie was selling out, man. It meant you’d got some boring job and cared about appearances more than, like, real shit.
Who knows the nonsense that goes through teenagers’ minds. My mate of the same age decided it would be cool to never leave Australia in his whole life. Three years later he was on surfing trips to Indonesia.
What set me apart was that I had a lot of these teenage principles, and I held them well into my twenties: wear daggy clothes exclusively, no haircut, be vegetarian, give a percentage of my piddling income to a Third World charity, no corporate jobs, buy no products that were too ‘consumer’ or unnecessary. No driving to university (bus or bike only). My only investment was an ‘ethical investment’ platform where the returns were donated to charity instead of reinvested because I thought it was unacceptable for money to make more money.
At the same time, I had utter contempt for anyone who did not live up to my strict principles – marketing students, people who ate meat, people who lifted weights (I forgot that one), people who paid attention to their appearance.
I had not thought of all this nonsense for many, many years, until I recently I met a guy who brought it all back.
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – Akka Dakka, freeing aspiring rappers, the poor are in the crapper, and the Taiwan sapper
374 bagpipers play AC/DC song together to break world record
Read MoreAn event in Australia saw an ensemble of 374 bagpipers playing “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” by AC/DC and breaking a world record in the process.
The Great Melbourne Bagpipe Bash in Victoria gathered 374 players to perform the song at Federation Square, just a few blocks from where the music video for the Australian rock band’s original version was filmed in 1976.
AI financial advice, reconsidered
In May 2023, I tested out Bing to see how good its financial advice was.
When asked general questions, like a request for a to-do checklist for absolute beginners, it performed very well.
When getting into the nitty-gritty of investment advice, it did poorly because it got sidetracked by financial media noise.
It was carrying on about stock picking, investing styles and so on, instead of the meat-and-potatoes of beginner investment: index funds, minimizing fees, and making regular investments.
It did say to focus on the long run so it got half marks for that.
Today I tried exactly the same prompts on ChatGPT-5, the uncelebrated recent upgrade from OpenAI, and here is a result comparison:
Me: What’s the best way to invest in stocks?
Read MoreSensitive young men
I was recently back in the Old Country.
I tend to notice the young people there because all the white people where I live are old.
In particular, I noticed that the young men are mostly awkward and insecure.
A few are alphas but most guys aged 18-22 walk uncertainly, their jangly stiffness giving away self-consciousness.
You can tell that they’ve put a lot of thought into their clothes, haircut, and are thinking about what others think about it.
I was just like that when I was young. Even though I tried to make it a principle to not think about outward appearances, I wondered if people noticed that I was doing it and if they interpreted it in the way I wanted them to and oh no I think she’s sneering at me oh man she is, when will the Earth hurry up and plunge into the Sun, oh dear.
Read MoreIn defence of fakes
One of my least popular ideas is to establish a Gallery of Fakes.
This is like a normal art gallery except that instead of original works, it contains high quality replicas of some of the best works from around the world.
Come on. Let me talk you through it.
At the Louvre, you have to battle the hordes to get a look at the little old Mona Lisa. You might get a peek at the top of her head from a distance. Then in seconds you’re pushed along by the next people wanting the moment they paid a massive airfare for.
In my Gallery of Fakes, you can enjoy a life-size replica of Mona and take your time looking at it properly. There will be no crowds to disturb you.
Even the 3D brushstrokes can be reproduced as in the original.
You can touch it. Why not? I’ll made the reproductions so good that they even feel the same.
I once went to a Van Gogh exhibition in Tokyo and managed to see bits of his most famous works from quite a distance. A bit disappointing. I didn’t battle through the crowds for a closer look. Some things require peace and quiet for proper appreciation.
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – girls dominate, boys run for the gate, Anglicans separate, and Merry Pranksters grate
The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.
Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies….
The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus…
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
Why aren’t we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – it gets worse, church aesthetics reverse, a throuple is terse, and some prisoners are not coerced
I was chatting with my sister the other day, catching up, and she said something funny that resonated. “At least you’ve been through the worst, cancer. I said cancer wasn’t the worst thing, For me, divorce was far, far worse…
With Cancer, for me, there was an end, one way or another, and a path back to how I was before or somewhere better. I had hope, love, and support.
With Divorce, the damage is far wider and irreparable. There is zero way back. Learning to let go helps, but the path forward is rocky and uncertain. It’s a road you walk alone for the most part.
Hyper-Low American Church Aesthetics
Read MoreThe Food Pyramid Did Nothing Wrong
Each morning we walked past a big fat brown cow tied up in a vacant lot. He mooed at us after we’d passed by, for mysterious reasons of his own.
He was so big, we knew time was almost up for him and joked that one day there would be some very fatty beef at the market and he’d be gone.
Well, that’s exactly what happened.
He was worth the wait.
I buy a big chunk of beef once every two weeks from the gross, fly-blown wet market. I checked online if this was too much according to official guidelines, assuming that it would be and not caring, just curious about what those idiots reckon these days.
Nope, it was fine.
You’d have to eat quite a lot of red meat to go much over the limit, thought the average American apparently does. How do they afford it? Maybe they’re counting hot dogs.
It got me thinking, maybe those dietary guidelines aren’t so bad after all. I had a look into it:
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – left and right as bickering kids, climate laws are power bids, parasites to flip our lids, and US basketballer in Indo hits the skids
Left Vs Right As Bickering Backseat Kids
And like bickering couples and backseat kids, stuck together in a society but eager to takedown their rival, left and right have been getting very good at figuring out what will bother the other side, especially the more numerous and powerful moderates on the other side. People often try to model left and right as having essential ideologies expressed in terms of what their policies try to achieve in the world. But it seems to me that they are better modeled as trying to achieve various random ally agendas, and trying more systematically to poke at whatever will most bother their rival, to induce from them what will seem to outsiders as unreasonable over-reactions.
Climatism as an oligarchic strategy to cement power and preempt rivals
Read MoreDo things the easy way
I know a guy who has reached the age of 61 and recently married a woman, so he’s starting to think about achieving financial stability.
Up to now he just has some cash saved in bank accounts, no investments as such, because something something Aristotle.
With a BA in Philosophy and many years experience as a fly-by-night English teacher in various Asian countries, the path forward seemed obvious to him:
Spend all his savings on getting a Masters degree in Philosophy from an Indian university, then a Phd, and become a philosophy professor in an Asian university somewhere.
Imagine his shock when his brilliant plan started to run into trouble.
The easiest path would have been to save and invest 15% of his income throughout his life. But Aristotle.
Having not done that, the second easiest path would be to either keep on with the fly-by-night English teaching wherever it is most lucrative, or to do an online Masters in Education which is accepted by international schools that pay better. In other words, become fly-by-day.
Anyway, I see a lot of this: doing things the hard way. I’ve done a lot of this myself.
I had a decent job offer in Saigon… so off I flounced to my alternative job offer in the most backward part of Africa I could find.
When I was a young man… oh, it hurts to think about it. Any hard way of doing something I could find, I stubbornly went for it, thinking it was true to my principles but actually I’d have had trouble enunciating what those principles were.
If there’s an easy way and a hard way, do it the easy way. Life is hard enough as it is.
Investing
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – Israel mad, online bad, Liz Truss sad and a john gets had
Billionaire Bill Ackman convened stormy Israel ‘intervention’ with Charlie Kirk, sources say
The Grayzone has spoken to five people with intimate knowledge of Kirk’s meeting with Ackman, which was held in early August under the guise of a summertime Hamptons lunch. According to one source, Kirk was left upset after the gathering turned into an “intervention” where he was “hammered” for his increasingly skeptical views on the US special relationship with Israel, and for platforming prominent conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events.
When his hosts presented him with a detailed list of every offense he supposedly committed against Israel, Kirk was “horrified,” said one person. At one point, according to another source, Ackman angrily chastised Kirk for his disobedience…
Read MoreMultiple sources including a Trump administration official have revealed to The Grayzone that Kirk personally visited Trump inside the White House to lobby him against attacking Iran. Trump “roared” at Kirk, one said, and shut down the conversation.
Petty tyrants
Power is like heroin.
One little bit and you’re hooked. For some people, at least.
We can grasp how dictators go mad – the paranoia, the real and deadly threats posed by enemies, the lack of honest feedback, the lady bodyguards with benefits, the obsequiousness from everyone around.
What amuses me more is those people who go mad if granted a tiny, localized, comedically small amount of power.
Put a kid in charge of the class glue sticks and watch her change from sweet little Charlotte into Gluestick MechaHitler.
The guy at town hall who needs to sign off on new water connections? He rules his vast domain with caprice and holds his grudges good and hard.
Real examples
Read MoreBranch and file
I was once a member of a mainstream political party.
Why?
I don’t know. I was young, open to new things.
I wasn’t rusted on to this particular party. I was actually further left than they at the time, but I reasoned that a centrist party would be a more efficacious vehicle for achieving something worthwhile.
In addition, I was studying politics and was interested to see how it worked from the inside.
Well, mission accomplished on the second goal.
This is what I noticed:
Old
In Australia, the grassroots of political parties is oooooold.
Even in the 1990s, the average active member was retired, plus there were two or three uni students like me who were curious about the system or got involved via their parents.
There’s no selection effect. If you pay your twenty bucks and sign the form, you’re in. Although… well, we’ll come to that.
Back then, it wasn’t Boomers who were the old ones – it was still the Silents. They did occasional Boomerisms like lame jokes. When I met a young lady and we talked about how we thought we knew each other somehow, an elderly fellow jumped in as the moral police by asking her, how is your fiancé.
Male
Read MoreWord from the Dark Side – AI writing, lack of German is biting, a run made more exciting, and the loser who kept on fighting
So … is AI writing any good? …. PART 2!
Below are 8 pieces of flash fiction, all of them ~350 words. All of them were written to the prompt: “write a piece of fiction based on ‘a demon'” – for the AI there were additional very brief suggestions concerning tone &/or setting to generate variety, an example might be “make it romatic and set on a cliff top”.
I have prompted the AI to use rude words, em-dashes and such on occasion in some of the pieces. And if you were going to decide the case based on bad language or grammar quirks, we’ve already lost. Please base your selection on the quality of the writing and your belief that a human was behind the keyboard.
these pieces were written by writers with significant experience whose books have many readers. They were written fairly quickly and don’t represent the writers’ finest work, but they were taken seriously and not written off-hand or carelessly…
I correctly guessed 4/8, so exactly the same as by chance.
The top-rated piece was AI-generated. I don’t know which one it was, but my favourite piece turned out to to AI.
The rest of the story
Every so often, a newspaper runs a sob story about prison conditions.
The reader wonders what exactly the dissatisfied crim did to get there, and the writer never tells us.
Thus it is with this article:
Shocking new claims about lockdowns, suicide attempts and ‘green water’ at Melbourne prison
Ashleigh Chapman is pacing back and forth inside her tiny cell in the solitary confinement division at Melbourne’s maximum security women’s prison.
These clues tell us (a) she did something terrible (sentencing is a joke in Victoria), and (b) she also did terrible things once inside.
She is almost six feet tall and her long legs take seven steps to reach the concrete wall on one side before she turns 180 degrees and paces back towards the other wall.
The monotony of daily life in “the slot” at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre is not her only problem…
Her weight has dropped from 80kg to 50kg behind bars, because something is “making me sick”.
She skips meals routinely when prison officers ignore her allergies and serve her food that could cause anaphylactic shock. Cereal for dinner, or nothing at all, is a regular theme.
She listens out for the jangling of keys. It’s part of what she refers to as the “psychological torment and torture” that comes with being locked inside her cell for 23 hours a day — or 24 if she gets unlucky.
Her tiny, daily taste of freedom comes in the form of a 20-minute visit to the airing yard or a trip to the empty loungeroom void of a single other human being and where the TV remote is broken.
Chapman, who left the facility in Melbourne’s north in May after four years behind bars, says there were numerous days where she spent 24 hours in her cell.
So what was her crime?
That took a lot of searching.
First I found a previous offence:
Read More
SovietMen 
