Funky-looking and tentacular.

I'm fascinated by the mysteries of sportswriting, and these 2 sentences jumped out at me:

Even the way he plays, all funky-looking forehands and tentacular court coverage, is far from conventional, and at times polarizing. Away from forehands and backhands, he has always been a master of the dark arts, knowing how and when to work a crowd to his advantage, and being more than willing to turn a match into a circus if he thinks it will give him an edge.

That's written by Charlie Eccleshare, at the NYT, in "Daniil Medvedev, tennis’ walking Rorschach test, asks the U.S. Open what it sees."

"Tentacular" — a word I'd never noticed before. I see that H.G. Wells used it in "The War of the Worlds" (1898), to refer to the Martians with “long, tentacular appendages.” The use to describe the tennis player is close enough to the literal meaning. Apparently Medvedev was octopuslike.

But the word has appeared with a more attenuated connection to creatures with tentacles. Grok tells me that the philosopher Donna Haraway writes about "tentacular thinking" in the book "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" (2016). There's some notion of "multispecies, interconnected, and responsive" thought to be distinguished from "human-centered, linear, or hierarchical" thought. I'm told there's something called "tentacular empathy" and "tentacular relatings of kinship." Strangulating, and yet I get the sense we're supposed to love it.

Of course, the octopus is a mainstay of political cartoons. Here's one from 1877 that has some present-day resonance:

Lots more here, at "The Octopus in Political Cartoons/Russia, Germany and the United States have all been depicted as octopuses by their nemeses.

"The most extreme end of the promortalism movement is 'Efilism,'which takes its name from 'life' spelt backward..."

"... and argues that all sentient life should be extinguished to prevent suffering. Gary Mosher... one of its most prominent proponents... endorses violence towards women, even claiming he will murder any woman he gets pregnant who refuses an abortion. 'The end goal is for the truth [Efilism] to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilising this planet of the disease of life,' he wrote in an online manifesto. But after the IVF clinic in Palm Springs was bombed, he distanced himself from the violence. 'The fact is that there’s people in the world who are lonely, and some that are crazy, and this, that and the other thing,' he said on [YouTube]. 'They have some reason to be despondent, and they have low investment in their existence, and those are dangerous people.'... [I]t is not hard to find members recommending various methods for killing oneself, or using the term 'CTB' — or catch the bus — for suicide...."

From "Inside the ‘strangest terrorist movement the US has ever seen’/Guy Bartkus tried to destroy an IVF clinic to save the embryos the pain of existence. Alarmingly for national security, his ‘promortalist’ philosophy does not die with him" (London Times).

"If a human being did not exist then the absence of bad would be good... but the absence of good would not be bad because nobody was deprived."

Said David Benatar, quoted in "Antinatalist philosopher: The Palm Springs bomber proves my point/We should stop having children, says David Benatar — whose beliefs were reflected in Guy Edward Bartkus’s manifesto written before he blew up an IVF clinic" (London Times).

He firmly rejected the notion that painful experiences offer perspective or meaning, or that life’s fleeting pleasures make its fundamental wretchedness worthwhile. He said nothing would be lost if babies stopped being born.... He writes in his book that “while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.” His advice to those who do exist is to do no harm to other human beings or animals, and to “get the joy you can and give the joy that you can give.”

"[Guy Edward] Bartkus was said to have identified with 'pro-mortalism,' a philosophy that claims death is preferable to being born in the first place."

"His extremist beliefs, which he recorded in manifestos, included being against bringing babies into the world without their consent to spare them from future suffering. The suspect attempted to live-stream the explosion, although authorities said the video failed to upload.... Bilal Essayli, the US attorney for Los Angeles, wrote on social media that Bartkus appeared to be 'anti pro-life.'"

From "Terrorist bombed fertility clinic ‘to spare babies suffering’/Guy Edward Bartkus was the only fatality in the explosion at a facility in Palm Springs, California" (London Times).

I don't think there is an organized "anti pro-life" movement (to be distinguished from the pro-choice opponents of the pro-life movement). Here's the L.A. Times article about Bartkus's manifesto:

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

Proposed museum installation: Loop this clip and project it endlessly onto each of the 4 walls of a darkened room.

I watched it 10 times and felt quite mesmerized:

Defund NPR. It should survive on its own.

pic.twitter.com/dtm5qbbxix

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

“She explores how she struggled as a 'fat philosopher' — a representative of a field that prizes 'muscular and compact' forms of argument and 'prides itself on sharpness, clarity, and precision'..."

"... to 'reconcile my image of my body with its role in the world as the emissary of my mind.' That mismatch, she quips, has been her own, real-life 'body-mind problem.' But it’s really no laughing matter...."

From "The consequences of being fat are deeper than we realize/In the book 'Unshrinking,' philosopher Kate Manne argues that fatphobia is a form of structural oppression" (WaPo)(free-access link).

An "emissary" is — to quote the OED — "A person sent on a mission to gain information, or to gain adherents to, or promote the interests of a cause. (Until the 19th century used almost exclusively in bad sense, implying something odious in the object of the mission, or something underhand in its manner.)"

Do you think of your body as an emissary of your mind?

"Like Dr. Frankenstein, we are neglecting the monster’s point of view. What will our possible children think of their existence?"

"Will they be glad they’ve been born, or curse us for ushering them into being? Having children, [the philosopher Mara] van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as 'a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.' We are deciding 'that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,' and we 'must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.'..."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should We Think of Our Children as Strangers? A new line of inquiry asks us to imagine them as random individuals who just happen to live in our homes" (The New Yorker).

Based on the title alone, I presumed I was about to read some anti-natalist material. Who would commit to accepting a random stranger into one's home — with no option to kick him out? To ask the question in that form is to undercut the pro-natalist propaganda that is — unless women are coerced — needed to keep humanity from becoming extinct. 

And, indeed, Rothman gives short shrift to the pro-natalists (though he does say a little more than that they include Trump and Vance, which, I suspect, would be enough to put off most New Yorker readers):

"There’ll always be people who say, 'Why can’t the Museum of American History tell everybody’s story?'"

"But the truth of the matter is, America’s history is too big for one building. I really think that what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model. This is a two-sided coin. One side is about a community, about identity. But the other side is 'How does that identity shape all of us?'"

Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).

"It’s sort of a philosophical question. If I have a tree in my backyard and I cut it down and a stem comes back up from it..."

"... I would generally think it’s the same tree. But if you do it 10,000 times in a row, is it still the same tree?"

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, an evolution and ecology professor, quoted in "This tree survived the last ice age. It’s now threatened by development. The Jurupa Oak is older than almost any other plant on Earth. Soon it may face off with a business and housing development" (WaPo).

[The Jurupa Oak is] a collection of shrubs nestled atop a hill in a rocky gully. But those shrubs are just the crown of a giant, spreading oak tree, 90 feet long and 30 feet wide. Most of the tree is underground. Estimated to be 13,000 to 18,000 years old, the tree... is older than almost any other plant on Earth. It has survived an ice age and rapid climate warming. Its leaves may have brushed against saber-toothed cats and 500-pound ground sloths....

"As I applied the nightly serum, I remembered the description, by philosopher Clare Chambers in her book, Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, of 'shametenance'..."

"... all the things we do (like applying 'natural makeup') that contribute to the idea that our unmodified bodies are shameful, that even our ageing eyelids must be fixed.... And then one night I had a terrible dream that my eyelashes had grown too long. They were like a dark black fringe, blinding me, and I woke in a sweat. Shortly after this, I started to read about experts warning of potential side-effects linked to eyelash growth serums, including 'a permanent change in eye colour,' dark circles under the eyes and 'a sunken effect.' At this point my lashes had grown longer, definitely longer, but also spidery and fine...."

From "All of a flutter: how eyelashes became beauty’s biggest business/The eyelash business is worth $1.66bn – and is predicted to grow from there. Why are we so obsessed with our lashes? Eva Wiseman reports on their history and significance" (The Guardian).

That article continues with various other eyelash treatments, so I go looking for more on Clare Chambers and "shametenance." I find this from last year: "A Defense of the Unmodified Body: Clare Chambers Interview/We spoke to the acclaimed Cambridge philosopher Clare Chambers about her new book, Intact, which examines and critiques the urge to alter or ‘perfect’ our bodies." Excerpt:

Powered off.

I'm reading "Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, 82, Dies/Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an illusion, free will was a fantasy and evolution could only be explained by natural selection" (NYT).

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

Do you take offense at my post title? 

"To get yourself into SBF’s mindset, consider whether you would play the following godlike game for real."

"In this game, there’s a 51 percent chance that you create another Earth but also a 49 percent chance that you destroy all human life. If you’re using expected value thinking, and if you think that human life has positive value, you must play this game. SBF said he would play this game. And he said he would keep playing it, double or nothing, over and over again. With expected value thinking, the slightly higher chance of creating more value requires endlessly risking the annihilation of humanity. Expected value is why SBF constantly played video games, even while Zooming with investors. He calculated that he could add the pleasure of the game to the value of the calls. The key to understanding SBF is that he plays people like they’re games too. With his long-suffering EA girlfriend, her expected value went up when he wanted sex and then down right afterward.... This is the perfection of the EA philosophy: Maximize the value of the use of any given resource. And aren’t other people resources that can produce value?"

Writes Leif Wenar, in "The Deaths of Effective Altruism/Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial" (Wired).

"[T]hey agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering."

"Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism...."

Writes Elizabeth Barber in "The Case Against Children/Among the antinatalists" (Harper's). The author wants a baby.

Lots of stories of antinatalists at the link, but what I want to quote is some of the philosophical material:

"To make 'thoughtfulness' a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege."

"That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom. The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right...."

Writes Andrea Long Chu, in "Freedom of Sex/The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies" (New York Magazine).

Note the suggestion that puberty is nature's sexual assault upon the child. The author doesn't quite say that, but she put the thought into my head. It would prove too much though. We wouldn't ask whether any given children can consent to take puberty blockers; we would ask whether all children should be required to take puberty blockers.

Also in this article is an acronym I'm seeing for the first time: TARL. This is a "trans-agnostic reactionary liberal":

"Will this scatter the Effective Altruism herd? Or will they bleat that he Did It Wrong, and the movement can never fail only be failed by the weak, &c.?"

A good question, asked in the Metafilter discussion, "Jury finds Sam Bankman-Fried guilty."

That made me notice that I hadn't heard much about effective altruism lately (but isn't it always hard to notice what is not being said?).

I went looking for recent SBF stories that talked about effective altruism. Hard to find anything — that is, I found the absence of talk — but I did find this at CoinDesk: "Sam Bankman-Fried Demonstrates Ineffective Altruism at Its Worst/The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

That sounds like it's going to be the he-did-it-wrong "bleat" that the Metafilter commenter was predicting, but it's not:

I feel compelled to disagree.

I'm reading "Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to Disagree)/Shedding the concept 'completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy,' the Stanford biologist and neurologist argues. It might also be liberating" (NYT)

The interviewer asks, "So, whether I wore a red or blue shirt today — are you saying I didn’t really choose that?"

Sapolsky answers:

Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if you’re sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of that has to do with genetics: What’s the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning did they have to particular smells? All of that affects the outcome.

And what of those of us who have lost all or most of our sense of smell? Is this random affliction making me liberal?

Asked "Do we lose love, too, if we lose free will?" he says:

Yeah. Like: “Wow! Why? Why did this person turn out to love me? Where did that come from? And how much of that has to do with how my parents raised me, or what sort of olfactory receptor genes I have in my nose and how much I like their scent?”

Lacking a sense of smell, am I more free? I know, he'd say I'm not free at all. I lack this factor that affects other people's decision-making, but that just leaves me disproportionately affected by the remaining factors.

It seems clear, based on the whole article, that believing there is no free will makes people more liberal. You won't think people deserve the rewards and punishments that come their way. But you don't have free will to decide not to believe in free will. First, comes the desire to justify the status quo and to punish wrongdoers, and then comes the belief in free will. Take that away, and you'll run into the arms of Sapolsky.

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

"On a continuum of good vs. evil, Zuckerberg is probably less evil than Elon. I don't like Zuckerberg, but Elon is a disgusting bottom dweller. I hope this is the nail in Twitter's coffin."

This is the top rated comment at the WaPo article "What we love and hate about Threads, Meta’s new Twitter clone/Threads may be the first Twitter alternative that really matters because it’s built on top of Instagram’s existing base of billions of users."

And it's a better answer to the question of what to "love and hate about Threads" than anything in the article, which suggests we ought to love Threads because it's easy to get on it via your Instagram account (which millions did without realizing that they can't delete their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account). 

Anyway, for me, the key thing to like (or "love") would be good, readable writing (and part of readability is the absence of visual clutter). But Threads won't let me look at it as a web page, and I won't accept the app without seeing that it's something I want. It's what people used to call a pig in a poke. Or, in some countries, a cat in a bag. At least with Twitter, I can see the pig/cat. 

And didn't Thoreau say, "Beware of enterprises requiring new apps"?

But let's think about that comment (in the post title). It states the "lesser of 2 evils" principle. I understand that in an election, but is this a lesser-of-2-evils situation? We don't need to choose one or the other. We can reject both.

Now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Lesser of two evils principle":

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". The modern formulation was popularized by Thomas à Kempis' devotional book The Imitation of Christ written in early 15th century.

In part IV of his Ethics, Spinoza states the following maxim: 

Proposition 65: "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."

I'm sure these wise men all realized that there are circumstances where you can choose neither. For example, I abstained in the last election, and I endorse abstention as an option and argue with those who say you're doing something wrong if you refuse to vote. 

I get diverted into the Wikipedia article "False dilemma." The best thing about that article is this cool poster from 1910:

ADDED: I'm just noticing that the scales held aloft by the Chief Justice embody the principle of the lesser of 2 evils. There are just 2 options, and the weightier one ought to win.

AND: At least the Justice is considering legal arguments as the 2 options and choosing between the entities who are the parties in the lawsuit. By contrast, in the WaPo commenter's formulation, the 2 options are 2 human beings — Zuckerberg and Musk. We're not expected to understand the substance of what we'd be getting if we chose Threads or Twitter. That's too hard and too sober for us, the social media people, who gravitate toward decisions that are personified and inflated with scary, emotive insinuations of evil.

"Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism..."

"... today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own. This new movement should prioritize humans above machines and reimagine human relationships with nature and with technology, while still advancing what this technology can do at its best. Artificial intelligence will, unquestionably, help us make miraculous, lifesaving discoveries. The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline, especially as it eclipses us in apperception. We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines.... Today’s elementary-school children... deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas.... No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon...."

Writes Adrienne LaFrance, in "IN DEFENSE OF HUMANITY/We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence" (The Atlantic).

Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?