Hey, I've been a fan for a few months and I'm not going to unsubscribe, but this was not your best stuff. I don't know if it's from LLM usage or ragewriting without calmediting afterward. The big gap between this and your previous work is the large number of adjectives shoehorned in with no ear for prosody, creating odd turns of phrase that look like they should be idioms but aren't:
- laughter chorus
- burgeoning geysering tower of burbled up tribalism
- you Big Law prostates showcase your lights (?)
- fixation of plugging up holes of a devoured ego with soaked wads of cash
I wondered for a moment if you thought this all in Arabic or French and then wrote it in English, but your English is good and I doubt you normally do that.
More importantly, your posts usually have a "point" (usually several!) and this had less than one.
I always appreciate feedback and I intentionally do not expect nor want everything I write to land with everyone. I thought the point was obvious: "the big law lawyers bending the knee are privileged cowards with no justifiable excuse for submission"
This piece was written 100% LLM free! And it was stonedwriting followed by extensive calmediting day after. I did stuff it with strings of adjectives and adverbs, indeed at the expense of prosody, but it was a worthwhile trade-off given the tenor I wanted to hit.
Writing like this feels like a stretching exercise for me, a way to loosen up the muscles given how much rigid precision inevitably haunts my other stuff. It's one of the few times I truly enjoy the act of writing itself (as opposed to enjoying _having_ written), almost as if I'm physically grasping wispy plumes of smoke and cryogenically freezing them into place. Inspiration for this mood doesn't happen that often though.
With that in mind, the odd turns of phrase were also intentional. Very often in my writing I have a vivid image in my head and I try to work backwards to figure out how I can present it through prose. Random example, but Tolkien described Saruman as having "a mind of metal and wheels" which is such an insanely wordcount efficient way of referencing the precision of Saruman's thinking, his rigid and myopic stubbornness, his unrelenting industrial-scale ambition, and his scorn of the natural world.
Obviously I'm no Tolkien but it's fun discovering these awkward prose grenades that might not make total sense, but nevertheless hit the general aesthetic chord I'm after. Almost like slamming keys on a piano. All the examples you mentioned were specific vistas I was trying to capture:
- laughter chorus: 'Chorus' was a Greek theater reference, which fits really well in the context of how lawsuits play out in court. 'Laughter Chorus' implies the overall spectacle was too ridiculous to take seriously, and so laughing fits forced the Chorus to abandon its traditional role as a neutral commentator.
- burgeoning geysering tower of burbled up tribalism: This very accurately captured the image I had in my head. I have written extensively about the myopic dangers of tribalism, often in a dismissive patronizing tone. And yet, here I was vicariously experiencing a solidarity with strangers I have never met just because we happen to be members of the same tribe. The turn of phrase was meant to capture how much I may have been in denial about my alleged high-mindedness, showcasing how futile attempts to bury the sentiment potentially just increased pressure past a breaking point.
- you Big Law prostates showcase your lights: 'Prostrates' was fully intended as the noun version of 'prostration', which calls back to the numerous references to physical submission in Islamic prayer, which also is the body position I kept imagining these lawyers in. Very conveniently, 'prostrates' also works extremely well as a reference on two other dimensions. You're insulting someone by calling them butt hole, and there's also an allusion to men deriving pleasure from sexual submission. With 'showcase your lights', I kept thinking of billboards and neon signs, and how their explicit purpose is to advertise oneself to the general public. It paired really well with the subsequent sentence about constellations, basically as pinprick actions (stars) forming a shape that tells a much larger story.
- fixation of plugging up holes of a devoured ego with soaked wads of cash: So much in this sentenced coalesced perfectly for me! I imagined someone experiencing deep insecurity as having a crumbling ego riddled with pockmarked holes, which dovetailed nicely into envisioning a container dramatically leaking out its contents. There was something delightfully ironic about having to resort to using wads cash not for their monetary value, but in a futile attempt to plug liquid leaks. The image of dollar bills stuffed into cracks of a wall, saturated with rushing liquid they never had any hope in plugging up, was just too perfect to pass up.
I really appreciate your comment. If anything, it encouraged me to explain how much intention there is behind my word choice, which I almost never get to do.
Wow, in some ways I’m glad I didn’t enjoy the original piece because this was a lot more elucidating. (When I said the piece didn’t seem to have a whole point, it was in the sense that it seemed to create a vibe but not say anything of substance. But this may be because I unconsciously mapped “seen this before” to “insubstantial”, which is unfair.) I’m not going to turn around and claim I like the piece now, but I’m grateful for your response. Peace ✌️
I felt this way halfway through the essay but felt like it came back in the end and I understood the thesis. A little verbose, sometimes awkwardly so, but I thought it stuck the landing.
Thanks for the enjoyable read! This kind of rant isn't usually my favourite thing, but you've made a good specimen. You are pointing out genuinely outrageous behaviour, and the flowery profanity serves the right vibe. Plus your urging for gratitude and humility about the benefits of modern liberalism and material comfort remind me of Steven Pinker's recent work. That's a win!
The best part of the game is that even alien or bizarre ideologies, like The Hive's, are presented in a reasonable internally-consistent way. There's no way to really dispute Yang's idea that individuals are meaningless without disagreeing with him axiomatically.
(edited to remove superficial comment on actual article)
Choices come to all in their days; Patrick Henry could have said the same of the rich New York merchants eager to collaborate with the British occupying forces.
(and the tories could and did say worse about the spoiled, idiot patriots - one is reminded about the bon mots that "we always hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves," and about how a yankee was so uncultured a specimen as to think a mere "feather in his cap" was enough to make it high-fashion in the italian style, or "macaroni.")
That was a good time & I really appreciated your Aristophantic brio .
There was one dissonant note, though:
> It’s disappointing. One, god what a pathetic flail! What a flagrant red cape of blatant insecurity, advertised loudly to the entire world.
I've never once seen this accusation hit the mark. The likes of Trump have a bottomless hunger for obsequious displays of featly and submission. Maybe it's fundamentally downstream of insecurity, maybe not. If it is, that well is so far beneath the surface that it doesn't matter: the appetite has become its own thing.
Perhaps it is indeed buried far too deep, but I haven't seen anywhere near enough efforts to properly excavate it. Demands for fealty should be reflexively met with far more ridicule than they are currently.
I've given up on claiming I actually understand what makes for a good political strategy but the piece makes me think Trump opponents could do worse than to just hammer insults that wouldn't be out of place in a Rodney Dangerfield picture. These fucking losers. These chumps.
While I agree that belittling Trump is probably the best strategy, the problem is that his political opponents are such feckless HR nerds that they've never delivered a proper insult in their adult life, and it's painfully obvious whenever they try to do so to Trump.
I feel just as ignorant about good political strategy, but this is the note that keeps resonating the most with me. Who knows how many share my sentiment.
I thought Rodney Dangerfield mostly insulted himself?
But more seriously, I don't think anyone can insult Trump's base away from him. In order for an insult to be effective, the person saying it has to seem authoritative to the audience. No one cares if the nerd calls the prom king a loser. If anything, it makes the nerd seem more pathetic.
I guess that leads to the question in why Trump has successfully insulted his way to the presidency twice now. And I think that's mostly because the insults change the conversation. Low-energy Jeb isn't a particularly brutal insult, but it changed the entire conversation to be about Jeb's energy level rather than his record as governor, conservative ideology or whatever else made him seem like a contender going into the 2016 primaries. But it was catchy and even trying to argue against made "energy levels" the debate rather than something Jeb would have had an advantage in. Or mocking Kamala's lack of emphasis on her Black heritage in the past. She could only respond by insisting that she had always ran campaigns based around her race, which was a controversial strategy nowadays where affirmative action is being scrutinized.
it's surprising that you think that people haven't been insulting Trump(or should I say DRUMPF) for years. There's a huge audience for someone like Jeff Tiedrich. However, I don't think democrats really understand that strategy since all of their insults can be reframed in ways that help Trump. Consider how the conversations go:
Loser: "Of course, the establishment think that MAGA is losers! These smug elites think that anyone that didn't go to Harvard is a loser! Not me, even though I went to an Ivy. I love the poorly-educated unlike the smug idiots I went to school with"
Weird: "Look at LibsOfTikTok. Of course they think I'm weird. They're telling your kids that any man that isn't wearing a dress is weird."
Chump: "Of course they think I'm a chump. They don't understand how business works. They don't even understand the difference between a company going bankrupt and me going bankrupt. I used those bankruptcies to my advantage."
Personally, I think the most effective insult would be to his realty show career. It's so pathetic that he takes pride in The Apprentice. I think focusing on that would have been effective, solely because him insisting that The Apprentice was actually a big accomplishment would have made the conversation revolved around the importance of reality tv compared to more traditional presidential backgrounds. (Of course, this doesn't work anymore now that he's been the most powerful man in the world).
Or maybe something from an old Bogart movie -- Key Largo if I'm not mistaken -- where Bogart says to a mafioso that what he really wanted was simply more. Addictions come in many forms.
I love this article, but the one it links to, claiming morality arises from material comfort... is insanely ignorant about the people who actually move the ball forward the most. Jesus of Nazareth was homeless, broke, living on handouts, and with no material means of amplifying his message other than his feet and his mouth. At his moment of peak ethical impact, he was deprived of his eloquence and mobility and most of his following. Wealth does not make people braver, any more than giving lunch money to a class bully makes him nicer.
This is a deep misunderstanding of my argument, almost opposite to my actual position. I never claimed that wealth makes people braver, nor did I claim that the poor cannot advance compelling moral narratives.
Hey, I've been a fan for a few months and I'm not going to unsubscribe, but this was not your best stuff. I don't know if it's from LLM usage or ragewriting without calmediting afterward. The big gap between this and your previous work is the large number of adjectives shoehorned in with no ear for prosody, creating odd turns of phrase that look like they should be idioms but aren't:
- laughter chorus
- burgeoning geysering tower of burbled up tribalism
- you Big Law prostates showcase your lights (?)
- fixation of plugging up holes of a devoured ego with soaked wads of cash
I wondered for a moment if you thought this all in Arabic or French and then wrote it in English, but your English is good and I doubt you normally do that.
More importantly, your posts usually have a "point" (usually several!) and this had less than one.
I always appreciate feedback and I intentionally do not expect nor want everything I write to land with everyone. I thought the point was obvious: "the big law lawyers bending the knee are privileged cowards with no justifiable excuse for submission"
This piece was written 100% LLM free! And it was stonedwriting followed by extensive calmediting day after. I did stuff it with strings of adjectives and adverbs, indeed at the expense of prosody, but it was a worthwhile trade-off given the tenor I wanted to hit.
Writing like this feels like a stretching exercise for me, a way to loosen up the muscles given how much rigid precision inevitably haunts my other stuff. It's one of the few times I truly enjoy the act of writing itself (as opposed to enjoying _having_ written), almost as if I'm physically grasping wispy plumes of smoke and cryogenically freezing them into place. Inspiration for this mood doesn't happen that often though.
With that in mind, the odd turns of phrase were also intentional. Very often in my writing I have a vivid image in my head and I try to work backwards to figure out how I can present it through prose. Random example, but Tolkien described Saruman as having "a mind of metal and wheels" which is such an insanely wordcount efficient way of referencing the precision of Saruman's thinking, his rigid and myopic stubbornness, his unrelenting industrial-scale ambition, and his scorn of the natural world.
Obviously I'm no Tolkien but it's fun discovering these awkward prose grenades that might not make total sense, but nevertheless hit the general aesthetic chord I'm after. Almost like slamming keys on a piano. All the examples you mentioned were specific vistas I was trying to capture:
- laughter chorus: 'Chorus' was a Greek theater reference, which fits really well in the context of how lawsuits play out in court. 'Laughter Chorus' implies the overall spectacle was too ridiculous to take seriously, and so laughing fits forced the Chorus to abandon its traditional role as a neutral commentator.
- burgeoning geysering tower of burbled up tribalism: This very accurately captured the image I had in my head. I have written extensively about the myopic dangers of tribalism, often in a dismissive patronizing tone. And yet, here I was vicariously experiencing a solidarity with strangers I have never met just because we happen to be members of the same tribe. The turn of phrase was meant to capture how much I may have been in denial about my alleged high-mindedness, showcasing how futile attempts to bury the sentiment potentially just increased pressure past a breaking point.
- you Big Law prostates showcase your lights: 'Prostrates' was fully intended as the noun version of 'prostration', which calls back to the numerous references to physical submission in Islamic prayer, which also is the body position I kept imagining these lawyers in. Very conveniently, 'prostrates' also works extremely well as a reference on two other dimensions. You're insulting someone by calling them butt hole, and there's also an allusion to men deriving pleasure from sexual submission. With 'showcase your lights', I kept thinking of billboards and neon signs, and how their explicit purpose is to advertise oneself to the general public. It paired really well with the subsequent sentence about constellations, basically as pinprick actions (stars) forming a shape that tells a much larger story.
- fixation of plugging up holes of a devoured ego with soaked wads of cash: So much in this sentenced coalesced perfectly for me! I imagined someone experiencing deep insecurity as having a crumbling ego riddled with pockmarked holes, which dovetailed nicely into envisioning a container dramatically leaking out its contents. There was something delightfully ironic about having to resort to using wads cash not for their monetary value, but in a futile attempt to plug liquid leaks. The image of dollar bills stuffed into cracks of a wall, saturated with rushing liquid they never had any hope in plugging up, was just too perfect to pass up.
I really appreciate your comment. If anything, it encouraged me to explain how much intention there is behind my word choice, which I almost never get to do.
Wow, in some ways I’m glad I didn’t enjoy the original piece because this was a lot more elucidating. (When I said the piece didn’t seem to have a whole point, it was in the sense that it seemed to create a vibe but not say anything of substance. But this may be because I unconsciously mapped “seen this before” to “insubstantial”, which is unfair.) I’m not going to turn around and claim I like the piece now, but I’m grateful for your response. Peace ✌️
Darn, now I’m disappointed. When I read it I assumed “lights” was in the sense of “Liver and Lights”.
Oh neat, I never heard of this phrase before. Language is fun!
I felt this way halfway through the essay but felt like it came back in the end and I understood the thesis. A little verbose, sometimes awkwardly so, but I thought it stuck the landing.
This feels like the lawyer equivalent of these second amendment guys who fantasize about getting home invaded while watching true crime shows.
Not inaccurate
A Paul Weiss lawyer after reading this: "My takeaway is he wants to join our firm, we should make him an offer."
SMAC references + best leader ever? I'm in love.
Well that escalated quickly
Best example of the righteous rant genre I’ve read in years. (And completely justified.) Thank you!
“know that I always play CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri.”
Chad
Thanks for the enjoyable read! This kind of rant isn't usually my favourite thing, but you've made a good specimen. You are pointing out genuinely outrageous behaviour, and the flowery profanity serves the right vibe. Plus your urging for gratitude and humility about the benefits of modern liberalism and material comfort remind me of Steven Pinker's recent work. That's a win!
If you're a SMAC fan, please consider reading this random blog where someone goes through every aspect of the game:
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time-here/
The best part of the game is that even alien or bizarre ideologies, like The Hive's, are presented in a reasonable internally-consistent way. There's no way to really dispute Yang's idea that individuals are meaningless without disagreeing with him axiomatically.
(edited to remove superficial comment on actual article)
Choices come to all in their days; Patrick Henry could have said the same of the rich New York merchants eager to collaborate with the British occupying forces.
(and the tories could and did say worse about the spoiled, idiot patriots - one is reminded about the bon mots that "we always hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves," and about how a yankee was so uncultured a specimen as to think a mere "feather in his cap" was enough to make it high-fashion in the italian style, or "macaroni.")
That's all true
That was a good time & I really appreciated your Aristophantic brio .
There was one dissonant note, though:
> It’s disappointing. One, god what a pathetic flail! What a flagrant red cape of blatant insecurity, advertised loudly to the entire world.
I've never once seen this accusation hit the mark. The likes of Trump have a bottomless hunger for obsequious displays of featly and submission. Maybe it's fundamentally downstream of insecurity, maybe not. If it is, that well is so far beneath the surface that it doesn't matter: the appetite has become its own thing.
Perhaps it is indeed buried far too deep, but I haven't seen anywhere near enough efforts to properly excavate it. Demands for fealty should be reflexively met with far more ridicule than they are currently.
I've given up on claiming I actually understand what makes for a good political strategy but the piece makes me think Trump opponents could do worse than to just hammer insults that wouldn't be out of place in a Rodney Dangerfield picture. These fucking losers. These chumps.
While I agree that belittling Trump is probably the best strategy, the problem is that his political opponents are such feckless HR nerds that they've never delivered a proper insult in their adult life, and it's painfully obvious whenever they try to do so to Trump.
I feel just as ignorant about good political strategy, but this is the note that keeps resonating the most with me. Who knows how many share my sentiment.
similarly, which I now see you've already liked https://substack.com/@statesofexception/note/c-98326612?r=ngvj
I thought Rodney Dangerfield mostly insulted himself?
But more seriously, I don't think anyone can insult Trump's base away from him. In order for an insult to be effective, the person saying it has to seem authoritative to the audience. No one cares if the nerd calls the prom king a loser. If anything, it makes the nerd seem more pathetic.
I guess that leads to the question in why Trump has successfully insulted his way to the presidency twice now. And I think that's mostly because the insults change the conversation. Low-energy Jeb isn't a particularly brutal insult, but it changed the entire conversation to be about Jeb's energy level rather than his record as governor, conservative ideology or whatever else made him seem like a contender going into the 2016 primaries. But it was catchy and even trying to argue against made "energy levels" the debate rather than something Jeb would have had an advantage in. Or mocking Kamala's lack of emphasis on her Black heritage in the past. She could only respond by insisting that she had always ran campaigns based around her race, which was a controversial strategy nowadays where affirmative action is being scrutinized.
it's surprising that you think that people haven't been insulting Trump(or should I say DRUMPF) for years. There's a huge audience for someone like Jeff Tiedrich. However, I don't think democrats really understand that strategy since all of their insults can be reframed in ways that help Trump. Consider how the conversations go:
Loser: "Of course, the establishment think that MAGA is losers! These smug elites think that anyone that didn't go to Harvard is a loser! Not me, even though I went to an Ivy. I love the poorly-educated unlike the smug idiots I went to school with"
Weird: "Look at LibsOfTikTok. Of course they think I'm weird. They're telling your kids that any man that isn't wearing a dress is weird."
Chump: "Of course they think I'm a chump. They don't understand how business works. They don't even understand the difference between a company going bankrupt and me going bankrupt. I used those bankruptcies to my advantage."
Loser insult example from former chair of CA democrats: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/as-a-businessman-trump-was-the-biggest-loser-of-all
weird: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/opinion/trump-vance-harris-walz-weird.html
Chump: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/trump-china-asia-pacific-trade-tpp.html
Personally, I think the most effective insult would be to his realty show career. It's so pathetic that he takes pride in The Apprentice. I think focusing on that would have been effective, solely because him insisting that The Apprentice was actually a big accomplishment would have made the conversation revolved around the importance of reality tv compared to more traditional presidential backgrounds. (Of course, this doesn't work anymore now that he's been the most powerful man in the world).
👍🙂 Something from Upton Sinclair seems a fair synopsis:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something
Or maybe something from an old Bogart movie -- Key Largo if I'm not mistaken -- where Bogart says to a mafioso that what he really wanted was simply more. Addictions come in many forms.
I love this article, but the one it links to, claiming morality arises from material comfort... is insanely ignorant about the people who actually move the ball forward the most. Jesus of Nazareth was homeless, broke, living on handouts, and with no material means of amplifying his message other than his feet and his mouth. At his moment of peak ethical impact, he was deprived of his eloquence and mobility and most of his following. Wealth does not make people braver, any more than giving lunch money to a class bully makes him nicer.
This is a deep misunderstanding of my argument, almost opposite to my actual position. I never claimed that wealth makes people braver, nor did I claim that the poor cannot advance compelling moral narratives.