November 2020 Favorites

By Stefan Imhoff
18 min read

The problem with Human beings is somebody always shags a monkey.

Videos

Science & Knowledge

Productivity

History & Culture

Cinema & Film

Philosophy

Politics

Humor

TV Shows

  • Friends 3 4 5 6 7 P
  • The Alienist 2 N – I’m happy this TV Show got a second season because it’s a good thriller that takes place in the last days of the Victorian era in New York.
  • Luther 5 N

Movies

Podcasts

The Joe Rogan Experience

  • 1559 – Steven Rinella – Talk with Steven Rinella, the host of the Netflix show MeatEater. One interesting topic was how Joe’s podcast happened and how it grew and why podcasts are so successful compared to other media formats.
  • 1560 – Mike Baker – Mike Baker is a former CIA covert operations officer, host of the Science Channel series Black Files Declassified, and current president and co-founder of Diligence LLC, a global intelligence and security firm.
  • 1561 – Kermit Pattison – Kermit Pattison talks about his new book about the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind.
  • 1564 – Adam Alter – Interview with the author of Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.
  • 1568 – Tom Green – Comedian, actor, filmmaker, and talk show host Tom Green talks about living in a trailer and traveling the USA.

The Art of Manliness

Lex Fridman Podcast

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

Quillette Podcast

Watching America

  • The Value of Tolerance and Freedom in Western Civilization – Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an activist for women’s rights and the author of the book Infidel: My Life, and many others. In this episode of Watching America, Dr. Alan Campbell speaks with Ali about America, religion, cancel culture, the failures of American universities, and more.

Indubio

Books

Articles

Inspiration

Stuff & Things

  • Netflix Dark. Face your questions. – The official website of the fantastic TV Show Dark. It allows navigating all three seasons and see all the connections and the different family trees. It’s possible to deactivate specific seasons to not see any spoiler.
  • Google Books Ngram Viewer – This tool by Google allows searching for words in books from 1800 to today and see how their usage changes over time.
  • Starship: Cross-Shell Prompt – The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell.
  • Rumble – A nice video platform.
  • Parler – A free-speech alternative to Twitter. After the election debacle in the USA and Twitter’s brazen attempt to silence any person questioning the election results, the network got a huge membership growth and was the most downloaded app for multiple weeks in both app stores.
  • Spiked – The political magazine that wants to change the world as well as report on it. For humanism, democracy and freedom.

People

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Human rights activist, founder of AHA Foundation, an organization fighting against female genital mutilation, honor violence, and forced marriage. She is a fellow of the Hoover Institution.
  • Tom Green – Canadian comedian and television show moderator who has been traveling for a few months in a trailer around the USA visiting remote places.

Quotes

You are not for free speech if you don’t defend speech that offends you:

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

—Noam Chomsky

John Stuart Mill thought that suppressed speech harms in multiple ways:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, rev. ed. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863) 35–36

Heinrich Heine knew that the ban, censorship, and destruction of books is the first step to totalitarianism that will kill people in the end:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

—Heinrich Heine

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

Eric Weinstein explains how he compares humans often with terms from computer engineering: Hardware, Software, and Firmware. He is not at all interested in hardware, and very strongly invested in the right firmware of a society.

I tend to talk about software, hardware, and firmware. In essence, hardware is your genetics, the melanin content of the skin which everyone seems so fascinated by at the moment which I don’t believe. Then there is a question about the software. What do you think? What political party do you belong to? But there is also this different issue of the firmware. Like the operating system that rides on the hardware. And I’m very particular about firmware, and I’m almost indifferent to hardware. I don’t really care about … if you told me that there was an advanced European-like civilization in Uganda. Where everyone was black, but me. I would be far happier to live in that society, where the firmware was familiar and the hardware was foreign, then to live in a world in which the firmware got swapped out and everyone shared my exact genetics. I really care about firmware Nationalism, I don’t want hardware Nationalism.

Eric Weinstein explains his 5-word law for the era of social media: Optics create its own substance how the killing of George Floyd serves as an example for confirmation bias that ignores all things that don’t fit the narrative of the case, as similar deaths of white persons or asking questions about how the whole situation happened:

The importance of the George Floyd killing or death, however you see it, is that it was optically perfect as a lynching, provided that you didn’t ask hard questions. To give up an optical lynching out on video simply because there are mitigating and complicated and confounding variables was not possible, because in fact in a weird sense you have a very strong belief that there is prejudices and bigotry that seldom lends itself to simple description. Finally, we’ve got one! And then the idea is when it’s optically perfect and that creates its own substance, that is the minds of many people agree that this officer Derek C. and his knee on his neck caused this death through prejudices and bigotry, then the Tony Timpa killing in Dallas can’t … that violates the rule. That would complicate the optics.

Alexis de Tocqueville described over 120 years ago how the state tries to create dependent citizens and misuses its power to subdue each person:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6

Let your intellect—not misplaced emotions or tribal ideologies—inform your positions. To be a truly wise person requires that we recognize those domains best served by our intellect versus those best guided by our emotions.

Trump won the largest non-white vote share for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

—Joseph Stalin

Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.

—Duncan Trussal

My rules right now include never to apologize when someone demands it, never to apologize to groups, only specific individuals, only to apologize for errors not hurt feelings, and to apologize as often as possible in one-on-one settings, not in public (which is signaling).

Earn with your mind, not your time.

—Naval Ravikant

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

—G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

—Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letter, Letter 16, 1657