chorpharn @chorpharn

Inga Clendinnen’s “The Aztecs” is one of my very favorite books: beautifully written and evocative, it cracks open a window to a very different world. She doesn’t just *write* about the Mexica; through her pen, you sense that she has been there herself, and returned to tell you of her travels Her description of the Aztec ruler or “Speaker” are some of the finest in political history: upon his elevation to his new office - sanctified by standing naked, for hours, before the image of Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, god of the night sky, fate, and war; through his mouth, the ornate “flower speech” of the Mexica transforms into the flute of this dread deity - “he was already our lord, our executioner and our enemy”. The last is an extraordinary political cosmogony; I know of nothing else quite like it. Perhaps in ancient China; you get a sense of the absolutism of the Qin here. But that isn’t exactly right either. Here reflects a unique timeline and evolution in political intellectual formation. Other titles for the Speaker reveal something of its nature: Enemy on Both Sides, the Mocker, He Whose Slaves We Are, Capricious Creator. As Clendinnen puts it, “It was this principle of subversion, of wanton, casual, antisocial power which was particularly implicated in Mexica notions of rule, and was embodied (at least on occasion) in the Mexica ruler.” This is where the Mexica depart from the Chinese example. In ancient China, the supreme ruler was imagined as a guarantor of a correct, moral, order. The presence of chaos in human relations - war, earthquake, famine - signal its absence. But the Mexica aimed at something subtler. The royal court around the Speaker was “the slippery place” ; power in the Aztec world was not a guarantee of order, but rather a sort of sacred caprice, raised to the level of an institutional principle Anyway, I’ve gone on too long. If the above captured your imagination in any way, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is absolutely extraordinary, both as a literary as well as a feat of the historian’s craft.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en

9 hours ago

"the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire (Aztec) civilization and society revolved." thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztec…

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‘They are our own’: Dinesh, Alex Yam urge compassion for S’poreans missing in Nepal and loved ones bit.ly/3SBGT3M

Very heartened to see the MP calling this out as inhumane and racist. There has for a long time been a loud minority of people who deem any naturalized Singaporean as illegitimate, especially if they're Indian

The Straits Times @straits_times

24 hours ago

Alex Yam calls out comments asking if 9 missing in Nepal-Tibet floods were ‘really Singaporean’ bit.ly/4y9Q9Lo

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Mega projects in Singapore’s road map could unlock multi-decade investment story: OCBC bit.ly/4iIGeIa

This weekend, I visited the Panoramic Digital Life Lab at Peking University and a neuroscience + AI new lab in Beijing. I also took a look at PKU's Archaeology Museum. That symbol might mean "I" 我and in Chinese, the idea of "I" 我 implies that self-awareness is a weapon (戈).

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I've posted this a million times before, but college is essentially transforming into a 4 year resort experience for the world's smartest/hottest young people, basically the children of the global affluent class, and also exceptionally bright minds outside of that group. The educational merits are besides the point now, its not the point. If your school either isn't truly elite in terms of its network, or state subsidized + offering resort like amenities in a warm climate(Think U of Alabama/ASU), it will be bombed off the map and there is a high likelihood it will not exist in its current form by the 2040s. The educational value proposition of universities in everything besides medicine and engineering is going to zero, which means its only value is to become the world's greatest 4 year networking party, and overtime a lifelong globalized country club, which is an eternal value it can have.

VB Knives @Empty_America

a day ago

@okaythenfuture 100%, if you don't get into a true Ivy+, might as well punt and go do some tanning down south.

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@gordonliao @EswarSPrasad @threadreaderapp

The cause of the deadly mudslide in China's #Xizang has been identified. A Chinese Academy of Sciences team found that at around 10:52 am on August 26, a glacier on the southern slope of Langtang Lirung in #Nepal fractured at an altitude of about 5,200 meters, triggering an ice-rock avalanche that plunged to about 4,000 meters and evolved into a massive debris flow, the official from Xizang said at a conference on Sunday. The debris flow traveled approximately 22 kilometers at high speed before reaching China's Gyirong Port, at an altitude of around 1,800 meters, flattening about 0.7 square kilometers and destroying 27 buildings and related facilities.

the real reason nobody can build an american shenzhen is that western capital fundamentally despises low-margin physical infrastructure we spent 30 years financializing our economy & replacing hardware engineers with software middle management so now we have infinite capital for app wrappers but 0 physical muscle memory left to assemble the world you cant legislate industrial density when your entire elite class is trained to extract yield instead of moving atoms

Mehdi 麦迪⁠ @BetterCallMedhi

2 days ago

china has already won the hardware war & most of the west just hasn’t processed the lag yet the whole gap is architectural shenzhen built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where thousands of specialized nodes iterate in parallel compounding knowledge

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“the future is basically China + the Semi-Autonomous Quasi-Sovereign Musk Zaibatsu” Hard agree and where I think Balaji’s model of US vs China vs “Network” is outdated. The network was never a serious contender, without control of its own physical infrastructure, energy, water, food and overwhelming kinetic deterrence, it exists at the mercy of the sovereigns it LARPs at superseding (see Network School’s expulsion from Malaysia). The “America” and “Network” options basically fused into the Elonverse Semi-Autonomous Zaibatsu and this is a positive development, because if it came down to Network vs China per Balaji’s vision, it would have unequivovally and automatically been China (as maybe he knew)

The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge

2 days ago

Increasingly US industrial strategy is just “let Musk handle it” Which makes sense. He has genuine convening power. People organize towards his interests. The system *wants* him to succeed It’s a lot for any one person But the future is basically China + the Semi-Autonomous

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Had a good meeting yesterday with the Governor of the Samarkand Region, Adiz Boboev. There is much our cities can learn from each other. We hope to explore new markets, expand business opportunities and strengthen people-to-people ties. – LHL go.gov.sg/p710nw

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Increasingly US industrial strategy is just “let Musk handle it” Which makes sense. He has genuine convening power. People organize towards his interests. The system *wants* him to succeed It’s a lot for any one person But the future is basically China + the Semi-Autonomous Quasi-Sovereign Musk Zaibatsu

Amir Efrati @amir

2 days ago

⚡️scoop: Elon Musk appears to be making a bold bet to solve the coming data center power shortage: making gas turbine components himself! this is classic Musk doing an end-run around a big giant industry (see full story below)

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Babette’s Feast was one of the assigned films in my Intro to Film class at BYU. It almost felt transgressive when I saw it, a film whose message is that our human wants and needs are often holy and beautiful rather than base and offensive.

DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine

3 days ago

Pope Francis considered "Babette's Feast" (1987) to be "One of the best movies he had ever seen" & it was one of his top 3 movies of all time. About the film, he said, "The story takes place in a very strict Calvinist community in Denmark. The protagonists, two sisters,

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Dwarkesh is the most San Franscisco podcast of all. Its universe is intense, hyper intelligent and maximally AGI pilled. I suspect that it dramatically overestimates the value of intelligence outside of SF, and underestimates the inertia of the rest of the world

Bill and Melinda Gates have saved 40 MILLION LIVES!!! Fuck this guy. Seriously. Are there challenges with non-profits? Are some better than others? Sure. But get the fuck out of here with this "charity is net-negative" bullshit. No wonder more and more people hate the rich

darrennn @genzzztrade

5 days ago

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says donating to charity is net negative "The common view is that philanthropy is this noble cause, and Bill Gates is like 'I'm going to go rehabilitate my image and do philanthropy.'" "A lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net

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The internet keeps telling me that the youth are Chinamaxxing. But as I learned from talking to my friend's teenage daughter in LA yesterday, this just mostly means they’re aware of the cool robots (and yes, the trains), but they still have intensely, intensely negative views about China. So, yes, it seems to be much more about “Western fatigue” than anything else. PS But a lot of them are learning Chinese as a foreign language anyways. What gives

No one has yet anticipated the Niulai Moment for Science.

Red Bull New York @NewYorkRedBulls

6 days ago

Niu Lai? We know a bull.   ——————   牛来？红牛也来!

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This is just patently false in so many ways. For one thing, India's power has grown in objective terms — to wit, when George W. Bush took office in 2001, India's nominal GDP was roughly $495 billion but today in 2026 is projected at nearly $5 trillion. To say that India's "power hasn't risen" or that India has "borrowed status" because Washington somehow subjectively "legitimated" what is in fact an objective rise in Indian power is stuff and nonsense. As important, there were 473 good reasons to improve U.S.-India relations that were not about Washington's supposed "China-containment strategy." And incidentally, as a Chinese commentator really ought to know, the Bush administration, which presided over the transformative decade in U.S.-India relations with the civil nuclear deal, was ALSO a high water mark for U.S.-China relations. So one relationship did not wash the other. As for India's status being in "Washington's gift," this is patently bullshit too. As noted, India's status has risen markedly in the last two decades by dint of its own objective rise on various economic and military metrics so hasn't been "gifted" by another country. But the conceit that this is just an American story is especially annoying. The fact is, Japan, South Korea, the EU (which concluded a major FTA with India in January), Australia, Canada, and others have deepened their engagement with India. The last decade especially has hardly been an "American" phenomenon of engagement. This is a nonsense take. And the notion of "borrowed status" seems especially insulting.

India's World @IndiasWorld_mag

6 days ago

The debate on India and “de-Americanisation” continues | Part 5 “India mistook the status Washington gave it for a rise in its own power,” argues Chen Zhuo. Adding a Chinese perspective to the debate, Chen notes that the US elevated India (Indo-Pacific power, Global South

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China has tended to see ties with India through a US prism & thinks - inaccurately - that India sees ties with China through a US prism too. Underlying this & other recent rmrks seems to be a sense PRC has more leverage now thx to India-US strains & India less negotiating room

Global Times @globaltimesnews

6 days ago

#Opinion: The China-India border talks look the same as always. But the real change isn’t at the table – it’s outside. The American shadow that once shaped every move between Beijing and New Delhi is quietly fading. globaltimes.cn/page/202608/13…

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Sure, Singapore isn't perfect - but i'm goddamn sure it's a real good place to live in One example is the comprehensive coverage our integrated hospitalisation plans provide I rarely hear of people in Singapore going BANKRUPT because of medical expenses We have Medisave as part of CPF - a national medical savings scheme in Singapore that allows working citizens and permanent residents to set aside a portion of their monthly income to pay for personal and family healthcare expenses - which already gives a pretty comprehensive coverage And Integrated Plans that probably is one of the most robust and covered in the world??? Majulah Singapura

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