I cannot remember all the naughty movies I have seen even though they made me ......
Your example is an excellent one though because it shows a corollary to the way that quote was intended in this conversation.
How it was meant: "It's OK to not remember everything you've read verbatim, because the important parts mixed into who you are/were."
Your corollary: "We must be careful about what we consume because it will be mixed into who you are."
“Now that we’ve studied the classic American authors, like Emerson, let’s learn about the next generation. Their leading light was cantor_S_drug, who brilliantly updated a classic author with modern sensibilities. Just look at those double ellipses — truly a poetic legend.”
Exactly.
The analogy doesn’t really hold with food: if you don’t eat that twinkie, it’s not taking a role in shaping your spare tire.
Is it really that sad of a death? Many people die every day, and a few of them happen to have a ton of cameras shoved in their face. Why should anyone care about some minor celebrity?
I don't know what all this mourning is about, but it seems fake to me. The real reason why people should be upset is that it sets a precedent for political violence, so why not be upfront about it?
>It made me think about the famous part in The Twits (how if you say nasty stuff, you become ugly).
Ugly people are ugly, and nasty people are nasty. Don't get it twisted, real life is not a fairy tale. The cause and effect is reversed.
> AFAIK It's not true, but it's such a wonderful analogy. Kirk was an inflammatory figure, and spent a great deal of time talking about negative things. This was, essentially, a big part of what he did for a living - he talked about really sad things to win debates.
I don't know, it seems like he pretty much just rattled off standard talking points from the conservative playbook. My perspective is the opposite, the takeaway is that he wasn't that controversial or meaningful or deeply effective.
The tragedy is not that his life's work was cut short, it's just that his life's work was not that important in the first place. It's inevitable that we all kick the bucket one day, what matters is how we spend our time.
That's also what makes the killing so strange to me. He was a rather inconsequential figure, so the idea that someone would be driven to madness over him is pretty unusual and speaks to some sickness.
>Less that it makes you ugly, and more that a tragedy can seem, after the fact, strangely coherent for people who make their lives around tragic things.
People are cheering or mourning because they want to see "their side" win regardless of the principles or civility. It's not that complicated.
I can't tell you whether it was 'that sad of a death', I'm afraid - one of the ways I cope with the abject horror at all the suffering that exists is by convincing myself that suffering is a binary state, and cannot be ranked. That's something I choose to believe to my own sanity. It could be desconstructed in multiple ways.
I just know that I am better to other humans and animals, in terms of my own actions, where I don't think of a death as 'more' or 'less' sad. For me, personally (and this is not a judgement about anyone else, or an implication it would lead anyone else to such thoughts) I would find it to be an incredibly slippery ethical slope. It's a stance, in a semi-Kierkegaardian way, that I choose to take. I would rather not rank suffering.
> Ugly people are ugly, and nasty people are nasty. Don't get it twisted, real life is not a fairy tale. The cause and effect is reversed.
Ditto, I'm extremely handsome, so I can't go around posting about people being ugly. That's not in the secret code they give insanely good looking / handsome guys, and most of us follow to this day.. I guess you didn't get taken out of lessons for those classes? (I jest - I'm a conventionally ugly man.)
> I don't know, it seems like he pretty much just rattled off standard talking points from the conservative playbook. My perspective is the opposite, the takeaway is that he wasn't that controversial or meaningful or deeply effective.
> The tragedy is not that his life's work was cut short, it's just that his life's work was not that important in the first place. It's inevitable that we all kick the bucket one day, what matters is how we spend our time.
On that second one, that's a question of my ethical preference not to speak about people in certain ways so soon after their passing. Again, no judgement, and I'm not saying one position is more moral than the other. In fact, the only thing I'll say against Kirk for a little while in public is that many Christians don't believe it's humanity's job to do the judging.
Purely politically, yes, I strongly disagree with both his beliefs and methods. It's hard for me to know how much I'll mind when people shit-talk my politics when I eventually die. Again, I'm sorry, I'm arguing from emotion here - I just prefer not to for a little while. I don't know what that might feel like. I'm sure you can infer my political beliefs (and if you despise them, you are welcome at my funeral, should I beat you there - it might be a learning experience for me).
> That's also what makes the killing so strange to me. He was a rather inconsequential figure, so the idea that someone would be driven to madness over him is pretty unusual and speaks to some sickness.
This part is, genuinely, fascinating, and what I'm interested in and happy to talk about personally.
While two of the 'great American assassinations' (MLK, Malcolm X) of the 20th Century weren't serving politicians, I don't think it's unfair to say that Kirk was not a man who cast a similar image in the popular imagination.
I'm speaking completely in media-theory, star-theory terms, here.
You're right: it's deeply deeply strange.
We have been on a trajectory for some time where the idea of what I think is best described as 'divine right to celebrity' has been in a process of entropy. There are lots of theories about that, but I don't buy the 'we have more access to them, so they have to be more authentic' argument which seems to be most common.
(Personally, I believe that it's due to the increasing secularisation of the West; no matter how good an actor is, it must have been so much easier to understand Marilyn Monroe as an Athena than it is for us today to understand Sydney Sweeney the same, despite them sharing other archetypical qualities. It wasn't many years before Monroe's time that the audience's primary consumption of the feminine image would be as religious figure. I am not saying one mode is better or worse; I am saying that the context around "seeing a human image" has changed drastically in the West, and I believe this is overly discounted by many.)
This is important, and strange, I think, because Kirk's death is the crystallisation of this. His imagine is described as an 'icon' but is entirely divorced from the idea of an 'icon'. He is described as 'political' but was not a politician. I could go on, and I thought the image on Fox News of Trump announcing they'd caught a possible perm - looking for all the world like he belonged on the sofa - was one of the perfect images of the Trump campaign. Trump is by nature a pundit more than he is a politician, and I think he'd be the first to say as much. He would be a perfect president of the US if all that job entailed was sitting on a sofa being [charming/off-colour/a mix].
None of this, either, is a value judgement. You cannot force meaning onto star images. I don't think most politicians understand that. I think most people see their images in a fairly accurate way, and agree or disagree with the idea that they should be politicians based on that.
But it is a very very important to understand that:
- When the media treats the assassination of (forgive me if I'm wrong) a man who was essentially in charge of a big youth club and YouTube channel the same way they would the killing of a very, very important politician, this is new.
- When other world leaders phone in condolences for the same guy, this is new.
- When his body will be displayed in the Rotunda(?) this is extremely new ground for a man of his profession.
Utah is a death-penalty state. Assuming no inside job, if a killer knew that and still chose the Utah date, on a literal list of tour dates, this means that the killer sees this person's image as of high importance.
Because you really can just take a shot at anyone you like, really.
To choose a guy who is, functionally, a vlogger (right?) is new. And while I'm not saying the killer is of sound mind, or not of gainful employment by other parties, they are still a person who consumes news media and made this decision.
I think that had the assassination weapon been a drone, people would understand so much more how new this is. It's totally, totally new ground. I think it shows how completely meaningless the old ideals and images of the Anglo-American sphere are becoming, and I think it points to why it often seems like different people are looking at America, or the world, from completely different planets.
(NB - I know we killed John Lennon, which is somewhat analogous. But at least Charlie Kirk pretended to listen to and debate people, whereas I don't remember seeing any videos of Lennon showing any empathy to his audience prior to some of his contributions to the later Beatles stuff, eg White Album. If only Lennon had been carrying a copy of the record when he was shot. Not that the vinyl would have stopped a bullet, but there would, at least, be one fewer copy of it in circulation. I'm only joking - and mostly because I want people to understand that despite what I said above, I do think it's fine at a point - I do quite like that album. It's really useful, for example, if someone asks you which Beatles album you think Charlie Kirk was most akin to, because they're both basically about as bad as it gets.)
On taking notes/highlighting I agree with the author. A general behavior I observe in colleagues or co-workers is that they highlight half of a paper, but they never do anything with that highlights. This is something I never understand. If you never use that piece of information anywhere, why bother even spending ink on it?
They might be using this exercise to help them focus and absorb what's important on their first pass of reading -- they might not expect anyone to ever use their highlights.
People will have been taught different techniques, and adapted their own.
I never got into highlighters. We were taught to keep our books unmarked, for the next year to reuse them, or for resale value.
In grad school, I was told paper-reading techniques closer to what you describe.
(Skim abstract, decide whether to keep reading, skim results/conclusions, decide whether to keep reading, look at citations, cynical joke about citation politics, decide whether to keep reading, then some order of skimming introduction and related work and other parts that I don't recall because I didn't follow that guidance, and then eventually you might give the whole thing a close read.)
I take pretty aggressive notes in Obsidian for each paper [1], which carries the benefit of being able to MediaWiki-tag definitions as I find them and build up a dictionary of terms I can reference.
I've never really seen the point of highlighting, it takes zero comprehension of the material to rub a marker over a page. I try my best to summarize each paragraph into a bullet. I figure that if I can summarize stuff accurately, I at least have some understanding of the material, and again this builds up a repository of notes I can read later (though I rarely do because I usually have a decent enough memory of the source material afterward).
Some day I will start sharing my archive of paper summaries for the world to not-actually-read, though I can't right now because they're kind of intermingled with personal notes that will take some time in order to decorrelate.
[1] I have actually been experimenting with Logseq lately, and I use Codex to synchronize back to Obsidian for the time being.
In a sense the highlighting is just a way to localize my thoughts to a particular passage of the text, and the colours (or even highlighting at all) are secondary.
There's some considerable duplication of effort (notes in Zotero, then I type up notes in Obsidian, then also extract out some of those ideas into their own files). But, much like the recent posts about "outsourcing thinking" and GP noting that people sometimes do nothing with their highlights, I find that the work is useful for understanding and remembering.
Out of interest, why have you been considering Logseq?
Primarily because it's FOSS; I love Obsidian (I even pay for it) but I have to consider the possibility that they'll be bullshit and start charging for stuff or start restricting things arbitrarily. If Logseq becomes bullshit then I (or someone else) can fork it and maintain/grow it. It's also written in ClojureScript, so legally I have to kind of like it :).
I've also kind of grown to like the way that the "unit" of Logseq is the "block" instead of the "page". Pages are more about aggregation than "units" of information, and as a result of this I find that the graph view is actually useful, instead of just something pretty in Obsidian.
There are some things I really don't like about Logseq (the lack of proper Vim keystrokes being a big one for me), but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people try software for five minutes, make zero effort to understand what the application is actually trying to do, give up, and declare the software as "bad". I felt like that's what happened with Gnome Shell, for example.
I will likely eventually go back to Obsidian, but I figured that I should give Logseq a fair shake, and it's different enough from Obsidian that I felt it's only fair to spend a few weeks properly learning it.
The bullets don’t bother me, since I outline a lot already, but there are other annoyances, like the poor performance, and an inability to split the screen.
I am still using it for a bit just to give it the fairest shake, but honestly I am kind of counting the days before I am back to Obsidian.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/September-2025/Tryi...
I had to learn this lesson a long while ago when I realized many sites I casually browsed were injecting and repeating many dark thoughts that weren't truly reflective of reality. I've been way more careful of my daily intake and the groups I associate with ever since.
In 2016 I used to browse free webinar. In 2021 youtube self-help videos. Now-a-days only focused on history books as already learned everything needed for self-help.
And most often we focus on what we don't know. In my exp I wasted most time rereading stuffs I already knew.
Writing while reading is a way of focusing on what either resonates with me or confounds me.
Little notes in the margin can also be a fun plot device, used to great effect in one of the Harry Potter books, (I think?) The Chamber of Secrets.
Writing down things makes it much easier to move forward to the next project of the day.
Probably various a bit from person to person.
Your attitude makes sense when reading for pleasure, such as HN posts unrelated to your work.
I think even more so than non-fiction, this is really true of literature that gets labelled "difficult". I find a lot of people bounce of more dense/experimental texts, especially poetry, because they want to understand every aspect of the text. That's especially true when there's external pressures as well, like with school-children reading Shakespeare.
In my experience, being more loose about the need to understand every part of a text deeply frees people up to actually enjoy things a lot more.
Agreeing with the article, you don't need to remember the justification nearly as much as you do the bare facts. Except: in the future, remembering some of the anecdotes helps you remember why you believe what you (now) believe in the first place. It also helps you convince other people of the rightness of the ideas.
> We can only read a text once
Is clearly false. OP is expressing a choice, not a truth.
Yes, it’s the OP’s choice, it’s their information diet. You COULD read the good stuff over and over, but you risk falling behind the flood. This is their approach to keeping up. It makes me a little sad, sure, but as a practical solution I get it.
I certainly don’t use this approach to literature. I’ve reread my favorite books a few times over the years (Cat’s Cradle, White Noise), but I’m sure that’s not the kind of thing OP is talking about.
Go play Outer Wilds if you want to experience what I mean. It's the only game I've played that's affected me so strongly in this way.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice"
You deliberately pulled it out of context, didn't you?