longpostsforlaterreading

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

Interesting question!, albeit one I feel unqualified to answer on both sides. To take a stab at it off the top of my head, I would point to three most important factors: geography, the relative preeminence of the various contending city-states, and Persia.

Geographically, the features that led the Hellenic world to be divided into hundreds of mostly small city-states in the first place did not change once a few major poleis had risen to prominence by the early Classical period. Like, Sparta controlled the largest territory of any of them, and their direct control was only ever just "part of the Peloponnese". Corinth had a strategic location, Athens had the largest economy and maritime presence, Thebes had the best gays... You can see why these were the preeminent cities but you can also see why none of them were ever powerful enough to force the other cities into anything other than loosely subjugated alliance networks. That's pretty different from the great powers of Europe, who had deeper internal resources to draw on and were less dependent on a host of lesser powers for their power. The poleis were more vulnerable because it was much easier for rival cities to collapse their fragile webs of control. That vulnerability also made it harder for peaceful coexistence, since any rival could easily nucleate a coalition against you.

On top of this, the Classical Greeks were also next door neighbors with the largest state in history to date. And once the Persians had decided that conquering Greece wasn't worth the trouble, they were more than ready to play the different cities against each other. The Spartans took Persian gold to build a fleet to smash Athenian naval supremacy to win the Peloponnesian War, but they wouldn't be the last.

So the failure of the city-states to stably balance each other was always the likeliest outcome. None of them were *that* powerful relative to the Greek world as a whole (maybe if Syracuse wasn't halfway across the Mediterranean...?), and so all of them could only ever manage to build fragile power bases, which were repeatedly vulnerable to rival coalitions backed by an outside superpower.

That said, your question is clearly implying "did the Greeks just suck at statecraft" and it's hard to deny that they kinda did. Athens was profoundly stupid in how they handled their empire. Use a light touch! Be the stationary bandit! The speed with which the Athenians built a petty protection racket to gild the Parthenon is just deeply depressing. Maybe some of that is just the natural self-interest of a pre-modern democracy, but I'd also point to ideology and statecraft.

Ideologically, there just wasn't enough of a pan-Hellenic sentiment at the time to counterbalance the deep attachment people had to their cities. That simply was the natural unit for everyone to think of. City-states had been warring with each other and exploiting each other since before the return of literacy to Greece, and in a sense the Athenian Empire was just a turbocharged version of that. What are we gonna do, not rip off these other cities that are now in our power? Unthinkable. There was *just* enough fellow feeling to barely pull off victories in the Persian Wars but that was a massive existential crisis and it was still a very near run thing both internally and externally.

In terms of statecraft, we do see further "technological" development as we move from the Classical to the Hellenistic periods. The post-Alexander kingdoms were way closer, and more involved in internal Greek politics than the Persians had ever been. A much bigger threat in other words. And in response to that pressure, we do see the city-states gradually forming themselves into proper confederations, most notably the Achaean League, which covered most of the Peloponnese. These weren't just reruns of the Athenian Empire with a single hegemon, they were actual confederations (although they weren't above forcing cities in to their leagues at swordpoint). They were imo a genuine development in terms of both ideology and political organization, but much too late in history and so of course they got smashed by Rome. Sorry guys, shoulda done it in 480, your achievements would've been legendary instead of "trivia for people who read Plutarch".

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

i'm at it again: here's a new game you can play with magic: the gathering cards that's not, like, the main one you might have heard of

I Poop On Your Doorstep is subversive: it draws attention to the norms of proper social behaviour, and how artists get a broad yet partial licence to violate them. It's shocking and icky, especially to you.

And let's talk about the title. The word is not "shit" or "defecation" but "poop", alluding to a childlike playfulness, rather than horror or disgust. The deconstruction of our boundaries must not be profane or desensitized, but a work of whimsical play.

---

A response to advocates of I Poop on Your Doorstep:

I wonder what the first men of the church to find prehistoric bones thought. What went through their heads as they gazed upon bones that defied all reasonable expectations? Femurs the size of a man. Knuckles the size of a woman’s fist. Teeth the length of an arming sword. What else could such things be but

Holy?

Divine, biblical?

Some bones were attributed to monsters. To the Antediluvian Giants, or to the fearsome gauls that crashed against Rome, or to the serpents that God had to lay low. That last interpretation isn’t far from the truth: What else is a meteor if not an act of judgement, whether cosmic or ordained?

But some bones were closer to human than monster. Large, yes, and old, and heavy, and all these other descriptors, yes- but the knuckle of some great raptor looks remarkably similar to the knuckles of that peasant boy taken by a stray arrow. Put the two side by side after the crows have had their fill and you can almost imagine the knuckles belonged to the boy. Maybe, given enough time, and food, and space, and fervor, and, and, and- maybe he could become that which those men of the cloth believed they had found.

Saints.

It sounds comical, knowing what we know about the suspected shape of the creatures whose bones the soil turned skyward. Scales and feathers, razor teeth and wicked claws and vibrant colors garbed in church white. A halo suspended atop a gore stained head. Gold capped teeth set in the jaws of an apex predator. But what else could they think?

What else could these bones, these relics stained and fossilized and carbon dated by millennials of age be, if not.

Well.

I wonder if human is the appropriate word. After all, is not the goal of every saint a separation of humanity? To shed one’s flesh, to slough off sin stained and forgiveness scented skin in favor of wings? In favor of fire? 

Did those first men ever ask themselves, 

“Where are the wings? Where is the fire?”

“Why is it here?”

The church reburied the bones of these Newly Found and Hastily Named Saints in the graveyards and catacombs and holy sepulchers of worship and prayer. Right across from the peasant boy who no one remembered, killed by the pox that had ravaged his town, found gutted and naked by the side of the road. Was he a saint, in the end? Did he feel the presence of the Bone Saints, lying next to him? Or was it all dark?

I wonder- if it all ends like they say, fire and brimstone and all that, will the Saints get one last chance to see the world? 

There, look honey! It’s Saint Peter, right next to Saint Nicholas!

And Saint Stegosaurus!

And Saint Mammathus!

Would their halos fit their heads?

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

So apparently the only study (afaik) that has actually engaged in quantitative research about how often Catholic priests have sex in general (there’s been multiple that only focused on CSA) was a 37-year stud from John Hopkins published in 1990 that ended up with a number of around 50%.

And I’ll be totally honest if the Catholic Church went up to me and was like “Memecucker tell us how to fix the ordination crisis even when we think it might be stabilizing the seminaries are just getting flooded with far-right lunatics!

…

We’ll pay you if it works and also translate whatever historical documents you ask”

Then in that case my advice would be that no matter how successful your marketing is, if the impression is that only incels need apply, then you’re gonna only get incels to apply. In heavily Catholic cultures people know that priests fool around even if they may not know which individual priest is doing Id still wager most people could name at least one auntie that was fucking a priest. I genuinely think at certain times and places Roman Catholic priests had more sex than married Orthodox priests

But nowadays you know how many people just assume a priest will get defrocked or excommunicated just for fooling around with a consenting adult? Maybe just try and nudge things so some insider info gets out a little like

“Hey if its WITH AN ADULT and the info isn’t public at all and as far as your bishop knows it only happened once, he’ll probably just tell you to confess and uh don’t do it again ok and don’t do it with someone connected to the church if that’s the case also. I mean compare ‘hey, stop that!’ to the penalties for a priest entering a civil marriage and refusing or being repeatedly fully open about fucking someone now thats the type of shit it takes to get kicked out of the priesthood but people don’t realize that! ”

like you guys don’t gotta make a press release saying that just like, you know how to let info leak out. Hell, the 1917 Canon Law code said a priest who attempts to enter a civil marriage gets automatically excommunicated which includes being defrocked but the 1983 code lowered the penalty to suspension from clerical duties and it’s only if the priest refused to leave the relationship does he get kicked out of the priesthood but doesn’t even get excommunicated! That was a step in the right direction like let people know you’re not in a position to be expelling priests for a thing a lot of them do anyway

Remind people that Donatism is a heresy and sinful priests are still valid sacramental ministers. Go around telling people that “hey breaking the vow of chastity WITH AN ADULT is still technically bad but you know what’s super duper really bad is when it causes “public scandal”” like hammer that home. Like one of the current things that results in automatic excommunication is a priest that grants confession to and absolves the sins of someone they’re having an affair with so you know, take a hint and maybe don’t fool around with religiously Catholic ADULT women that would feel that compulsion in the first place? God made non-Catholic ADULTS that wouldn’t care for a reason.

Drop the hints, like “Hey are you Catholic and also don’t see yourself getting married until middle age? Try out the priesthood why not!” maybe suggest you’re “thinking” about making laicization easier after a few decades in the priesthood like you don’t need to do it just have it leak out so young dudes can go “well if it doesn’t work out I can just marry at 45 or something”. Do ad campaigns with messages like “Priests are humans too!” “Monks are the ones that are super duper serious about vows like specifically monks are the ones that are supposed to be held to higher standards chastity specifically monks”

Do some back channel stuff and encourage TV shows to also give hints you know, make priests look sexy like “oh man if priests *did* fuck they’d have no trouble fucking other consenting adults! oh wow he only got a warning I thought the penalty would be way worse” Maybe some medieval dramas where it’s like “oooh look how religious these people are they’re so much more religious back then and zealous but there’s lots of priests that lowkey fuck isn’t that crazy they didnt even have cars that let them drive to another city first wild huh it’s like secretly normalized weird huh”

Prepare yourself.

And then there was this dude Ezekiel the Tragedian who is the earliest known Jewish dramatist and he was like “Hey the Greeks use their own religious stories to make these great epic plays why don’t we use own of the stories from the Torah… oooh I know the perfect one!” and he made the Exagōgē a dramatization of the Exodus story up to the escape from Egypt and he was like “yeah I’m changing parts of the story for dramatic license, am I allowed to do this I dunno it’s in clear ‘imitation of idolators’ but also what you gonna do Maccabee this is Alexandria” like God is a character in the play with a speaking role bc why not he had a cool scene as the burning bush where they used a burning bush on the stage while a voice off stage speaks and says “For it is impossible for a mortal to see my face, but it is possible to hear my words, on account of which I have come to you” bc God has to explain to the audience why he can’t actually appear on stage so Greeks don’t start being all “idgi is the crane broken a god is speaking where’s the person being lowered from the ceiling” and the play starts off with Moses calling Egypt a bunch of tyrannical oppressors and Egyptians were like “hey uh, we’re cool right?” that enslaved the Hebrews and Egyptians were like “huh? We kept you guys as slaves? What Dynasty does this take place in?” and then Pharaoh orders the firstborn Hebrews be killed and Egyptians were like “Ok hold on what is this what the fuck is this we don’t do that the fucking Greeks kill kids they don’t want like just look outside the city us Egyptians find that horrorific and rescue them why are you saying we and wait a minute didn’t you guys also do that one ritual that other Cannanites did where” and then Egypt is hit by the plagues there’s an original scene where Moses has a vision in a dream where God hands him a scepter and lets him sit on a heavenly throne above the whole world bc yeah that thing you associate with Moses being the World-Emperor I guess and the Plagues happen and Egyptians are like “no really what is this” and the Egyptian priests are defeated by Moses and Egyptians were like “. ……..?” and Pharaoh lets them go but then attack with an army that’s “one million” strong and then th sea gets parted and its portrayed like Aeschylus’s Persians where a lone surviving soldier is like “oooh nooo we Egypt is ruined our might empire lost by so much we’re such fucking losers we were so arrogant to think we could defeat those cool Hebrews they’re so awesome and they’re even led by Moses the biggest badass ever how foolish we were to oppose Moses” and Egyptians were like “NO SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THE POINT BEHIND ALL THIS” and the play ends with like a massive giant bird with red and gold colors showing up to the Hebrews and symbolism and Greeks were like “oh cool! That’s our thing that’s a phoenix” and Egyptians were “THAT IS A BENNU THAT JS THE BIRD OF RA ITS OUR THING WE CAME UP WITH IT FIRST WE CAME UP WITH ALL THIS SHIT FIRST”

And then Egyptians like, they didn’t write plays but they were like “ooooh just gonna fucking… make up bullshit… fucking… we can do that to” and they wrote history books and this dude named Manetho was like “one day there was a Pharaoh named Amenophis and he built a giant fucking leper colony with 80,000 lepers working a stone quarry and the stupid miserable lepers we’re joined by other impure degenerated who fell under the sway of sn evil renegade priest of Osiris named Osarsiph who was like “hmm I can do something with this and cause some chaos” and started giving them a new set of laws to replace Egyptian ones and it wasdescribed as inverting Egyptian laws so Osariph was like “hehehe stop worshipping stupid Egyptian gods! Dont offer intense at temples or anything actually go forth kill the stupid animals that stupid Egyptians view as sacred like cows and bulls let’s kill those stupid sacred animals of Hathor and Apis hahaha those stupid Egyptians not killing cows because they give milk and Hathor is nurturing! I say killing cows is awesome we should even kill them just to kill them make it a ritual and we’ll do it by setting them on fire so not only do we not get milk anymore but we aren’t even getting meat ahaha yes my depraved army of lepers kill and eat all their sacred animals eehehehe kill them and eat them yess slaughter them all and devour all those the cats, baboons, herons, crocodil-” and Jews were like “Wait we don’t ea-“don’t care” said Manetho “anyway don’t forget to * never* eat pigs even though they’re an excellent calorie efficient source of meat hehehe we think pigs are sacred! Yes fucking sacred because they’re beloved by the one true god! But not as sacred as donkeys which btw we also don’t eat! And also we should hate everyone that isn’t an ugly smelly falling apart leper… except for these guys! And he summoned their Cannanite allies the Hyksos who are a bunch of nomadic desert savages that had already once ravaged Egypt in the last and Jews were like “wait is that word.. fucking who???” and Manetho was like “and then Osariph’s miserable leper slaves and the Hyksos barbarians spent years committing atrocities and desecrating temples and committing massacres and eating baboons and leaking pus on scrolls of Thot and Pharaoh was exiled to Ethiopia but then he came back and Osariph was like actually my real “btw name… is Moses!!! And we worship the one god… Set who is the true god ahahhaa yes it’s Set Fuck Yeah God of Murder and Chaos!!!! Who else could it be other than Set wanting to murder Osiris for good now! Im going around spreading fucking plagues because what other god would do that other than Set The Egyptian Murder God That Hates Egypt who also likes pigs and donkeys! and then Pharaoh returned with an army and defeated the miserable lepers and barbarians in an epic battle where Egypt kicked ass and won so yes Egypt won like Egypt used to win a lot back in the day and then the asshole leper slave barbarian stinky degenerates fucked off to make their shitty desert temple city in over in uh Syria I guess I dunno who gives a shit”

Linked posts by @professormcguire https://www.tumblr.com/thebewitcher/796315436618760192/two-up-two-down

@gaystergangster https://www.tumblr.com/gaystergangster/797457840436576256/the-death-eaters-and-the-nazis-are-not-the-same

@yaoist https://www.tumblr.com/yaoist/812913833958129664/a-lot-of-the-political-critique-of-hp-falls-really

@ianwaite https://www.tumblr.com/ianwaite/643039074681307136/an-ex-criminal-and-alcoholics-view-of-severus?source=share

The main guy's writeups:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03780

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XHtygebvHoJSSeNPP/some-rules-for-an-algebra-of-bayes-nets

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWQWzGCSFj6GTZHz7/natural-latents-the-math

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTiuLzusJWyepFpbN/why-care-about-natural-latents

My partial writeups:

https://www.overleaf.com/read/wfpkyjhmmwvy#5441d9

https://www.lesswrong.com/collaborateOnPost?postId=TsFaJnxrPx6LWTWSC&key=f7d71ecf3e5b3e9f7354ebce03b521

https://www.lesswrong.com/editPost?postId=nAaLSq5izGn7kZheu&key=9e4531fcb6e0659a4d1bf16e59d9ea

My general plan: Finish up notating the rules for the algebra of Bayes nets in terms of blackbox rewriting rules for monoidal category string diagrams. Use category theory to find any rules JSW might have missed. Use even more category theory to figure out where any useful universal properties fall out, like his sense of isomorphism. Use yet more category theory to talk about this stuff in full generality, not just for Bayes nets, and probably even get cleaner or stronger proofs.