brockm
Mike Brock

Unfashionable.

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nprofile1qqstjqpcx0atlun36puzuqctucdhasuvul295xu6s60mmv6tnckjqqqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dse9wuw5

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Last Notes

2026-02-28 14:06:22 UTC

The insane gaslighting from people who said Kamala Harris would start wars, and Trump would start none, who now defend this, and argue it's constituional is something that nobody's public reputation in politics should be able to recover from. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules.

2026-02-28 12:51:15 UTC

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Let’s just face facts Evan. The whole bitcoin commentariat is full of shit.

2026-02-28 12:44:25 UTC

To the motherfuckers here who thought Kamala Harris was the neocon, I have nothing but a “fuck you” to say to you.

2026-01-27 17:57:27 UTC

I am amused that the new right-wing CEOs — the champions of free speech from the censorious left — have given us a historical demonstration of just how big of a fraud the entire political atheistic of free speech warriorism was. It was just reactionary anti-leftism all along. Censorship was always okay to the right when it had the right targets. They’ve shown us this repeatedly throughout history.
#note1pga…wc3h

2026-01-14 17:26:52 UTC

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Donald Trump will have a decision to make, yes. It won’t be because of my petition. But my petition is certainty an opportunity for good people to come together and stand together as a good patriotic Americans and put their name underneath a clean statement about support for good republic governance, no?

2026-01-13 19:16:31 UTC

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Absolutely. https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/on-the-passing-of-scott-adams

2026-01-12 13:02:30 UTC

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Hi Darth Vader wannabe guy.

2026-01-12 04:22:53 UTC

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You think seriousness is being an asshole. And that’s your problem. Not mine. And not the rest of civilized society’s.

2026-01-12 04:01:41 UTC

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Would you like to do a live debate with me? I can host you on my Substack Live. I have 18,000 subscribers and 22,000 followers. You can demonstrate to my audience your superior understanding of economic theory to me, and my misplaced judgement of Keynes’ positive contributions to understanding macroeconomics. I know you spent a lot of time at mises.org and have memorized at least two or three stupid talking points.

2026-01-12 03:45:22 UTC

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You don't have the first fucking idea what you're talking about.

2026-01-12 01:44:35 UTC

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You are an angel! Thank you, Roya!

2026-01-12 01:21:21 UTC

I am going to harshly judge my friends who don't sign my petition. Just so you know. https://www.change.org/p/restore-integrity-in-american-governance

2026-01-11 20:39:14 UTC

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I was never on the side of tearing down human civilization, Derek to rebuild the world in the shape of feudalism. You know that.

2024-04-21 17:33:05 UTC

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*Rees-Mogg. My bad.

2024-04-21 15:59:54 UTC

I will also say, this same argument, when generalized brings into question the whole concept of digital contracts as workable at all. The idea of self-executing contracts that can be used to revolutionize everything from property titles to equities trading. But any sane workable system is going to rely on truth oracles that have some social component to deal with disputes. And if that’s true, then we’re probably right back in good old regular law courts.
At which point, the question just immediately needs to be asked: why do we have these digital contracts in the first place?
I actually think this is a completely fatal blow to the entire idea of Web3. The intractable problem is staring you in the face, if you do some philosophical exploration of the people. #note1np9…3ejf

2024-04-03 16:15:54 UTC

Land taxes are the most defensible form of taxation. Fight me.

2024-03-26 03:54:11 UTC

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But I'm not trying to reach it from the top down. I don't know what you're insisting on a directionality. Individual and collective interests can be in tension with each other, and the maxima of the latter seems to be highly contingent on some concept of the former. As demonstrated by collective action problems (see: tragedy of the commons, uncaptured negative exterbalities, incentive structures for non-violent dispute resolutions like rule-of-law).

2024-03-26 03:16:15 UTC

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I don't claim the common good exists in a foundationalist way. I am arguing that conception of it, is necessary for a stable society. You're the one that's insisting that any ethical foundation must be derived from purportedly self-evident truths or objective truths about individual rights. I make no such claim. Either about individual rights or collective rights.

2024-03-26 02:41:53 UTC

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This might be the dumbest thing I've read all day, to be honest.

2024-03-26 02:38:28 UTC

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How am I suffering from an ontological fallacy, exactly? I'm not the one insisting that the normative grounding of my ethics needs to be erased in any universalist natural rights theory. You're doing that. Not me.

2024-03-26 02:10:19 UTC

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I think you're engaged in a kind of ontological fallacy here, where you insist there's something necessary to directionality. The collective interest and the individual interest can simply be in tension, and mediate each other. Insisting on a simplistic grounding, as say praxeology tries to do, to me, is just weird. It just rejects any kind of dynamical notion around competing equities, and demands a universal starting point.

2024-03-26 01:53:43 UTC

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I definitely don't think that ought can be derived from is. I am firmly in Hume's camp.

2024-03-25 22:50:35 UTC

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I think you’re mostly getting my idea. I think it’s also worth mentioning that in many ways, classical liberals like say Locke and Jefferson, were in their own ways, skeptical of libertarianism (even though they didn’t have a word for it) as a standalone ideological orientation, hence the fact they were social contract theorists — which by definition is trying to mediate individual rights against some conception of the common good.
I’d go further and suggest that the emergence of state capacity libertarian and liberal nationalist thought are both re-evaluations of these insights by a bunch of former libertarianism and neoliberals who have recognized this very danger and are now trying to cope with it, in a contemporaneous conversation.

2024-03-25 18:42:00 UTC

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I will try to respond with as much academic clarity as possible, to avoid any misunderstanding of exactly what I mean when I talk about uncontained libertarianism:
Libertarianism, while a vital force for individual freedom and resistance against tyranny, can become self-defeating and enable fascism when taken to an extreme and not constrained by a commitment to the common good. The libertarian focus on individual liberty and skepticism of collective action, when unmoored from any conception of public interest or social responsibility, can erode the very foundations of a free and open society.
By making epistemic arguments against the possibility or knowability of the common good, radical libertarianism can fuel a market fundamentalism that concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy, dismantles social protections, and undermines the capacity for democratic self-governance. This atomistic individualism creates a vacuum of meaning and solidarity that is easily exploited by fascist demagogues promising a return to unity and purpose through authoritarianism. Thus, an improperly contained libertarianism that rejects any notion of the public good or legitimate government can paradoxically enable a far greater threat to human freedom in the form of fascist tyranny. The libertarian impulse must be balanced with a commitment to the rule of law, democratic institutions, and some conception of our shared responsibilities and interests as a society.

2024-03-25 16:31:54 UTC

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Of course it has to be contained. The individual is not the only equity in a society. There must be a social interest considered, as a prerequisite to encouraging cooperation, rather than violence.

2024-03-24 20:10:53 UTC

The libertarian impulse is a beautiful, necessary and emancipatory part of the human spirit. Without it, we’d all already be in bondage. Or dead. But the libertarian impulse, improperly contained is ultimately self-destructive and closes in on its own contradictions. It should actually not that all be surprising, to find that when, uncontained, its contradictions emerge in the fascist tendency.

2024-03-18 17:04:56 UTC

When the crux of your argument is to just start demanding the other party subscribe to more simplistic categories of thought, you’re through the Dunning-Kruger looking class.
When they start dismissing nuance and complexity as a lack of critical thinking skills, you know you’ve come face to face with the golem of anti-intellectualism.

2023-10-22 16:54:32 UTC

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Oh, I think we could be in WWIII before the end of the decade at this point. My prediction is up to about 50% likely now.

2023-10-22 16:15:54 UTC

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The doom loop is so stupid. Not that there’s not things to be deeply worried about in the world — including inflation and the fiscal crisis we are likely to have. But the way some people are embracing the chaos they believe is coming as some kind of cleansing, and opportunity to build a new world, like we’re somehow likely to even survive a complete destabilization of the world order is fucking nuts.

2023-10-22 15:20:06 UTC

We are neither in any economic recession or depression. The fact people keep saying this makes me think we need to turn the whole Internet off.

2023-10-08 06:26:42 UTC

I'm convinced the most powerful insight that one can have, in order to see the world in the most a dispassionate analytical lens possible, is to fundamentally come to understand where value-judgements enter our human arguments and understanding about the world. These things are what philosophers call normative arguments.
They are everywhere in your thinking.
Every argument you make about politics, economics and culture, has a normative argument hiding in there. No matter how "evidenced-based" or "objective" you think the position is.
When you learn to parse for that, you immediately see through a lot of the narrative-based reasoning traps that people fall into.
But still, no matter how analytical you are, you're going to have to show up with your own normative arguments, yourself. But being aware of them is critical to intellectual honesty.

2023-10-08 06:06:38 UTC

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America is not an empire. But its strength in relative terms has declined due to the rise of other power centers. That said, the end of the unipolar moment will lead to instability.

2023-10-08 05:47:41 UTC

The reality is this ... those people who think the decline of American-led rules-based order is going to usher in an era of peace, because you've convinced yourself that the military industrial complex is the chief antagonist in what would otherwise be a more peaceful world ... well, you may very well be about to feast on prodigious meal of rude awakenings.

2023-06-20 17:25:10 UTC

I have officially confirmed that Chicken Republic in Nigeria is way better than KFC. https://nostr.build/i/01903d0656d7a3de2d646cfe16b53a965483240e62838a51487aba2f363730c0.jpg

2023-06-04 21:02:32 UTC

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I'm actually not a fan of Dollar Milkshake Theory. 🤷🏻‍♂️

2023-05-30 15:40:25 UTC

Bitcoin doesn't prove Austrian Economics correct. Behind these pronouncements are normative arguments being paraded as objective truth.
Also, the axiom of action is not self-evidently true. It's circular reasoning, disguised as a revelatory brute fact.

2023-05-29 21:58:40 UTC

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Basically. I mean, people have choices. I also think it's pretty strange that when people say "mainstream media", they tend to exclude things like Fox News, even though it is quite literally the most watched news network in the US.
I have a far more cynical view of these things than most other people. I think humans are looking for dopamine hits and to confirm their biases. And there's a lot of people selling that as a product.

2023-05-24 06:18:51 UTC

No human has ever seen what the world really looks like. We've only seen how bundles of neurons make sense of the electrical impulses from the photons hitting the back of our retina, sending signals down the optic nerve.
If you saw the world the way it looks in totality, when you looked up in the night sky, you wouldn't see blackness. If your eyes were sensitive to infrared light, radio frequencies, microwaves, ultraviolet and the entire electromagnetic spectrum, you'd see a universe glowing brilliantly above you. Yet we see but a tiny sliver of what we call "visible light".
It is strange that our intuition is that the human eye is the gold standard for visual perception of reality, when it sees so little of it.

2023-05-17 02:40:17 UTC

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Let's say he's right, and remote work is much less productive than in-person office work. I might even be convincible in some cases, for certain kinds of work and the potential for driving consensus faster. I'm not sure net-net it's less productive overall. But we can wring-hands about it for hours.
Whether he's right about that or not does not nexus on a moral claim. Why is something that is "less productive" equate to something that is immoral? By that measure, people should go to jail for taking vacations.

2023-05-17 02:33:49 UTC

I'm not convinced that Elon Musk has a firm grasp on what the word "moral" means at this point. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bullsht-and-morally-wrong/

2023-05-11 19:13:01 UTC

Google Bard is quickly catching up to ChatGPT. I played around with it like two months ago, and it was clearly inferior to ChatGPT (hence all the mockery). But Google has truly closed the gap quite a bit. For some of the stuff I was using it for — research and ideation — it might even be a little bit better than GPT 3.5 now. Still think GPT-4 feels quite a bit more advanced. But this makes me think people shouldn’t count Google out.

2023-05-04 02:06:01 UTC

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Your semantic nitpicking aside, I would argue that absolute certainty is not compatible with changing one's mind. Because if you're absolutely certain something is true, it's logically correct to dismiss any evidence to the contrary as fraudulent.
Accepting the possibility some evidence could change your mind, is sort of predicated on the idea you *could* be wrong in order to provide a cognitive basis for evaluating such evidence in the first place.

2023-05-03 23:13:33 UTC

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Disagree. I think you tend to see a lot less identity-idea connection in a lot more centrist and moderate forms of politics, where there tends to be a greater emphasis on seeking evidence-based policy, compromise and affordance for accepting disagreement and loss.

2023-05-03 22:21:41 UTC

The weird thing I notice about some of the people who state they are most opposed to identity politics, is how ironically -- and seemingly unknowingly -- they are enmeshed in extreme forms of it.
If your personal identity is tied to a belief system of any kind, and you consider attacks on that belief system to be a personal attack. And, you tend to constrain your personal relationships to people who share that belief system, you are simply part of identity politics. That is what identity politics is.
It doesn't really matter what the belief system is: if it's progressive or "woke" politics. Or right-wing populist politics. Or even if it's categories like bitcoiner vs nocoiner -- if your personal behavior, and community behaviors fit the definition I laid out in the second paragraph, then you are participating in identity politics.
And yes, identity politics is pretty bad for anything resembling a functioning pluralistic society.

2023-04-19 20:37:48 UTC

I really think everyone should be significantly more freaked out about AI.

2023-04-17 10:53:24 UTC

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Well, we can. But the chances of our premature extinction go way up in that scenario.

2023-04-16 08:47:05 UTC

AutoGPT shows the whole debate over whether GPT is on the path to AGI or not is completely irrelevant to the scope of disruption to come.

2023-04-12 23:07:54 UTC

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I'm not sure past technological epochs can be held up on an apples-to-apples basis, here.

2023-04-12 22:37:27 UTC

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Yeah. I mean, I hope I'm wrong. Who doesn't want to live in utopia? I want that for my kids and myself. But all the knowledge of accumulated on human nature and human group dynamics points me towards believing there's quite a bit of trouble ahead, socially and politically.
It's one of the reasons thoroughly unconvinced by books like the Sovereign Individual and more recently, Balaji's Network State.
These frameworks for future society are built atop axioms and assumptions of the human condition that I do not believe map onto reality.

2023-04-12 11:40:27 UTC

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I think this is where people get quite confused. People point to the illiberal and undemocratic things in liberal democracies as proof of the problems with liberal democracy. But the point is, we have a standard by which we can measure against, that our societies are supposed to live up to. We can point out an example of government censorship, and recognize that's illiberal. The philosophical ideal isn't the problem. The problem is we're not living up to it.
The good news, is we have a bunch of people jumping up and down demanding we do live up to those ideals. And the push back does work, when the voices get loud enough.
So far, those of us who push back and yell, are not being disappeared and sent to re-education camps. Which is a pretty important thing to think about, when idiot libertarians claim we're supposedly living in a totalitarian states now.

2023-04-12 09:43:47 UTC

We take written language for granted. But it's actually the most important human invention, when you really think about it. Nothing else comes close.

2023-04-12 00:24:17 UTC

When was the last time you said "I don't know" in an argument?

2023-04-11 08:05:20 UTC

Japan is such a beautiful country. I am going to come back here more.

2023-04-03 20:00:23 UTC

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this is a guy who has clearly come to terms with the fact he's never getting his $44b back.

2023-04-03 06:04:33 UTC

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I'm definitely not wishing for it to transform into a low-trust society!

2023-03-30 14:49:52 UTC

I do happen to think TikTok is not a trustworthy platform and should be basically considered under CCP control, for all intents and purposes. However, banning access to it is not consistent with the principles of a free and open society. Some of the things policymakers are now contemplating are dangerously illiberal in the zeal to take down TikTok.
The RESTRICT Act, being one example of a impulsive to extreme overreach.
These impulses are very bad for the future prospects of an open internet. There needs to robust pushback from civil society, here. You don't fight tyranny by adopting the tools of tyranny.

2023-03-29 16:35:18 UTC

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I don’t expect the petition to work. But I do hope more people start taking the dangers more seriously. 🤷‍♂️

2023-03-27 00:27:43 UTC

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If you're thinking of putting your iris scan into a centralized biometrics database ... don't.

2023-03-26 18:45:21 UTC

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I'm not debating they are powerful. I think my original point implicitly concedes that. I'm arguing they lower information content in the discourse, tend towards framing things in black and white, in-group and out-group.

2023-03-25 17:06:04 UTC

Seems like few people are aware that the intensity and low latitude display of the Aurora Borealis, is actually the result of a near-miss by Earth from what was another potential Carrington Event from the Sun.
The sun had a massive eruption that was luckily on the far side of the Sun from us. Had it been pointed towards Earth, we may have found ourselves in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis, with satellites in orbit burned out by intense radiation, electrical power grids knocked offline by overheated transmission lines, and potential serious damage to global communications infrastructure, which could have knocked wide-swaths of the internet and mobile communication systems offline for weeks or months.
We were literally spared a serious catastrophe by random chance.

2023-03-24 20:56:56 UTC

If Greenpeace drops their opposition to nuclear power, I would at least be open to the faint possibility of taking them seriously.

2023-03-22 22:34:28 UTC

The world would literally be so much better if everyone did psychedelics at least a few times in their life.

2023-03-21 16:03:46 UTC

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I just think arguing about this stuff from the perspective of normative ethics to demonstrate the folly of the system is severely misguided. I think people can say "fractional reserve banking is fraud" until the cows come home, and unless governments outright banned it, the incentives to do it will persist indefinitely. Because there's actual productive efficiencies to be found in time arbitrage markets, even though they contain obvious tail-risks.

2023-03-21 01:22:00 UTC

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Because governments will continue to retain their taxation power despite AnCap fantasies to the contrary. Because there are real economic efficiency advantages to have competing currencies, particularly between different geographies to account for issues around trade balance, in the aggregate. Because the collective incentives to time arbitrage in very high. Both for governments and the private sector. Because liquidity traps and demand destruction traps can and do occur in markets, and the political incentives for governments to step in, in those scenarios is extreme.
If you're betting against all these things, I think you're betting on a bunch of human restraint and collective belief in specific ethical assumptions, that I think are a stretch to believe will be universally adopted.

2023-03-21 01:03:03 UTC

I think Bitcoiners may be surprised that no matter how successful Bitcoin becomes, that state-issued currencies will continue to exist, and bitcoin will be more like a world-reserve currency, that central banks hold, and people use as an inflation hedge, and people resort to as freedom money in hostile environments.
This is a very real possibility as to what Bitcoin's future looks like.

2023-03-15 19:04:40 UTC

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The one that allows you to say something like this, and not have police come knocking on your door.

2023-03-13 18:17:55 UTC

For what it's worth, I do not believe the reason why BTCUSD is up, is because we're seeing a flight-to-safety effect. I believe we are seeing the result of the market believing there's going to be lower rates now, and betting on the Fed pulling back from the tightening cycle. If you want to see this very clearly, just look at bitcoin's correlation to the NASDAQ today.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_c1d7b684fba90e332e81b11c71e64b9c5c12f512afd3375659395f4e1ecf14ab.png

2023-03-12 22:45:35 UTC

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Well, if you don't care about easy on-ramps and off-ramps for BTCUSD, then you can go ahead and not care.

2023-03-12 22:42:37 UTC

The collapse of Signature Bank is very bad for bitcoin in the US, to say the least.

2023-03-12 20:32:42 UTC

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Maybe. Or they're telling the truth.

2023-03-11 22:27:28 UTC

This will probably be very unpopular among people here, given the sentiments I'm seeing here, but while I didn't think SVB should be bailed out, for reasons I elucidated, I do think the FDIC should likely intervene with First Republic this weekend. It is as well of a capitalized bank as any other bank in the US, and ordinary people and businesses are going to lose money for no other reason than hysteria brought on by the SVB collapse.

2023-03-04 18:38:59 UTC

Anybody want to help design t-shirts and hats for Foundation for Conservation of Salamanders and Woodlands (FCSW)? It's a worthy cause, I think you will agree. And spreading the word on this important cause is a great worthwhile initiative.

2023-03-01 23:55:24 UTC

I believe in liberal democracy, and therefore the existence of the modern state.
However, I do believe that the maintenance of freedom and democracy requires that the power of the state be continuously held in healthy suspicion, and in many cases, actively challenged.
I definitely stop short of holding the goal of "burning it all down", as I think that would unleash untold suffering and catastrophe. In fact, I think this goal is ridiculously misguided.

2023-03-01 18:54:20 UTC

TBD is going to have a big announcement tomorrow ...

2023-02-22 21:32:18 UTC

https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_228a5b197ed5043171c5e84543d94ed0ea18efb0d604215f335a04294c5ff05a.png

2023-01-22 02:37:53 UTC

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So you're saying that because the spec is hosted at the W3C, it will break if the W3C goes down? Are you actually arguing that?

2023-01-02 02:25:13 UTC

Going to be going on a major recruiting campaign as soon as Damus is approved.

2022-12-31 19:52:09 UTC

What if balkanization of social media is a good thing? What if scale is inherently unstable? Not for technical reasons. But for sociopolitical reasons. What if that's what's really going on right now?

2022-12-30 17:20:50 UTC

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Believing there are singular and simple answers is incredibly seductive, though!

2022-12-30 16:14:22 UTC