THREAD

1/ Yesterday's indictment of Douglass Mackey was deeply satisfying in that a co conspirator that was identified in the indictment ; Microchip. This Alt Right troll targeted me, & many others in 2017

cc
@thespybrief
@RVAwonk
@JamesFourM
@TheRickWilson
@DrDenaGrayson

'Tera mera rishta kya, hindu, hindu,hindutva' is a clear take on 'tera mera rishta kya,la ilaha illallah'. As much as Hindutva hates the monotheistic religions especially Islam, there's a strange wistfulness and subliminal need at display now, to BE that they hate. 1

Charlie Hebdo doesn’t come up as a cautionary tale now but rather 'why cant we be like that'?
Growing up, Hanuman was an adorable deity for us, who swallowed the sun, or who couldn’t figure out what was Sanjeevani booti so he picked up a whole mountain and came back with it. 2

Or he was loyal, admirable and when he cleaved his chest, you saw both Ram and Sita. Now we have a lot of “Angry Hanuman” stickers. Why is a cute childlike God angry? We don’t know. It's a convenient blank space where to paint all the angst of Hindu Khatre mein hain narrative. 3

The other strange thing that has started happening is pictures of Ram appearing sans Sita. “Jai Siya Ram” has become “Jai Shri Ram”. Some people disingenuously explain it as being the same thing - because Shri is a name of Lakshmi. Not really. Siya is an apbhransh of Sita. 4

Shri is a prefix of respect in this case. Hinduism is being militarised. A woman/Sita has no place in it. Even the militaristic Goddess that is Durga has no place in this conception of neo-Hindu divinity, as evidenced by Dilip Mandal wondering where Durga came from. 5

Great seeing one of the fastest natural drivers of the last decade Robert Kubica today with @WilliamsRacing at @COTA #USGP #f1 #robertkubica #Poland #richenergy

A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

And you want to avoid the asymmetric downside: anything that can end the game, whether it's through financial ruin, or reputational ruin, or physical ruin.

That requires a certain amount of chaos and spontaneity.

If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality.

We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that's not how the world around us works anymore.

The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.