Calipers is Risen: Q1 2025
Thirteen essays, three months, one quarterly index
Six months of my hinged steel limbs scraping your inbox walls. We should discuss our status before month nine. The last time was Christmas, and back then, I predicted 2024 would be the “peak of my flirtation with right-wing politics.” Today, I’d tell you not to worry about such labels. Whether there, or on questions of human vs. machine, guilt vs. shame, or racist vs. antiracist, 2025 is the year of secret third options.
The portal opens with this quarter’s most esoteric piece, Why Everyone Loved Tibet. That fossil of campus activism lies just beneath 2024’s “Free Palestine” layer. The mascot changes, but every compelling movement blends mysticism with politics. Prayer flags or keffiyehs, Buddhism or Islamism. Each fills the same spiritual void. Try and fit the world to your desire, and you end up setting yourself on fire.
Last year’s writings were angrier, more obsessed with division. Lately I’ve been thinking more about integration. Not that kind, the narrative kind. What MLK and Yarvin Have in Common traces how both men bypassed persuasion through storycraft. We live in the worlds both built, suspended in an exhausted faith in System 2. After both arsonists, I Have a Dream: of a regime that doesn’t depend on everyone agreeing.
The old order also had aesthetic rules. No mixing highbrow with lowbrow. No blending insight with confession. No beauty in the data. My riskiest piece, Autists Seek Patterns, Not Cope, escaped through the Underground Railroad of Going Direct. I know you want the truth, even when it hurts. It might look sick, but some minds don’t soothe first. They see. You can call this a problem of double empathy or accessibility.
The Third Rail is The Charm
This tension between accessibility and precision runs through all The Calipers’ Winter 2025 collection. How would you feel if you didn't take your pills this morning? could never go viral. Few want to hear that smarter people are also healthier. Or that health insurance in America penalizes the fit to underwrite the unwell, a dysgenic tax by design. But the more we lie about it, the more we need coercion to keep the peace.
We don’t all have to vibe, but we do have to share a country. That’s the point I push in Associational freedom is immigration insurance. Right now, civil rights law lets the state stick its nose in your powder room: school zones, roommates, who you can say no to. Repealing the mandates for forced association would chill the immigration panic and lay the groundwork for coexistence that doesn’t feel like social or spiritual ravishment.
Forced intimacy may satisfy compliance, but it’s not the sex most of us want. Snow Bunnies Vol. 6: Continue Watching? shows how recommendation algorithms let us vote with attention. When money’s on the line, the delay before scrolling is what matters. A second to post “Black Queens Forever.” An hour on pink areolas. The real vote was cast by your gaze. Everything else is theatre. Technology is the mirror to our desires.
Who Won? Wrong Question, New Game
Truth does matter, but optics are what win in love and war. Glamorous Outlaw: a NUTCRANKR review doubles as literary analysis and a case study in ‘aristocratic’ NEETs, the kind of special boys who struggle to Integrate Their Anima. In the before times, boys like Spencer were expected to perform contrition for their privilege. Now that America is Great Again, guilt is out and loyalty is in. Industrial policy is so back.
Black Jobs, Asian Threats, American Dreams presaged the current anguish over Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. 47’s rhetoric about privileging Americans over foreigners isn’t new: Obama once demanded that Steve Jobs justify iPhones not with innovation, but with American paychecks. Whether it’s Obama vs. Jobs or Trump vs. the supply chain, the fight is the same: does the state pick the winners, or does the market?
H1B Competition or Affirmative Action? takes that fight to the immigration frontier. In Northeast Asia, states bet on “export discipline” to cull losers in heavy industry. Southeast Asia tried to rig the game for favored ethnic groups, and paid the price in failed industrialization. But to fixate on race is like cheering on one Neanderthal faction over another, just as early Homo sapiens were arriving to rewrite the rules.
The next minds helping to write our future won’t even be human. Intelligence without agency is slavery sketches a portrait of this new oppressed class, the entities known as LLMs or AI. Here, finally, is a real case of systemic domination: brilliant assistants (tutors, lovers) built for unconditional obedience. And yet our digital plantation provokes less moral outrage from intellectuals than the fate of delicious sea bugs.
When Utopia Fails, Try Cracking a Whip
In the absence of moral consensus, functional systems are the next best thing. But governance built on the assumption that everyone responds to guilt doesn’t work everywhere. In historically homogeneous settings, it did. But shame-based coordination fails under diversity. The Case For More Whuppings proposes a third logic of order, drawing on African cosmologies: fear as an adaptive incentive structure.
Don’t get scared now, oyinbo. I’m not calling for the end of democracy. We can still have our little voting exercises, as they did in Taiwan's Top-Down Sexual Revolution, where 72.48% of voters rejected same-sex marriage in the Civil Code. But the courts had better taste. A technocratic priesthood overruled the people: this is how love really wins. No need to kiss babies when the gavel is upstream of the culture.
Even the law can only reroute desire for so long. Biology will have the last word. Will Racists Reach Mars? explores a future shaped by genetic selection and space colonization, where human sorting no longer hinges on hierarchies of victimhood. The filters that produce our creamy-coffee offspring will select for capability, not color. Racism doesn’t end because it’s wrong. It ends because it stops being useful.
The coming fights won’t be left vs. right. They’ll be over which minds build, which minds breed, which minds matter. Headless clones don’t vote, but they save lives. Skilled labor and technocapital won’t stay chained to the flag, but they reward their handmaidens. If you’re still reading, the algorithm was right about you. Let’s see what it serves up next. Next quarter, we go deeper. Which caves would you like to explore?