I can feel this post triggering a little BlueVsGreen thinking habits. Instead I'm going to attempt to stay Bruce Banner, and simply ask for clarification, but if my comments appear frustrated/insulting- please forgive me.

Can someone, OP or otherwise, explain to me, directly, the connection being made between Penn's rant and rationalists loving hedonism? Even if I accept each assertion, the materials don't construct a train-track capable of being traveled for my brain:

• What does Penn's rant have to do with the nature of the goals we choose and should choose?
• Winning short term goals can be destructive to long term goals; I got it. Again though, not seeing the connection to prior prior paragraphs. The seduction of short term, even wanting seemingly human-long(years) instead of generations-long goals. Got it. Important topic. However, again: how does this relate to previous paragraphs of Obama/Penn/society/elites/etc?

My inklings-

• There is a lot of talk about Penn- or is this a hidden discussion of high-utility Obama and HIS hedonistic behavior? Not accusing, but when I supported a color team, I found it difficult to directly associate faults the team leader.
• Am I over analyzing due to repeated pattern-exposure/anchoring to difficult not-how-homo-sapians-were-evolved-to-think bias Articles of Truth+3? Should this instead be taken as a loose interior monologue to explain how one event (the video) sparked a series of associations to bring up a topic worthy of further discussion (devilish attraction of short-term/winnable goals)?

Again, ending topic is very worthy of discussion- but I'm not seeing how it fits together

Edit: fixed link error with a bigger error, then fixed again.