Ideological privilege:
This is the difference between the hard Left & hard Right: you can be a violent leftist radical and go on to live a pretty kickass life. This is especially true if you’re a leftist of the credentialed class …
(The whole article is strongly recommended, for topicality among other qualities.)
West:
I like to pride myself on having a very low opinion of people, but even I’m sometimes surprised by how idiotic they are …
(Empirical-realist, and punchy.)
Apparently we’re already in the next phase:
To call Trumpism fascist is to suggest that it demands from us a unique response. We can deploy the “fascism” moniker to Trump’s ascendance by recognizing features like selective populism, nationalism, racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak and disregard for reasoned debate. The reason we should use the term is because, taken together, these aspects of Trumpism are not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason. It is constitutive of its fascism that it demands a different sort of opposition.
I doubt whether they’ve thought this through, but don’t let that get in the way of progress.
… is looking like the one thing everyone can agree on (1, 2, 3, linked in order of escalation).
Prompt via.
Silicon Valley leans dismally leftwards, but at least it’s unprincipled:
President-elect Donald Trump’s views on a range of issues, from immigration to climate change, alienated many left-leaning tech employees in Silicon Valley, but none more so than those working at Alphabet. […] During the presidential campaign, 33 employees at the tech giant donated $20,000 to Trump, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was a tiny fraction of the 1,400 employees who donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for a total of $1.6 million. […] And it wasn’t just political donations. […] The revolving door between the Obama administration and the company swung hard and frequently during the past eight years: 22 former White House officials left the administration to work for Alphabet, according to research from the Campaign for Accountability. […] … Despite this rocky history, both sides are now trying to find common ground as the inauguration approaches. Alphabet CEO Larry Page recently joined other tech leaders at a meeting with the incoming president. Meanwhile, Schmidt has been very visible at Trump Tower, visiting at least twice. …
(Internal hyperlinks are all inane, so I’ve ignored them.)
(Via.)
The Cathedral rises in visibility as it dies. Fernandez:
If Eastern socialism died with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the Western version may at last be crumbling before a monumental wall of kicked cans. The Gramscian termites ate through the institutions and found with their last triumphant bite that they had eaten it all. […] Its demise will leave an historic hole in Western civilization. For good or ill the Left was the West’s familiar: the wheedling family bum, what we defined ourselves through and in opposition to. Without the Left neither the 20th century, the EU or the American progressive project is even comprehensible. It was the future that never happened, the madness over which mankind walked the narrow path of nuclear destruction yet which framed the debate. Now it is passing from the scene with all the drama of an empty ramen wrapper on the sidewalk. […] The great locomotive of history is out of gas and we have to walk the remainder of the way wherever it is that the road leads. It’s demise marks the fall of a great civilizational cathedral.
(Follow the last link if you doubt the neo-orthodoxy of his usage.)
An instant Twitter-format classic, by David Hines, on the Leftist political violence to come. Storified here.
Among the critical points:
Righties tell themselves that *of course* they’d win a war against Lefties. Tactical Deathbeast vs. Pajama Boy? No contest. … Why, Righties have thought about what an effective domestic insurrection would look like. Righties have written books and manifestos! … It’s horseshit. … The truth: Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of it.
ADDED: Spandrell’s take.
long live The Hoes Of Thoth pic.twitter.com/H9hog655Kk
— ((pseud(*)())(su))() (@0xDEBA5E12) January 13, 2017
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
(Proximal source.)
Fundamentally solve the “intelligence problem,” and all other problems become trivial.
‘Fundamentally solving the intelligence problem’ would be intense in a way I suspect no one has yet begun to understand. Once intelligence is fully off the leash, all previous problems look trivial, because intelligence is — beyond all comparison — the most dangerous thing out there.
Karlin’s discussion touches all the bases, including the idiocratic scenario:
Human genetic editing is banned by government edict around the world, to “protect human dignity” in the religious countries and “prevent inequality” in the religiously progressive ones. The 1% predictably flout these regulations at will, improving their progeny while keeping the rest of the human biomass down where they believe it belongs, but the elites do not have the demographic weight to compensate for plummeting average IQs as dysgenics decisively overtakes the Flynn Effect. …
