Due to our rigorous aversion to partisan vulgarity, we couldn’t possibly comment on this:

The majority leader pummeled the airwaves, spending more than $5 million on the race, including a direct-mail piece that took a harder line against immigration reform than Cantor previously had advocated. […] In many ways, however, the show of force gave more oxygen to the little-known Brat, who had few resources and almost no outside cash funding his underdog effort. To Cantor’s millions, Brat raised only $200,000, and spent even less, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. […] Among those who advocate changing the nation’s immigration rules, Cantor’s loss seems likely to dash all hope that the House will act on any legislation to provide a citizenship path for some immigrants — as Cantor had once proposed. […] Many had expected the chamber could turn to the issue once primary season had ended and lawmakers no longer had to worry about protecting their right flank.

“At least they cooked that freaking duck …”

The Dark Dream scenario up to and beyond 2016 isn’t hard to piece together:
* GOP lock on Congress to ensure maximum obstruction.
* Tea-Party insurgency driving the GOP into right-wing extremism®.
* Secessionist ambitions spreading like a forest fire.
* A radical progressive Democrat in the White House, to keep a Cathedral clown-face glued onto the collapse.

Carry on.

ADDED: Jim.

ADDED: I like the cut of Zachary Werrell’s jib.

Charles Ponzi, call your IP lawyer. This is the kind of argument that makes sense when pursued without the distractions of STEM training:

… the humanities crisis is largely a positive feedback loop created by stressing out over economic outcomes. Research by government bureaus held that people who studied STEM disciplines had better employment prospects. As a result, state and federal education budgets consistently made these subjects a priority. Enrollment in the humanities slumped, and this made it more difficult for budding humanists and artists to succeed, not least because fewer and fewer jobs were available in the academy.

Humanists are being educated to teach the humanities in higher-education, why can’t anybody see there’s a model there that, like, could totally work?

Bryce passed this on:

A Troublesome Inheritance has served as a rallying point for an obscure far-right ideology called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Self-professedly “anti-democratic” and “neo-reactionary,” this movement brings together an odd assortment of fascists, neo-Nazis, men’s rights activists, and libertarians who are united by their hatred of the “politically correct” academic and media establishment (which they refer to as “the Cathedral”), and by their unshakable belief in the biological reality of their racist and sexist beliefs. The “Dark Enlightenment” overlaps to great extent with the “human biodiversity” (HBD) movement, which is made up of (mostly pseudonymous) bloggers, bolstered by the support of a few fringe scientists. Among these scientists are Cochran and Harpending, who have their own HBD blog called “West Hunter.”

This has to be the greatest comedy sequence yet seen in the history of Twitter:

Oops. Just deleted my last Tweet. & would like to apologize to seniors & sufferers of Lyme disease. I was out of bounds.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014

Yikes. Had to delete another Tweet. I crossed a line on that one. Also, I thought 12 YEARS A SLAVE and THE BUTLER were brilliant.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014

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(Special dam-breaker issue.)

Recent. Copious. Regional.

Some background reading here and here.

Bryce Laliberte passed along this pop culture celebration of democracy’s death in imperialist chaos. It’s worth a look. (Kevin Spacey seems to have made himself the iconic face of mass media dark enlightenment.)

So, it’s happened:

Read Mencius Moldbug.

— Justine Tunney (@JustineTunney) April 28, 2014

This strikes me as a poly-dimensional crisis moment — or at least cultural storm signal — (for NRx, for Google, and for the USA), so I’m obviously on tenterhooks to hear what people think.

ADDED: The anti-Tunney (or one of them).

Some instant-classic comedy at Salon.

(via @CineRobert)

The commentator going by the tag Saddam Hussein’s Whirling Aluminium Tubes has produced some of the most brilliant criticism this blog has been subjected to. Arguing against the techno-commercial strain of NRx from a hardline paleoreactionary standpoint, his contribution to this thread is the high-water mark of his engagement here. That, even at the climax of the assault, Outside in is unable to decline the diagnosis offered, with the exception of only the very slightest, marginal reservations, is a fact that attests to the lucidity of his vision. (Some minute editorial adjustments have been made for consistency — the original can be checked at the link provided.) SHWAT writes:

Admin’s analogy of Techno-Commercialism to the colonial government structures in the time of the East India company is absolutely correct and it provides a decisive clarification. This is like that time when one group stayed in Europe while the other group went and made their fortune in the New World.

Reaction: Stable order (as a value, if not a practical effect), hereditary position
Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition, dynamism

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Occupy Wall Street founder, now working for Cyberdyne Google calls for Neocameralism in a communist newspaper.

I’ll just let that simmer for a while …

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