Markets fail, so we need to rely on government sometimes (or often) to set things straight. — That’s probably the single most comical piece of commonplace insanity in the world today. All kinds of people fall for it, even those who seem otherwise capable of coherent cognitive processing.

Chris Edwards puts together an impressive short (and implicit) demolition.

Fernandez’ summary of the Edwards post is even better (so I’ve left the link to him):

Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.

A price tag doesn’t do justice to these calamities, which are not only wasteful, but positively and perversely harmful, but it’s a start. The category of ‘waste’ itself fails here, because it would actually be less culturally toxic for all the resources squandered on social programs to be simply annihilated into hyperspace without remainder. Ruinous dependency incentives would then be hugely lessened.

Of course, the idea that dysfunctional political institutions will cooperate with their own public humiliation is also a piece of lunacy (and this time, one that beltway libertarians are peculiarly prone to).

ADDED: Highly relevant.

I try not to get spittle-flecked about the Boomers, but …

(Thanks to Bryce for the link.)

Chaos Patches are going to be transformed into a regular (weekly) facility, starting now, so there should always be one within reach. This is to solemnly recognize where the real ballast of this blog is to be found (in the comment threads). I’ll try to update the post with indications of the principal lines of discussion.

The re-surfacing of this classic is only the most recent of recent distractions. I’m sure the commentariat here have much more significant matters to discuss.

I’ll throw in John Derbyshire on Richard Lynn as a semi-random prompt (there’s more JD here, contributing to a highly-stimulating series of dissident right doom-futurism pieces).

A few cryptic link pushes: The recent trend to frag-blogging in the reactosphere is capturing my attention (no doubt, in part, because I’ve been doing so much of that myself recently). For instance, I’m eager to learn where this is going. At the other extreme, there’s this. If you haven’t already ventured over here, it’s highly recommended.

The Outside in preemptive disillusionment with Indian reaction in power is already on record. Nevertheless, this is going to be big. Over half a billion people went to the polls to make it happen. Progressive teleology isn’t heading where it’s supposed to. (UK communist media are covering it quite well.)

Congress, one of the most despicable political organizations on earth, has been crushed like a bug. The implications of that are roughly comparable to the detonation of a dirty nuke at Davos, so a modest period of celebration would be wholly understandable. Unfortunately, while Modi’s historic victory is a massive global lurch to reaction, it is also a surreptitious triumph of democracy, and we’ve seen the way this plays out before.

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With cognitive disintegration prolonging itself deeply into the month, this is a scrappy sketch of the space across which I’m strewn. I have three pieces of writing on the go, under deadlines of varying severity, along with a tangled bundle of other stuff.

The first thing — kind of almost finished now — is the latest in a string of Accelerationism papers and posts. (The previous one, entitled Teleoplexy and devoted primarily to twisted historical entelechy, is coming out in this.) The new piece is structured as a contribution to security analysis, or preemptive, cryptographic, Butlerian Jihad. If acceleration to hard singularity were directed as a Terminator-style resistance drama, how would a strategically-rational Human Security System be depicted? Fuse MIRI with the CSER in a virtual / clandestine species-defense apparatus (Anthropol), then ask how it would operate to prevent the emergence of the ultimate enemy. It’s not at all easy. One almost begins to sympathize with the wretched creatures.

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The next installment of sub-cognitive fragmentation became too snarled in self-involvement to manage, splintering its crate, and leaving a debris trail of scrap notation. When a flicker of proto-intelligence finds itself out beyond the ledge, tumbling into the abysmal self-problematization of Gnon, it has either to surrender itself to the plummet, or scrabble quickly for some arresting roughness on the cliff walls. This isn’t the time for a deep descent (so my figurative fingernails are gone).

After seven years in an apartment at the edge of Xujiahui, we have moved to a slightly larger one in the Jing’an District (with space for each of the kids to have their own room). It’s up on the 19th floor — above the mosquito level — with a view of the Wheelock Square tower (an impressive KPF structure). The move was only completed over the last couple of days. So life this end has been vastly more chaotic, is becoming a little more spacious, and is already far more high-rise. Some of the recent gusts of disorder stem from this.

The scrap-reduced sub-cognitive fragment goes something like this: NRx has its own micro-decadence, which is expressed through a fixation on values, asserted as an alternative to thought. This is, I realize, overtly and dramatically controversial. If thought is confused with reason, and values identified with inherited intuitions, it might easily appear as a direct attack upon the most sacred commitments of the reactionary attitude. What, after all, are the feeble tremblings of embryonic intellect compared to the grandeur of what has been received?

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Cambodia version:

Click on image to expand.

(The only illumination comes from the right.)

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How much credit is to be given to honest dishonesty? Answers should be addressed to Rod Dreher, in response to a truly astonishing blog post that sums up where we are right now more frankly than anything I have seen.

Short summary: We have a duty to lie.

In Dreher’s own words:

Given the history of the 20th century, I flat-out don’t trust our species to handle the knowledge of human biodiversity without turning it into an ideology of dehumanization, racism, and at worst, genocide. Put another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true — and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of truth. […] My point is simply that all of us believe that some facts are too dangerous to be known; they are like the Ring Of Power, in that the temptation to abuse them is too great for our natures to bear. […] Admittedly, this puts me in a tight spot. Am I saying that we should ignore reality? I suppose I am.

So there we have it — we have to ban acknowledgement of reality, because Hitler. This stuff is all going to fall apart so quickly (and nastily) that it will shock everyone.

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Jim wonders whether AI is still progressing:

AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit.

Do we need a theory of consciousness to close the deal? (Alrenous  has a long-standing commitment to this topic — see the comments.)

FWIW, Outside in is strongly emergentist on the question: doing AI and understanding AI might not be tightly — or even positively — related. (Catallaxy and AI are not finally distinguishable.) Of course, that makes the relevance of social decay even more critical.

Into the closing days of this Cambodian escape, I’m now in Kep, on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It’s an interesting place (which I’ll say something about in the Cambodia scrap log). Note the link there? There haven’t been any of those for a while. The reason it has now become possible is the Kep Lodge guest computer, which leaves my tablet in the dust. Links, cursor control, copy-and-paste … ecstasy. So I have to try and seize the opportunity …

Starting meta, there are two media-reaction compilation resources which everyone needs to know about (and I’m sure just about everyone already does). Both are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up. Handle’s (here) might by updating sluggishly for a few weeks, because the Hausmeister is taking a well-earned break. It might fall upon Amos & Gromar (here) to track developments, which are getting steadily more encouraging.

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