Did you know that Wikipedia has a plan for the end of the world? (It’s not something I would have suspected, before Tyler Cowan pointed to this.)

In the course of the deliberations of the Wikipedia Data Preservation Taskforce, it was realized that although many catastrophes would be survivable, the possibility had to be faced that an extinction level event was possible, albeit unlikely, and plans should be initiated to preserve the encyclopedia in a non-terrestrial environment. To this end, Wikimedia has come to arrangements with many of the world’s scientific institutions for the provision of access to the vast majority of the world’s radio telescopes. [… ] While this is indeed a last-ditch attempt to save the knowledge of humanity, it can be hoped that someday, many years in the future and many light-years from Earth, minds immeasurably different from ours might look upon the works of humanity and understand. To quote Jimmy Wales’ message to the stars:
“While the light of humanity may flicker and die, we go gently into this dark night, comforted in the knowledge that someday Wikipedia shall take its rightful place as part of a consensus-built Galactic Encyclopedia, editable by all sentient beings.”

[The date at the end comes as a slight disappointment]

ADDED: Wikipedia wars. (Full)

Gloom and realism can be hard to distinguish, but it’s important to carry on. Curmudgeonry without stubbornness isn’t worth a damn. Even in the worst case, relentless, sluggishly deterioriating ghastliness can at least be interesting. It shouldn’t be necessary to cheer up, in order to continue, and there might be some lessons worth attending to in the slough of despond.

I’d go further. Despair can get things started, if it means the abandonment of diverting idols. A full, immersive soaking, which leaves no doubt about certain things being over,  is morbidly therapeutic, and even something like a first step (at least a first slouch). There are hopes that have to die, and the sooner the better, although if  they die slowly and horribly, they are perhaps less likely to need killing twice.

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Recent rumors of blog death in the reactosphere have been greatly exaggerated, but elsewhere — not so much. For sheer weirdness, it’s hard to beat the announcement of The Oil Drum‘s closure at The Daily Bell — an event of huge significance for the fate of the Peak Oil ‘promotion’, we were assured — and one almost immediately followed by the closure of … The Daily Bell. (Here‘s the farewell post, although I’m reluctant to link to a self-declared corpse.)

By simple analogy, can we assume this death is also overflowing with meaning? Has the DB’s signature brand of libertarian conspiracy theorizing been terminated for a reason?  If so, there aren’t any clues to be found in Anthony Wile’s quite bizarrely uninformative good-bye note.

I’m guessing my vague melancholy on the subject won’t find many echoes out here on the right fringe. “Another bunch of nutty libertarians go over the cliff, big deal” might not be a bad guess at the average response, if it didn’t so clearly underestimate the prevailing indifference (I don’t recall anybody else linking to them on anything). They were strong advocates of the “Internet Reformation”, ushering in a new epoch of liberty worldwide, as the scheming “global elite” were forced to take a “step back”, their “directed history” undone by electronic “truth-telling”.

I’m taking it that has all been swept off the table now, Peak Oil-style. It never did quite seem nasty enough to be real.

Spandrell takes concise argument to a whole new level.

At this thread (and in other places), commenter VXXC cites Durant’s Dark Counsel: “For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically.” He then remarks: “That’s fine with me, I’ll go with Freedom.” Outside in concurs without reservation.

Take this dark counsel as the thesis that a practically-significant ideological dimension can be constructed, within which freedom and egalitarianism are related as strictly reciprocal variables. Taking this dimension for orientation, two abstract models of demographic redistribution can be examined, in order to identify what it is that neoreactionaries want.

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Radish has had enough.

Jim’s preemptive eulogy, here.

The world just got a little more politically correct, and less amusing. (Unless, perhaps, there’s some kind of secret plan …)

ADDED: The commie-stomping is apparently not yet done.

There’s no direct evidence that Adam Garfinkle has been reading Moldbug, but he’s at least reinventing the wheel:

… the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. …  this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and … its unselfconscious use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians. […]

… the best way to understand U.S. foreign policy is, as the late Michael Kelly once put it, as “secular evangelism, armed.” American foreign policy is, as James Kurth has brilliantly and incisively written, a product of “the Protestant Deformation”, a declension of a religious worldview, complete with logical train and eschatological pretensions, but rendered systematically into secular language that masks its real source. As G.K. Chesterton said, America is indeed a nation with the soul of a church—and not just any church, but a multi-sectarian Protestant one. […]

We Americans believe in global democracy promotion, including in Egypt, ultimately for religious reasons tied to our belief in progress, which is itself a key premise of the aforementioned Protestant Deformation. So when both Islamist and even merely Islamic critics characterized the Bush “forward strategy for freedom” as a Christianity-based attack on Dar al-Islam, and most Americans were embarrassed for them on account of the supposed primitive level of their understanding, the fact of the matter is that they were correct. […]

When I hear democracy-export advocates talk about their plans and aspirations, whether in government or in the NGO think-tank world without, it reminds me of the tone, though of course not with the identical vocabulary, of what meetings in Methodist church basements must have sounded like as missionaries in the mid- to late-19th century were about to head off to fulfill their sacred duties to save the heathens in China. We sometimes worry about mission creep, and rightly so. But what we should be worrying about more broadly, as Lawrence Husick once shrewdly quipped to me, is missionary creep—a version of which infests the infernally silly “debate” we are now having about democracy in Egypt.

Anarcho-Tyranny loses one.

The feverish media spin: It doesn’t mean anything (see ABC at the link).

Nicholas Stix on what it would have meant (had things gone to plan), with the conclusion:

George Zimmerman must be kept out of jail. But even then he will need to get a new name, a new face, and … a new country.

In fact, we all need a new country.

ADDED: So it has to be time for some Charlie Manson Helter Skelter action, Goldman Sachs style.

ADDED: Nydwracu is on the case.

ADDED: Delingpole: “Half of the US (the Obama-voting half) is up in arms about the verdict of the Zimmerman trial. The other half is breathing a huge sigh of relief that the justice system in the US is still functional. (If but barely.)”

ADDED: Tortured liberal watch.

This sort of thing could begin to irritate people:

The six victims who gave evidence were aged between 11 and 15 when the abuse took place. They were plied with drugs and alcohol, repeatedly raped, sold and trafficked as prostitutes, all at a time during which when they were supposedly in the safekeeping of local authorities.

The trial — details of which were so disturbing that jury members were excused from ever having to sit on a jury again — exposed years of failings by Thames Valley police and Oxford social services. The court heard that the girls were abused between 2004 and 2012 and that police were told about the crimes as early as 2006, that they were contacted at least six times by victims, but failed to act.

The mother of Girl “A” said the police and social services had failed to protect the girls and made her and other family members feel as if they were overreacting. She said: “I can recall countless incidents when I have been upset and frustrated by various professional bodies.”

The mother of Girl “C” told the British newspaper The Guardian that she had begged social services staff to rescue her daughter from the rape gang. She said that her daughter’s abusers had threatened to cut the girl’s face off and promised to slit the throats of her family members. She said that they had been forced to leave their home after the men had threatened to decapitate family members.

Despite irrefutable evidence that the girls were being sexually abused, no one — according to a report published by the House of Commons on June 5 — acted to draw all the facts together, apparently due to fears by police and social workers that they would be accused of racism against Muslims.

Foseti explains (in his own comment thread) why our contemporary sovereign is properly described as the Cathedral. The terms works because:

It mocks those who think they’re above religion, it conveys information about the structure of their beliefs, and it’s beautifully concise.

(The effectiveness of this term is no reason to ignore its more technical Moldbuggian complement, the Modern Structure, suggests Anomaly UK.)