Given the price flatline over the half-century to 1973, it’s not easy to be confident that the market has settled into a steady rhythm, but the investment side of the oil business certainly seems to have:
(Via.)
Something like two decades of low energy prices ahead, if the established pattern is prolonged. There’s either a valuable futurist building-block there, or a provocation for futurological discussion.
Political categories — however plausible they look on paper — quickly dissolve into senseless noise when applied to modern historical reality, unless they foreground populism as the critical discriminating factor. Furthermore, populism is for all practical purposes already national populism, irrespective of ideological commitments to the contrary, since super-national popular constituencies exist only in the feverish brains of Utopian intellectuals. The Syriza victory in Greece is making all of this extraordinarily graphic:
Ushering in the new era, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister-designate, announced that he would not be sworn in, as tradition dictates, in the presence of Archbishop Iernonymos but would instead take the oath of office in a civil ceremony. At 40, he becomes the country’s youngest premier in modern times. […] The leftist, who surprised Greeks by speedily agreeing to share power with the populist rightwing Independent Greeks party, Anel, is expected to be handed a mandate by president Karolos Papoulias to form a government later on Monday. Earlier, Panos Kammenos, Anel’s rumbustious leader, emerged from talks with Tsipras lasting an hour saying the two politicians had successfully formed a coalition. […] “I want to say, simply, that from this moment, there is a government,” Kammenos told reporters gathered outside Syriza’s headquarters. […] “The Independent Greeks party will give a vote of confidence to the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. The prime minister will go to the president and … the cabinet makeup will be announced by the prime minister. The aim for all Greeks is to embark on a new day, with full sovereignty.”
Anyone who thinks it odd that Marine Le Pen and Slavoj Žižek are both firm supporters is missing the picture entirely. As Žižek remarks:
This is our position today with regard to Europe: only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza), a split from the European Union by Greece, can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity.
That’s what the Left means. Construct your ideological spectrum accordingly.
(Open thread, links)
NRx doesn’t vulgarize to a denunciation of Cultural Marxism (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …). Yes, ‘Duh!’, but well worth making explicit. Widening perspectives in time and space. “[T]he Reactosphere [is] an Illiberal University System.” Against critical thinking (and response). On the holiness problem. A thoughtful appraisal of Neoreaction (1, 2), but I’m reserving judgment on this. Terminal-phase feminism. Fragged Friday. Mitrailleuse off-blog channels. Meta-masters (1, 2, 3).
“Things without boundaries rapidly become unthings.” (This is also good.)
A few of the more notable aftershocks following the Paris massacre, from two generations of Le Pens (this is better), Malcolm Pollack, and the Anarcho-Papist. No go zones? A wide-angle view. Our interesting times are getting more interesting. The Saudi king is dead. The interim successor “has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and at many times cannot remember his own name.” ISIS made its move just in time. (Chaos, right?) An analysis of Saudi oil politics. Then back to France (sort of). Auster holds up well.
Venezuela, don’t laugh (related).
The Duck at Chateau Heartiste. Before Yarvin was Moldbug (from 1995). A Scott Alexander no-like list. The long culture war (and a more conventionally humanistic account). Broken democracy. The value of independent corroboration.
Unamused at work. Gregory Hood on MLK. Bookishness is over-rated. On Guillaume Faye on sex. The Economist tip-toes towards reality. Hope for Wikipedia?
All the stuff everyone else is saying is right. The Lou Bloom character is a creation of sheer genius, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in the role is beyond superb. The movie edges right up to the boundaries of the horror genre, and is also savagely humorous. Nihilism can produce high art, when it’s done right.
Nightcrawler approaches the topical subject of the relationships between the media, business, and law enforcement in a way that eludes conventional pieties. It deserves NRx endorsement just for that. In its darkness are strung subtle threads of possibility, in the working out of abnormal but powerful imperatives — of a supremely cynical kind — comparable in their diagonal subversiveness to a re-animated Scottish Enlightenment on ketamine, with all progressive hope burnt out so radically it doesn’t even register as a question.
These impulses are avatars of what is coming out of the collapse — tough, consummately disillusioned, and exploratory things.
Mix this with the Archdruid Report, and you begin to get why the world is so confusing. One of the crucial defenses of the term ‘Neoreaction’ — and thus an argument for clinging to it despite all frustrations — is its intrinsic orientation to grasping both of these perspectives at the same time. (Do that without time-spirals, and you’ve come up with something I’ve yet to consider.)
Bahrain government unfairly spying on man who has dedicated his life to overthrowing it.
http://t.co/gKRdZFrOwW
— anomalyuk (@anomalyuk) January 23, 2015
(There’s a perfect sanity to this tweet, sarcasm of course included, that would be hard to top. That is equally to say there is a perfect exposure of our reigning moral-political insanity. The “C’est un chien sauvage …” quote that should accompany it is escaping me for now … Something like: “It is a fierce beast. When it is attacked, it bites.” No doubt one of my cultivated readers can help.)
(The metric there is American school grade levels.)
But don’t worry:
“It’s tempting to read this as a dumbing down of the bully pulpit,” [former Clinton speechwriter Jeff] Shesol said. “But it’s actually a sign of democratization. In the early Republic, presidents could assume that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners. These, of course, were the only Americans with the right to vote. But over time, the franchise expanded and presidential appeals had to reach a broader audience.”
It just looks like escalating cretinization. Really it’s Democracy®! Yay!
Eric Raymond on the spontaneous response to Silicon Valleys SJWs:
Shut up and show us the code.
You want to make a point about women or minorities in hacker culture? OK, where is your commit history? What open source have you hacked on? Where are your Arduino and Thingiverse designs? Are you running any development projects yourself? What do you bring us that isn’t monkey screaming? Why should we care what you think?
And if the answer is “Justice!”, then our reply has to be this: The code is its own justice. No compiler or network stack or 3-D printer gives a crap about the shape of your genitals or the color of your skin, and hackers as a culture don’t either.
Close to the core of the tech-comm mind-set, no? (Via.)
… the (short) play:
A: We’ve got nothing against you personally. We don’t even know you. It’s just that we’re more comfortable restricting club membership to upper-income straight white male English-speaking Protestants.
B: Then you’re not very good Protestants!
A: Damn! You’re right …
