(The metric there is American school grade levels.)

(Via (Via))

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.

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.)

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.

(Open thread + links)

Some initial reacto-chatter — Sex and natural law (don’t miss the comment thread). Prepare for World War P. Inception politics. Battered West syndrome. The new alchemy. A new behaviorism. Exosemantics (are we going to get a Coles Notes for this?). A routine that’s still working well. Social Matter audio. “We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property” (apparently). Secular religion. Whose side is history on? Round-ups from FN and Steves, and continuous flow here.

The compression of ritual space (and a reading list from hell). Scale-free patterns.

Putin, international man of misery. A Pope beyond hope. Romney is perfect (for 1996). Awkward words in China (related). Unthinkable fears. Much of interest here (especially this).

Gibson’s ‘the Jackpot’ — or cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe — makes a real contribution to contemporary apocalypticism (this article offers no more than a hazy clue).

More Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare reactionary succulence.

Much entertaining frivolity this week (unless it’s just me) — “quite possibly the most racist article you will ever read” (I doubt it, but still …). Racism. Racism and hate. More racism and hate. Not racist. (This is how it used to be done.)

When socialism puts a ratchet into your churn, this is what happens.

(Via.)

The first XS ‘Progress’ post was also a chart — and it dove-tails with this one uncannily.

If this analysis is right, Romney would be sure to lose a 2016 presidential bid. “Voters will compromise on a lot of issues on Election Day but they won’t ever vote for you if they don’t like you or worse yet, think you don’t like them.” That makes him the perfect GOP candidate — delegitimating the opposition, without seizing the poisoned chalice of democratic leadership (i.e. increasingly vacuous symbolic authority). If the electorate grudgingly concede, after renewing his humiliation, he was right, but we voted against him anyway because he didn’t kiss my baby, it’s NRx gravy.

This has to be in some way related:

Romney 2016: Reform conservative. Romney 2020: Buchananite. Romney 2024: Rothbardian. Romney 2028: Neo-reactionary.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 13, 2015

Nothing to see here (move right along):

What happened to this? http://t.co/QAmOyvo4tJ … I was still reading it yesterday and now it can't be found. Not on internet archive.

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) January 11, 2015

ADDED: Found. NIO digs up some other relevant stuff.

Amplified when read as a follow up to #4, this piece of jiu jitsu by VXXC is a great way to invigorate some running debates (even if it can’t be embedded normally because of the ridiculous privacy option activated on his account):

Strangely so called Reactionaries coming to Fences marked Republic, Constitution, United States wish to obliterate these walls utterly. (9:09 AM, 7 January 2015.)

Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.

“Why oh why don’t those damned crackers just leave?”

If we’re already entering the ejection phase of neo-secessionism, it has to be a good thing, right?