The Less-Evil Twin hasn’t been on its best behavior recently. Discussing the prospects for Accelerationism (following this negative prognosis), it quite innocently suggested:

@turingcop (A new pulse of darkside electronic music innovation would help.)

— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) May 27, 2014

… and it was already over the line.

@UF_blog @turingcop why isn't there any coming out of neochina?

— Urbanomic (@urbanomicdotcom) May 27, 2014

@urbanomicdotcom @turingcop Actually, my guiding theory there is hardcore racist, so I bet save it for the darkside space.

— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) May 28, 2014

[‘bet’ should be ‘best’ (not ‘better’)]

That’s where things paused for a while.

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Scott Alexander shows an acute appreciation for Nydwracu’s Fnord hunting (my own was far too cursory). It’s rare to see the innovation of a method (with a purpose), and it’s something more noteworthy than any but the most exceptional idea.

Someone with the requisite technical skills should implement this method in convenient software. As a quick-and-dirty way to excavate real messages, it’s hard to beat.

The moderators of the Outer Right information exchange / discussion forum at /r/DarkEnlightenment are mulling an overhaul (i.e. “gutting the hell out of the … sidebar”). Any suggestions? This is a piece of dissident Cyberspace with a significant defining role.

Among all the attractive features of liberalism, there’s nothing quite so adorable as the shredded, bleeding schizophrenia:

As Miriam Greenberg wrote in her 2008 book Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, in order to combat the growing loss of film production to Hollywood, in 1966, then-Mayor John Lindsay overhauled the city’s film agency in 1966, and streamlined the permit process for major motion pictures to be shot in New York. This brought much-needed revenues into the city, but the arrival of all of those additional film shoots, thanks to the change in policy by the perilously liberal Mayor Lindsay, documented the effects of all of the other changes in policy the Lindsay era was ushering in. The inadvertent result was a series of films documenting the horrors of the last years of Lindsay’s administration and its successors, Abe Beame and Ed Koch: The Panic in Needle Park, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Taxi Driver, and Death Wish among them.

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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Robert Kaplan explains ‘Why East Asia Alienates Intellectuals':

… East Asia is a rebuke in major respects to the humanist project. It is prosperous and successful, with the latest postmodern infrastructure and technology; yet at a macro political level it is consumed less by universalist ideals than by old-fashioned ethnic nationalism. China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and so on are deeply conscious of their own ethnic identities, which carry within them clashing claims of sovereignty in the South and East China Seas, as well as elsewhere. East Asia shows how exclusivist mindsets need not be confined to poor, post-communist populations or poverty-stricken peoples with tribal or sectarian differences. East Asia is a flagrant example that sustained capitalist development need not necessarily lead to universal values.

Modernization without ethnomasochism isn’t something the Cathedral wants to understand.

If you’d asked me what I think about The Prussian yesterday, I’d probably have assumed you were talking about Frederick the Great. Today I’m seeing his stuff mentioned all over the place (at least, by Bryce on Twitter, and Scott Alexander at his place). The two pieces being especially recommended share a tack (interesting) and a tone (impressive). The Outside in response to both is unsettled, but already uneven. At the very least, they initiate a conversation in a way that is unexpected and worthy of respect.

The highlight for me was this (to repeat the second link):

… when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the ASPM gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped to argue that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive supremacy (Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the variation does not affect IQ, but does affect the ability to hear tones, and is associated with a lack of tonal languages.

To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-jumbo; that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the term correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-tonal is one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization got started in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s hypothesis of why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology. Needham argued that the Chinese failed to make the break to the conceptual level of science that the ancient Greeks did, and part of this is to do with the concrete-level of Chinese vocabulary. By contrast, the reduced sound range and hence, reduced word range available to Indo-European languages may have played a crucial role in making that initial great breakthrough.

Has the case just been made for a clearly identifiable genetic predisposition to digitization? It sounds that way to me.

ADDED: Theden gets serious on the genetics of tonal language.

ADDED: A critique of the Anti-Racialist Q&A at The Right Stuff.

You thought Slate had a lock on Cathedralist direct current? Then you probably haven’t been keeping up with The Atlantic.

I’m old enough to remember when The Atlantic Monthly was a serious magazine. That was before James Fallows took it over, and drove it into a ditch. It has since progressed to Atlantic Trench depths of comprehensive intellectual ruin. Some gratitude is in order for the clarity with which it exposes our destination, guided by the supreme Leftist Law: Any cultural institution that is not dominated by the oppressed talking about their oppression is oppressive.

As Professor Zaius explains in the comment section of the vibrant debate article:

… the judges, while they are experienced debaters and coaches themselves, don’t by and large subscribe to the notion that the “best argument” in conventional terms should win. Many, if not most, see debate as a means for advancing social justice and dismantling oppressive hierarchies of whiteness and patriarchy. Inasmuch as “logic” upholds these hierarchies and personal experiences from POC and non-linear storytelling and music fight them, then “logic” should lose.

We’re so screwed.

ADDED: “… while one has some sympathy for Hardy and the other traditional debate do-gooders, they seem to be pining for a format, and a world, that has already passed. Have a look at Twitter. Or MSNBC. Or the New York Times. Or Attorney General Eric Holder. Or any of the rest of the grievance-mongering chattering class for whom the unbeatable trump card these days is discerning ‘racism’ in their opponents. Debate isn’t what it used to be. The college kids might as well learn this brute fact sooner rather than later.”

A politically-incorrect short history of the Wild West. (Jim at his rough realist best.)

Perhaps even more than print, the movie industry has epitomized the macromedia (few-to-many, or broadcast) model of cultural distribution. In two penetrating articles, Hugh Hancock examines the impact of electronic games software and impending virtual reality technology on film production. Extreme change seems inevitable.

As with any social process touched by computers, the basic tendency is to decentralization. By down-streaming productive potential into ever-cheaper digital systems, the ability to execute complex media projects is spread beyond established institutions, encouraging the emergence of new agents (who in turn stimulate — and thus accelerate — the supportive techno-economic trends). Since the Cathedral is primarily a political-media apparatus, which is to say a post-theistic state church reproduced through the effective delivery of a message, these developments are of critical importance to its functional stability. It seems the unfolding crisis is destined to be entertaining.