10
Aug
(Open thread, and stuff.)
Another take on the democracy problem: “Ideology is the death of good government. Democracy requires ideology. Therefore democracy is the death of good government.”
“Democracy is one of the more potent weapons that the USA can yield to destroy enemies, and the Chinese are clearly aware of what is in store.”
Leftism needs nationalism.
Selection pressure for modernity resistance.
An epic post on the Westernization of Hinduism.
There‘s a Matrioshka Brain Home Page.
Varieties of futurism.
The new mediascape as a festival of trolls.
Asking the important questions: “Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined?”
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20
Jul
The weekly free-for-all opens for business.
Amerika has posted an interview with an ‘Internet troll’ that’s well worth a look. Only a year ago, my sense of a ‘troll’ was of an abusive ‘drive-by’ commenter, putting up remarks of no cognitive value, designed entirely to annoy. By early this year, after the most hilarious hoax in history had been executed, my understanding of the word had definitely evolved (swearing solemn oaths on a copy of The Origin of Species does that). I’m now inclined to interpret ‘trolling’ as a subtle art, in the spirit of Swift’s A modest Proposal (a work referenced in the Amerika interview). I’ve not been subjected to a moronic drive-by for months, so the fact I no longer have a convenient name for it doesn’t matter a huge amount. Is ‘goblin’ available?
The Unz Review goes from strength to strength, and now hosts Peter Frost. That’s an opportunity to recall a remark by fellow Unzer Razib Khan, which I would expect to be endorsed by other writers there: “… when Neoreactionaries using [sic] terms like the Cathedral they’re closing off the conversation to outsiders, and creating a group with initiate-like dynamics.” That strikes me as a feature rather than a bug, which suggests that distinct evaluations of ‘public conversation’ are the real topic here. (The Public Sphere is an intellectual-liberty death zone.) While in Unz-territory, this post by Steve Sailer is also notable.
Why Israel will die. Additional racial provocation for the week on Israeli Naziporn, Asian rage, and Weissrein TV.
The crazy productivity levels at TNIO and Anarchopapist are disintegrating my brain.
Some global collapse stuff. (+)
Dampier on digital intrusion.
Cthulhucoin? (It’s hard to quite know.)
03
Jul
Colin Liddell, amid an impressively cool-headed discussion of John Engelman and racial neuralgia:
Jared Taylor is trying very, very hard to avoid the Jewish question. Naturally I disagree with this, but I can understand why Taylor wishes to do so, as the Jewish Question has become a kind of lightning rod for a lot of angst and rage in our society that does not have the time, sophistication, or emotional equilibrium to attain to a more complex understanding of the challenges of modernity.
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20
Jun
It’s not about white people.
28
May
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:
… and it was already over the line.
[‘bet’ should be ‘best’ (not ‘better’)]
That’s where things paused for a while.
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23
May
Dissatisfied with this, so I’m taking the unprecedented step of pushing it under the fold, and replacing it.
Despite some intense competition (see comments), I’m going for the classical approach. People could actually get away with wearing this, without being beaten to a brain-damaged wreck in the streets, and the message could not be more crucial. So here we go:
E > V
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11
May
It looks as if the NYT has canned Nicholas Wade. Another stereotype conspicuously un-busted.
John Derbyshire, who know a thing or two about the social consequences of exorbitant truthiness, rounds up the reviews (prior to the axe falling).
ADDED: Wade says the DC is lying about trying to contact him (i.e. this crucial assertion: “Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment”). Since that’s the key evidence for the DC article, it makes the whole thing go away.
Wade: “I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.”
To the precise extent that an apology is due to the New York Times, curse the Daily Caller. (Thanks to commentators below for clueing me in — although Twitter got there first.)
10
May
Some concentrated Handle-awesomeness unleashed in a Tyler Cowen comments thread (on Nicholas Wade):
1. You are not going to learn any new Science
2. You are going to learn what happens in your society when a distinguished and relatively prominent Science journalist publishes a prominent book in which he shows a bit of courage and gets as close as possible to promoting an unorthodox and taboo truth without risking utter ostracization.
3. You will learn who cannot risk publically aligning with that position in order to maintain their position and current and future influence. And you will learn the techniques they must employ in order to walk the narrow path between sacrificing their integrity promoting the erroneous orthodoxy itself, and supporting the accurate contrarian position. Don’t hold anything against Prof. Cowen, he’s doing good work, but sometimes he writes a post the purpose of which is not to be a reflection of his genuine understanding or position, but, essentially, to allow Sailer to write in the comments section and do the actual updating of priors.
Asking why people successfully avoid the subject and remain respectable by constantly talking about the Flynn Effect just might be relevant to this lesson.
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03
May
Charles Murray has written a magnificent review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. He sees the publication of this book as a major cultural event, but the impact he forecasts remains carefully hedged:
… as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation’s universities. I expect that their resistance to “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.
So one way or another, “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists’ willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be seen a century from now as proof of this era’s intellectual corruption.
22
Apr
They had buried him deep, shuddering all the while, scattering their incantations of protection on the accursed grave, as if to entomb their memories there, interring everything they had known in the infinitely forgiving clay. What they begged silently to forget, most of all, was the prophecy that when the stars were right he — it — would return for some hideous completion. Time passed, in the exact measure that had always been necessary, until the moonless night came, unheralded, and unstirred by the slightest breeze, when the stars were — in icy, twinkling fact — perfectly and pitilessly right …