Ebola! Stories from Nigeria (good) and Europe (not so good). Contagion math (and from Taleb). “The End of the World: it’s sooner than you think.” Ebola as a morbid cultural indicator. Oddness and lunacy.

Fertility transitions and dysgenics. (Related.)

Some (old) background to Singularity and time preference. There’s a lot more to discuss about technology, reaction, and time horizons at some point (given time).

Secrets.

Taking trolls seriously.

Dampier on van Creveld on sexual privilege. Mangan on masculinity and politics. Goddesses and man at Harvard. Phalanx: “… we envision a group of men meeting regularly to do things like the following: Go to church …”

This time is different.

South Africa disillusions the left.

The singular of data is anecdote. Charles Murray reviews The Bell Curve. Model minority trickiness. Slate cuts some bait.

SST on politicization.

Free Northerner‘s Christianity debate begins. What Gibbon got right (and what he didn’t say). On The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

SoBL on Mulholland Drive.

News without novelty.

Zombie sociology. A skeptical overview of the Typhonian Tomes. Crabzilla.

Fermi Paradox — the poem.

From the perspective of Outside in, however, this post misses the most crucial level of the question. Capitalism — like any ideologically contested term — is cross-cut by multiple meanings. Of these, its generic sense, which “simply means that private individuals own the means of production” is far from the most objectionable.

Yet, far more significant is the singular sense of capitalism, as a proper name, for a ‘thing’ or real individual. To grasp this, it probably helps to consider the word as a contraction of ‘terrestrial capitalism’ — not describing a generic type of social organization, but designating an event.

A biological analogy captures the distinction quite precisely. Consider ‘life’ — understandable, certainly, as a generic cosmic possibility, defined perhaps by local entropy dissipation, or other highly-abstract features. Contrast this sense with ‘terrestrial life’ — or, even better, the biosphere (we might say ‘Gaia’ if the hopelessly sentimentalized associations of this term were avoidable). Terrestrial life began at a definite moment, followed a path-dependent trajectory, and built upon a dense inheritance, as exemplified most prominently by the RNA-DNA chemistry of information replication, the genetic code, genetic legacies, and elaboration of body-plans within a comparatively limited number of basic lineages. Terrestrial life is not a generic concept, but a thing, or event, meriting a proper name.

Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.

It’s frightening how many of them look almost uncontroversially realistic. The Outside in favorite (predictably enough) was the ‘Bilderbergularity':

Billionaire overlords throw in the towel trying to run the planet, escape en masse to low earth orbit. People around the world breath a sigh of relief … before falling onto each other like zombie hordes.

[A Governmentularity / Fungularity mash-up would work well for me.]