The Duck does the integration:

1) disagreeing with progressivism is trolling 2) trolling is terrorism therefore 3) disagreeing with progressivism is terrorism

— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) August 20, 2014

That escalated quickly.

They’re everywhere and even if one gets eliminated, there’s two more to take its place (that also applies to HYDRA). But I feel like this is the point we’re at now. That’s sad and terrible, but it’s the truth. I used to think turning comments off was *the* solution, and while I do think comments have become useless, and largely a hotbed for hate and racism, turning them off is only going to drive the poison to even more public forums like Twitter and Facebook, where a hateful or factually corrupt tweet or status update can spread like a disease across the globe and turn supposed rational human beings into muckrakers of misinformation, hate, and other dark things.

Citing Doctor Whitney Phillips, of Humboldt State University, and a troll expert (who has written a book on the subject), Manjoo illuminates the phenomenon unambiguously:

If there’s one thing the history of the Internet has taught us, it’s that trolls will be difficult to contain because they really reflect base human society in all its ugliness. Trolls find a way.

“It’s not a question of whether or not we’re winning the war on trolling, but whether we’re winning the war on misogyny, or racism, and ableism and all this other stuff,” Dr. Phillips said. “Trolling is just a symptom of those bigger problems.”

As with so very many other things, there’s no solution to trolling short of the absolute triumph of progressive across the whole of the earth. This is an argument crying out for an #AAA tag like no other I’ve ever seen. (I’d link the Twitter hashtag, but it’s deeply confusing.)

ADDED: It’s a jungle out there.

ADDED: I’ll throw in the T-shirt slogan here for free — Resistance is futile trolling

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?”

In case anyone was unaware, libertarians eat each other too. It’s especially worth underscoring this friction factor:

This is the second approach to a new definition of libertarianism: People wish to analyze society not according to whether it is voluntary but in order to ferret out signs of power and privilege which they self-righteously condemn. Consider open source software. It has been castigated as a realm of privilege because it predominantly consists of white men. Open source software is source code that is thrown into the public realm so that anyone can modify and enhance it. It is a pure expression of free speech; the product is available to everyone for free; there are no entry barriers or requirements other than caring enough to learn code. Learning code is also available and free to all.

My misanthropy takes a hit.

ADDED: Creep-out troll terror.

@pjebleak @Recursive_idiot @UF_blog But of course. Stephanie Meyers is the gateway drug. http://t.co/jboJSuhqQj

— Laboria Cuboniks 0.2 (@nervemeter) August 5, 2014

.@nervemeter @pjebleak @Recursive_idiot @UF_blog Quick, someone start a band: Too Late For Tricia

— Mr. Archenemy (@mr_archenemy) August 5, 2014

The entire review (for Fanged Noumena, one star), by ‘Amazon Customer’ and entitled: Stick to Stephenie Meyer, for heaven’s sake! —

My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.

None too soon, in my view – but too late for Tricia, I fear.

***

Lanzhou, the major gateway city to the West, didn’t win me over. It’s congested, and — upon superficial contact — almost wholly charmless. Given its extraordinary history and contemporary frontier-hub function, that’s a great disappointment. (Despite the grunge, a modest downtown apartment there still costs US$200,000.)

The taxi-ride from the train station to the airport is unusually long because the broken country made it hard to situate runways conveniently. The route we took on the way back took us past the rapidly-arising New Lanzhou City — which is huge. There’s some prospect of a few glitzy modern buildings, if the promotional posters are to be believed. Serried ranks of comparatively tasteful proletarian residential highrises make up the bulk of the New  City so far.

***

The Chinese West is weirdly comparable to the American West, but historically fragmented. It plays a similar role in the local movie industry, as an imaginative space of heroism, violence, and civilizational fragility. It’s vast, arid, and geographically sublime — recalling the (to me) stunning fact that China’s proportion of arable land is only fractionally larger than Australia’s. Arid mountains, deserts, and harsh scrubby plains stretch endlessly. Dangerous tribes with an exotic nobility populate the Western frontier myths. Foreigners tend to understand — perhaps even overestimate — the American fascination with the frontier, but China’s is nowhere near as thoroughly appreciated. (A fake ‘ancient Dunhuang’ has been created near the real one, catering to the huge appetite of the Chinese movie industry for historical ‘Westerns’.)

***

In the Occident, the reputation of Buddhism has been almost completely devastated by New Age flakiness, but there are plenty of important things to say about it, and do with it. It’s a religion suited to philosophical appreciation, and no engagement with ontological questions can avoid the Buddhist contribution without self-impoverishment. Consider the crucial NRx topic of time-preference, which — abstractly apprehended — concerns the investment of the future with ontological weight. High time-preference amounts to an estimation of the present as more real than the future, and therefore as more worthy of concern. Buddhism, perhaps most clearly in its hyper-philosophical yogacara strain, accesses this problem with unique directness. English becomes Buddhist when it talks — with systematic ambiguity — about what matters. Attribution of reality is a sink for purpose. Is there an Eastern assault upon high time-preference that orients itself to a dis-investment of the present (as delusion), rather than — in the style of Occidental prudence — a super-investment of the future (as an irrationally-neglected inevitability)?

***

It struck we with peculiar force quite how ironical it is that those regimes (now defunct) with an overt commitment to the labor theory of value — and therefore to pro-natalist exhortation on economistic grounds — are the ones with the most consistent record of destroying the economic value of labor. To invert the same irony, Deng Xiaoping introduced counter-natalist policies at the very moment (Mainland) Chinese labor was becoming a resource of unprecedented value. Irony is destroying us all, but it isn’t something we cooked up.

***

Thanks to @ProfessorZaius for passing along the following troll-masterpiece by ‘Amazon Customer’ (reviewing Fanged Noumena, 1.0 out of 5 stars, 14 Feb 2014):

Stick to Stephenie Meyer, for heaven’s sake!
My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.
This is possibly the worst mistake I have ever made.
From being a happy-go-lucky Goth with a crush on Robert Pattinson, Tricia has become a ‘post-human nihilist’ who stays up all night listening to the sort of machine music that makes your ears bleed and gibbering about the ‘Dark Enlightenment’.
I have written to the book’s author to complain, but received no reply. I am informed by his publishers that Mr Land has in any case disowned all his previous writing and decamped to Shanghai.
None too soon, in my view – but too late for Tricia, I fear.