And my latest addition to the block-charts, the same method but applied to the Roman Republic in 225 (it's a big chart, you may want to zoom in): 3/23 pic.twitter.com/gONo2h048G
— No Context Chick Tracts (@No_Context_JTC) June 7, 2022
Politics-themed tweets:
7. My prediction about the 2020 US presidential campaign:
So, I'm saying there's a 25% chance Warren wins Iowa and goes on to win the nomination, and a 75% chance Warren loses Iowa and Biden wins the nomination.
8. Josh Fruhlinger’s prediction about the 2024 US presidential campaign:
assuming trump loses this time, he's definitely going to make noises about running in '24 for like 2 and a half years, fucking w/everyone else's attempts to lay the groundwork for a campaign, before eventually endorsing don jr's doomed run https://t.co/ceC813pHGn
A TRINONYM is a compound word in which both halves plus the compound itself all mean the same thing—like KITTYCAT, which means the same as both KITTY and CAT.
— Haggard Hawks 🦅📚 Words | Language | Etymology (@HaggardHawks) December 4, 2021
12. Something that makes Audrey Farnsworth happy come Halloween:
i love seeing people in Halloween costumes at ATMs. hang on The Riddler needs to casually bank for a minute
13. Matthew Goldin on the divide between straights and gays:
Straights and gays can agree on pretty much everything when it comes to art, tech, and politics. But when it comes to getting aroused and selecting someone for the sack… welp, let the bickering begin!
15. Fabrizio Gilardi shares a study that calls into question the idea that anonymity is a driver of toxicity in online debates:
Anonymity is often touted as a main driver of online toxicity, but these results don't support that view
"We find no support for the hypothesis that personal anonymity breeds incivility or lowers discussion quality in online discussions"@ylelkes et al. https://t.co/nMp9McDUy3
— Fabrizio Gilardi 🦣 @fgilardi@mastodon.social (@fgilardi) November 23, 2021
I don't want children's school lunches to be free. I think they should cost a lot and you, specifically, the person complaining about free lunches, should have to pay for them.
3. Sam Haselby on the good cop/ bad cop routine that underlies the pseudo-leftism of America’s elites:
Most people are familiar with the bad cop / good cop routine from cinema or television. America’s elite neoliberal institutions rely on it too, recognize and promote both professional types.
This Stanford brouhaha just makes me want to grind this axe again — why would Stanford Law School, an institution whose only purpose in life is to be exclusive and hierarchical, have a dean whose job is to pretend to be trying to make it equitable and inclusive?
Think of it this way: the dogmatic neoclassical economists (in Larry Summers’s words if there is more inequality it is because people are getting more what they deserve) are the bad cops of elite neoliberalism. They frame you and beat you up, so to speak. But then their…
…colleagues come into the holding cell and say, look I want to abolish the police, return the land to the indigenous, and provide reparations. None of this is going to happen. They are the good cops of elite neoliberalism. The legitimacy and power of the system relies on both.
Another way to think of it is the bad cops have helped secure material resources of historic abundance, the good cops come in and provide the moral resources which to try to balance out the bad cop’s depredations have to be pushed to a grandiosity, a meta-historical scale.
5. Fr Reginald Foster was a better teacher than he pretended to be:
I studied with Reggie in the last summer class he ever taught. I can say that, *at least at that time*, it’s just untrue that he taught with no regard for how difficult or easy the texts were. The first thing he read with us was from Cornelius Nepos and recommended it to less… https://t.co/ATFo4iWiCa
Here’s @holland_tom on St Paul: “You are kind of hearing him thinking aloud as he wrestles with the implications of the fact that Christ suffered this. And everything that he’s writing is an attempt to say – how this could be?
“It’s upended his expectations of God’s plan so radically that he can never arrive at, I think, a stable sense of exactly what it means. Although Paul absolutely recognizes that the fact that Jesus was crucified lies at the heart of everything that Jesus’ mission is
“and therefore how he relates to God’s plan, what is happening, the very character of the world, the very character of God, the very nature of God’s relationship to humanity – Everything has been upended by this.
“So the cross is absolutely at the heart of everything that Paul’s writing about. But at the same time, there is kind of an embarrassment about it because it is the most shocking thing imaginable, which is kind of the point.”
Originally tweeted by Susannah Black Roberts, Niece Appreciator (@suzania) on March 18, 2023.
7. Carolina Eyck plays the “Queen of the Night” aria:
I somehow missed this until today. It is fantastic, maybe the single best theremin performance I've ever heard: https://t.co/7L7Et7ti0n via @YouTube
Looking through my archives, I see that I’ve been aware of “The Dark Enlightenment” or the Neoreactionary (“NRx”) movement since at least September 2007, when I slogged through a Mencius Moldbug post and selected some key quotations from it. I read another post by MM in February 2009 and complained about it.
The September 2007 and February 2009 posts mark the boundaries of a time when I was spending a fair bit of time trying to get a handle on NRx thought. I’d largely lost interest in it by the spring of 2009, though I did bring the movement up again in 2014 in order to mention the snappy nickname for it I’d come up with,”The Dim Enlightenment.” During last year’s US election campaign, the prominence of Peter Thiel in Donald J. Trump’s campaign and Hillary Clinton’s decision to give a speech accusing Don John of Astoria of involvement with the “Alt-Right” brought the Neoreactionaries a significant amount of public attention. The idea that Don John himself is directly influenced by NRx writings is risible, as the Hated Steve Sailer pointed out:
Trump loves nothing more in life than settling down with a 35,000 word Mencius Moldbug essay. https://t.co/w7VP8M508o
Nonetheless, I have had the vague sense that I ought to take another look at that stuff.
Heaven knows I’m not going to dig my way through another 35,000 words of unedited ramblings by Mencius Moldbug. Fortunately, I remembered that in 2013 Scott Alexander had written a summary of NRx thought. I hadn’t read it when it was new; the title, “Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell,” had turned me away, since “enormous” and “planet-sized” are two things NRx writers consistently do themselves. As it turns out, Dr Alexander’s post is actually rather concise. And it is admirable in its fair-mindedness. Dr Alexander labors mightily to present the best possible case for NRx views, especially those with which he most strenuously disagrees. I chuckled when I saw the point at which his imaginative sympathy finally broke down: “Reactionaries also seem to be really into metaphysics, especially of the scholastic variety, but I have yet to be able to understand this. Blatant racism, attempts to clone long-dead monarchs, and giving a gold-obsessed alien absolute power all seem like they could sort of make sense in the right light, but why anyone would want more metaphysics is honestly completely beyond me.”
Dr Alexander followed this post up with an “Anti-Reactionary FAQ,” which by March of 2014 he was saying he no longer fully endorsed. Still, unless you’re planning to make an academic study of the Neoreactionaries or to engage in an exhaustive public debate with them, I think Dr Alexander’s posts should tell you just about all you really need to know about them.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain routinely gives little gifts to their fans at Christmastime in the form of particularly generous postings on their (already very generous) website; this year they’ve posted a series of videos under the title “Christmas Playalong.” Here’s one of them:
Also, our old friend Al Wood has posted his usual excellent Christmas things at Ukulele Hunt, including the Christmas UkeToob.
I remember Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fondly, or perhaps I should say I am of the age of people who remember that show fondly. I didn’t have a TV when it was on. Anyway, I don’t think I’d ever heard this one before.
Psychologist James Thompson engages in one of the most venerable of all Anglican religious traditions, publicly declaring that Anglicanism is doomed and wondering whether it deserves to die. I can’t explain why we do that, I can only say that it’s our way.
Jacobin magazine has a brief summary of how the Christian Left in the USA tends to think of Christmas, which picks up where James Brown left off a few decades ago:
I allowed myself a little scholarly musing on Twitter this morning, in response to a remark by Tom Holland:
@holland_tom I wonder if that's a subtle protest against Gnosticism- so far from being a sign of holiness, knowledge is a mark of Satan.
To stick with stuff on tumblr for a minute, here’s a cartoon in which Gahan Wilson expresses irritation that various holidays, including Christmas and Halloween, run together in the USA:
Some observers of the US political scene did predict the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election with some success. That shouldn’t be surprising; the polls consistently predicted that the national popular vote would be close, which it was, that Hillary Clinton would win it by a narrow margin, which she did, that the vote would be even closer in states including Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which it was, and that the vote in those states would determine the winner of the Electoral College and therefore of the presidency, which it did. So, making a right prediction required only that one take the polls at face value, disregarding historical analogies and political science models which suggested that someone like Donald J. Trump (alias Don John of Astoria) could not possibly be elected US president.
Among those who can fairly claim to have shown real prescience in connection with this election, pride of place should go to Steve Sailer, who has spent the last 16 years describing how a Republican candidate running on a pledge to restrict immigration could precipitate ethnic bloc voting among whites and thereby win a national election. He’s been reposting some of his old stuff lately, for example this 2000 piece in which he first laid out “the Sailer Strategy.” Mr Sailer has been remarkably restrained with his I-Told-You-So’s; in hundreds of pieces over the years, he has outlined scenarios that have played out in 2016. As a longtime reader of Mr Sailer’s blog, I do find it a bit jarring that he, so long a voice far removed from the ins and outs of Washington politics, is now mentioning people whom he apparently knows personally as potential appointees to senior positions on the White House staff.
Scott Adams, the guy behind the “Dilbert” comic strip, has attracted a great deal of attention for predicting a Trump win; in several posts lately he’s been focused on responses to the election as illustrations of the concept of cognitive dissonance.
Mr Sailer is a Trump supporter, and Mr Adams is not a Trump adversary. Liberals, leftists, and others who strongly oppose Don John have been searching for explanations as to what went wrong Tuesday. Some of these reflections focus on the shortcomings of the sort of people who voted for Mr Trump; these could be summed up in this cinematic moment:
Some reactions have been more interesting. Quartz classifies political parties around the world as “populist” or “liberal,” and finds the populists riding a wave. The more I look at their lists, the more the “populist” and “liberal” labels look like big grab-bags of organizations that have very little in common, but there are some neat maps, and I do think they are onto something.
Atrios is angry with Hillary Clinton and her supporters for managing somehow to lose to Donald Trump, and with the elites in the USA more generally for the way they have of failing upward.
Malak Chabkoun sees in Don John’s election a case of chickens coming home to roost from the violence the USA has inflicted on the rest of the world, and in the panicked reactions of many who opposed him a political immaturity based in ignorance of what America’s empire truly is.
On Twitter, Freddie deBoer allows himself an I-Told-You-So:
if only someone had tried to warn liberals that their in-group language rules and constant signaling made them myopic and politically weak
Meanwhile, political scientist Allan Lichtman takes advantage of the moment in the spotlight that his successful prediction of Don John of Astoria’s election has earned him to publicize a further prediction, that he will be impeached. It’s much easier for me to imagine that Don John will warrant impeachment than it was for me to imagine, or indeed than it is for me to believe, that he will be president. So I’m inclined to believe Professor Lichtman. Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama also predicted the elections results successfully, in his case calling 48 of 50 states correctly; he may yet see that record improve, since Michigan and New Hampshire, the two states where his forecast did not agree with the current reports, are so closely divided that their results are not yet final.
Michael Kazin, writing in The Wall Street Journal, of all publications, traces the rise of Trump to the decline of organized labor.
Jonathan Haidt is always worth reading, and his latest piece is no exception. Asking “In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace?,” he has to make statements that sound rather obvious to anyone who reads old books or otherwise cultivates the memory of times before the 2010’s, such as the following:
Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.
It may be difficult for some to imagine that there are people in the world who actually need to be reminded of this, but as an American academic who lives in a liberal college town I can attest that there are many, enough of them that they may well have influenced the Democrats to adopt losing campaign strategies this year.
Former New York Times reporter Michael Cieply may not have seen the election result coming, but he isn’t surprised that his old paper was so far off in its expectations. He describes how, unlike typical newsrooms in which editors ask reporters what information they’ve picked up and try to figure out what’s going on based on that, Times editors openly devise a framework and craft the news to buttress that framework.
Glenn Greenwald blames liberals for refusing to learn the lessons of Brexit, lessons which he finds stated clearly both in his own writings and in a note by Vincent Bevins of the Los Angeles Times. Writing from a perspective very different from Mr Greenwald’s, Peter Hitchens made similar points. Mr Hitchens opposes British membership in the European Union, but thought the referendum was a disastrously bad way of trying to achieve exit; he also opposes mass immigration from the Islamic world to the West, but clearly does not see in Don John of Astoria a successor to Don John of Austria or other historical defenders of Christendom whom he might be prepared to admire.
Professor Charles Camosy writes that left-of-center academics, and to some extent even college graduates working outside the academy, have so effectively insulated themselves from those to their right that they have become all but incapable of hearing what they have to say. What Professor Camosy sees in general, Professor Stephen Bainbridge sees in a particular event at the University of California at Los Angeles.
And of course there has been some post-election scrambling for personal vindication within what was once the Hillary Clinton campaign. Some of the stories that have made their way into print show surprising people seeming to try to distance themselves from her loss. Notably, Bill Clinton is named as one who advocated a strategy that would have reached out to non-college educated whites in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the voters who put Barack Obama over the top in 2012 and who swung to Donald Trump this year. Perhaps Mr Clinton did not personally authorize this leak- perhaps others within Clintonworld are trying to refurbish his image as a political wizard in order to boost the chances that Chelsea Clinton will be able to start a political career of her own soon.
You, you like whatever it is you like. But me, I think io9 is a pretty good website. For example:
A strongly favorable review of a movie about a young woman who abandons vegetarianism for cannibalism includes this paragraph:
As the film unfolds, Justine slowly becomes more acclimated. She begins to experiment with sexuality and, for some reason, starts to break her diet in really odd ways (namely the human meat thing). This is the one dark mark on Raw. Watching the film, Justine’s turn from hardcore vegetarian to something else comes out of nowhere. There are a few hints for sure, but the transition is still jarring. Once you get over that, though, is when things go from really good to completely great.
As I say, I don’t know about you. But if I went to see a movie in which the main character begins as a vegetarian and ends as a cannibal, I would be disappointed if there were not some kind of storyline explaining why she made that transition. As inLe Weekend, for example.
Anyway, just as any one person’s culinary tastes may vary within a lifetime, so cinematic tastes vary from person to person. I realize this.
I was lost in the forest at night, alone, and I called to my ghost; and at last, my ghost came to me.
I asked my ghost, “Why, when I was lost and I was calling, did you take so long to come? I have been wandering alone and blind through the dark, and I could have harmed this body beyond repair.”
And my ghost settled before me like mist on the ground, and reached out to touch me.
“I was gone far,” it said, “looking along the paths of the forest, and the things that dwell therein.”
“And what did you see?” I asked my ghost, and saw that it still hung away from me, as though reluctant to come home to my body.
“I saw pain and hunger,” the ghost said. “I felt death and the terror of many small scuttling things. And I saw on the fringes of the forest, villages; but the villages lay empty, burned by fire and disease until the living fled and the ghosts of the dead, unable to bear the loneliness, fled after them.”
“What else?” I asked, for I knew the ghost had more to tell; it was my ghost, and it had dwelt within me since the moment I was born.
“And I saw on this path, before us, five images in the shape of women; but women they were not.” The ghost paused, and I could feel it look away into the jungle with its eyeless eyes. “They had skulls for faces, and were clad in robes made of the night. And the first of them had a flame in her hand, for she was the spirit of passion and the heat of vengeance, and she would burn you to ashes if she found you; not because she would want to, but because it is her nature.”
“And the second?” asked I.
It just gets better from there, it really is a gorgeous bit of writing.
It’s certainly at the opposite extreme from the sort of thing I encounter that sometimes makes my daily habit of looking at things on the internet feel like this:
I am very fond of this installment of The Periodic Table of Videos. My favorite moment comes when the Prof says, “I’ve no idea how this sample got to London. It was brought to me in London, in Max’s bag.”
The “Archdruid,” alias John Michael Greer, is occasionally brilliant; this essay about “The End of Ordinary Politics” builds on his theory that the distinction between hourly wages and salaried employment marks a class division that explains much of American social life, and that the US political elite has little comprehension of or curiosity about the economic interests of wage laborers. The Archdruid holds that the kind of partisan hostility that Alan Jacobs, Scott Alexander, and others lament is largely explicable as the result of tactics representatives of the salaried classes deploy to keep wage laborers off the political radar:
I’m thinking here, among many other examples along the same lines, of a revealing article earlier this year from a reporter who attended a feminist conference on sexism in the workplace. All the talk there was about how women in the salary class could improve their own prospects for promotion and the like. It so happened that the reporter’s sister works in a wage-class job, and she quite sensibly inquired whether the conference might spare a little time to discuss ways to improve prospects for women who don’t happen to belong to the salary class. Those of my readers who have seen discussions of this kind know exactly what happened next: a bit of visible discomfort, a few vaguely approving comments, and then a resumption of the previous subjects as though no one had made so embarrassing a suggestion.
It’s typical of the taboo that surrounds class prejudice in today’s industrial nations that not even the reporter mentioned the two most obvious points about this interchange. The first, of course, is that the line the feminists at the event drew between those women whose troubles with sexism were of interest to them, and those whose problems didn’t concern them in the least, was a class line. The second is that the women at the event had perfectly valid, if perfectly selfish, reasons for drawing that line. In order to improve the conditions of workers in those wage class industries that employ large numbers of women, after all, the women at the conference would themselves have had to pay more each month for daycare, hairstyling, fashionable clothing, and the like. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the slogans of an earlier era liked to claim, but it’s clearly not powerful enough to convince women in the salary class to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of women who don’t happen to share their privileged status.
To give the women at the conference credit, though, at least they didn’t start shouting about some other hot-button issue in the hope of distracting attention from an awkward question. That was the second thing relevant to my post that started happening the week after it went up. All at once, much of the American left responded to the rise of Donald Trump by insisting at the top of their lungs that the only reason, the only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters.
The Archdruid isn’t a Trump supporter and does not deny that Mr Trump’s appeal is at least partly racial, but he focuses on the questions of economic status that have drawn so many white wage-earners to that particular loudmouthed landlord when they might have chosen to throw their lot in with any of a number of other race-baiting demagogues.
If we were to ask the same New Guinea tribe to follow Jewish food taboos one week and American food taboos the next, I’m not sure they’d be able to identify one code as any stricter or weirder than the other. They might have some questions about the meat/milk thing, but maybe they’d also wonder why cheeseburgers are great for dinner but ridiculous for breakfast.
People get worked up over all of the weird purity laws and dress codes in Leviticus, but it’s important to realize how strict our own purity laws are. The ancient Jews would have found it ridiculous that men have to shave and bathe every day if they want to be considered for the best jobs. One must not piss anywhere other than a toilet; this is an abomination (but you would be shocked how many of the supposedly strait-laced Japanese will go in an alley if there’s no restroom nearby). I have been yelled at for going to work without a tie and for tying my tie in the wrong pattern; wearing sweatpants to work is right out. And once again, this gets even longer if you you let the more modern/rational rules onto the list – Leviticus has a lot to say about dwellings with fungus in them, but I recently learned to my distress that landlord/tenant law has a lot more.
Once again, if we made our poor New Guinea tribe follow Jewish purity laws one week and American purity laws the next, they would probably end up equally confused and angry both times.
So when we think of America as a perfectly natural secular culture, and Jews as following some kind of superstitious draconian law code, we’re just saying that our laws feel natural and obvious, but their laws feel like an outside imposition. And I think if a time-traveling King Solomon showed up at our doorstep, he would recognize American civil religion as a religion much quicker than he would recognize Christianity as one. Christianity would look like a barbaric mystery cult that had gotten too big for its britches; American civil religion would look like home.
Insofar as this isn’t obvious to schoolchildren learning about ancient religion, it’s because the only thing one ever hears about ancient religion is the crazy mythologies. But I think American culture shows lots of signs of trying to form a crazy mythology, only to be stymied by modernity-specific factors. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many historians around to tell us exactly how things really happened. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many scientists around to tell us where the rain and the lightning really come from. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we’re only two hundred-odd years old and these things take time. And most of all, we can’t have crazy mythologies because Christianity is already sitting around occupying that spot.
I have a weakness for maps that purport to describe what people are like in various locales, such as this one, which I saw here and which comes from this article:
My wife and I have some connections to the Episcopal Church, and one of the things that first attracted me to that institution was this In Search Of… episode about the tragic life of Bishop James Pike. All the remarks from clerics reminiscing about the efforts they made over the years to keep their friend Jim out of trouble showed me that, whatever its faults, it was an organization in which there was an abundance of clear heads and warm hearts:
5. When I was about twelve years old, my brother gave me an LP I still have. I should say “the LP I still have,” since I haven’t had a record player for 20 years and got rid of all the others long ago. This one is The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, and it’s a prized possession. Here’s my favorite track:
6. There are a couple of outstanding made-for-TV-movies Leonard Nimoy was involved in that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the tributes. One is 1991’s Never Forget, in which he played Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein, who in the 1980s found a way to fight Holocaust deniers in court. The movie makes it clear that Mermelstein is Good and the denialists are Bad, of course, but there’s a lot more complexity and humanity in the film, as it explores Mermelstein’s relationship with his family and shows how the consequences of the Holocaust continue to play out in all of their lives.
Another is 1971’s The Assault on the Wayne, where he plays the commander of a nuclear submarine against which enemy agents are hatching evil schemes. He’s the good guy, but watching him I’m very glad I am not a sailor- it would be quite exhausting to serve under a commanding officer like that, especially in the confined world of a submarine. His first encounter with his supply officer is terrifying:
As I’ve mentioned, I’m scrapping most of the links pages attached to this blog, but preserving the most recent version of each as a post. So here is what our links to reference materials looked like when we last updated it, more than four years ago:
I’ve been trimming down the links pages connected to this site; the idea of a links page is hopelessly old-fashioned, and neither I nor anyone else was using most of them. But I’ve been copying them into posts, as a way of recording what they looked like. So, here’s what our list of Science links looked like when it was finally deleted:
acilius
believer1
lefalcon
losthunderlads
vthunderlad
Panther Red 