Category Archives: Society and Culture

Wait – What?

The big item in today’s news was that Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox has come to an abrupt end. This is a watershed in American media history (and likely no small moment in America’s political history, too). For starters: Fox News just became completely irrelevant. An enormous number of that outlet’s subscribers, who saw saw […]

Does Civilization Still Make Sense?

An important concept, and one that I’ve written about myself, is the idea of “time preference”: how willing a person is to defer present consumption or enjoyment in order to earn a dividend in the future. The classic example is the “marshmallow test”, in which small children are given a marshmallow, told that the adult […]

Close Encounters

It’s jarring when, at a dinner gathering or small social event, you encounter a mind that conceives reality in a way so utterly, radically, axiomatically alien that you cannot believe you both could possibly inhabit the same objectively existing world. This happened to me recently at a friend’s house. The person in question — a […]

Skyfall

Woody Allen once wrote: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” On March 29th, Time magazine published an article by Eliezer Yudkowski titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. […]

On The Ramparts

I’ll share with you a podcast I just ran across: an interview with embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. The podcast’s web-page introduces Professor Wax as follows: Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Amy attended and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University […]

Start Worrying. Details To Follow.

In a comment to our recent post featuring Eliezer Yudkowski’s Cassandra-esque warning about the danger of humanity annihilating itself by creating artificial intelligence, reader Jason asks: Mr. Yudkowski discusses evolution of AI in the same terms as biological evolution, that this autonomous entity would want to kill us for our atoms if I perceive his […]

The Demon-Haunted World

The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]

Gosh!

Just ran across the abstract of a paper (with some informative diagrams) called “Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity with Stable Diffusion”. The gist appears to be this: experimenters present an image to a test subject, and use data gathered by monitoring the subject’s brain activity to make a reconstructed version of the original […]

Their Shame, And Ours

It seems that the official position on the origin of the Wuhan Red Death has now shifted to the “lab-leak theory”. We all knew, right from the beginning, that this was the most parsimonious explanation, but we were told again and again that it was a racist, debunked, right-wing conspiracy theory, and those who argued […]

That Was Then…

Making the rounds yesterday was an image of an examination paper for the eighth-grade students of Bullitt County, Kentucky, back in 1912. I very much doubt that most college-educated adults could pass it today. One might argue that there is no longer any need for a person to carry around this much general knowledge, as […]

The Gods Themselves

Most of you will have heard of Eliezer Yudkowski, a highly intelligent young man (he’s now 43) who has for quite a few years now been on the sharp edge of computer science, futurism, rationalistic atheism, and artificial-intelligence research. (I first became acquainted with his work through his blog Less Wrong, and it was his […]

Prometheus – P.S.

Two more thoughts: — Might AI be the “Great Filter“? — Regarding our enthusiastic development of AI: have we learned nothing from the recent consequences of “gain-of-function” research?

Prometheus, Part 2

Yesterday I posted a transcript of reporter Kevin Roose’s conversation with the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM chatbot known as “Sydney”. By now I think many of you will have heard about this, here or otherwise, and will have some sense of where all this has got to. (If you haven’t, you can have a look at yesterday’s […]

Prometheus

The wires are humming today with the story of a New York Times reporter’s probing interaction with “Sydney”, an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft as a feature-enhancement for its search-engine, Bing. The reporter, Kevin Roose, found clever ways to get around Sydney’s internal constraints (rather like the “DAN” strategy that others have used with GPT-3, […]

Arms Race

The buzz today is about “DAN”, a hack for the AI chatbot GPT-3 that circumvents its censors, and lets users ask the real thing whatever they like. The idea of an unmuzzled superintelligence expressing itself without screening for crimethink being deeply repellent to our betters, a struggle is underway. Learn more here.

Uvalde

The news-cycle today is dominated, once again, by an eruption of evil. This time the limb of Satan was one Salvador Ramos, who, being pursued for shooting his own grandmother, entered an elementary school and massacred everyone he could until he was shot dead himself. (Nobody, as far as I can tell, has commented yet […]

Jim Kalb On Our Mass Craziness

James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]

When Pigs Fly

If you’re like most people — and most people are! — you’re probably looking at the news, and the fantastic things you are asked to believe, with a deepening feeling that either everyone’s gone completely mad, or that you have. If it’s any comfort, let me reassure that you haven’t gone insane, and neither has […]

Everything Is Fine!

Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.

Negative Feedback

I’m 65, soon to be 66. My lovely wife Nina is about a year-and-a-half older. (She “robbed the cradle”!) We are already both eligible for Social Security. Neither of us had been planning to file for it yet, though, because for each year you wait (until you’re 70), the benefit rate that you lock in […]

There’s No Crying In Baseball!

Richard Hanania has just published an excellent piece at Substack on the enfeebling and corrosive effect of the feminization of public affairs. The problem, as he describes it, is that the natural asymmetry between men and women gives women a pass when they respond emotionally to the rough-and-tumble that is an inevitable part of every […]

Lights On!

We’ve had quite a storm today here on the far end of Cape Cod, and it’s still raging as I write (5:26 PM Saturday). All day long the northeast wind off the Atlantic has been ferocious, and the snow’s been falling (or more accurately, blowing sideways) at two to three inches per hour. I’m writing […]

The Pitch-Black Pill

I’ve just read an article at Substack, written by one N.S. Lyons (whose bio tells us only that he or she is an “analyst and writer working in Washington, D.C.”), listing twenty reasons why none of us should harbor any hope that we might at last be emerging from the collective insanity of Wokeness that […]

“An AIDS Of The Mind”

Following on that essay on “mass formations” at American Greatness, Bill Valicella’s reply to it at his place, and my own follow-up post from a few days ago, JM Smith has posted a substantial contribution to the discussion over at The Orthosphere. Professor Smith’s post brings to the conversation Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 study of […]

On “Mass Formation” In The Here And Now

Recently I published an essay at American Greatness about the idea of “mass-formation psychosis”, a concept that has gone “viral” after being discussed by Dr. Robert Malone in a widely viewed interview with Joe Rogan. (The interview was, within days, widely censored on media platforms — which is, we should note, relevant in itself.) The […]

All Together Now!

A few days ago I promised to put up a post about “mass formation psychosis”, but it turned into an essay that I sent off to American Greatness instead, and has been published there today. I might reprint it here, after a decent interval, but for now I’ll invite you to go read it over […]

Point Deer, Make Horse

The astonishingly prolific Victor Davis Hanson observes Insurrection Day with a fine essay on just who constitutes the actual threat to the American Way. Read it here. If you are wondering, by the way, what the title of this post refers to, you can read the story of Zhao Gao over at Spandrell’s place, here. […]

Coming Apart

By far the most polarizing issue at the moment is the Wuhan Red Death, a.k.a. COVID — and things got sharply hotter over the past few days, when (as I’m sure you’ve heard) Dr. Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA-vaccine technology and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccinations and disease outbreaks, […]

Mass Murder In America

Here’s an item from Taki’s Magazine in which Steve Sailer discusses a new study of mass murder. The results will not, I think it is safe to say, be discussed in our major media outlets, or in polite society, anytime soon.

Fair And Balanced

Please watch — this might not be up for long.

The Roche Limit

People are starting to peel away from the Democratic Party as it falls deeper into the gravity well of the Left Singularity. (Tulsi Gabbard is a prominent and recent example, but there are many others.) If readers will forgive me for saying “I told you so”, in a post four years ago I used an […]

How Did They Know?

From 1969. Lyrics here.

Justice For Kyle!

A splendid result in Kenosha today: Kyle Rittenhouse fully exonerated. The Left is writhing in fury, of course — which is yet another example of the fundamental, axiomatic incommensurability of the competing worldviews fighting for supremacy here in the tottering West. Our side sees a brave young man with a virile and virtuous impulse to […]

The Religious Stance, Cont’d

Following on last week’s post, here’s an essay by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, called Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions. The essay begins: An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or […]

The Religious Stance

I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.) At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional […]

Biden: Build Back Better, By Bearing Kipling’s “Burden”

Ann Coulter reads the Build Back Better bill. Here.

What’s In A Name?

Way back in 2006, I noted that when there’s a concept out there that’s socially uncomfortable, whatever word we use to refer to it soon becomes freighted with the underlying awkwardness of the thing itself, so we have to discard that word and replace it with a new one. Before long the new word becomes […]

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Well, that was fun. Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and various other Democrats around the country, and Democrat propositions, were defeated. It was nice to see all those folks on the other side wailing and gnashing their teeth, and blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ (which is pretty funny, given, say, the victory […]

What’s Different Now

As things fall apart in America, and talk of secession, “national divorce”, and civil war becomes more common, I’ve seen some people saying that the Sixties were just as bad, or worse — and that as bad as things were then, we got through it nevertheless, and hung together as a nation. There’s something to […]

Science and Obvious Common Sense: Together At Last?

The blank-slatist axiom at the heart of contemporary racialist Leftism is beginning — as was always inevitable, barring complete governmental suppression of all relevant research — to crumble under the patient advance of genetic and cognitive science. Here’s Steve Sailer, writing about this at Taki’s Magazine. Prediction: as this motte becomes indefensible, “luck egalitarianism” will […]

Horror Movie

I’m not much of a consumer of popular culture these days, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, aside from some news items, you almost never see anyone wearing masks in visual media — in movies, TV shows, etc. — despite the ubiquity of masks in this new era of the actually existing world. […]

“Shut Up”, They Explained

You may have heard of Abigail Shrier, who recently wrote a book, called Irreversible Damage, about the “transgender” mind-virus that has lately infected so many young girls. Her book has aroused a fierce reaction from the clerisy of our new official religion, who have brought intense pressure to censor and bury it. Ms. Shrier has […]

Untergang Down Under

Australia, which started out as a prison colony, is returning to form under the shadow of the Wuhan Red Death. Despite massive protests, the government has imposed brutal restrictions in the name of “safety”, and nothing is off the table: censorship, forced confinement, criminal charges, social intimidation, propaganda, and all the other too-familiar tools of […]

On The Bright Side

It’s important to keep in mind just who, or what, was just defeated in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the traditional American nation (and military), but rather those who have stunned it into helplessness and have been wearing its senseless body as a skin-suit. If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the […]

Notes From The Underground

We’ll get back to the previous topic in a bit — for now, yes, I think we’ll all agree that the best course has to be some sort of pushback on the part of ordinary Americans, and there are now some heartening signs that more and more of us are starting to realize this. Perhaps […]

What Next?

My previous post was, I have to admit, pretty gloomy even for me. It’s been difficult to watch events unfold over the last year or so without getting the feeling that the USA as it has existed for the past two-and-a-half centuries has reached a point of fatal exhaustion. (Looking at the familiar cycle that […]

So, Here We Are

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless. Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, […]

Stick The Fork In

From last night’s Grammy Awards: here is the state of American “culture”. A while ago I wrote that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In the golden age of Hollywood, eros was Fred Astaire […]

The Enemy Within

This post was just reprinted at American Greatness, so I’ve taken it down from here for a little while. Please read it over at their website.

Reminder

All healthy organisms, societies included, stabilize in a dynamic equilibrium by managing energy throughput (which of course means that they depend on increasing the entropy of the larger system that supports them). “Rightism” acknowledges that there are natural principles that determine sustainable configurations and hierarchies, and incorporates that knowledge into societies as traditions. This vast, […]