February 28, 2017 – 5:54 pm
Remember Supernova 1987a? (Of course you do.) Well, NASA’s been keeping an eye on it for you. Fantastic video and images here.
February 28, 2017 – 5:04 pm
A couple of months ago I was contacted by a woman named Lucy Diego, who was putting together an anthology of neoreactionary essays and wanted to know if she might use some of what I’ve written here. (I was happy to agree.) Ms. Diego runs an art gallery in London that last year mounted an […]
February 26, 2017 – 8:11 pm
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Outline of History, written in 1920 by H.G. Wells. I’m halfway through the first volume of two. It’s a fine example of post-WWI Progressive-era thinking, and Mr. Wells was of course a wonderful craftsman, so I’ve been enjoying it enormously. (The entire book […]
February 24, 2017 – 11:11 pm
By now you’ve probably heard about the flagrantly tendentious decision by the Fourth Circuit in Kolbe v. Hogan, which upheld a flimsy “assault-weapons” ban in Maryland. The ruling is here. Here, here, here, and here are some responses.
February 23, 2017 – 3:58 pm
In its ongoing purge of all heterodox opinion, Twitter has now suspended Nick Land’s account, @Outsideness. They have no possible pretext for doing so, other than the suppression and silencing of ideological dissidents. Nick Land has never threatened anyone, nor even used a profane word. If you have any doubt that there is now an […]
February 23, 2017 – 12:25 am
As dark allusions to the rise of Hitler circulate in the wake of the new administration’s immigration-enforcement initiatives, making the rounds tonight is this anonymous remark: Clearly we must do what the world did after it recognized the horror of the Holocaust: come together in support of the founding of a Mexican homeland. A place […]
February 21, 2017 – 4:25 pm
There’s been quite a fuss about Donald Trump’s having suggested that Sweden might be having problems digesting millions of profoundly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. The narrative conflict could not be starker: on the one side, a description of a formerly safe, homogeneous and peaceful Scandinavian nation descending into a darkening abyss of rape, fear, cultural […]
February 21, 2017 – 12:56 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here’s an item, by Alex Ross for The New Yorker, arguing that the Frankfurt School foresaw the rise of Donald Trump. Did they? Well, we shouldn’t be surprised, because they labored to create exactly the ideological conditions in the postwar West — the deadly mind-virus of radical and pathologically […]
February 16, 2017 – 4:57 pm
I heard it again just the other day. It’s from some sappy movie a few decades back: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” What idiot wrote this? Love means constantly having to say you’re sorry.
February 16, 2017 – 4:38 pm
Steve Bannon’s reading-list has had our Brahmins on the fainting-couch. In this item, for example, Jason Horowitz of the the New York Times, searching for the “roots” of Mr. Bannon’s “dark” and “apocalyptic” worldview, notes with horror that our new presidential adviser has not only heard of, but has actually read Julius Evola. (So have […]
February 16, 2017 – 3:35 pm
In my ceaseless foraging for blog-fodder, I ran across this clickbait today: 10+ Hilarious Reasons Why The English Language Is The Worst “The worst”? Au contraire, say I: what other language has such richness of idiom, precision and discrimination? Anyway, off to the linked item I went. It began: English is a mystery to all […]
February 15, 2017 – 1:13 pm
With a hat-tip to Nick B. Steves, here’s a post-and-thread you might like to read, if you have some time. The post, at the computer scientist Scott Aaronson’s blog Shtetl-Optimized, is a protest against the Trump travel ban, from a familiar perspective, and ends with a challenge to Trump voters: “go ahead, let me hear […]
February 14, 2017 – 1:36 pm
Our previous post touched on the inexorable encroachment of sensors and listening devices into every cranny of our lives. In the comment-thread I mentioned a “particular nightmare” of my own, and said I’d describe it in a new post. It is this: given the exponential advances being made in brain-machine interfaces and nanotech, I see […]
February 11, 2017 – 3:45 pm
One thing I’ve been awfully leery of is the proliferation of sensors of every sort in every part of our environment. In particular I’m edgy about the new generation of devices, such as Amazon’s Echo, that just sit in your house and listen. I realize that this ship has already sailed, really, in that we […]
February 10, 2017 – 7:38 pm
In September 2015 I commented on the increasing political polarization of Europe, and the extent to which any middle ground was increasingly excluded. A longish auto-quote: … [T]he entire continuum of political opinion on the question of immigration and and of the ethnic and religious composition of European nations has now been reduced, editorially, to […]
February 9, 2017 – 7:42 pm
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s an interesting little item: three Congressional IT staffers — brothers Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan — may have been using their access to snoop.
February 8, 2017 – 4:14 pm
Here’s tart piece by Porter on Cass Sunstein’s vision of the Constitution. (I always enjoy Porter’s astringent writing, except for those doggone sentence fragments.)
February 8, 2017 – 2:32 pm
The National Association of Scholars has published a new report entitled “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics”. From the “executive summary”: A new movement in American higher education aims to transform the teaching of civics. This report is a study of what that movement is, where it came from, and why Americans should be […]
February 8, 2017 – 1:14 pm
It turns out that “Publius Decius Mus”, who wrote the influential essay “The Flight 93 Election” back in September (we commented on it here) is Michael Anton, a former editor of the Journal of American Greatness. He is now a member, I’m glad to say, of the Trump administration. Therefore he is also a Nazi.
February 8, 2017 – 11:53 am
From a scathing editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal (my emphasis): The Senate made history Tuesday when Mike Pence became the first Vice President to cast the deciding vote for a cabinet nominee. The nominee is now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The vote came after an all-night Senate debate in a futile effort by […]
February 7, 2017 – 2:15 pm
The range of human emotion varies widely not only among individuals, but also across cultures. There is a poignancy in an inexpressible emotion (there ought to be a word for that!) — but there’s a good chance that what is inexpressible in one language is pinpointed by a word or phrase in another. Tim Lomas […]
February 5, 2017 – 8:15 pm
In the comment-thread to a recent post, our commenter Henry argues that Calexit, as the Golden State’s secession movement refers to its goal, is a non-starter. Is it? Is secession prohibited by the Constitution? Not explicitly. By Constitutional interpretation? Well, there’s Texas v. White (1869). Wikipedia has excerpted some key passages from Salmon P. Chase’s […]
February 5, 2017 – 1:42 pm
Why is there civilization? To make beer, of course. Duh.
February 5, 2017 – 12:10 am
Here’s a story I think we’ll be hearing a thing or two about. From the Daily Mail: The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris […]
February 3, 2017 – 12:11 pm
Our commenter Robert has sent us a link from MindingTheCampus.org: What To Do When Angry Students Plan To Cancel A Speech. It is brief enough to quote in its entirety here (emphasis added). So the Chancellor of the University of California put out a defense of free speech when violent rioters threatened to cancel a […]
February 2, 2017 – 11:25 pm
In my previous post I mentioned the fault-lines dividing the nation, and said it seemed the ground was beginning to shake. There’s no question that the West’s tectonic plates, which have been locked for a long time now, have begun to slip; the collapse of the Democratic Party, and the ascension of Donald Trump, could […]
February 1, 2017 – 11:26 pm
Here’s me, three years ago: America’s ideological landscape is like the continent itself: transected by deep fault-lines at the irregular boundaries of rigid plates. Though crushed tightly together, these great masses seek to move in different directions, and so they strain relentlessly against one another. The pressure builds, and builds ”” until, sooner or later, […]
February 1, 2017 – 8:53 pm
With a hat tip to Nick B. Steves, we have for you a meditation from the Dissenting Sociologist on an ideological neoplasm: the Universal Person. The Universal Person is a being almost celestial. He is best understood in contrast to the corrupt and sublunary identitarian, who remains trapped in his gross particularity: Since the particular, […]