Monthly Archives: May 2023

Crime And …

May 31, 2023 – 10:26 pm

Someone in an Urbit chat group just posted a link to an article I’d never seen about vote fraud in the 2020 election. The essay was written in December of that year on a blog called The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, and it is probably the best analysis of the question that I have yet […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Well!

May 26, 2023 – 5:37 pm

Here’s an interesting item about New York State’s election system. (I’m sure you will be as shocked as I was.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Three Years On

May 26, 2023 – 5:23 pm

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the death of America’s holiest martyr, the sainted George Floyd. His joining of the choir invisible, while hospitalized after resisting arrest, ignited — as readers may recall! — a national convulsion of rioting and chaos that resulted in widespread social and physical devastation. I’m a day late, but I […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Time-Hopping

May 20, 2023 – 2:54 pm

One of the greatest Roman citizens of the late Republican era was the statesman, lawyer, and orator Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). A little while ago, wanting to dig a little deeper into the man’s life and work, I ordered a book called The Complete Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (now out of print, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Vallicella On The Limits Of Transhumanism

May 16, 2023 – 6:58 pm

We live in an age dominated by scientistic materialism. Ever since the Enlightenment, the explosive growth in our scientific understanding of nature has rocked religion back on its heels by providing mechanistic and mathematical explanations for phenomena that had previously been wholly mysterious. The great paradigm by which we understood the world was slowly inverted; […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Religion | Comments (2)

No Can Do

May 11, 2023 – 6:00 pm
This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Accelerationism

Over the past week or two I’ve been kicking around the idea of “accelerationism” — that the best way forward for this rotting society is to give its most destructive factions free rein, so as to make the disease progress so rapidly, and to such extremes, that it either provokes, at last, an “immune response” […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Contra Accelerationism

May 8, 2023 – 1:04 pm
This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Accelerationism

Our commenter mharko has given us a link to a brief video making an argument, from a Christian perspective, against accelerationism. The presenter, Jonathan Pageau, calls it “dancing with death”. Here it is: There is an interesting “as above, so below” theme running through the argument. The idea is twofold: first, that there is an […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

Just So

May 6, 2023 – 1:30 pm

“Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter.” — Mencken

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Where Matters Stand

May 6, 2023 – 1:25 pm

I’m at the point where I don’t see much use in banging on endlessly about how broken things are, and about what a decadent position we’ve reached in the great cycle of civilizations — but every now and then I suppose we need a little reminding, just to keep the fire going, and today at […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Not To Worry!

May 5, 2023 – 4:56 pm

If, like me, you’ve been worrying about the threat of runaway artificial intelligence, well now you can relax: the government is here to help. The formidable polymath Kamala Harris, fresh from her successful remediation of our troubles at the southern border, is now the Biden administration’s AI czar. What a relief! It’s good to know […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology, Rubbish | Comments (2)

More On Acceleration

May 5, 2023 – 4:43 pm
This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Accelerationism

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, commenter “mharko” (who also has things to say over here from time to time), left such a fine comment on Bill’s accelerationism post that I am going to repost it here: I had a thought mulling these things over while pulling weeds and cultivating soil that I wanted to risk […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (4)

Here We Go Again

May 4, 2023 – 1:23 pm

A couple of weeks ago, after a brief trip back to New York City (where I’d lived for more than forty years, and where my wife and children grew up), I wrote: I’m glad to be back on my little dirt road in the woods — NYC this time around seemed, in its accelerating degeneracy, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

Should The Culture War Take A Back Seat?

May 3, 2023 – 7:33 pm
This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Accelerationism

On April 27th, Josiah Lippincott published an essay at American Greatness arguing that we’ve lost the culture war, and that the way forward is for the Right to focus squarely on the issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016. Lippincott’s article, which you can read here, stakes out the argument as follows: Immigration, trade, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (2)