January 5, 2024 – 11:18 pm
Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]
January 4, 2024 – 10:27 pm
The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]
January 2, 2024 – 7:07 pm
Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline. Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her […]
December 26, 2023 – 6:38 pm
The muse isn’t singing for me tonight, so I’ll just leave you with this: “Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in […]
December 22, 2023 – 7:01 pm
Watch this video (it’s brief): We have a serious mental health crisis in this country pic.twitter.com/dumx4nZagc — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 21, 2023 This is what we get when we tear everything down — all the sturdy scaffolding that children have relied on throughout history to learn to be adults — without putting anything […]
December 21, 2023 – 7:39 pm
Back in 2020 I published an article at American Greatness on the subject of civil war. In it I wrote: One of the peculiarities of civil war is that it is hard to say, except in retrospect, when a nation has passed the point of no return. There is rarely anything so distinct as Caesar’s […]
December 20, 2023 – 12:41 pm
We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]
December 18, 2023 – 11:44 am
In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]
October 2, 2023 – 11:42 pm
Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]
The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter: The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie. One way to detect that you […]
Steve Sailer recently gave his first public speech in a decade or so at VDare’s summer conference (which was held a couple of weeks ago at the castle they now own, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Here it is:
A couple of days ago I posted some commentary on Michael Anton’s recent article on “national divorce”. Asylum magazine has now made available online Michael Anton’s response to an anonymous reader’s critique of his dialogue on the topic of “national divorce”. (You can read it here.) Mr. Anton seems irritated; his rejoinder is titled “How […]
I’ve just read an engaging pair of articles at Asylum magazine: an item by Michael Anton on the possibility of “national divorce”, in which he makes the case for breaking up the United States, and a rebuttal to Anton’s position by an anonymous author. (You can read Michael Anton’s original post here, and the response […]
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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” […]
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 […]
“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
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]
My old friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has put up an item about my “accelerationism” post, and some discussion has ensued in the comment-thread. You can read it here.
In case you haven’t noticed, America, and the West more generally, are falling to pieces. How so? Here’s a brief, but far from exhaustive, list: — Public confidence in the government and media are at all-time lows; — The printing of money in order to support government spending at an astronomical rate has triggered dangerous […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
March 10, 2023 – 10:47 pm
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 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 […]
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 […]
February 27, 2023 – 12:04 pm
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 […]
February 25, 2023 – 11:26 pm
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 […]
February 23, 2023 – 6:22 pm
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 […]
February 18, 2023 – 12:39 pm
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?
February 17, 2023 – 8:03 pm
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 […]
February 16, 2023 – 7:16 pm
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, […]
February 7, 2023 – 5:42 pm
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.
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 […]
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 […]
March 18, 2022 – 11:53 am
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 […]
Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.
February 16, 2022 – 11:48 pm
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 […]
February 13, 2022 – 10:31 pm
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 […]
January 29, 2022 – 5:42 pm
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 […]
January 23, 2022 – 11:19 pm
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 […]
January 21, 2022 – 11:11 pm
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 […]