… the one core belief of the Puritans, that which survived any number of changes to mere theological and moral beliefs, is that they, the enlightened and holy, should be in charge. Starting with the University they founded within a decade of establishing their first town, the Pilgrims asserted what to them was the obvious and certain truth: they had a bead on things, anyone who disagreed was stupid or evil. It was their right and duty to rule. The theology changed from Calvinism to Unitarianism to Marxism and beyond, but the core belief in their superior understanding survived all such superficial changes.
Category: Decline and fall
Today’s useful phrase
“Recreational Marxism.” And also “bespoke Molotov cocktails.”
Fun with your tax return
I would have posted this a few days ago, but I didn’t discover it until just now. (Via Amy Welborn.)
Tune of the day #213
According to Mollie Hemingway, “a proper understanding of punk and its inherent rebellion would have everyone becoming a libertarian or principled conservative.” Today is the day for Libertarian punks. (Via Grim.)
Today’s quote
Ross Grossman on Ozempic:
The modern environment floods us with things designed to hijack our reward systems. Junk food engineered for maximum craveability. Social media designed for maximum addiction. Pornography available in infinite variety. Gambling apps in your pocket. The world has become a casino that follows you everywhere, and the house always wins.
Maybe pharmacologically dampening those circuits is reasonable adaptation.
Maybe it’s surrender.
Maybe — and I’m not sure I’m ready to say this out loud — it’s the beginning of a future where we chemically modify our capacity to want things because we’ve built a world with too many things to want—and we’ve decided it’s easier to fix the people than fix the world.
Today’s quote
I herded the church kids into the art room so they could play together. Twenty minutes later, I discovered them staring in complete silence at their phones.
The only kid without a phone was mine. She was drawing a picture of her cat surrounded by cat toys, colorful blankets, and bowls.
This is a new thing, by the way. I vividly remember kids playing and running around in the art room. It’s like in that fairy tale where an evil magician stole the children’s laughter.
The Lambeth Goose Step
No comment necessary.
Today’s quote
A trillion here, a trillion there. Sooner or later, you’re talking about fake money.
Gyneco-Obstetric Algebraic Didactics and Post-Partum Group Theory
According to a recently published paper,
A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.
(Via Eugene Volokh.)
Not quite as impactful as Alan Sokal’s classic paper, perhaps, but much more efficiently created. As the author notes, “All procedures followed the principles of academic transparency and surreal humor.”
I cannot tell the difference …
… between facts and sites satirical
Hmm …
After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:
- Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
- Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
- Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
- Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
- Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
- Etc. etc.
It may not be a coincidence that I don’t watch recent movies either in theatres or online, don’t stream music or listen to radio, seldom read recent books, or listen to audiobooks. If Gioia’s schoolbus plunges off a cliff, it would be a net gain for civilization.1
Hooray for Captain Spaulding
Animal Crackers is in the public domain as of yesterday.
For discussion of copyright and the crimes of Sonny Bono, see Dr. Boli and Another Movie Channel.
Quote of the day
As we say around here, infinite Information Velocity effectively = zero IV. You have access to all the information, instantly… but it’s all AI slop and none of it can be trusted, not least because AI is just Reddit but faster (probably trained on Reddit).
And actually this is great from a Dissident perspective. In a world of nothing but AI slop, what can you trust? Nothing but what is told to you by a real person, whom you know well, with an ironclad rep for honestly. The endpoint of Globalization is, as it turns out, extreme localism.
Today’s quote
Coming soon: a wacky roadtrip version of The Gulag Archipelago starring Seth Rogan and Patton Oswalt.
Today’s curious phrase
“voluntary mandatory shift coverage”
Years ago one of the aircraft manufacturers in Wichita required mandatory overtime of its workers. They were allotted time to go home for dinner and sleep, but otherwise their waking hours were spent building airplanes. I asked one how his situation differed from slavery. He had to think for a minute before answering.
Footnote
In case anyone reading this doesn’t understand what it means to “serve humanity,” here’s Damon Knight’s explanation.
Bonus tune
A footnote to Dr. Boli’s notes on our kinder, gentler slavery.
Today’s quote: classical edition
What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship’s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject’s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs—caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire—all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites—class privilege, the “establishment,” male dominance—were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla’s adolescent rants.
Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea, and Lysistrata.
Slavery? “No man is born a slave,” wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.
The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.
Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped—whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians—a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.
Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian’s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the “settler colonialism” of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as “assimilationist” or as a sort of proto–melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian–Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.
Today’s quote
It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads—so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.
They used to call it extortion—pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm.
Today’s quote
Jim:
As Charlie Kirk, martyr for Christ, told us, the proposition that Church and Easter are inessential activities, but bars, race rioting, and burning down Wendy’s are essential activities makes so much more sense if you assume our rulers are possessed by demons.