This Week in the Write Wing – Issue 10 – 24 June 2023
Gnon-compliant Mercenaries Edition
It’s been quite a week, I think you’ll agree. We started it with the spectacle of a carbon fibre sub getting crushed by deep sea pressure like an empty can of Bud Light in a drag queen’s hairy fist. We ended it with a mercenary mutiny, which is why I’m starting this week’s digest with a roundup of news and analysis on The March on Moscow, after which we look at what the Political Animals are saying about other current events, or just about political theory in general. There’s a full course calendar at the Culture War College this week; pay attention, there will be a test, some of which will include advanced topics in Mental-Physics and Wyrd Science. After all that studying you’ll be looking forward to getting your Revenge on the Nerds by beating up on academics. As always, the digest completes with a selection of of arts and letters in Pulped.
Get your French Press brewed, and let’s get started.
March on Moscow
At The Slavland Chronicles
gets to say I Told You So as PMC Wagner rolls on Moscow. The entire Internet is riveted to this rapidly developing story right now. Hot takes abound, speculation is rampant, and no one has a clue what is actually happening or what any of it means. Rolo, however, is so far as I know the only analyst who saw this coming. About a month ago he speculated on The Worst Case Scenario of warlordism and strife as a logical outcome of the Kremlin’s policy of fostering ethnic militias, and shortly after that he covered the Wagner chief’s warnings in Prigozhin: We Await the Nationalist Uprising Against the Russian Deep State! In addition to being entertaining as hell, Rolo’s track record has been pretty good throughout this conflict, and in recognition of that he gets this week’s Iron Ring Award. You should subscribe.Earlier this week, Rolo pointed out that Lukashenko Reveals Hidden Sell-Out Agenda Behind Secret Moscow-Kiev Talks, then wondered what it meant as Putin Flashes Page of Secret Agreement Signed Between Moscow and Kiev Last Year at African Peace Summit, and then looked at the abortive Istanbul treaty in The Mystery Behind the Secret Peace Agreement Deepens! That’s a sarcastic title. Mid-week he did a deep drive, asking Who Are the So-Called "Russian Nationalists" Fighting on the Side of Kiev?
Rolo isn’t the only one covering the Wagner rebellion/uprising/coup d’etat/mutiny/aggressive contractual dispute resolution tactics. Here’s
boggling as RUSSIA BRACES FOR EXTREME WEIRDNESS AS FSB-PRIGOZHIN DEATHMATCH BEGINS. has thrown together a few links regarding the Russia coup round-up - History is starting again. has a Special Report: Emergency Situation as Prigozhin Goes Nuclear Option, in which he throws out several different scenarios while admitting he has no idea what’s actually happening.Earlier this week, Simplicius spent some time Dissecting West Point Think-tank's New Analysis of Russia's Military Evolution. Briefly, it seems that the West Point analysts are of the opinion that Russia’s occasionally mystifying battlefield behaviour haven’t been the result of incompetence, but are carefully thought-out tactical adaptations to the presence of long-distance, high-precision strike capabilities dominating the modern battlespace. This has resulted in a fragmentation of deployment structure, necessitating smaller, more dispersed, more independent units that dig in for shelter. WWI without the trench lines, in other words.
Political Animals
observes that the weight of diversity is even Too Heavy For Superman… Complex systems can only take so much of a competence deficit before getting crushed like a bargain-basement submersible at the bottom of the ocean. People have gotten used to those uninspiring 50-year-old white men swooping in to save them, but there are limits. Especially when those 50-year-old white men keep getting fired in favour more more inspiring twenty-five-year-old black women. Charles Haywood reviews Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen at The Worthy House. Deneen’s new book is the culmination of a decade-long intellectual project to articulate a postliberal alternative, a bold endeavor that ends with a damp fart: the regime is rancid, vacuous, vampiric, odious in every way, Deneen apparently affirms, and therefore we should ... have more congressmen or something. This generally confirms my distaste for establishment academics: the most you get from their verbose intellectualizing, assuming there’s any weight to it whatsoever, are timid suggestions that we polish the Titanic’s brass with a clockwise rather than counter-clockwise motion. Nevertheless, there’s some small value to Deneen’s description of the liberal state.
At Political Ponerology
writes some notes In the Margins on cliodynamicist Peter Turchin’s new book End Times, focusing in on The Rise of the Precariat. The precariat is that class of people hustling in the gig economy, with no prospect for stable, long-term employment. It is growing in size even as it declines in standard of living, and therefore it is also growing in resentment. It isn’t all Uber drivers, though: the modern precariat includes a large fraction of over-educated wannabe elites, thanks to the simultaneous expansion in university education and the current elite class using DIE to slam the doors shut to competition. Turchin’s whole thesis, of course, is that elite overproduction, and the resulting mismatch between occupation and ability, is one of the main drivers of sociopolitical instability. Lobaczewski described these dynamics too, apparently, and saw the present crack-up coming back in the 80s. maintains Heroes and Villains, which he mainly uses to draw attention to the work of other writers and journalists that he thinks are worth paying attention to. Jerome doesn’t do a lot of his own original writing, but he’s got a good nose for good content, and is worth subscribing to. A case in point: in RFK Jr. speaks suppressed truths! Is he our guy? Jerome highlights a few recent pieces that stake out the different positions regarding the Democrat’s dark horse candidate: on the one hand, doing God’s work bringing some semblance of plain, honest speech regarding food adulteration, vaccine damage, and so on to the national political conversation, but on the other hand kind of a normie when it comes to Israel.Speaking of RFK, Jr.,
has a shocking headline from the future: Trump, Kennedy Struck Down by "Magic Bullet". It killed one anti-establishment candidate, then did a 180 degree turn to fly across the continental United States to strike down the other. Amazing but true, and if you disbelieve you’re a right-wing conspiracy nut. By the by, I was one Kevin’s False Flag Weekly News radio show last Saturday: FFWN: Dystopia Rising: Was the Unabomber Right All Along? with John Carter of “Postcards from Barsoom”. We had a great time, covering an amazing number of the headline items in the course of an hour. of the New Right Poast has two compilations of all the shit unfit to poast this week. #71. I don't appreciate you covers “Hateful 12-year-olds, Grease-y Indians, competence collapse, racist fields, and cringe Satanists!”, along with a tweet thread suggesting that the right wing should do more original, investigative journalism and fewer op-ed think pieces, which is not a bad suggestion at all. #72. Your trailerwife, sir looks at “Slutty tradwives, inspirationally diverse submarine companies, abortion jokes, and right-wing Marxists!” Also an important thread emphasizing that right wing elites need to start playing the patronage game. writes that it is Case Closed: Summative Evidence that Lockdowns, Medical Errors, and Vaccines Were the Real Pandemic.
Culture War College
At Raw Egg Nationalist’s Man's World, Scott Locklin delineates the difference between Free Men and Slaves, using Aristotle and Xenophon to demonstrate that the modern office coomer is no different in essence from serviles. Rule yourself, or be ruled.
REN himself has an essay at the new Asylum magazine looking at the question of tradition and the urge to RETVRN, in which he urges us to FAIL BETTER: TACITUS AND ART ON THE DISSIDENT RIGHT. We can't just ape the styles of the past - we lack what is necessary, both in context and ability, to make it any more than a parody, and in any case artistic styles must match the era they depict.
Another piece at Asylum, submitted anonymously, is worth your time to read for its sheer blackpilling thoroughness. Everyone keeps talking about the necessity of a national divorce, but there are good reasons to consider that this entire conversation is a National Divorce From Reality. Even if you don’t agree with the author’s conclusions, and I’m not so sure that I do, he describes the magnitude and tangled complexity of the problem quite effectively. It’s a Gordian knot, to be sure ... so maybe trying to untie it isn’t the best strategy.
The future belongs to those who show up for it. At Anarchonomicon
makes some fascinating observations about American Conservatism and Fertility Cult-ure. He notes that Mormon fertility has fallen off a cliff in recent years, which suspiciously corresponds exactly to the religion finally attaining the respectability it has chased after for so long. Meanwhile, the one American group, and indeed the only other group aside from Orthodox Jews anywhere on the planet, to maintain above-replacement fertility at the same time as a first-world income, are the much-despised American rednecks. Kulak argues that it’s precisely because they’ve rendered themselves cringe that they’ve managed to insulate themselves from sterilization by the liberal borg, a form of evolved cultural resistance akin to the anti-malarial sickle cell gene possessed by sub-Saharans.At Luc Talks
thinks that if we want to transcend woke tyranny it is essential that we acknowledge The Truth in Wokeism. A lot of readers will bridle at this, yet he makes two subtle but quite correct points: first, that automatic rejection or inversion of a given ideology or belief-set produces behaviour that is every bit as unthinkingly robotic as the worst Current Thing NPC; second, that for any memetic complex to prosper – as wokeism very obviously has – it must have some connection, however tenuous, to reality. We’ve been through such a reflexive inversion before: the post-war Western liberal consensus is essentially predicated on every aspect of National Socialism being evil, and the opposite of National Socialism therefore being good ... with Progress Pride fascism being the inevitable product. Luc focuses on the education system to make his point, noting that the awful mess of an ideologically inflexible, bureaucratic indoctrination complex we have today is essentially the mirror image of the very Prussian factory model the progressive reformers of the past sought to improve and replace. Rather than oscillate from one one mirror image extreme to the other, with each swing of the pendulum preserving the worst and discarding the best of what came before, Luc thinks that we should use our minds: preserve the best of the past, keep the best of the present, and thereby move towards a better future.The Reactionary Feminist
reviews Pulitzer winner Andrea Long Chu’s book Females and asks Which orifice? What organs? Who cares? Chu is a professional ladyboy who’s made a reputation for himself in academic gender theory by, as Harrington puts it, saying the quiet part out loud: sissy porn made him trans, he hates women, so does everyone, including women, especially including feminists, and that’s a good thing. Forget about sessile gametes, “femaleness” is an ontological category, or something. It’s all nonsensical clownspeak but it’s amusing watching the clowns getting into their slapstick clownfight as they all play make-believe that it’s intellectually profound rather than profoundly embarrassing. There’s a certain satisfying schadenfreude in the avatar of feminist theory’s final form being a trap sneering that ultimately women are just another wet hole. As Harrington points out, this was all inevitable once women embraced The Pill.At How To Subvert Subversion
gives some pointers on How To Wage a Woke Jihad. This was behind a paywall last week, but the R-rated parallels between wokesters and jihadis are now available for all eyes to see.At A Ghost in the Machine
celebrates Greatest Sin Month with Pride Goeth Before the Collapse.At Tell Me How This Ends
tells us how it ends in Ruin: A How-To. Stalin’s preferences regarding reality kept overriding actual reality in the early days of WWII, with predictably and continuously disastrous consequences for the Red Army. In the end Russia had to throw twenty million people into the meat grinder to prevail. There’s a good chance that the ocean of Slavic blood would not have been nearly so deep and wide if the Soviet hierarchy had been capable of reacting to disconfirming data as anything other than disinformation. Sounds familiar somehow. Next, Bray wins the Briggs Award For Funniest Headline: Jeffrey Dahmer Angry That Some Conspiracy Theorists Harbor Doubts About the Wholesome and Nourishing Meat in His Freezer, in which he just can’t even as California state senator Scott Wiener insists that it’s a baseless and furthermore hateful far-right conspiracy theory that the state of California wants to take children away from their parents in the name of butt stuff at the very moment that he’s ramming a bill through the lubricated legislative sphincter which is explicitly intended to enable the state to do just that.Michael McConkey, who goes by
at The Circulation of Elites, looks at PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY AND CYCLIC HISTORY through the eyes of THE PHENOTYPE WAR. McConkey argues that the left/right distinction is largely a divide between those with high openness versus high conscientiousness; equivalently, those whose orientation to the world is spatial versus temporal. The big five personality traits are largely genetically determined, from which he suggests that political conflict down through the ages may simply be a tug-of-war between two opposed psychological phenotypes.At
’s blog Not On Your Team, But Always Fair has published Chapters 22 and 23 of his ongoing evopsych analysis of wokeness Worshipping the Future: Beneficiaries of Dysfunction and Migration as social-imperial project: I. In Chapter 22, he argues that there is a vast quantity of embedded learning in human society, all those lessons of the past that have been coded into custom, tradition, folk tale, myth, and so on, which we discard at our peril ... which those who make the transformative future their lodestar inevitably do discard, with inevitably disastrous results, because no information can come from the future to compensate for the information lost from the past. This isn’t at all a bad thing for the vampire elites, however, since they prosper in direct proportion to the degree the venomous theory poisons the body politic: the more problems they create, the more problems there are for them to get paid to not solve. The main thrust of Chapter 23 is that migration is a tool used by imperial systems for internal colonization. Along the way, Lorenzo conducts a detailed comparison of the sacralized lifeways practiced by Christian and Islamic cultures, demonstrating that the fundamental sociological assumptions built in to the latter at a foundational level are utterly incompatible with the institutions characterizing the institutions developed within Christendom. thinks that Propriety is Important, and complaints about "weaponized propriety" miss the mark: propriety is supposed to be weaponized. The problem is more like weaponized culture: Little Sister is forcing us to inhabit an alien, unnatural, unpopular, and very ugly new culture. It is, dare I say it (and I do, as does Doc), a culture war.From The Tomb of Morgthorak
points out the obvious about these Vicious Bitches: Woke communist women are evil to the core and cannot be trusted. If anything, his language is too kind.At The Neo-Feudal Review
demonstrates The egalitarian ratchet effect: Why opposition to transsexualism will fail. NF thinks that it all started with Paul’s egalitarian transvaluation of Roman warrior virtue, and that if the right wants to not lose on the tr00n question the way it has lost on every single previous battle in the culture war, it will require a societal transvaluation of values leading to a rejection of equality as a core principle and an embrace of inequality as a positive good. It isn’t just a matter of averting a world with more chicks with dicks. As NF points out, the alternative to a transvaluation is a leftist singularity into pederasty, bestiality, and genocide. uses Google Trends to calculate a national woke index and finds that the USA gets the bronze medal in The Woke Olympics. Canada is the clear gold medallist, surprising no one, particularly Canadians. Woke indices in hand, HWFO proceeds to compare them to irreligiosity and white population percentage, finding no correlations with either.
Mental-Physics
Caloric restriction is often advised by longevity gurus, but is living in a constant state of low energy perched on the morbid edge of starvation even life?
points out that this advice isn't even new: in Cornarism and its consequences, he discusses the Italian nobleman Luigi Cornaro, who advocated precisely this strategy back in the 19th century. Nietzsche had a go at him, suggesting that it was Cornaro's cold-blooded type of life that made his reptilian lifestyle possible, rather than vice versa. But would a more hot-blooded type, vigorous end energetic, overflowing with an abundance of vital energy, be able to thrive on a crust of bread and bowl of tomatoes every day? And what does it mean that the modern bugman, embodied in Bryan Johnson and his 'Blueprint' project, is so eager to outsource his dietary instincts to an AI intent on minmaxing quantity of life at the expense of quality?The Eucatastrophologist
writes On the inevitability of hierarchies in Hunting the white stag. The white stag is an Arthurian symbol of virtue and purity, and there’s a reason we have to hunt it. Using a related Arthurian tale, Reyburn illustrates the necessity of establishing properly ordered hierachies according to natural law ... and demonstrates all the ways in which egalitarian nihilism is an inversion of appropriately ordered hierarchies, as we see around us every day in groomerland. I especially enjoyed his apt analogy of the rainbow flag to a prism, which splits apart the purity of white light and thereby reduces illumination.At Contemplations on the Tree of Woe
contemplates Gnon in Post-Physicalist Physiocracy. Woe defines physiocracy as rule by natural order, and suggests this as a superior alternative to libertarian, reactionary, and (may Allah forgive me for uttering this word) conservative. Don’t let the name deceive you, however: a physiocrat is not a physicalist, he does not believe that reality is explained by deterministic atoms bouncing around in the void. Woe established all of this in a series of previous essays; in the present work, he describes what he thinks might be the non-materialist but science-compatible philosophical framework physiocracy needs: Steve Taylor’s post-physicalism, as described in his book Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World.At Notes from the end of time
has “a friendly conversation with some fellow Christians” in You Whitewashed Sepulchres. And by friendly he means an excoriating chastisement for alienating a friendly atheist who had attended a church in order to see what it was all about ... and who of course, stopped attending. Quite apart from not being terribly Christian of them, Kenaz notes that driving away potential converts is counterproductive. A certain amount of gatekeeping is necessary, of course, but no church – or political movement – will grow in number and influence if the barriers to entry are too high. There’s been a similar ongoing issue in the dissident right, with every girl that gets interested immediately getting dogpiled by angry incels. of Becoming Noble suggests that without understanding prayer, the vitalist right will achieve nothing but A Liturgy of Death. Sun and Steel are not the end of the process, but merely the first steps.At his Webstead Jeff Russell delves into THE TROUBLE WITH AUTHENTICITY by way of his explorations into magical practices. He distinguishes between authenticity, or provenance, and validity – what works. Why is it that we value the former more than the latter? Following archdruid John Michael Greer, who makes no claims whatsoever to the historical authenticity of his own practices, Jeff suggests that validity is far more important. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire ... and fire must be continually fed with new fuel, and moreover by its very nature is always changing.
of Ghost in the Machine goes out for some Sunlight and Spearmint as “an antidote to the daily soul-suck of Modernity”. Step away from the Infinite Scroll, touch grass, taste the tea, drink the Sun, and immerse yourself in the Flow.
Wyrd Science
presents a masterful history of archaeology at Man's World in which the development from culture-history to genderqueered sub-Saharan Vikings is Broken Open. And then, in 2015, the elder gods returned. Two papers were published, "triumphantly holding up the severed head of post-war archaeology … Invasions were real, male warriors dominated Europe, they were white, huge and aggressive, they took local women and killed or subjugated the men, they had symbols of war – they were the nightmare Aryans of earlier generations."At Ælþ,
poses the counter(?)-factual, But what if we aren’t alone? Yes, yes, UFOs are all a psyop, sure, he agrees, but what if they aren’t? He looks at the question in the context of the David Grusch interview (just trust me, bro), the interstellar comet (or was it an alien space probe?) ‘Oumuamua, and the strange behaviour of Tabby’s star (the star around which it was breathlessly suggested there might be alien megastructures). Ælþemplær treatment of these subjects is impressively thorough and technical: he doesn’t just rely on the press releases, but has clearly gone digging in the actual scientific literature. thinks that Atheism is Dead and Karl Friston has killed it. This isn't a proof of the existence of God so much as an observation that God - that is to say, an understanding of the good - is wired into your neurology. Whether you unify that instinct into a single root understanding, and whether you make it conscious, is what makes all the difference. I had to look up Karl Friston: he's a British neuroscientist who developed an interesting paradigm in which brains are treated as active Bayesian inference engines whose primary function is to maximize the probability that the fundamental model “I exist” is not falsified. That ‘active’ part of active inference refers to the tendency of brains to change external circumstances when they fail to accord with that basic model assumption. This is the most intellectually stimulating concept I’ve come across in a while, and Ektropius’ development of it is something worth chewing on, in recognition of which he gets this week’s Iridium Torc. of bad cattitude looks forward to settling in to the reputation economy, which he thinks will utterly wreck the lives of the credentialed expert class. Can’t happen soon enough. Next, he asks why does the department of education desperately want to break AI? The answer is obvious. It's for the same reason that they insist on censoring social media, controlling legacy media, and rubbing rainbows all over the school curriculum. If they don't control AI, AI will tear their deceptions to shreds.Not everyone is enthusiastic about AI. At Seeking the Hidden Thing (and What's with the Name: Seeking the Hidden Thing? anyhow?)
writes about The Loss of ᾰ̓ρετή: Why Technology Makes You Dumber and Less Capable While Making You Feel More Powerful. For uneducated plebs who don’t read Greek, which I trust is only a small minority of my readership, ᾰ̓ρετή is arete, which can loosely be translated as virtue. Kruptos argues that the devil’s bargain of technology is that we obtain material prosperity and physical power, in exchange for our own inborn and inbuilt abilities: we can go faster than our legs could ever carry us with cars, but as we come to rely on them our legs atrophy. The Greeks could have gone down this path, but Kruptos thinks they deliberately forswore it, as they understood the price they would pay is too terrible. Kruptos thinks that ultimately, we’ll have to consciously turn away from technology, but I’m not so sure about that; as I’ve argued before, we signed that contract with the devil before Homo sapiens even evolved, and technology has carved itself so deeply into our biology that we cannot survive without the blade, the flame, and the word. In any case, I share his concern about AI: there’s a real danger that our silicon neocortices will render us feebleminded.Kruptos isn’t the only one who’s nervous about the impact of AI on our minds.
of shadowrunners dicusses AI and the destruction of thought. Scientific progress foundationally assumes the presence of contrarian thought – challenges to consensus, where either the challenge or the consensus can be incorrect. We’re already at a place in which everything outside the consensus is considered misinformation. How much worse will it get when seemingly (but not really) omniscient oracles are providing information (much of which is simply made up) rather than search engines? Bad as search engine censorship is, AI censorship may prove to be much worse. has a few pieces of interesting research for us this week at Just Emil Kirkegaard Things. First, he looks at several of the studies investigating the question of whether pot turns you into a schizo or schizos smoke pot and concludes that, yes, Cannabis probably causes schizophrenia. However, he thinks the effect is probably pretty small at the population level, and that on balance it’s better to just legalize it because the drug war is absurdly destructive. He also looks at evidence for pot reducing IQ, and finds nothing to be worried about. In What are the race differences in sexual behavior? Kierkegaard and evaluate racial differences in penis size, kinky sex preferences, and the all-important boobs versus butt question, among several others, by the best possible methodology: they ask a statistically significant sample of whores. It turns out black bulls are overall better in bed, but white guys are still the most preferred clients. Francis has his own take on the work, Racial Differences in Sexuality: A Sex Worker Survey, up at Anglo Reaction. Finally, in From riches to rags to riches he uses examples such as the winners and losers of WWII or the density of ordinance dropped on Vietnam via a district-level US dataset (the sort of dataset only an autistic stats nerd like Robert McNamara would have compiled; also, I hadn’t realized that the total mass of explosives dropped on Vietnam was greater than the total mass of Vietnamese people), the intergenerational wealth of southern slave-holders and their descendants, and the persistence of elite surnames among the socioeconomic elite from the Qing dynasty to post-Cultural Revolution modern China, to demonstrate that, while having your country blown up is very obviously a bad thing, over the long run it doesn’t make much of a difference to per capita GDP. Which makes sense: people need to rebuild after a war, but they also need to rebuild just to modernize aging infrastructure. As Hiroshima versus Detroit have demonstrated, it is better to be a Japanese city targeted by American A-bombs than an American city targeted for migration by A-Americans. In other words, it all comes down to human capital. Which is why foreign aid doesn’t work.
Revenge on the Nerds
prophesizes The Collapse of The University. He argues that demographic decline, reputation destruction, exorbitant tuition, top-heavy administration, and automation will combine to put most universities out of business. He's right, you know. After pouring cold water over the future financial viability of higher ed, Ignatius follows up by pantsing the housing market in Real Estate Myths Exposed. Housing prices don’t always go up, rent is not remotely passive income, and it isn’t always cheaper to own than to rent. Ignatius thinks that housing prices will probably decline as the population starts to shrink, and I suspect he’s right, but that could be wishful thinking on my part.At a plague chronicle
continues his ongoing series with Pandemic Impressions III: The Great Beclowning of Science. The Science made an ass of itself during the pandemic, although this was really just the culmination of a rot that had been spreading through academia for a long time. Perversely, even as it slumps towards the nadir of its epistemological validity, it reaches the zenith of its sociopolitical power. Next he summarizes several of his recent and long-standing observations about the the administrative state to arrive at the description of the The Administrative Man, that statistically weighted average of humanity that the bureaucrats clas imagines it is managing … and which it will damn well turn all of us into, for our good (and their convenience). Eugyppius also had a look at The limits of populist resistance and the nature of Western liberal democratic government. The flammable energy of populist anger is an incredibly powerful thing, yes, but we must never delude ourselves that the path to victory in a system comprehensively designed to insulate the managerial elite from democratic pressure is to vote harder.At Karlstack
has two DIEvy League scandals for us this week. First, BREAKING: HBS professor placed on "administrative leave" following bombshell investigation into fake data. A Harvard Business School ladyprof is having at least four, and potentially all, of her papers retracted, having been busted thanks to sleuthing by three other business school profs. All three of them are nerdy middle-aged white dudes, so they can probably expect to be raked over the coals for misogyny. Apparently the perp wrote a book called Rebel Talent that was all about succeeding via rule-breaking, which is pretty lulzy. Next up, BREAKING: American Economic Review retracts Princeton economics professor's paper due to "coding error". Chris thinks maybe the author in question wouldn’t have gotten his current prestigious position without the publication, which in turn wouldn’t have been worth publishing but for the erroneous conclusions emanating from the “error”. But so far he gets to keep his job. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen before in academia, so it isn’t uncommon.Last week I carried a story from
about the career destruction visited upon a top astrophysicist for "sexual harassment". Putting your hand on someone's shoulder is basically the same as rape, you know. As it turns out, they're not content merely ruining that man's career, but are going after the careers of anyone who dares work with them. Even if they're women. At Heterodox STEM tenders A testimony of “guilt-by-association” harassment in astronomy. The litany of petty mean girl shit she's been subjected to over the course of years says quite a bit about the modern academic community. None of it good. Notably, Vollarroel isn’t a professor with a juicy tenured position to take: she’s a lowly postdoc with no power at all. In case you thought the cordyceps had only eaten the frontal cortices of Studies professors, Villarroel's experiences will set you straight. Fiamengo also comments on Villarroel’s experiences, observing that The Feminist Black Hole Swallows Non-Compliant Women Too.Science Is Not The Answer but math is.
demonstrates The Simple Math That Proves Our Worship Of Victims Must Cause Our Doom. Laws against discrimination necessitate discrimination. Insofar as some of that discrimination was rational - based on merit - we therefore discriminate in favor of incompetence. Our complex systems will not survive.My favourite piece from Briggs this week is his call to End All Formal Science Journals & Papers, and just allow scholars to talk with one another like normal people again. Peer review has smothered the originality of science, turning every scientific project into a tedious exercise in committee meetings, and dramatically lowering the functional IQ of science (as committees always do). Which is to say nothing of the absolute piracy of a business model in which publicly funded scientists do all the work, and privately owned journals lock that work behind paywalls (without even paying the scientists). That’s a business model so unethical it could only have been invented by a Mossad agent ... Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, perhaps. Just spitballing here.
Next, Briggs reviews a recent Nature paper in which Academics Say Morality Isn’t Decreasing, But The Increasing Numbers Who Say It Is Decreasing Cause Morality To Decrease, which is as stupid as it sounds. Finally Briggs explains How People Come To Believe Something As Stupid As Male & Female Equality. Or any other kind of equality, for that matter. The answer, of course, is social pressure, as it is with all of these triumphs of theory over reality. We need to harden our hearts to the tears of the perpetually offended, and learn to laugh at them every time the waterworks gets turned on.
Pulped
At The Lake of Lerna,
continues last week’s deep dive into bronie culture with The Men Who Stare at Horses - Part II. continues his beautifully composed literary lessons, this time showcasing the power of the simple rhetorical device of strategic repetition in Storytelling 105: Epistrophe, Epiphora, and Antistrophe.At The Cat Was Never Found,
reviews Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in Cain’s Kids. of Semantic Sybarite confesses that I've Always Been a Demon Worshipper:When I came into the world, I was still and silent as a corpse. I had sallow purple skin, claws on the ends of my stubby fingers, and tiny wings plastered to my back with amniotic fluid. My metamorphosis didn’t come as a result of a pact I made, or rituals I performed. My parents sold my soul to Samael while I was still in the womb. I was born this way.
At Soaring Twenties, a short story from
, Two Moons:has chapter 17 of her novel The Hidden People up:It was garbage day when he saw it. Or garbage day’s eve, rather, the night upon which Harold Wafflepohl would trudge wearily, wheeled trash can trailing him, from the side gate of his suburban home, that picket-fenced, tick-tacky-composed repository of knick-knacks and bric-à-brac, container for all manner of pointless things, that collection of useless trinkets for which he and his neighbors labored endlessly in dead and dreary glass boxes, punching numbers into keyboards and pushing pencils onto the corpses of a billion trees to a pointless end, tasks upon tasks seemingly without an end, without any ultimate purpose beyond the accumulation of more junk that would eventually find its way into the sacks like the one he carried to the bin and then the bin to the road to be retrieved by those unsung heroes of civilization, those trash men who hide from us the shame of our foul-smelling mountainous wastes by carrying them away to the aptly named dump, that burial ground for the discarded detritus of the pursuit of our material dreams.
Annurin helped Jo walk across the courtyard. Jo studiously ignored the alley between buildings where the body of the Prince of Skulls had lain.
That’s everything for this week’s digest, dear friends. If you’re still looking for more to read, feel free to check out my archive – and I do mean free, because it’s all in front of the paywall. Some of my most popular essays are collected here. As always, a special thank you to those brothers in brutality and sisters of savagery who have stepped up to become supporters of this blog. You’re what makes all of this possible, and that isn’t just me trying to shift the blame. If you’ve been enjoying my writing, and would like to liberate your spirit from the dense gravitational field of your guilty conscience and join the rest of us in orbit on Deimos Station, our doors are always open. Also! This blog is very, very close to winning the coveted orange check of reader approval. Whoever bestows this mark upon me by becoming the hundredth paid subscriber will receive a lifetime comp (I actually thought I’d reached this milestone last week, but alas ... Substack does not count comped subscriptions. The more you know!)
"And what does it mean that the modern bugman... is so eager to outsource his dietary instincts to an AI intent on minmaxing quantity of life at the expense of quality?"
Nannystate AI: You need to cut back on carbs and meat.
Me: *Loads 15 lbs of spaghetti on my plate.*
There's no incentive to attain long life in a world ruled by finger-waving church-lady robots.
It's very interesting that every time the Biden Crime Family gets more exposed, something big jumps onto the front page of all newspapers to obscure it.
The Navy knew for three days that the sub had been crushed, but let people worry and let the search continue, because that conveniently distracts them from the comically obvious corruption in the White House.