Tag: technology

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When I was a boy my parents would take me to the cinema. (That’s the Proustian opener out of the way). It would be either my father or my mother but never both, as I had brothers five years younger than me, identical twins, and my parents would take turns looking after them (and they were a handful) while the other one took me to see a movie. I remember seeing Walter Matthau in the movie Prisoner of Second Avenue with my dad, and both my mother and I being scared out of our wits seeing Carrie. I also remember classic Disney films. (more…)

5,939 words

Thomas Rohkrämer
Martin Heidegger: Eine politische Biographie
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020

“Heidegger passes the comeback test with the grade of fully satisfactory on both sides.” 

— Carl Schmitt (1950) [1] (more…)

George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”

7,971 words

Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.

6,316 words

Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.

“Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem?” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1]  (more…)

Trofim Lysenko

2,149 words

Thinking about the continuing plague of neo-Bolshevik assaults on our intelligence and our institutions brought me around to reflect on the difference between pure and applied disciplines of knowledge. Consider: pure or theoretical mathematics is the abstract science of number, quantity, and space, as distinct from applied mathematics, (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Lookout, 1887.

6,044 words

One of the more common tropes found in Dissident Right discourse concerns the relationship between the Left and “reality.” This discourse articulates a belief held by Right-wingers that the Left lives in denial of reality, and that this leads to deleterious outcomes for peoples of European descent. However, in another sense, Right-wing discourses concerning the Left-wing relationship with reality focuses on how particular personalities common on the Left cause them to relate to present and future realities differently than those on the Right. (more…)

2,365 words

Shiva Naipaul
Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
New York: Penguin, 1982

In 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide. A joke at the time went like this: “Why did Heaven’s Gate kill themselves? They had to keep up with the Joneses.” (more…)

Justus Sustermans, Galileo Galilei, 1636.

2,142 words

Czech version here

Even the mainstream media are acknowledging that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is declining in most of the world. My view of intelligence is that is partially genetically determined. Genes give you a ceiling for intelligence; you have a potential IQ and a real IQ. Your biology determines your potential IQ; let’s say it is 120. If you receive the proper nurture, i.e. good food in childhood, exercise, and cognitively stimulating activities, by the time you are 25 (the age the brain fully develops) or before, you will have an IQ of 120. (more…)

Detail, Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, ca. 1550.

1,379 words

I had been aware for some time of the phrase “the engineer’s fallacy,” but unaware of its provenance and exact definition. I struck lucky on the ‘net, because this gentleman claims to have invented the phrase, and this short piece repays inspection. 

Mr. Kelly’s definition of the Engineer’s Fallacy is pleasingly simple: (more…)

1,307 words

John Seymour
Retrieved From the Future
London: New European Publications, 1996

John Seymour’s Retrieved From the Future depicts a Britain when the oil runs out, caused by the CRASH, when Shiites take over the Middle East and promptly destroy all its oil wells. (more…)

1,241 words

Imagine going back in time to the 1500s. You can only take one technology with you: the freezer. For the purpose of this thought experiment, we will pretend you’ve also got a way to power it. Now imagine you show the freezer to some peasants in a village. At first, they will probably be most interested in its craftsmanship. They’ve never seen such perfectly smooth metal, the astoundingly high-quality hinge, and the interior of the box magically lights up when opened. (more…)

Mr. Gurdjieff

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George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born on this day in 1866, 1872, or 1877 — depending on whom you ask. [1] Much else about his biography is equally uncertain. We do know that his father was Greek, his mother Armenian, and that he was born in Alexandropol which was then part of the Russian Empire (it is now in Armenia and is called Gyumri). (more…)

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Modest Mouse was formed in Issaquah, Washington, in the year 1992. Issaquah was formerly a sleepy community removed from the sprawl of the Seattle metropolitan area, but is now another far-flung bedroom town swallowed whole by the Microsoft and later Amazon-centered tech boom and its ensuing concreting of the Puget Sound (more…)