link roundup 1
Published:
this is a feature i’d like to post roughly weekly, though i doubt it will be scheduled. ~5-10 high quality links per post is my target. some weeks may lean more heavily into one topic or another, and politics will likely feature heavily, though i’d like to keep it loose.
reading
- Paleocons for Porn - Jacobin
Infighting over the precise definition of “alt-right” may continue for years to come, but the broadest interpretation encompasses various, often warring, factions from the white supremacists who consider themselves the rightful owners of the term, to followers of Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment, to the “alt-light,” which includes social media figures like Milo Yiannopolous, right-transhumanism, traditionalist neo-masculinism, and right-wing chan-influenced culture broadly. What these factions have in common is that they constitute a total break from the preexisting American conservative movement and, in different ways, they all seek to reassert the power of some combination of the last remaining identity group yet to be admitted to the identity politics tent — white heterosexual men.
- Race, Science, and Razib Khan - Undark
Still, Khan insisted that his writing about the biology of race was sound. “It’s not socially acceptable to say that there might be group differences in an endophenotype — in their behavior, intelligence, anything that might have any genetic component,” Khan said. “You cannot say that, okay? If someone’s going to ask me, I’m going say, ‘It could be true.’”
Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”
- How French Intellectuals Lost Their Faith - quillette.com
French intellectuals have long been at the forefront of revolutionary thought. Voltaire and Rousseau radicalised French liberal opinion in the years before the toppling of the Ancien Regime. In the 20th Century, Sartre, Althusser and Badiou promoted communism, while Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault dug into the foundations of Western culture. Their disciples led the famous 1968 protests, which escalated to the point that President Charles De Gaulle fled to a military base in Germany.
Now, it is not radicals who speak loudest in French culture. It is reactionaries. Novelists, philosophers and political commentators speak less of liberation than degeneracy, and less of revolution than decline.
- Days of Rage - status451.com
One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.
Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
- The Coming Amnesia - bldgblog.com
“Astronomers and physicists who develop an understanding of nuclear physics,” they write, “will correctly conclude that stars burn nuclear fuel. If they then conclude (incorrectly) that all the helium they observe was produced in earlier generations of stars, they will be able to place an upper limit on the age of the universe. These scientists will thus correctly infer that their galactic universe is not eternal but has a finite age. Yet the origin of the matter they observe will remain shrouded in mystery.”
In other words, essentially no observational tool available to future astronomers will lead to an accurate understanding of the universe’s origins. The authors call this an “apocalypse of knowledge.”
misc links
and a few things i’ve found recently that i just wanted to share…
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Resting Bell Netlabel – lots of excellent, free ambient music. i recommend saito koji and summons of shining ruins.
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txt.fyi – pastebin-type service, but nicer to look at.