Sad record of note: One of the deeper blogs on the web, Slate Star Codex, has been voluntarily deleted by its author.
Why? As a professional with professional responsibilities, and while already receiving some trouble for his labors, the noble NY Times threat and promise of an expose apparently helped the decision.
I was planning on linking to a post over there on an AI model running only on Wallace Stevens poems and now it’s gone. Here’s to hoping it’s not permanent as in forever.
A shame:
1,500+ @nytimes articles on Banksy respected his pseudonymity,
because art.1 article on @slatestarcodex cannot, because smart. pic.twitter.com/D43DH3OgSz
— Geoff Lewis (@justGLew) June 23, 2020
I’ve been treating my blog as a salvage operation, carrying the poems, songs, ideas and traditions most important to me, and my small contribution to our Republic, forwards.
It’s not much, but it’s something. I tend to seek out people who disagree (including Slate Star Codex) as often as those who might agree.
—
My biases and two cents: Twitter LI (loudest ignorance) and LAB (loud activist bias) seem to be proceeding apace. I certainly don’t trust people curating that network to maintain a platform for broader and freer thought, though the design works well for cheap, easy access to a network and constantly updating information across that network (emergencies, weather, a media wire, condensed packets of information etc.)
As for the NY Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR etc, given how social change cool becomes radical chic, and radical chic ‘wokeness,’ and ‘wokeness’ narrow ideological conformity, it’s little surprise they’ve drifted as well.
From where I stand: Tack your sail to normalizing the radical, and you tend to drift further away from tradition (joining individuals and groups who often ‘otherize’ anything religious, established and traditional and who unify their in-group by viewing such ideas as morally suspicious and potentially evil). Utopias hang endlessly upon the horizon. Making politics the thing-that-unites is placing a ridiculous weight upon political institutions.
The high liberal ideals and appeals to universal secular humanism don’t seem to be placating the desire for immediate and radical change, nor the meaning and purpose provided in some lives by ideological membership; the individual (S)elf increasingly left to make all of life’s meaning on his own.
Just as many universities, journals, publications and media outlets are going woke and failing to understand what scientists do (often displaying loyalty to ideological visions of (S)cience, Romanticized Nature and techo-bureaucratic utopianism), many publications also can’t resist the pressure of deploying gloriously useless art for the latest moral or political cause.
The problems of nature, human nature and legitimate authority are deeper than many realize.
As posted, someone’s going to be running our institutions and making rules out of a presumed universal and common sense set of assumptions:
Martin Gurri via Marginal Revolution: ‘Notes From A Nameless Conference:’
Gurri offered an interesting take on matters socio-cultural:
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.
Hmmm…:
‘The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. Muslims trusted Muslims, and no one else. Some archetypical essence of “woman” or “Muslim” made internal communications possible, and separated each group from the rest of the human race. It was, to be sure, a disaster of biblical proportions – the story of Babel told in the times of the tweet – and it left the men in charge desperate to put forward individuals of a different sex and skin coloration, to say the things they wanted to hear.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.’
Roger Sandall from ‘Guardianship: The Utopia Of The New Class‘ finishes with:
‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.
‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’
Just thought I’d Throw This In There:
An interesting take from Slate Star Codex-‘The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay:’
There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
This reminds me of a poem by Robert Pinsky, entitled ‘Essay On Psychiatrists’
V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others
Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy
Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me
He looked from the back like one more professor.
And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage
Which foreigners always note in American men, combined
As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,
Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more
Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon,
Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,
Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied
Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely?
Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something
Maintaining a healthy skepticism:
Previous ‘elite’ links on this site, arriving at some yet predictable, unrealized truths: Via Marginal Revolution via American Affairs: ‘The Western Elite From A Chinese Perspective:’
Kenneth Anderson At Volokh: ‘The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, Or, Downward Mobility