Therefore, these rational peasants used the power of democracy—which is irresistible but unstable—to depose their old oligarchy and install a new monarchy.

First: their government sucked. Both the cathedral and the civil service were insanely obsessed with race—because

First: their government sucked. The Tsar was creepy, incompetent and sadistic. His son, the Tsarevich, was a junkie, a rumored pedophile and a known hemophiliac.

chanterelle

basal

Go back to the lake and the sewage. How do you fix the lake? Not by skimming off the algae! Obviously, you need to stop the sewage leak and get rid of the pig farm. Then, you can either wait for the lake to purify itself naturally, or pump the polluted water out and let the clear blue mountain stream refill the basin. I recommend… the latter.

When we remove pseudo-information that has obviously evolved in this way, we are not left with the opposite of the pseudo-information, but an absence of information. Whatever the signal reality is sending us, we cannot hear it. All we know is that our institutions cannot hear, think, learn, know, understand or teach any recessive ideas—that is, ideas that would damage or delegitimate the powers that be.

The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.

funky encrypted Internet stuff

bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?

Math is perfectly suited to the cathedral—and the Soviet Union. In fact, it is hard to imagine any form of government so dysfunctional and dystopian that it could not, given the raw autistic IQ talent, make progress in math.

inexorable forces: physical reality and human ignorance. The latter relaxes its grip only by painfully-won millimeters.

“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.

magna est veritas et praevalebit: the truth is great, and will prevail. Somehow.

An optimal disinformation weapon works by convincing its enemy than an ineffective strategy is effective

It may not be the meek who inherit the earth. It is always the humble.

Problems, though, began when I beganTo think, like some rogue algorithm,

What troubled us most was this disparityBetween the books of ourselves and the thingsWe saw our body do.

been our twenties,

they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist.

If the diffusion of education, Having the general tendency to elevate the understanding, is to produce more had men than good, we had better abandon than foster our Common School system.

demagogues

ARISTIDES

regicides

the value of someone's coin should be correlated to that person's standing in society.

philomath

For Pogany, the world of seventeenth-eighteenth century is a stable, proto-global merchant system that collapses with the French revolution. Around 1815, after 20 years of chaos and Napoleonic wars, the next stabilized system is Smithian capitalism marked by a total domination of capital over labour. Smithian capitalism collapses in WW1, which creates another chaotic period ending after WW2, with the emergence of the social democratic welfare state, which collapses in 2008.

planetary guilds enabled by blockchains.

ZapatistasF

nation, and the state

The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0

I think this is what happens to humanity: we extend as systems and weaken as individuals.

the irrationality of rationality.

At the moment, we are divested of our data all the way down to our desires and nervous systems.

At the same time, there are many issues that remain global. How do you deal with overfishing in international waters? You need a global institution for that. How do you deal with Fukushima-like accidentsFootnote 14? The radioactive wave does not stop at your border.

‘Wave Pulse theories are cyclical theories of human history, which see societies evolving in a succession between more extractive/degradative phases, and more regenerative phases in which the commons operate as a key “healing” mechanism.’Footnote 13 During the degradative phases of consumptive expansion, the ruling class pushes towards the use of more and more resources – they have to do this, because they are competing with others. When things start degrading (soil becomes depleted, or whatever else happens in a particular context), that degradation creates a counterreaction and opens up a regenerative phase needed for saving the region where it occurs. But as soon as the regenerative phase is over, humankind begins a new degradative phase.

TechnoCalyps

our intelligence—also makes us uniquely vulnerable to mental predators and parasites.

“Memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the group… they form a self-organizing, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not.”

The Meme Machine

“Self-justification means that the components of a memeplex mutually justify each other.”

A meme only needs to fake positive qualities to be repeated, even if it’s actually useless, meaningless, unhealthy, or a straight-up lie.  

I like to feel powerful.

Jane Fonda

symps

symps

There is nothing we find more despicable than spontaneous collective action motivated by collective self-interest among a homogeneous consensus.

You are right that you have a fatal disease. It is one your body recognizes as self.

Video et taceo

Vogon spy

“I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”