Culinary Mysticism — review of “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage (IM1776) Rob does not hate Portland; like Socrates, who dismisses outright the idea of fleeing Athens for Thessaly, he sees it from the standpoint of eternity, and so both loves it and knows it to be deeply broken: Amir: “If the city floods we can always…
Tag: Justin Murphy
weekday links
Spenglerian Moments, Borders, and the Rise and Fall of Kingdoms (The Outpost): Since the publication of The Decline of the West in 1918, Oswald Spengler’s theories of civilizational decline have never truly gone out of fashion. War, Plague, Death and Conquest: no civilizational end of cycle is without its godly scourges. Kingdoms rise and fall,…
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Cybernetics of Migration in the Covidian Age (The Outpost) κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ) means “governance” in Greek. While the world’s hoi polloi accumulate at the gates of sinking empires, the great powers (the US, China, Russia) scramble for influence over the vast territories left behind. Meanwhile, second-tier petty kings in Europe and Africa navigate the stormy waters…
w e e k e n d LINKS
The best links on the Internet this weekend are located here. Barbarians Past the Gate: Legacy institutions are at war with distributed collective intelligence, but the legacy institutions are losing—badly. 2 million full-time “content creators,” outside any professional sanction; the election of Donald Trump against an airtight media consensus certain of its impossibility; mass, hysterical…
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Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…
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A weekly compendium of links. An Interface Theory of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: “Interface Theory’s creator, Dr. Donald Hoffman has suggested that phenomenon like synaesthesia may be instances of evolution at work, a kind of real time tinkering of the interface to see what works and what doesn’t via mutation. In that light, it’s not hard…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…
“Lying to yourself about who you are is no less evil than lying to a friend about something important.”
An intellectual does not become unproductive because of some mysterious ailment called “writer’s block.” An unproductive intellectual is an intellectual lost in Evil. Many people think “writer’s block” is a real phenomenon and Evil is only a mystical superstition. In fact, “writer’s block” is the superstition, and Evil the real phenomenon. To escape the sin…
INTERVIEW: Justin Murphy #WeirdPoliticalTheory
JUSTIN MURPHY Q: You recently conducted an interesting study whose results probably surprised some people. Essentially, the data you’ve looked at seems to suggest that “radical leftists” and/or “the far left” are not necessarily the threat to free speech they are often portrayed as; rather, the problem free speech runs into is more complex and…