BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-12 Mo
The lies the authoritarian right tells itself; just friends friending around; transformer models and vector databases; & Ip critiques Bidenomics, Tolkien says "felix culpa!", Troughton-Smith wants...
…a more expensive Apple Vision Pro, & Loomis advises targets of the right-wing authoritarian machine…
MUST-READ: Þe Authoritarian Right’s Lies It Tells Itself Today:
I first came across this mode of thought in a passage by the excellent historian C.V. Wedgwood,trying to defend the fact that, at its lowest ebb, the Protestant Dutch Revolt of the late 1500s was composed of a bunch of pirates: “When a torch is all but extinguished it is poor policy to complain because its flame is smoky and smells of pitch.”
The party line over at The American Conservative—and others of its ilk—seems to be the same: patriarchy and religiosity have no chance of resisting liberalism if they fight fair, and will fall unless we rightists abandon our institutions that have kept us free and enthusiastically support, and in fact hand control of our destiny over, to people we admit are quite unpleasant.
And, of course, The American Conservative and its ilk all avert their eyes completely from the fact that the quite unpleasant people to whom they submit themselves completely and unthinkingly are not true believers in the cause but rather in it for the grift. Trump is not a foe of divorce or of birth control.Putin is not an Old Believer:
Michael Warren Davis: What Russia Means: ‘I want to tell you why Western elites hate Russia…. if we are being honest—which, again, I’m not sure we can be—our elites hated Russia long before she invaded Ukraine. What is more, that hatred helped to precipitate the invasion…. Russians lived under a regime of brutal state atheism for the better part of a century…. The church in Russia today is descended from those men and women who persevered in the faith through a century of vicious persecution…. Russia is not a Christian utopia…. Nor am I saying that Russia will become a Christian paradise. That is up to the Russian people, and God, if we’re getting technical….
Why our elite hates Russia—and why it has always hated Russia. Here in the West, our conventional wisdom holds that the church is on its last legs…. “Christian values” are an anachronism. We are on the cusp of a new age: an age of freedom, of tolerance, of unbelief. This is the end of history. Russia stands as a living rebuke to this narrative. Traditional, supernatural faith is rebounding…. The resurrection of the Russian Church is nothing short of a miracle. And our Western elites will do everything in their power to keep us from witnessing that miracle. That is why they have been on the war path against Putin for the last twenty years….
We hate Russia because they are mean to the gays. Deacon Nicholas Kotar, the great novelist and translator, gave a wider view: “What the Russian government is doing is setting a red line to the spread of NGO-style liberal democracy. And Ukraine, unfortunately, has been a buffer zone, and a kind of test-case, for the spread, not of a political system, but of a system of values, that is espoused by the elites only.... The problem is that with all these colored revolutions, no matter how you look at it, the thing that comes in together with the money is an insistence, unfortunately, on the adoption of the Western liberal cultural milieu. It happened in Georgia, it happened in Ukraine, it happened everywhere…”.
There is a Christian renaissance underway in Russia, which is nothing short of a miracle…. Western elites want us to believe that the triumph of “NGO-style liberal democracy” is inevitable everywhere. But it’s not. Russia is living proof of that. Her story should give us hope. But that is the very last thing our ruling class wants us to have…
ONE IMAGE: Just Some Friends Friending Around:
ONE VIDEO: Edo Liberty: The Rise of Vector Data:
Very Briefly Noted:
Duncan Black: Good Faith: ‘Every single elected Republican prays every day that Trump chokes on his own vomit (or goes to prison), every journalist knows this, yet we all must pretend the kayfabe is real, that liars are operating in good faith…
Tuan-Hwee Sng & al.: The Fractured-Land Hypothesis: ‘Why China is unified but Europe is not…
John Gruber: Reddit’s Hoped-For IPO and Pipe Dream of Cashing in on OpenAI’s Hype: ‘Huffman is trying to charge now for horses that were let out of the barn years ago… doesn’t care about Apollo… other third-party Reddit clients, or… Reddit’s reputation as a platform vendor. He’s just trapped in a fantasy where investors are going to somehow see Reddit as a player in the current moment of AI hype…
Chris Anstey: Hop in Inflation, Skip in Policy Could Mean Jump in Fed Dissent: ‘With the Fed’s rate-setting committee expected on Wednesday to refrain from raising interest rates… Powell will probably face the challenge of placating a number of colleagues who worry that progress on inflation has stalled…. Several have made clear they think the Fed may need to do more to cool a surprisingly resilient economy…
Bloomberg Editors: Climate change is increasingly central to the insurance business. Republicans would rather look the other way: ‘Imagine if politicians tried to block restaurants from considering the taste of the food… nuclear-plant owners from applying physics… doctors from consulting blood tests…. State attorneys general who are trying to pressure insurance companies into ignoring… climate change…
Wikipedia: Abacus…
Francis Bacon (1626): The Great Instauration; and, New Atlantis…
Jessica Wildfire: Nobody Thinks It Will Happen to Them: New Research on Covid: ‘We're in deep trouble, but there's a lot we can do…. Some people recover from Long Covid. Others don’t…. David Cutler estimated the total economic cost of Long Covid alone at… $3.7 trillion...
Wikipedia: ‘The Eight Great Eminent Officials (Chinese: 八大元老)… abbreviated… Eight Elders (Chinese: 八老)…. In the English-speaking world… often called The Eight Immortals…. Deng Xiaoping… Chen Yun… Li Xiannian… Yang Shangkun… Peng Zhen… Bo Yibo… Wang Zhen… Song Renqiong… Deng Yingchao… Xi Zhongxun… Wan Li…; Wikipedia: ‘The Eight Immortals (Chinese: 八仙) are a group of legendary xian… revered by the Taoists...
Tim Burke: Critique of Jared Diamond: ‘There are some legitimate criticisms of Diamond to be made, both problems that are particular to his work and problems that are more general in sociobiological or materialist histories...
¶s:
The Biden people have two somewhat inconsistent responses to Greg Ip’s critique: First, the right response by other countries to “protectionist“ measures that actually compensate for important externalities is for other countries to match them, rather than to complain about them. Second, the Biden administration needs to get things through the Senate, they did the best they could, and they continue to lobby the Senate for friendshoring, as opposed to onshoring: Greg Ip: Bidenomics and Its Contradictions: ‘Competition with China has reinforced President Biden’s commitment to industrial policy, but his vision for government intervention carries risks for the U.S. economy and allies…. Three pillars… the quality of economic growth matters more than the quantity… to correct… market failures, Bidenomics aims to direct private capital toward favored sectors via regulations, subsidies and other intervention… trade policy should give priority to American workers, not consumers…. But the U.S. doesn’t have the capacity to supply everything it now imports. Diverting workers to make things that can be imported more cheaply raises costs and takes scarce workers away from industries that might be more productive. Industrial policy “does not create jobs; it merely shifts jobs from one place to another,” wrote Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in a recent critique. “As for idle workers with the right skills,” he continued, “they don’t really exist.”… The foreign and domestic arms of Bidenomics are also at odds…. While seeking solidarity with like-minded partners against Russia and China, the buy-American policies of the Biden administration discriminate against those same partners…. “The U.S.A. is our partner of shared values, but at the same time there is an enormously protectionist economic policy,” German finance minister Christian Lindner told a German newspaper…
Going all in on the “felix culpa!” here: Paradise attained through great pain and sorrow. After error through a long process of redemption is better than paradise never marred: J.R.R. Tolkien: Silmarillion: ‘And it was told by the Vanyar who held vigil with the Valar that when the messengers declared to Manwë the answers of Fëanor to his heralds, Manwë wept and bowed his head. But at that last word of Fëanor: that at the least the Noldor should do deeds to live in song for ever, he raised his head, as one that hears a voice far off, and he said: “So shall it be! Dear-bought those songs shall be accounted, and yet shall be well-bought. For the price could be no other. Thus even as Eru spoke to us shall beauty not before conceived be brought into Eä, and evil yet be good to have been”…
Contrarianism here! Remember that the Vision Pro is going to be half the real price of an early 1980s personal computer in a society twice as rich as that oh40 years ago, and rising wealth inequality, meaning that it will be only one quarter as large a proportion of its target audiences resources . If you think buying a personal computer in the early 1980s was wise use of resources, then you should buy an Apple Vision Pro, if you think that it is likely to be even a quarter, as salient for your life and work: Steve Troughton-Smith: ‘The more I think about Apple Vision Pro this week, the more I'm starting to realize I want to see it go up in price, not down. I want to see the higher-end model with an M2 Pro or Max chip, with 64GB of RAM and 1TB+ internal storage. Give it on-board macOS virtualization, too. I don't think enough people have given this thought, but I think there is huge potential for higher-end models, especially as pro apps find their way onto the platform—the ‘Mac Pro’ of spatial computing…
Wise advice from someone who has spent much more time in the barrel than I have. One important thing, I think, to recognize when you are in this situation is that you will get no back up at all from anyone who still cherishes any chimerical hopes of having influence on or obtaining Office from anyone on the Republican side of the aisle: Erik Loomis: Republican Leaders Attack Academics: ‘Having been targeted by Republicans, the only advice I can give these poor academics dealing with this trash is to throw it back in the bully’s face. Because really, what else are you going to do once you’ve been targeted? Cower?: “Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan… demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech…. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird… Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda… threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests…”. It really sucks to be in this situation. But this becomes your moment. Do you stand up against fascism or do you cower? They’ve targeted you and they’ve set the ground rules. Again, my personal view is that the only way to respond is with extreme hostility and politicizing it yourself. No one is going to care if you rest your case on academic freedom grounds or the supposed dispassion of the academic. Completely irrelevant and a horrible way to fight back. You have to actually fight. And I know this from very personal experience…
Actually existing religiosity is much higher in Ukraine than in Russia; Michael Warren Davis' dreams of Russian religiosity are effective altruism-style projections for the future. Patriarchy, on the other hand, is indeed stronger in Russia. Is that a "revealed preference"?
The Revolution of Dignity was the epitome of a bottom-up, anti-elite revolution; the elites, among whom we must certainly count Yanukovych, were quite happy to be corrupted by Russia. That is why Ukraine's current leader, who is also its historically best and most popular leader, is a Jewish comedian. And there is another revealed preference.
The folks at First Things are just Manicheans.