Sublime
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The tendency to bicker internally had totally obliterated our ability to look carefully at outside threats. And we will never be able to overcome threats we refuse to see. No one stays on top of the pecking order forever. This is a difficult lesson to learn. Debate is a necessity, but if it becomes irrational, violent, and blind to the menaces beyo
... See moreHoward Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
Time, March 26, 2006
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
The industrial elites, I mean to say, have lashed their fate to that of the battered model in which they have thrived. Their political projects seek to restore distance rather than authority. Their hope is to silence the public, not persuade it. Hillary Clinton ran for president on a promise to keep the deplorables in their place. Angela Merkel cli
... See moreMartin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
X has turned into a bullhorn for “anti-woke” sentiments used to boost Musk’s political messaging, Meta has abandoned its fact checking in deference to possible Trump retribution against the Zuckerberg empire; Starlink, TikTok, and Nvidia/TSCM are becoming geopolitical bargaining chips in nativist industrial trade wars; Network States are gaining po
... See moreNick Houde • Good Is Out, Evil Is in ♞
The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons
Michelle Goldberg • The Darkness Where the Future Should Be
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
For the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
Yuval Noah Harari • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
- There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.
- What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena
Notes On Amusing Ourselves To Death
Her conclusion is hard to miss or to ignore: “The only thing that stands between America and oblivion is a total immigration moratorium.”