Google's "Culture of Fear", Wall Street's DEI Retreat, Paving the Way For End to War in Ukraine via Negotiations, Machiavelli on Political Origins, Some Actual Great News
“I would disagree with Polansky on this point "The US founders, in other words, consciously sought to create a wholly new society based upon just principles rather than the contingent events that gave rise to past governments".
While there was certainly a plurality of views among the Founders, there was always an attempt to show continuity with British political tradition even among the most liberal Founders. The American Revolution is not a Revolution but a counter-revolution.
Most of the colonists believed that Parliament violated the historic liberties afford to English men, this includes representation in government which goes all the way back to Witans of Anglo-saxon kings. Thomas Jefferson believed in the Anglo-saxon myth which stated that prior to the Norman Conquests England was a republic where every landowner had a role in choosing their government.
And didn't have the complex feudal system of barons, dukes, etc.( this ignores the existence of the Earls among the Anglo-Saxons tho). John Jay in the Federalist papers stated that nations revolve around people coming from common history, language, customs, and religion. The common law was also retained.
The main innovations that were made by the Founders were the system of checks and balances and separation of powers, which Hamilton stated would prevent the tyranny that arose in the British Constitution( Hamilton also would advocate life terms for Senators similar to the House of Lords and a King not really liberal). I wish I could write more but I have mental fog, but I think i explained it somewhat.
Edit: Despite this I don't think the American Revolution was justifiable considering that the American government was more tyrannical than King George implementing onerous taxes just a few years after Independence.
Likewise by not making Christianity the official religion they rebelled against God and the English Constitution( which was based on Christianity see King Alfred's Doombook among other things). The Covenanters talked about this and what would happen, and in the end they were right.”
(And furthermore, I disagree with your entire comment.)
The history of America from the Iroquois to the Internet is a series of Federations, the Founders worked with what they had, and it was no blank slate.
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Completely off-topic, but I like your name. I watched Dune part 2 last night and imo Javier Bardem delivered the best performance. Unfortunately he didn't have enough lines to qualify for Best Supporting Actor.
So probably this comes down to a clownish attempt to prove they are not evil...but what if the real intent is to forever undermine actual Progress in dei
"The moms are speaking up for their sons". You bet they would be.
DEI has reached the point where it threatens the expectations of core constituencies of the regime. So it will be reined in, at least to the point where these constituencies are again in sight of their comfort zone.
As for the rest of us in the slave-pits of the post-liberal West, it won't necessarily make too much difference.
That is bang-on true. But this one is the first revolution in history (correct me if I'm wrong) where neither the 2% and the !0% even know which sex they are.
Even the whole thing of “moms are speaking for their sons” has the “”People Team’s 🤮”” shtick all over it. Since being a white woman is the second biggest evil after the white man she had a misfortune to procreate with, she(?) is still allowed some voice.
In tech my entire career (G and A in FAANG included ;), and in my view these revelations make it look much more benign. The power dynamic (God I hate that word) is different when that someone holds the key to the health insurance, maybe earlier retirement. Hence I agree with you that it’s too late for the tier 1 West, these fuckers won’t leave those places until they burn everything down to the ground. The entire tech economy, unless in hardware, is unsustainable in practically every way conceivable so what is left is the clumsily orchestrated political act to avoid anyone ever discovering it. And an absolute progressive jihad because they can’t talk to the “other ones”.
They’ll be a lot of violent spasms from the suddenly unemployed useless, and possibly far worse reactions from the previously deplorable, many small actions.
"Its wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid."
Which is exactly the strategy for making money off of AI. All you have to do is own it, thereby making it proprietary, or invest in it to a grab a share of the profits. No "innovation" beyond that is required.
White WOMEN are speaking up about DEI? That's actually nightmare level bad for the liberal left, pissing off that demographic. Interesting development.
Afa Ukraine, clearly reality is setting in. But I get the sense the conflict is kind of getting away from the west. There's a lot of "One hand not talking to the other." Macrón called for a potential all-out ground invasion in Ukr, about a week(?) Before Nuland resigned. Total bluff imo, but there's clearly chaos happening in the back rooms.
Whoever calls the game that is the US/NATO criminal syndicate attacking Russia (Clinton/Talbot/Nuland expand NATO up to Kiev) is not backing away from killing Slavs at good returns from the military industry complex.
Russia is agreeable to burn US dollars and weaken Kiev.
Time, and logistics is on Russia’s side.
While US government debt is climbing even with great Bidenomics.
The concerns over the violence and cruelty that are central to the establishment of any real-world regime recalls the embarrassment and unease we feel when contemplating our parents having sex. Regardless of our feelings, facts are facts.
The most liberal and well-ordered states have their origins in explicit violence. The English state was created by two critical acts of conquest: one by William of Normandy, the other by William of Orange. There is nothing to regret about this. The effluxion of time makes whatever pain or injustice that was involved with these events irrelevant.
The current obsession with origins that is sweeping the Anglophone world (1619 for America, 'settler-colonialism' etc) is less about improving present day conditions as it is about preparing a case for the legitimacy of a new, emerging, regime. For this reason alone we need to take the issue of origins very seriously indeed.
I would contend that the violence is a corollary parasite on an initial peace of one polity coming together to pursue the common good, the common good being defined as the tranquility of order. If you want to get a decent grasp on what I mean by the common good, look up the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at.
At what stage of their civilization did the Egyptians first record the concept of Ma'at? The hieroglyphic literature was written thousands of years after the peoples along the Nile had settled down. I doubt that the earliest pre-dynastic Egyptians were any more tranquil or peaceful than any other primitive people.
Fair enough. I meant to use Ma'at as a quick and analogous example of the philosophic content of "common good." As a general observation, and as a concession to your point, human order, prior to the grace of Christ, tends to grow towards the bare minimum of goodness necessary to achieve self-centered ends.
Does not ‘preparing a case for the legitimacy of a new, emerging, regime’ contradict your earlier remark ‘DEI has reached the point where it threatens the expectations of core constituencies of the regime. So it will be reined in’?
I would not have thought so. Regimes evolve. The current regime is beginning to apply woke/DEI as a form of triage for increasingly marginal whites within its core constituencies.
The core mass constituency that has supported the existing regime is the predominantly white upper middle classes which has lived comfortably enough with affirmative action for the last generation. However, the regime is preparing for a future with a much more diverse elite. Pressures of affirmative action are escalating and are having a concrete effect on the expectations of much of this class. In a nutshell, ethnic depriorotization now threatens the upper middle class with the prospect of downward social mobility for the next generation. As a result the upper middle classes are starting to divide between those who expect advantages from the emerging regime and those who don't.
Woke/DEI is likely to be reined in selectively across different sectors but only where woke impedes profits or where entrenched white resistance is particularly strong (as in some of the Ivies). This may be camouflaged in some instances but not in others. I'd expect very uneven and varied results. Hope this explains things better, but am struggling a bit here.
I think one thing you bring out is some people actually believe in the grievances behind wokeness rather than as a more or less cynical or commercial response to pressure from below.
On the other hand having liberal beliefs is often illiberal, a means to power.
Woke also an attempt at a replacement religion, only semi-Secular. America remains a deeply religious country…. That made the 20th century mistake of making Politics the religion.
With the defenestration of Constitutional government to get rid of Trump and smash his populares (COVID) they needed a replacement.
It’s failing.
Its fall is taking the creaking post WW2 order with it - overreaching hastened the end.
Spot on. The colour of the coolie is irrelevant and no one with a serious career within the system has any loyalty to anyone who might be disadvantaged by the new arrangements.
Would the conclusion of the first part of your essay be what the academic agent described as putting the woke away, eg a tactical but not a strategic retreat? Thank you 🙏
"The removal of Victoria Nudelman is the removal of a maximalist from the chessboard."
From the little that I know about this, it seems that hers was a "self-removal", not a "being removed"; and I would argue that her doing so was preemptive, preferring to position herself on -- at/near the head of -- the [Ukr/]Euro-Allied negotiating team, rather than as a member of the increasingly disinterested US/UK team.
Some claim that Nuland left because she wasn't promoted. There was a vacancy at the State Departmentment for the second man after Blinken. For some time Nuland filled that position as an interim. But then someone else was appointed.
The financial pressures against woke and DEI are generated by the need to compete in global markets. They reveal the dirty truth: both woke and DEI are exceptionally parochial phenomenon, unimaginable outside their origins in Anglo Yankee culture and the very specific redistributive culture of the racial spoils system as it evolved from Tammany Hall to Civil Rights and the post Cold War era.
Now that capitalism is very busy organising anew along planetary lines with supply chains constrained by various geopolitical fissures it is clear that both woke and DEI constitute impediments to collective achievement and routine profit. This does not mean an immediate end to either. It is way too soon for that, but it suggests that the turn America took under Obama was a reactionary and expensive digression. A course correction is beginning to emerge.
"The sun will end its life as a white dwarf - a dead star that has exhausted all the fuel that it's capable of burning. It will slowly cool and fade away to lower and lower temperatures." A further example of 'go woke, go broke'.
How could google fail is pretty obvious if you know anyone at Google. I do. I also know OG google employees from when it was less than 100 people. The latter were bona fide genius types. The former are sort of like self-regarding DMV employees who attend Yoga classes. That's what you get when you hire into what amounts to a lucrative public utility.
In 2010 when they were still relatively innovative: about 10,000 people. By 2019, still under 100,000 people. Consider that 2019 Google doesn't make money in any different ways than they did in 2010. Then they nearly doubled in headcount over the next few years. Still no innovations, no new profitable lines of business. What do you think those numskulls are doing besides inventing new pronouns?
FWIIW, Brave has a pretty good search engine; not as good in the long tail as it hasn't been around as long, but it was built with around a half dozen people.
Looking forward to Nudelwoman defenestration. I sort of wondered if she were responsible somehow for the recent signal intercept about the Crimean bridge.
Paragraphs! Paragraphs!! Paragraphs!!! you’re long-winded comment needs at least,
At—Least!! 4–Paragraphs…. Here you go…. Now please go back and turn this into at least, 4–PARAGRAPHS. THEN I CAN READ IT….
I meant proper paragraphs like this.
“I would disagree with Polansky on this point "The US founders, in other words, consciously sought to create a wholly new society based upon just principles rather than the contingent events that gave rise to past governments".
While there was certainly a plurality of views among the Founders, there was always an attempt to show continuity with British political tradition even among the most liberal Founders. The American Revolution is not a Revolution but a counter-revolution.
Most of the colonists believed that Parliament violated the historic liberties afford to English men, this includes representation in government which goes all the way back to Witans of Anglo-saxon kings. Thomas Jefferson believed in the Anglo-saxon myth which stated that prior to the Norman Conquests England was a republic where every landowner had a role in choosing their government.
And didn't have the complex feudal system of barons, dukes, etc.( this ignores the existence of the Earls among the Anglo-Saxons tho). John Jay in the Federalist papers stated that nations revolve around people coming from common history, language, customs, and religion. The common law was also retained.
The main innovations that were made by the Founders were the system of checks and balances and separation of powers, which Hamilton stated would prevent the tyranny that arose in the British Constitution( Hamilton also would advocate life terms for Senators similar to the House of Lords and a King not really liberal). I wish I could write more but I have mental fog, but I think i explained it somewhat.
Edit: Despite this I don't think the American Revolution was justifiable considering that the American government was more tyrannical than King George implementing onerous taxes just a few years after Independence.
Likewise by not making Christianity the official religion they rebelled against God and the English Constitution( which was based on Christianity see King Alfred's Doombook among other things). The Covenanters talked about this and what would happen, and in the end they were right.”
(And furthermore, I disagree with your entire comment.)
The history of America from the Iroquois to the Internet is a series of Federations, the Founders worked with what they had, and it was no blank slate.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
Anything that can be programmed can be manipulated and abused. The human factor will always remain the go to source for reality and truth.
Yes.
Google's web search product gives me big Kodak vibes relative to a ChatGPT.
That's what Solana is arguing
Completely off-topic, but I like your name. I watched Dune part 2 last night and imo Javier Bardem delivered the best performance. Unfortunately he didn't have enough lines to qualify for Best Supporting Actor.
So probably this comes down to a clownish attempt to prove they are not evil...but what if the real intent is to forever undermine actual Progress in dei
"The moms are speaking up for their sons". You bet they would be.
DEI has reached the point where it threatens the expectations of core constituencies of the regime. So it will be reined in, at least to the point where these constituencies are again in sight of their comfort zone.
As for the rest of us in the slave-pits of the post-liberal West, it won't necessarily make too much difference.
Every revolution is instigated by a feud between the top 2% and the top 10%.
True. The key class conflict in the US is between the oligarchs/plutocrats and the oligarch-adjacent classes (professionals and managers).
On balance, I suspect that the masses across the US would prefer the rule of the former to that of the latter.
That is bang-on true. But this one is the first revolution in history (correct me if I'm wrong) where neither the 2% and the !0% even know which sex they are.
It's not just for white son's either. There is a real and insidious hatred of men in this country who will not fall in line and agree to be weak.
Even the whole thing of “moms are speaking for their sons” has the “”People Team’s 🤮”” shtick all over it. Since being a white woman is the second biggest evil after the white man she had a misfortune to procreate with, she(?) is still allowed some voice.
In tech my entire career (G and A in FAANG included ;), and in my view these revelations make it look much more benign. The power dynamic (God I hate that word) is different when that someone holds the key to the health insurance, maybe earlier retirement. Hence I agree with you that it’s too late for the tier 1 West, these fuckers won’t leave those places until they burn everything down to the ground. The entire tech economy, unless in hardware, is unsustainable in practically every way conceivable so what is left is the clumsily orchestrated political act to avoid anyone ever discovering it. And an absolute progressive jihad because they can’t talk to the “other ones”.
It’s going to be interesting watching this go.
They’ll be a lot of violent spasms from the suddenly unemployed useless, and possibly far worse reactions from the previously deplorable, many small actions.
"Its wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid."
Which is exactly the strategy for making money off of AI. All you have to do is own it, thereby making it proprietary, or invest in it to a grab a share of the profits. No "innovation" beyond that is required.
Not unless you crush or buy the innovative- and Musk.
White WOMEN are speaking up about DEI? That's actually nightmare level bad for the liberal left, pissing off that demographic. Interesting development.
Afa Ukraine, clearly reality is setting in. But I get the sense the conflict is kind of getting away from the west. There's a lot of "One hand not talking to the other." Macrón called for a potential all-out ground invasion in Ukr, about a week(?) Before Nuland resigned. Total bluff imo, but there's clearly chaos happening in the back rooms.
Whoever calls the game that is the US/NATO criminal syndicate attacking Russia (Clinton/Talbot/Nuland expand NATO up to Kiev) is not backing away from killing Slavs at good returns from the military industry complex.
Russia is agreeable to burn US dollars and weaken Kiev.
Time, and logistics is on Russia’s side.
While US government debt is climbing even with great Bidenomics.
The concerns over the violence and cruelty that are central to the establishment of any real-world regime recalls the embarrassment and unease we feel when contemplating our parents having sex. Regardless of our feelings, facts are facts.
The most liberal and well-ordered states have their origins in explicit violence. The English state was created by two critical acts of conquest: one by William of Normandy, the other by William of Orange. There is nothing to regret about this. The effluxion of time makes whatever pain or injustice that was involved with these events irrelevant.
The current obsession with origins that is sweeping the Anglophone world (1619 for America, 'settler-colonialism' etc) is less about improving present day conditions as it is about preparing a case for the legitimacy of a new, emerging, regime. For this reason alone we need to take the issue of origins very seriously indeed.
I would contend that the violence is a corollary parasite on an initial peace of one polity coming together to pursue the common good, the common good being defined as the tranquility of order. If you want to get a decent grasp on what I mean by the common good, look up the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at.
At what stage of their civilization did the Egyptians first record the concept of Ma'at? The hieroglyphic literature was written thousands of years after the peoples along the Nile had settled down. I doubt that the earliest pre-dynastic Egyptians were any more tranquil or peaceful than any other primitive people.
Fair enough. I meant to use Ma'at as a quick and analogous example of the philosophic content of "common good." As a general observation, and as a concession to your point, human order, prior to the grace of Christ, tends to grow towards the bare minimum of goodness necessary to achieve self-centered ends.
TYPO: philosophic content of "common good."
CORRECTION: philosophic concept of the "common good."
Does not ‘preparing a case for the legitimacy of a new, emerging, regime’ contradict your earlier remark ‘DEI has reached the point where it threatens the expectations of core constituencies of the regime. So it will be reined in’?
I would not have thought so. Regimes evolve. The current regime is beginning to apply woke/DEI as a form of triage for increasingly marginal whites within its core constituencies.
The core mass constituency that has supported the existing regime is the predominantly white upper middle classes which has lived comfortably enough with affirmative action for the last generation. However, the regime is preparing for a future with a much more diverse elite. Pressures of affirmative action are escalating and are having a concrete effect on the expectations of much of this class. In a nutshell, ethnic depriorotization now threatens the upper middle class with the prospect of downward social mobility for the next generation. As a result the upper middle classes are starting to divide between those who expect advantages from the emerging regime and those who don't.
Woke/DEI is likely to be reined in selectively across different sectors but only where woke impedes profits or where entrenched white resistance is particularly strong (as in some of the Ivies). This may be camouflaged in some instances but not in others. I'd expect very uneven and varied results. Hope this explains things better, but am struggling a bit here.
No, it makes sense.
I think one thing you bring out is some people actually believe in the grievances behind wokeness rather than as a more or less cynical or commercial response to pressure from below.
On the other hand having liberal beliefs is often illiberal, a means to power.
Woke also an attempt at a replacement religion, only semi-Secular. America remains a deeply religious country…. That made the 20th century mistake of making Politics the religion.
With the defenestration of Constitutional government to get rid of Trump and smash his populares (COVID) they needed a replacement.
It’s failing.
Its fall is taking the creaking post WW2 order with it - overreaching hastened the end.
Well they’re just establishing a founding myth to demoralize us then crack out what we built.
It’s essentially anticolonialism and just move the 3d world North. We’ll all be the UK and Canada now, on our way to being Detroit and San Francisco.
It’s “Globalization.”
Spot on. The colour of the coolie is irrelevant and no one with a serious career within the system has any loyalty to anyone who might be disadvantaged by the new arrangements.
Would the conclusion of the first part of your essay be what the academic agent described as putting the woke away, eg a tactical but not a strategic retreat? Thank you 🙏
To be determined!
"The removal of Victoria Nudelman is the removal of a maximalist from the chessboard."
From the little that I know about this, it seems that hers was a "self-removal", not a "being removed"; and I would argue that her doing so was preemptive, preferring to position herself on -- at/near the head of -- the [Ukr/]Euro-Allied negotiating team, rather than as a member of the increasingly disinterested US/UK team.
Some claim that Nuland left because she wasn't promoted. There was a vacancy at the State Departmentment for the second man after Blinken. For some time Nuland filled that position as an interim. But then someone else was appointed.
She lost
There is quite a lot of speculation floating about regarding her resignation. Was she pushed? Or did she jump ship?
The financial pressures against woke and DEI are generated by the need to compete in global markets. They reveal the dirty truth: both woke and DEI are exceptionally parochial phenomenon, unimaginable outside their origins in Anglo Yankee culture and the very specific redistributive culture of the racial spoils system as it evolved from Tammany Hall to Civil Rights and the post Cold War era.
Now that capitalism is very busy organising anew along planetary lines with supply chains constrained by various geopolitical fissures it is clear that both woke and DEI constitute impediments to collective achievement and routine profit. This does not mean an immediate end to either. It is way too soon for that, but it suggests that the turn America took under Obama was a reactionary and expensive digression. A course correction is beginning to emerge.
Ah poor Tammany. It did you know actually build things…
Correction taken 😔☘️
"The sun will end its life as a white dwarf - a dead star that has exhausted all the fuel that it's capable of burning. It will slowly cool and fade away to lower and lower temperatures." A further example of 'go woke, go broke'.
How could google fail is pretty obvious if you know anyone at Google. I do. I also know OG google employees from when it was less than 100 people. The latter were bona fide genius types. The former are sort of like self-regarding DMV employees who attend Yoga classes. That's what you get when you hire into what amounts to a lucrative public utility.
Consider their headcount over time:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees
In 2010 when they were still relatively innovative: about 10,000 people. By 2019, still under 100,000 people. Consider that 2019 Google doesn't make money in any different ways than they did in 2010. Then they nearly doubled in headcount over the next few years. Still no innovations, no new profitable lines of business. What do you think those numskulls are doing besides inventing new pronouns?
FWIIW, Brave has a pretty good search engine; not as good in the long tail as it hasn't been around as long, but it was built with around a half dozen people.
Looking forward to Nudelwoman defenestration. I sort of wondered if she were responsible somehow for the recent signal intercept about the Crimean bridge.
Excellent post, particularly liked the parts re CF, and the establishment of political entities.