Fast Checker

To all the left-wing deathbringers out there: Trump's disapproval has recently been reported at an average of minus 12.9 points. Some light unskewing reveals that it's more like minus 10.0 points. And any minus 20 or minus 25 results are conceptual fabrications, utterly ridiculous even if derived from genuine data of some sort. More to the point, you're not going to shame Trump out of office. Your efforts so far have been shameful on their own. I'm not encouraging you to escalate; I'm encouraging you to give up completely and forever.

@brivael It's delusional to think that AI companies are constructing good things. It's more wordslop, more entropic avoidance, more deconstuction of whatever good things are left.

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme). Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident. Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité. Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison. Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme. Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable. Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion. C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part. Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes. Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre. Alors pardon. Et au travail.

@ilan_wurman Congrats on getting it out!

My book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is coming out next week it seems, with plenty of time to spare before the semiquincentennial. I apologize in advance for posting a lot about it in the coming days. First, the front and back jackets. Link: cambridge.org/us/universityp…

@CultureExploreX Tiramisu!

What is your favorite Italian desert?

@McCormickProf It will often involve a stage on which aging women parade with little pink flags. And sometimes not.

The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that people will have a religion, or something that plays the role in their lives played by religion in the lives of people of faith. The only question is what religion (or pseudo-religion) they will have, and whether it will be a good one or a bad one--one that upholds human dignity and teaches genuine virtue, or one that does not.

@RobertTalisse Manic Obsession! and I like those electrocuted chords, I think the machines are taking over...

Happy Friday Evening! "Seeing Red" - Killing Joke. Proof that sometimes one note is all you need

@JoshPhillipsPhD Don't know much about histoire, Don't know much about biologie, Don't know much about a science book, Don't know much about the French I took...

I don’t know much about poetry. I’ve read some basic stuff. That’s all However, sr year of college a friend gave me Whitman. He knew I wasn’t big on poetry & hoped I’d read it someday 5 yr later I had a 12 hr train ride. I read Leaves of Grass in one ride Someone read “Who Learns my Lessons Complete” at my funeral

@MartinCothran I'm off to read Plato's Laws!

This absurd post is a target rich environment. Anyone who contrasts the writers of modernity with ancient ones on the grounds of boredom, unlikability, and the penchant to attract undue appreciation clearly has not read Hegel, Heidegger, Faulkner, Joyce, Marquez, Sartre, or Beckett, none of whom are even close to, say, Plato or Homer in terms clarity and understandability.

@francesafetytra Les Zero Temps. C'est dommage!

How Many time You visited here?

@cb_doge And who is this Rubin? What did he do previous to the great demolition project?

David Rubin served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2019 to 2022. In 2020, under his leadership, the Academy launched the “Representation and Inclusion Standards” for Best Picture eligibility. These rules, still in effect, require films to meet at least 2 of 4 diversity criteria involving race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or disability in on-screen roles, creative leadership, or crew. Rubin publicly backed the changes and helped appoint the task force co-led by producer DeVon Franklin. He shifted the Oscars from “best movie wins” to race/gender engineering. A film can now be ineligible for the top prize purely for failing demographic quotas, regardless of quality or audience impact. Instead of focusing purely on talent and storytelling, the Academy under Rubin institutionalized identity preferences. Oscars prestige and viewership have tanked. Many see it as performative politics over art. Classics with non-diverse casts would be disqualified. He helped install the DEI machinery that turned awards into checkboxes and accelerated Hollywood’s quality decline.

@elonmusk A Shameful Coward!

So shameful of Rubin. All that should matter is the quality of the movie.

@NickAllmaier Beware!

@johnhboyer Hard to do well...even deception has an inner logic.

lol not the worst idea

@TimelessTrvlr Montagnola, Schweizerland

Let’s do something fun. Drop the name of any city or town in the world, and I’ll reply with a photo or short video of it. Hidden gems, famous icons, tiny villages, random places you’ve always wondered about. Let’s see where this goes 👇

It was the behavior of the "Great Books" people themselves that forced me to distance from their movement. Sure I'm interested, but those are historical documents, secondarie works are often more enlightening at first, and logic/science/math are better taught through short exercises to developing minds.

The Great Books trend of the past 5 years has been a total catastrophe. The simple fact is that Plutarch and Homer and Virgil et al. do have radical insights buried in there, but at the same time most of these books are truly boring and lame and most people pretend to like them, cannot really digest anything, and get absolutely nothing from them! The trend is overwhelmingly powered by these books' aspirational quality; it's like a luxury heritage brand that conveniently only costs $15 a pop. The people on social media who've made brands around how great all these books are, often they are trying to *express* something about *themselves*, which is nice, but does not change how lame and boring the lion's share of these books are! You don't have to pretend to love them! If you're teaching undergrads that's great, or doing real research, fine. But this in no way means that everyone should read these books; it does not even mean that the smartest and most educated adults today need to read these books. The bits of radical alpha in them are great to find, explore, and write about if you are in the .01% of people who are called to do such things, but there is really zero reason why anybody else should read any of these books. Frankly, many of these authors are even somewhat primitive and infantile compared to the best thinkers of modernity. Plato and Aristotle have tons of provocative alpha worth getting, but also they were retarded on many topics, especially religion. The Romans were even worse in many ways. But all of this gets shrouded in the cult of Great Books. There have never been more people professing to love the Great Books, and mass public culture has never been lower brow than it is today. A ton of larping and precious little education, virtually zero novel insight, has come out of this movement.

@RobertTalisse Grand, Fullblown, Dangerous

Happy Friday! "Born to Kill" - Social Distortion

@DrFrankTurek It's the global dream of free, instant, and impersonal sex.

Why is there so much hostility toward Christianity and conservatism in our culture?

@HansMahncke PP Tape!

On December 20, 2016, the FBI found out that the supposed super source behind the fraudulent Steele dossier, the man portrayed as having access to Putin’s innermost secrets, was in fact a total nobody who had interned at the Brookings Institution. When questioned, the supposed super source told the FBI that the dossier was just bar talk. Despite this, Comey proceeded as though it were real, taking it to the FISA court and briefing Congress on the lies, all while pretending he didn’t know it was made up. Worst of all, he also briefed President Trump, then leaked the fact that he had briefed President Trump, thereby laundering those lies into a full scale investigative and media operation that drove a multi year lawfare campaign against a sitting president and those around him. So when Comey now adopts a sanctimonious tone about the FBI being “under siege,” it lands with a particular irony. He is the one who turned the FBI into the siege engine.

@Bubblebathgirl Nice Costume! I don't care about the movie, though. I think directors have gotten a lot like politicians. Feeling entitled to a social position or an audience. Not enough work on basics, like who would ever care about their self-absorbed output.

Elon Musk criticized Christopher Nolan on 𝕏 Tuesday over casting choices for his upcoming epic “The Odyssey.” Nolan recently confirmed in a Time Magazine interview that Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o will play Helen of Troy — classically described in Greek mythology as the most beautiful woman in the world — and will also portray her sister Clytemnestra. Musk replied to the news (and related discussions about Academy Awards diversity standards) by writing that Nolan “wants the awards.” Earlier this year, Musk had already commented on the reported casting, stating: “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.” The film has sparked widespread online debate about historical accuracy, modern American accents in the trailer, and other creative decisions in adapting Homer’s ancient Greek epic. What do you think of the casting choice? (Video: AI)

@francesafetytra I would go to Paris.

Paris, Lyon, or Nice- if you could only visit one, which would it be?

@MZHemingway Is that a man walking on the water?