thissharpchain

Not having fun.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

Few people understand how fully degraded search became after 2020. In the before times, results were driven by user experience which fed algorithmic determination of credibility. Then Google flipped to prioritize "stakeholder" content. It was part of the general anti-populist revolution and clearly reflected a deep-state push.

At the same time, publicly available tools to examine the traffic of any site were made to vanish. This is all part of pushing messaging to the public and massively marginalizing creative and offbeat content. Today, the results of search reflects someone else's views of how you should think and not actually what the people are proven to want.

This gigantic change was never announced. Nor did the status quo ante return after lockdowns were over. The internet of today is completely unlike the internet of 2019. Now with AI driving most results, ruling class orthodoxies are ever more ascendent.

[EducatëdHillbilly™ @RobProvince]

Capturing these 3 in this image tells more of a story than a 1000 page essay…..

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

See you in the commie gulag, boyz 🫡

[Based Electrician⚡️🇺🇲 @ComeAndTakeIt]

@CollinRugg They can't even take a few minutes to PRETEND to care about fallen Americans

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Yesterday, West Virginia put out a report on how data centers are affecting the state. How?

They're making it rich.

Data centers are allowing the state to cut income taxes, fund schools, rebuild sewers and water treatment facilities, curb electrical costs, and generate jobs!

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is what happens when you let Muslims gain the majority

“In 2004, the people of Hamtramck, Michigan, voted to let the Muslim call to prayer sound over their streets five times a day. It passed by 262 votes. Progressives called it proof that tolerance really works. 19 years later, the all-Muslim city council that those same voters helped elect took the pride flag down from every public pole in the city unanimously.

What happened next was brutal”

Residents flooded into the city council meetings, the fiercely opposed the upcoming vote to ban pride flags. In the end, the city council voted to ban it on city property

But here’s where it gets crazier, they approved a rotating set of flags representing the countries that the city's residents had come from. Islamic countries…..

Hamtramck, Michigan became the first Muslim-majority city in the United States with the first Muslim Government

Here’s here it gets even more crazy. All 6 of the city council members were even born in America

- Mohammed Hassan - Bangladesh
- Nayeem Choudhury - Bangladesh
- Muhith Mahmood - Bangladesh
- Abu Musa - Bangladesh
- Mohammed Alsomiri - Yemen
- Khalil Refai - Yemen

It doesn’t stop there

- They approved Home animal slaughter in January 2023
- In December 2023 the council honorarily renamed a stretch of Holbrook as Palestine Avenue
- After two commissioners flew a pride flag on city property in defiance of the 2023 resolution, the council removed them and stripped the commission of control over flagpoles

[Charlie Walsham @CharlieWalsham_]

I grew up thinking liberalism meant free speech, tolerating disagreement, questioning authority and being deeply suspicious of anyone demanding ideological conformity.

At some point, the “progressive” left decided that disagreement itself is dangerous and conformity to a single worldview was a non-negotiable requirement of tribal fealty.

How did that happen?

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

I know I keep saying this, but I can't get over how entirely manufactured it all is.

The Democratic Party doesn't run on ideas or real policy anymore, it runs on propaganda, it's Truman Show-level coordination... the lawyers, activists, academics, judges, politicians, journalists, NGOs, scientists, doctors, and self-proclaimed experts... all converging on the identical narrative, then pointing to one another for validation and presenting it to you as fact.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Feminist icon, Kathy Hochul.

Slay, kween!

[wanye @xwanyex]

My biggest problem with most forms of modern liberalism is that I reject that we’ve made substantial moral progress over the last few hundred years. You are not the moral superiors of your ancestors. I think, in fact, you’re just lucky to be alive in a time where it’s possible to express alternative moral positions, because of technological progress and improved material conditions. I think that you’d behave exactly as your ancestors did, given the same information and constraints under which they labored.

And I think, further, the outrageous narcissism and arrogance that results from believing that all human beings up until about five minutes ago were racist and sexist pieces of shit is really deranging people’s sense of society and of their place in it.

And this, ultimately, makes them their ancestors’ moral inferiors in most ways that matter.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Yesterday, I described the now-overwhelming body of evidence that the Left, and not the Right, radicalized.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that the Left had grown over ten times more extreme than the Right on core issues from 1988 to 2024.

That data is backed up by Gallup and Pew data showing a similarly dramatic asymmetric shift on the issues.

I noted that the people who radicalized the most were the college-educated, with postgraduates swinging left after 2010, while every less-educated bloc in America drifted right.

And yet many and often most progressives cling to clearly false beliefs.

They believe Anthony Fauci is a hero of science despite overwhelming evidence that Fauci promoted destructive school closures and universal vaccination against the best scientific evidence.

Progressives believe ICE is as bad as the Gestapo, or nearly so, a comparison that Democratic lawmakers made repeatedly.

They believe police kill unarmed black men by the hundreds or thousands every year out of racial bias, even though the Harvard economist Roland Fryer first found no racial difference in police shootings a decade ago, and newer benchmarking against crime rates and a 2023 review of more recent data have come to the same conclusion.

The Left still believes Trump and Republicans are fascists and came within hours of overthrowing the government on January 6. Progressives believe climate change threatens life on Earth.

They support “gender affirming” surgeries on adolescents, even though a 2024 study of more than 90 million patient records found that adults who underwent such surgery attempted suicide at 12 times the rate of other emergency room patients and at nearly five times the rate of matched patients who had undergone tubal ligations or vasectomies...

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[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

The “Arc of History” is a moral fallacy that has given Progressives an aura of both legitimacy and inevitability for way too long.

You can probably call this a deductive argument against Progressivism itself.

1) Moral progress needs a fixed standard to judge said “progress”.
2) That standard must either exist outside history and transcend it, or it must be produced by historical events.
3) If it transcends history, then Progressivism has to accept that a fixed moral order exists and prove that its own preferred worldview adheres to it.
4) If the standard is simply produced by history, then it can’t objectively judge the “arc of history” itself without falling into circular logic.

This basically demolishes the two most common arguments you typically see from Progressives when it comes to their own smug sense or moral superiority and the apparent inevitability of their own ideological project.

On one hand, they’ll claim that all inherited moral orders are arbitrary impositions, and on the other hand they’ll claim that history itself is bending toward their morally superior order.

But one claim just dismantles the other. If every moral standard is an historical construct, then Progressivism is too. It’s just the latest one in a long series of moral orders that each claim to be the ultimate good. And if Progressive standards are in fact objectively true, then “the arc of history” cannot be invoked by itself to discredit every older moral standard.

[Ron Rule @ronrule]

The new mail-in ballot procedure isn’t something to be afraid of. It works like this:

1. The state provides a list of the ballots they intend to mail out.

2. USPS assigns a unique barcode to each.

3. When the ballot is mailed out, this barcode is scanned to ensure uniqueness and that it matches. If there is no match or it’s a duplicate, it is not delivered.

4. When the voter mails the ballot back, the USPS scans it again and checks to make sure it matches what went out and isn’t a duplicate. Any ballots that don’t match won’t be delivered.

5. This is all done on the exterior envelope. The USPS isn’t determining eligibility or deciding who gets a ballot. They can’t see the actual votes. They are essentially just ensuring there are no duplicates, that the number mailed in isn’t greater than the number mailed out, and that the person mailing one in was the same person who received them.

This is a common sense solution and is completely reasonable.

Why would anyone oppose it unless their intention is to cheat?

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

Once you remember that this man used to be the chief intellectual leader of the Conservative movement for 25 years, it all starts to make sense why the GOP functioned like controlled opposition from the 1990s until Trump came along.

Because that’s exactly what they were.

[Kyle Smith @rkylesmith]

such a great piece on the tragedy of Jason Arday by @gcaw. This metaphor is perfect.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

I said to my wife, “this is awful.” She said, “it’s insane.”

[memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus]

Lots of words have been underhandedly redefined by the left, but one that still shocks me is redefining greed from envious desire to take someone else’s belongings into the unwillingness to handover one’s belongings to the envious.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill:

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. . .

This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal.

And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation.

And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it. . . .

The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing.

. . . The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it.

I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race.

Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.

[viceroy gaga🎃 @viceroy_gaga]

Here’s the thing about Arday: he wasn’t a “real” academic fraudster. Of course, he committed extensive academic fraud, but it wasn’t his primary goal. He didn’t set out to be an academic superstar. I don’t believe he was even interested in politics. Arday didn’t crave intellectual glory, honor, or recognition.

Arday was primarily a Munchausen Syndrome case.

Pity was what he really wanted. He set out, with ruthless and single-minded persistence, to acquire the pity, condescending admiration, and doting care we reserve for the physically sick and infirm. And, it just so happened due to the ideological manias of our current historical epoch, that Western academic and media elites had boundless enthusiasm for providing it to him.

Across Arday’s speeches, lectures, interviews, TEDTalks, website, and ghostwritten autobiography, the fixation is with his own (allegedly) constantly broken and failing body. All of his stories, his lies, his “work” were nothing but shoddy vehicles to discuss his (purported) illnesses.

Including, but not limited to: severely nonverbally autistic as a kid; illiterate due to learning disabilities as a teen; epilepsy; testicular cancer; deaf in one ear; dyslexia; mini-stroke with memory loss; brain cancer; hit by a car; getting secretly beaten up; a months-long “locked-in syndrome” coma; something called “autistic burnout”; breaking his leg during a marathon but still completing it; and so on.

He didn’t care about racial politics beyond the perfunctory. Watch his lectures on “de-colonization”, anti-racism, or whiteness: listless and limp. He complains about racism, and demands change, but only in vague, general, and (most tellingly) rarely truly bitter terms.

Keep in mind, there are many in academia who are deeply hateful and venomous towards whites, who earnestly seek the complete dispossession and imposition of enormous suffering on us. Arday was happy to go along with these ideological fevers, but only insofar as they offered a potential chance to talk about physical fevers.

What’s the significance of this? Well, a lot, I think, but here are two things:

First, it’s incredibly diagnostic of what “Wokeness” really is. Arday wasn’t a black radical deeply acquainted with theory. He was a black man who wanted people to feel sorry for him. And THAT particular combination of traits was what was IRRESISTIBLE for those “at the top”. Relative to his actual abilities, Arday was probably the most accomplished person in academia ever, precisely BECAUSE he lucked out as a rare example of a black man with Munchausen Syndrome, a psychological disorder most common in white females. Thus, as a world-organizing system of thought, Wokeness is structurally oriented to maximally reward a Munchausen black guy who demands worshipful, reverent pity. Not real valiant struggle, not political vision, not even anti-white hatred, just the parasitical and pitiful. A black man who wanted your pity.

Second, it explains the ambivalent, or even fond (now with his passing, also mournful), reactions to Arday’s antics from “the right”, even from those most disposed to hate him. Many say that, due to the sheer scale and absurdity of his serial fabulating, it became amusing, surreal cheek: almost performance art. Others report complicated feelings of pity, and argue he deserves this pity, because “the system set him up”, or “the real racists are the ones who gave him a job he couldn’t do”.

But they’re misunderstanding their own reactions. The real reason it is difficult to truly hate Arday is because, even if you didn’t consciously realize it, on some subconscious level, we all recognize a Munchie. And we all intuitively understand the goal of the Munchie is not to rule over us, but to lie beneath. Even if you can recognize *logically* that Arday was a regime stooge, an ideological threat who objectively wielded power over you, it is very difficult *emotionally* to feel threatened by someone who wanted nothing but to be weak.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

Things that are now rightwing:

Investigative journalism
Academic rigour
Scientific dissent
Nature
Facts
Biology
Politeness
Punctuality
Normality
Free speech
Individual rights
Rationality
Objectivity
Self-reliance
Emotional restraint
Delayed gratification