In academia, I learned that many of our brightest minds are more interested in social status than the truth. Possessing more brains than guts, they play the glass bead game, shifting facts and theories around into whatever configuration will get them tenure.

Joe Allen, Dark Æon: Transhumanism and the War against Humanity

I’m in love with this book, people, but I still have 200 pages to go before I can review it. I’ve never even heard of this Joe Allen, and he’s almost exotically smart. Dark Æon is better than Surveillance Capitalism because the author is more profound as a human being.

I take back my entire previous post about intelligence concentrating on the Left. Allen is a conservative, and he’s extremely bright. And he openly recognizes that the lure of fluidity prevents him from being the kind of Christian that he’d like to be and the kind of human that it’s worth being.

Yes. Most smart people tend towards what the Left today is. It’s an important observation but the long article at the link never explains why.

The reason is that neoliberalism (or new Leftism) is exhilarating. It’s very enjoyable to smart people because it promises incredible rewards. And often it delivers.

Neoliberalism picks off the weakest first. It devastated blue-collar workers before anybody else. Now it’s doing the same for the lower-level white-collar workers. It will come for many (but not all) brainiacs, too.

Any conversation with children about drugs must start with the recognition that drugs are extremely enjoyable. It’s the same with neoliberalism. It speaks to the deepest, most pleasurable desire in human beings, which is to be godlike, to control everything, to be able to do everything, to decide and occasion everything. It appeals to hubris, which is the greatest temptation any of us can face.

The smarter people have more inner resources to resist the chaos that giving oneself over to these pleasures brings. As a result, it’s harder for them to see the downside. They will see it eventually but by that time it might be too late for them to do anything about it.

The moment the Left started to discredit itself by engaging in loud anti-Semitism, the Right decided to best it at the Jew-hating competition. If we can’t win anything worthwhile, let’s win the Hitler-praising contest, shall we?

The strategy of “let’s antagonize every voter category to make sure nobody ever votes for us” is bringing great electoral results. Not.

Instead of peeling off the other side’s voters, we are repealing voters.

Google “Candace Owens news” if you don’t know what I’m on about.

Absorption in the digital realm leaves kids feeling detached from their physical bodies. Virtual identities, invented through online play-acting and unwieldy pronouns, fuse with actual identities.

Joe Allen, Dark Æon

When very young people spend a lot of time interacting with a screen, they don’t grow into a normal awareness of their physicality. Their bodies are not completely real to them because they aren’t truly felt. The result is a subconscious but overpowering need to turn the body into a problem, endow it with festering wounds in order to be able to feel it. These wounds can be physical or mental but they are always invented and their purpose is finally to feel something.

As the technium expands, it transforms human nature. We are a civilization in transition. In many countries, the affirmation of transgender identity is enforced by law. Discrimination and “misgendering” are punishable by stiff fines, public shaming, and professional ruin. The Iron Rainbow hangs over our heads.

Joe Allen, Dark Æon: Transhumanism and the War against Humanity

The reason why the most recent interview makes such an emphasis on illegality is that the journalist needed an organizing idea for the piece. And her organizing idea was that I’m a victim because I’m a woman.

“Was it harder for you to get published because you are a woman? Was it harder to get tenure? To get recognition?” I said no to everything and explained that we have blind review. Nobody could have discriminated against me, even if they wanted, which nobody did.

But then I had to provide an alternative hook, so I did.

Actually, it’s easier to publish in my field when you are a woman. To give a single example, next week I’m speaking at a conference about masculinity. All speakers are female, and there’ll probably be an edited volume that will come out of it. But do you imagine an all-male conference panel on femininity? Or even on masculinity? Even if it did happen, it would be total crap because all men are allowed to say about masculinity is that it’s horrible. And I’ll give a talk that will be actually interesting because I don’t have these constraints.

These are the people we subserviently warn about upcoming terror attacks on their territory because God forbid they suffer any unpleasantness during the war they started:

And what do we gain from this eager subservience? When warned by Americans about the upcoming act of terror in Moscow, Putin publicly cussed them out and is now using the warning to insinuate that Americans knew about the terror attack because they organized it in the first place.

More proof that the US is not at war with Russia and, to the contrary, is positively disposed towards it:

Can you imagine Churchill warning Hitler that somebody was about to shoot Germans in Berlin in 1942?

Unfortunately, this American magnanimity is completely one-sided.

People get upset when I say the US soldiers are weak and pathetic but how would you characterize this?

It’s embarrassing to watch. See the dude with the fat butt who stands vapidly by while his comrades are pushed around and then runs away?

This unit should be renamed “anti-national guard.”

The whole thing is surreal. Yes, the Afghanistan withdrawal was embarrassing but at least it didn’t happen every day for years. This clown show does.

A terrible night for Ukraine. I didn’t sleep because I can’t while Kharkiv is being mass bombed. In the meantime, stupid Jack Sullivan is telling Ukraine not to bomb the Russian oil refineries because it’s mean, or something.

The Biden administration has been such a fail. They help Russia and Hamas, they send ginormous amounts of money to Iran so that Iran can give Russia even more Shaheed drones to destroy Ukraine. Domestically, they have the absolute gall to claim they reduced crime. Their vaunted crime reduction is in comparison with 2020, and the gullible among us don’t even notice the trick that’s pulled on them. The crime spike of 2020 came from the BLM and the resulting depolicing. These absolute cynics first engineer a huge crime wave and then want to be rewarded for bringing crime rates down in comparison to the crime wave of their own making.

I can’t, in good conscience, vote for these people. But I can’t vote for Trump either because he’s just as indecisive, dishonest and useless. Six years after becoming a citizen and being so excited finally to vote, I’ll probably sit out this presidential election because choosing between two shades of excrement is no choice at all.