All Thoughts Being Equal

I.   My friend Jon Bash is a very talented musician/composer , so it's safe to assume that he thinks very seriously about music in general. Recently he posted this article ( "How Popular Music's Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy" ) from a site called The Anti-Media, about a study examining the "reading level" of Billboard Top 40 songs. Stories about the study were passed around other places too, including The Guardian ( "Hip hop ain't top: new study reveals reading levels behind music lyrics" ) and The Onion 's A.V. Club ( "Popular songs are dumb and only getting dumber, says dumb study" ), with varying levels of skepticism and/or snark. Before getting in to any substantive discussion, however, I will first make fun of The Anti-Media for writing a really dumb article. Claire Bernish (Twitter handle: @ subversive_pen — Twitter bio: a Julian Assange quote) opens her turd-de-force with the following incredible paragraph-and...

In my previous post I wondered about the common feminist narrative of an overwhelming fear: that women face so many threats and imminent dangers that it's mentally exhausting just to get through the day. Rather than diagnose that directly (because politics is war and arguments are soldiers ) I want to examine another case of overwhelming fear: that of white male reactionaries. Why? Well, because I'm going to give a presentation on neoreaction later this month, but also because this is prima facie a "safer" discussion topic. The last section of Nick Land's summary of neoreaction (also known as NRx or the "Dark Enlightenment") includes a "multi-part subdigression into racial terror," and attempts to explain the deeper motivations behind stuff like John Derbyshire (formerly of National Review ) giving his son "the Talk" about basically avoiding black people unless a few prove themselves sufficiently safe to befriend. For the recor...

I'm only a few pages into Daniel Loxton's Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? (available in PDF here ) and it's already fascinating. I think I had heard a bit about how Harry Houdini leveraged his experience as a stage magician to combat the "spirit mediums" so common (and so fraudulent) in his day. What blew me away, though, was how far back these skeptical roots went. P. T. Barnum offered cash prizes to any psychic who could "pertinently" answer questions he had sealed in envelopes and stored somewhere else. Okay, you know your game's crooked when P. T. Barnum thinks your "humbug" has gone too far! Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, and M. Guillotin served on a special commission to the French monarchy to investigate "animal magnetism" healing touch quackery. Sort of like an 18th c. Justice League, but for science! and mostly French.   This stuff goes back yet another century, to the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Sir Tho...