Links & Such (February 2025)
Decided to start doing a links post. We’ll see if it sticks, but I like the idea of collating things I find interested in one place and being able to share, then go back and find them.
I enjoyed reading this article on “The New Control Society”. The site, The New Atlantis is… interesting? Seems to be a lot of Christian writers against modern tech and such. Might check more of their stuff out. Major quote I liked:
This is why we suspect that those who most loudly proclaim they are “following the science,” “following the process,” or “following the markets” are actually engaged in elaborate forms of ventriloquy. We can sense that power is operating. We believe we can tell when we are being disadvantaged and others advantaged. We believe we can sense — in the direction of the swarm, in the outputs of the algorithm, in when the protocol does or does not deliver the goods — some hidden hand, some force behind the scene. We experience growing paranoia about manipulation, and the growing reality of manipulation, in almost no relation to each other. We know that nothing that channels so much power and wealth, on which so much depends, can ever escape politics. But we cannot glimpse the operations of power: the protocol demands that the most effective exercises of power are the most invisible.
Protocol politics is fundamentally characterized by acephalousness — no head, no agency, no accountability. And yet we feel the ghost in the machine, the power that shapes the contours of our lives, even as we can almost never pin it down. As recounted in the last entry in this essay series, “An America of Secrets” [Summer 2023], we occasionally catch power after the fact thanks to transparency laws or government leaks. These serve not to bolster the legitimacy of the protocol but to make us wonder about all the things we missed.
I definitely agree that there’s a diffusion of responsibility with modern protocols, and a sneaky sense that someone somewhere is expressing power, but most kooky conspiracy theories don’t really get at it.
Found this hilarious article in the National Library of Medicine that describes a patient insisting his chicken be treated first despite him being on the verge of death. Wild stuff!
IT’S A CHICKEN’, he announced proudly, as if on a particularly unusual labour ward.
It was immediately clear the chicken had seen better days. Being hidden in a dark, stuffy bag in a patient cupboard for 2 days dramatically increases one’s morbidity and mortality figures; as demonstrated by the chicken suffering agonal breathing while knocking on death’s door.
The chicken owner too realised the poor prognostic situation facing his beloved pet, and his demeanour shifted to one of passionate verbal and physical protection of ‘Chicken’. It became clear that as an emergency admission and with no friends or next of kin in the UK to look after his pet of 7 years, he saw no option but to bring Chicken with him. Undergoing a gastroscopy was evidently not top of his priority list, despite repeated advice that his own life was in danger. Security were called, senior nursing staff arrived and the rest of the HDU bay cleared of patients. A prior arterial blood gas had shown a haemoglobin of 61 g/dL and the need for urgent scoping was clear. But the patient continued to refuse; sitting on the floor, covered in blood, quietly cradling his dying pet, utterly overcome with grief.
Poor Chicken.
Apparently a bunch of people think Elon Musk is stupid? Baffles the mind. Noah Smith writes about it here.
N.S. Lyons came out with another banger - American Strong Gods. Love this one. The main argument is as follows:
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.
The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.
I actually very much agree with this narrative, and it provides an excellent reason as to why atomization has been increasing. Now that being said, atomization was already an issue pre-WW2, but it does perhaps show the issue inching into a new era.
I think the decline of religion especially had its roots in the Protestant Reformation, and everything else is basically downstream of that in my mind. Perhaps too simplistic of a picture, but still.
Hopefully we’re finally seeing a large scale religious revival! Time will tell.
Love this meme. Very accurately describes the type of people I find SUPER annoying on X. Basically just people high on their own spiritual supply talking shit to others. I can sometimes get in this mode, but I’m trying to stop. ;D
A wonderful prayer I read in Christ the Eternal Tao:
Lord, I do not know what to beg of You. You alone know what is needed for me. You love me more than I know how to love You. Oh Father, give to your slave that for which I do not even know how to beg. I do not dare to ask for either boons or for consolation. I am only standing before You with my heart open to You. You see my needs, which I do not even know. See and deal with me according to Your mercy, purge and heal me. Humble and raise me. I am in awe before You and I’m silent before Your will and Your unfathomable ways for me. I’m bringing myself as a sacrifice to You teach me to pray. Pray Yourself within me. Amen.
I’m sick again and it seems related to emotional release. Might write up a blog at some point about the parallel, how I often seem to get sick for a week or two after doing a big emotional release. Perhaps it’s a thing! Who knows.
That’s all for now.
I like the prayer