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Category: Modernity

  • The Left Frets About Total Information Awareness Again

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/american-panopticon/682616

    https://archive.ph/qneQl

    (archive of https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html )

    Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.

    President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

    What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

    “This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”

    Rest at link.

  • AI Disruption in the Job Markets

    An article from Harvard Gazette (the internal newspaper for employees of Harvard University).

    But AI is also an undeniable factor. Even before Trump took office, tech giants were implementing mass layoffs while making huge investments in AI tech. Global management consulting firm McKinsey projects that by 2030, 30 percent of current US jobs could be automated. Goldman Sachs said that number could rise to 50 percent by 2045.

    Is AI already shaking up labor market? — Harvard Gazette

  • The Real Problem with Spain and Portugal’s Grid

    Reprint of https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/the-real-problem-with-spain-and-portugals-electrical-grid.2002/ (Monday, 4/28/2025) at the Phora, a private forum, to make thread from the ‘Electricools’ subforum public:

    … in Electricool terms: There is ‘Grid Inertia’ and ‘Grid Frequency’ and sudden drops in power capacity (‘rare atmospheric conditions’) can cause a grid frequency instability

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  • High Attitude Low Oxygen Injections for Gaia

    Good Lord. Someone has been playing too much HALO:

    https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024EF005567

    Low-Altitude High-Latitude Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Is Feasible With Existing Aircraft

  • Review of Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory trilogy

    Review of Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory trilogy | TBC

    This thread will (eventually) review all three volumes of Dugin’s 4PT trilogy

    – The Fourth Political Theory (v. 1, 2009)
    – The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory (v. 2, 2017)
    – Politica Aeterna: Political Platonism (v. 3, 2024)

    His current work on Trumpism (_The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers _), and the emerging Multipolar World Order, is very much in progress as are the events defining it. It is thus more collections of recent articles, often of different vintage, than a mature, considered work of political theory.

    I will start _in medias res_ with v. 2, because it is both recent and sets up the latest work — and together these works have not been as extensively reviewed and disussed as the 16 year old original publication in the series. At that point, we will be able to come back and review the work.

    Here, to get us started, is a comparative chart of the four political theories — the first three are liberalism, Communism, and fascism, with the last including related ideologies as Mussolini or Peronism.

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  • Charles Hugh-Smith on Hypernormality

    What’s “Normal” in a Hyper-Normalized World?

    Possibly interesting book mentioned therein:

  • Greer: Lords of the Fall and the King in Orange

    Lords of the Fall – Ecosophia

    It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials, while billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk frantically conducted competing orchestras of braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants. The only possible word for the cacophony that resulted is “Wagnerian.”

    *Rest at the Link*

  • Dugin: The Return of the Eurasian Macro-State

    The Return of the Eurasian Macro-State – by Alexander Dugin

    Alexander Dugin argues that the restoration of a civilizational bloc in the post-Soviet and post-imperial space is inevitable.

    When it became clear that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)1 could not fulfill the task of integration, the Eurasian Union2 was created. But it was founded solely on economic ideas. And since integration between countries cannot be achieved on economic grounds alone, this idea stalled once again. Only in the creation of the Russia-Belarus Union State3 have certain successes been achieved.

    Now we have reached a moment where a global restructuring of the entire world has begun. In these conditions, only great powers capable of integration will be able to preserve their sovereignty. Small states are already being forced to choose which great power to align with. If they fail to make this choice, they face the grim prospect of being torn apart under the pressure of these great powers, which are now becoming the primary and sole actors in global politics.

    This is the multipolar world, which we may have imagined quite differently. Yes, it is rather strict, with very rigid rules, and if you do not possess fundamental economic, political, military, strategic, resource, and territorial sovereignty, your fate is grim. One must choose a bloc to join. And the only reasonable path for the majority of post-Soviet states is to become part of a Eurasian macro-state.

    This is being discussed more and more frequently at various levels. Of course, many small states still cling to ambitious illusions of building something sovereign and equidistant from both Russia and the West. But these illusions are gradually fading, especially against the backdrop of our steady progress toward final victory in Ukraine.

    The creation of a macro-state, which is to emerge in the space once occupied by the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, is a historically inevitable process. It is the only way to preserve sovereignty for all participants in this new cycle of state-building. This will make it possible to resolve not only the fate of our “new” territories, not only that of Ukraine, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, but also that of Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, and even Azerbaijan. All of these peoples will find a place within the macro-state — one in which they will not lose but rather strengthen their sovereignty.

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  • Happy Patriots’ Day and Great and Holy Saturday

    The American Conservative Revolution | Page 3 | Phora Nova

    Dear Mac,

    The only way, in retrospect, that i can be alright with the American Revolution is that it was a seperation from Guelph rebels who had themselves turned against the Roman Imperium.

    Anyway, happy Patriot’s day.

    Remember that the entire hemisphere celebrates, with Russia, the outcome of 1812. The French Revolution had its good and bad points — as a peasant revolt by a Roman substrate population against their Frankish overlords, it makes a certain amount of sense. But then we have Napoleon… who uprooted Roman Civil Law (leaving only Scotland and Lousiana as relics of it), and of course invaded the Ukraine ;)

    I think what the Founding Fathers proved both by their Wisdom and their Folly is that Heretics cannot form a stable government in the long run, because they do not have a clear sense of what the ‘Salus Populi’ even is, because of a failed understanding of Anthropology and Ecology, etc.

    Only Holy Orthodoxy can save this Hemisphere and Country, is my current understanding. A bit sharpened now by events of 2020-2025.

    When Pascha is over, I will sharpen my points about Palamism implicit in my mention of Sherrard on this thread, but on which I have yet to expand: https://thephora.net/phoranova/inde…lism-in-orthodox-christianity-and-islam.1941/

  • Will AIs Kills Us all by 2027 postscript

    Comment from https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/ai-2027-the-polycule-has-a-new-nuclear-threat-for-us.2999/

    It’s a surprisingly dated projection. “Brute scaling will lead to AGI” was the party line two years ago because it was a great way to pull in investors but no one really believes it anymore.  Without a winner-take-all effect ensuring that AGI can only be created by quasi-national lab, containment becomes infeasible because the big breakthrough could come from anywhere.

    Scott Alexander and friends are still hung up on the AI box experiment and have a hard time conceiving of AGI as anything other than an Eliezer-like intelligence trying to reason its way out of jail.

    It’s also a surprisingly “unagentic” view of AI. […]

    I quite agree as far as the specific narrative proffered.  The authors know that a good campfire story reels ’em in and that’s fine.  There *is* a danger to Humankind there though, just not the exact way they interpret it.  If you replace ‘artificial intelligences’ with ‘devils’, and ‘alignment’ with Podvig for the Greater Jihad, you will see that the article and even the narrative can be read with in-sight and profit.  But I digress…

    The models themselves and their training is ‘not the problem’  It’s not the models that need to be put in a box, but the people who use them.

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