I believe it was Nietzsche who said we will never be rid of God until we stop believing in grammar. Since that did not fully work, the NYC educational apparatus is working hard to overthrow the oppressive authority of the quadratic formula.
A most pernicious mental habit is asking not whether anything is good or bad, right or wrong, but whether it is left or right, progressive or conservative.
If you do that long enough your mind will rot, and it seems to be very common.
Can her progressive fans tell me of one example where AOC did not simply uncritically (and stridently) embrace the most conventional, most unthoughtful "woke" consensus?
People forget that Communism was very "scientistic."
In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels.
That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too.
A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down.
The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together.
That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce.
By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky.
The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats.
Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.
Arguably, a nihilism powerful enough to undermine European Christianity will have an even more devastating impact on cultures that lack Christian antibodies.
I disagree with this view. This is, in fact, what a complete and successful assimilation looks like. She was likely raised to be a sweet hijabi girl with both restrained language and behavior. Her language and views, the self-justifying obscenity and the cultivated narcissistic rage, are more a product of the college-educated American middle-class culture than they are of her national and religious background.
One of the main problems of mass Muslim migration is not, as right-wing fantasies suggest, that it carries with it an alternative civilizational project, but that it is a failed and decomposed culture that fails to provide its adherents with moral character building that protects them from the worst pathologies of our times. And as such, it becomes a solvent, merely an accelerator of ongoing Western decomposition but not its author.
In the end in politics personnel is everything, and in the end US Democratic political personnel reflects all the cultural pathologies of the college educated secularized bourgeoisie. Even more than their economic interests!
Having to reveal to first-year college students that their K-12 education left them mathematically illiterate is so depressing.
A thing about Marxists is that even on the day somebody will murder them out of religious conviction they will *refuse* to believe that to be the real motivation.
"You are killing me because of a deep, structural socio-economic reason, you fool!"
I do have a hard time imagining one of our NYC bourgeois-intellectual leftists opening a bakery.
The entertaining part of a political clash of two nihilistic sides is observing each of the two being horrified by the nihilism of the other.
How the revolution is progressing in Milan:
lastampa.it/cronaca/2026/10/…
Personally, I suspect the problem with destructive rioters is that they are hate-filled nihilists. Their religious background, if they have one, comes into the picture in terms of failing to educate them to aspire to something better than looting boutiques and beating up people.
The only reason why people can think an LLM is "thinking" is because of the illusion of an instantaneous response. If people performed the same calculation over a few centuries using paper and pen, at no point in time would anybody believe there is thinking going on.
Del Noce thought that the idea of revolution has been the defining concept of modern political history, but as far as I know it has not played a major role in anglo-american political thought, because of its deistic-liberal inclinations.
If true, this means something, but I will let you decide what it means.
Report: 70% of Moroccans that Invaded Ceuta Claim to Be ‘Gay’ in Asylum Requests trib.al/COH428u
The funny thing about the modern left is that because it is not philosophically equipped to build real community or to foster authentic human solidarity, it always ends up being the political home of the *losing* (and thus "grieving") bourgeois secular individualists.
One of the many harmful effects of mid-20th century social sciences has been the corruption of the word "culture", whereby it means generically "ways of living and thinking" as opposed to its original sense of "cultivation of humanity" which involved critical awareness.








