Language needs something outside of language in order to function in much the same way that a propeller cannot function without air.  Language needs something to push against.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
  Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hardly matters;...
Read more

Against Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

Image
  CURTIS YARVIN IS A POSTMODERNIST  "They Hate Us For Our Freedom"   Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all thes...
Read more
Image
The right is convinced that politics (and economics) are downstream from culture. But the right is winning on the economic front, while losing on the cultural front. The left maintains that the economic base of society in the final instance determines its cultural (and political) superstructure.  ("It's the economy, stupid!")  But the left is winning on the cultural front, while losing on the economic front.  In other words, both sides see themselves as losing in the way that matters to them. Both sides see themselves as winning only in a superficial and ultimately even counterproductive way, while losing on the front that is fundamental and primary.  How can this be true? Why aren’t both sides winning on the issues that truly matter to them, especially since the opposing side doesn’t really care about those issues? Why aren’t we living in an egalitarian society in which class and other forms of inequality have been abolished, which is at the same time a so...
Read more