I read Neoreaction a Basilisk a few years ago. It was a hard slog, trying to wade through all the neoreactionary conservative garbage, and stories about Thiel and Yudkowski and Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. They’re all terrible writers and communicators who are only intelligible to people who have already been infected with their mind-virus. No, don’t try to defend Less Wrong to me — I tried giving them the benefit of the doubt long ago, and found myself sinking into a quicksand of nonsense generated by people who insisted they were the most logical and rational people on Earth.

I don’t generally recommend the book, because it’s very much a specialist tome. It’s like maybe a professional journal on the psychology of mass murderers is a good thing for experts to read, but for the rest of us, no thank you, we don’t need the nightmares. That’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, thorough and expert, but my god, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of hemlock.

If you really want to savor the flavor, Tucker Carlson interviewed Yarvin. It’s amazing. Carlson starts by saying that pretty much all of modern philosophy is an exercise in narcissism, but Yarvin is one of the few philosophers who sees through all the liberal nonsense. Yarvin is not a philosopher. He’s a software engineer with no expertise in philosophy at all, which tells you something about Carlson honesty and neoreactionary pretense.

Maybe this interview with the author, Elizabeth Sandifer is enough of a taste to let you know how awful and horrible and inane the whole neoreactionary movement is, without listening to pair of pompous asses on Fox News.

Her summary of Yarvin:

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

I think you can see why he appeals to authoritarians. I love this pithy summary of the whole movement.

To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos, stupid. Donald Trump, Vox Day, stupid, stupid, stupid. MAGA and The Daily Stormer are stupid. Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

Yes! That is the entire right wing right now. It’s true of Republicans, creationists, and flat-earthers. Tucker Carlson, stupid. All the idiots saying we can’t enact reasonable gun control, stupid. The people demanding that we punish women for getting abortions, stupid. Billionaires, stupid.

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If you get through that interview, you might also enjoy Sandifer’s deconstruction of Slate Star Codex, yet another scion of the poisonous bowels of Less Wrong.

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The stupidity might be congenital.

I read this story and thought it was too stupid to be The Onion, but maybe was pointless enough to the Babylon Bee…but no! It’s from the Daily Beast!

Far-right provocateur and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos has found a new gig: Capitol Hill intern for MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Yiannopoulos, 37, posted to Telegram on Monday morning a photo of what appeared to be a newly issued congressional badge, placed atop a Louis Vuitton briefcase.

“I’ve finally been persuaded out of retirement,” wrote the British right-wing media troll. “But my skills are a bit rusty, so the best role I could land was an unpaid internship with a friend. Pray for me!”

He added: “Mummy always said I’d end up in government.”

Yiannopoulos didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a statement provided via her spokesperson, Rep. Greene confirmed to The Daily Beast that Yiannopoulos is interning in her office.

“So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life,” Greene told The Daily Beast. “Great story!”

I had to check other sources, because this is nuts. Mediaite? Check. Vice? Check. Newsweek? Check. Forbes? Check. Salon? Check. Washington Post? Check.

There’s no avoiding the truth here. The circus is in town, and the clowns have set up shop in the capitol.

I picture all the writers at the satire sites throwing up their heads in despair, and crying at their desks.

I don’t know that the 21st century reality is any better.

Should I print this out and add it to my grandchildren’s Richard Scarry books, or do you think it would be too scary?

It does do a good job of preparing them for what they’re getting into.

Kirk Cameron is trying hard to be relevant again. He’s been making more noise about the wickedness of our secular culture and how the schools are bad.

Cameron takes issue with the perspective that a child’s education should be left solely to the so-called experts, without parents’ input. “And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at. Who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children? Is it the parents or is it the government?”

He went on to strongly criticize “those who are rotting out the minds and souls of America’s children” and said they were “spreading a terminal disease, not education.”

“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love for our great country: critical race theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether they want to be a boy or a girl, The 1619 Project,” he said.

Notice what he left out? The thing he is most famous for, besides making very bad movies? He doesn’t complain about science and evolution. He appeared in that infamous banana video with Ray Comfrot. Cameron is clearly trying to extend his ghastly influence beyond his usual gang of demented evangelicals to demented generic far right loons. There is a lot of overlap in those two categories, but he seems to be aware that getting specific about his crazy beliefs is going to be a deal breaker for some narrow subset of potential followers. Vague discontent is much more marketable.

I want the next person to interview him to ask him about bananas.

What is it? I’m an American, I forget.

No, I kid. Of course I know what it is. It’s the day we commemorate all the soldiers who died brutal, bloody deaths in vicious wars in order to give us a three day weekend.

I guess here in Morris we also get a benediction and brunch out of their sacrifice. Woo hoo. All I can say is that I have a son in the army, the USA better not ever give me an excuse to visit a grave.

ACAB is a pithy summary, but now we learn that All Cops Are Cowards, too.

Community members including relatives of students expressed anger and frustration Thursday about the time it took to end the mass shooting at an elementary school here, as police laid out a timeline with new details about their response.

Victor Escalon, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a briefing that the now-deceased gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, lingered outside Robb Elementary for 12 minutes firing shots before walking into the school and barricading himself in a classroom where he killed 19 children and two teachers.

Mr. Escalon said he couldn’t say why no one stopped Ramos from entering the school during that time Tuesday. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes after he entered the school, Mr. Escalon said.

So what were these cops doing while hanging about outside the school? They were roughing up the parents who had rushed to the school as soon as the news got out.

A Border Patrol tactical team went into the school an hour later, around 12:40 p.m., was able to get into the classroom and kill Ramos, Mr. Escalon said.

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents waiting outside the school who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner. After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for actively intervening in an active investigation.

Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

Ms. Gomez had more guts than the cops, I guess.

But, you know, the guy inside had a gun. The parents were unarmed, so they were a preferred target by the police.

Videos circulated on social media Wednesday and Thursday of frantic family members trying to get access to Robb Elementary as the attack was unfolding, some of them yelling at police who blocked them from entering.

“Shoot him or something!” a woman’s voice can be heard yelling on a video, before a man is heard saying about the officers, “They’re all just [expletive] parked outside, dude. They need to go in there.”

Parents can be heard yelling to each other that their kids were inside the school and that they needed to get in. A woman can be heard yelling at a police officer, “He’s one person! Take him out!”

Police aren’t there to stop crime. Their job is to bully civilians.

After the confrontation ended with Ramos dead, school buses began to arrive to transport students from the school, according to Ms. Gomez. She said she saw police use a Taser on a local father who approached the bus to collect his child.

“They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That’s how it felt,” Ms. Gomez said.

On a more positive note, there was one person there who was more useless than the cops.

“God is here with us tonight,” Pastor Tony Gruben, of Baptist Temple Church, told the people gathered at the Uvalde County Fairplex. “God still loves you and God still loves those little children.”

A local resident comments.

The Uvalde police department has a $4 million budget. I don’t think the citizens got their money’s worth.

…Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said “it is a fact” that due to the quick response of law enforcement officials, “they were able to save lives. Unfortunately, not enough,” in a press conference Wednesday. Abbott went on to list more than 20 state and federal agencies, including more than two dozen law enforcement agencies, involved in responding to the shooting. (These included immigration enforcement agencies housed under the Department of Homeland Security, which promised to refrain from deporting and arresting people in the area “to the fullest extent possible” for the time being.)

An article in the Star-Tribune caught my eye: Why did Scandinavian immigrants choose Minnesota? Even before I read it, I could guess why. I could also guess what other people would say.

Minnesota’s Scandinavian roots are a big part of the state’s national identity, from the Vikings football team to the Norwegian bachelor farmers of Lake Wobegon.

That Scandinavian stereotype harks back to an era when thousands of Swedish and Norwegian people traveled across the globe to establish thriving enclaves in the burgeoning frontier of Minnesota. But why Minnesota?

“When I ask anyone just in casual conversation, they all just say, ‘Well, because it’s cold here too!'” said reader Terri Stough, who moved to Minnesota in 2018. “And that kind of indicates to me that nobody knows the real reason.”

Right, it’s because Minnesota is like Norway and Sweden. Wrong. I’ve been to Norway, and there’s no way anyone could confuse Minnesota with Norway. One is flat, the other is mountainous; one is near the ocean, with deep fjords, the other is mostly landlocked, with one shore on a huge freshwater lake; one is prairie, the other is pine forest. They’re both in northern regions, with cold winters, but that’s about it.

The better answer is that it was all about the timing.

The abridged explanation is that America’s westward expansion — and the displacement of Native people that accompanied it — reached Minnesota around the same time that Swedes and Norwegians were fleeing bad conditions in their home countries. Aided by free land from the federal government, new immigrants formed settlements and encouraged friends and family back home to join them.

Another contributor is 19th century propaganda.

Prominent Swedish author Fredrika Bremer helped establish the area’s reputation as a hub for Scandinavians. Bremer journeyed to the Minnesota Territory in 1850 and wrote letters home that were later published into a Swedish book.

“This Minnesota is a glorious country, and just the country for northern emigrants,” Bremer wrote. “Just the country for a new Scandinavia.”

Minnesota is a fine place, good farmland, the weather isn’t as bad as its reputation would imply. The bandwagon effect also helped, with the early Scandinavian settlers writing home to tell everyone that they should join them. They were probably desperately lonely.

Among those letters was one sent by Norwegian immigrant Jens Grønbek, who wrote to his brother-in-law in Norway in 1867 trumpeting, among other things, the free land available through the Homestead Act.

“If you find farming in Norway unrewarding and your earnings at sea are poor, I advise you … to abandon everything, and — if you can raise $600 — to come to Minnesota,” Grønbek wrote, according to the book.

Grønbek told his friend that he should not worry about the voyage, adding this racist assessment: “Neither should you be alarmed about Indians or other trolls in America, for the former are now chased away,” Grønbek wrote.

There’s always racism, too.

Minnesota’s majority population is of German descent, though. So why doesn’t the state have a reputation as a Little Germany? Again, history.

But that German culture was suppressed for a number of reasons, Bredemus explained. Many people did not trust Germans as a result of World War I. Germans also organized unions, which were controversial. And drinking is a part of German culture, a practice that was demonized by puritanical groups during Prohibition.

During the war, statues were torn down, streets and buildings were renamed, and a new Minnesota Commission of Public Safety harassed the state’s German population while trying to root out unpatriotic sentiments, Bredemus said.

Meanwhile, next door in Wisconsin, Bratwurst und Bier are staples. It’s probably why the University of Wisconsin has a magnificent beer hall in the student union, while the University of Minnesota is dry. I really wouldn’t mind more beer and labor unions here.

But then, I’m descended from Scandinavians who first settled in Minnesota, and then flocked to Washington state around WWII, discovering then that that was the place more like Norway, only a bit warmer, so I knew all that. Paradise!