Marc Andreessen, in a NYT interview with Ross Douthat explains why a significant segment of Silicon Valley recently changed sides politically.
I think the Valley before me, from the ’50s through the ’70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in ’94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force. …
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.
Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.
Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat. …
Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.
Douthat: Those changes you’re talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?
Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it’s the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.
They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.
And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Thu Nguyen, a nonbinary city councilor for Worcester, Massachusetts with they/them pronouns, announced she is taking a month-long leave due to the unsafe and toxic culture after she was misgendered. She also filed official complaints with the city. pic.twitter.com/GHAK8CufuB
Georgy Kantor observes, and protests, the elimination of Classical and other Ancient Language Studies at many modern universities, and he is right.
Joseph Justus Scaliger. If you’re not a classicist or a historical linguist, you likely don’t know him. But if you are, he is a giant on whose shoulders you stand. Born in France, in 1540, he made his name at the Dutch university of Leiden. Here, at the lofty peak of the Renaissance, he reimagined what language could do. A polyglot — proficient in French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic — only someone like Scaliger could have achieved something like De emendatione temporum (“On correcting dates”). Freeing the ancient world from slavish Biblical interpretations, he utterly transformed Europe’s sense of deep history. With him, the continent first began to realise that the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia predated Greece and Israel by millennia. It would take centuries to properly decipher their scripts and languages, but that was the beginning of a revolution in historical understanding as profound as the Darwinian revolution in biology.
Scaliger showed that linguistic and textual scholarship is about far more than mere verbs or adjectives: it is a key to unlock our world. Now, though, his legacy is in danger of being abandoned. Over recent months, academics everywhere have been shocked by the news of cuts to long-established language programmes, including at Leiden. Among other languages, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew may all stop being offered. Arabic could soon vanish too: especially shocking at Leiden, home to the oldest chair of the language on earth. Yet if the decline has many causes, monoglot academic environments and budget cuts among them, the consequences are far from mundane. For if the trend continues, we will lose some of the best tools for cultural and historical understanding we have.
“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”
“I thought that would be about the number.”
“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”
“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”
“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”
“Oh yes. Often.”
“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”
“No, headmaster.”
“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”
“Yes, headmaster.”
“Then what do you intend to do?”
“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”
Shoppers in a Chicago supermarket had a reason to howl when a coyote was yanked out of the refrigerated section by a pair of officers — with the hair-raising moment caught on video.
The Aldi grocery store in the Windy City’s Humboldt Park neighborhood was like something out of a cartoon Monday as authorities used broomsticks to poke around shelves, according to the viral clip posted on social media.
An officer eventually grabbed what appeared to be a furry tail poking out of the shelves and furiously pulled before the wild animal shockingly emerged and landed on the market floor.
The gray coyote quickly scurried back between cold products, but was later taken into custody by animal control around 10 a.m., according to reports.
Kurt Schlichter does not believe the LA fires will cause California’s Blue State voters to wise up.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I’ve lived here 50-odd years, and I know the score. I got here when California was the Golden State, and now it’s the Charred Black State. It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving. That’s OK with the Democrats because it was the middle class that made California a Republican state for so long. They were the ones who demanded good government. Most of them are now in Texas or Idaho.
That leaves a bunch of really poor people and a few really rich ones. The poor people vote Democrat because the Dems feed them scraps, and the rich people vote Democrat because it makes them feel that they’re not the complete scumbags that, in many cases, they are. Have you noticed how it’s always the worst people who seem to be the most vocally liberal? Paging Harvey Weinstein – he probably worked with half the people whose houses burned down, and he probably tried to score with the other half.
The thing you must understand about the rich Californians who vote for Democrats – and not only vote for them but actively campaign for them and donate to them – is that this kind of leftism isn’t just a belief system. It’s their religion. Well, more accurately, it’s a substitute for religion. There’s an empty space inside every human being that normal people fill up with things like faith, family, and patriotism. The rich blue voters of California fill it up with commie gobbledygook. They add some wokeness, a dash of climate change, and a heaping helping of smug self-satisfaction. The resulting dog’s breakfast is what passes for their souls.
Gaston Glock’s decision to rely on a trigger safety overlooked the possibility that huge numbers of firearms novices and just-plain-idiots would choose his pistol or one of its numerous clone equivalents.
Texas rapper 2 Low demonstrated the hazard on a recent podcast from somebody called Mike D.
