The Post-Partisan Emporium

Thanks  to Saint  Jimmy for recommending this article... Emmanuel Todd: Nato will disintegrate if Ukraine loses By  Rob Lownie Nato will “disintegrate” if Ukraine loses its war with Russia, according to the French historian and public intellectual Emmanuel Todd. Speaking to Italian newspaper Corriere di Bologna this week, Todd claimed that “if Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans will last for a century”, but that if the US-backed Ukrainian effort fails, “Nato will disintegrate and Europe will be left free.” The comments were made during a tour to promote the Italian edition of Todd’s book The Defeat of the West, in which the author attributes Western decline to the increased secularisation of Anglosphere society and argues that European powers are becoming increasingly dependent on the United States. As he sees it, the Ukraine war has only highlighted this wider malaise. In the interview with Corriere di Bologna, he claimed that “the Ukra...

  The fatal flaw in Artificial Intelligence: Climate Change? by Leigh Haugen AI’s role in amplifying dominant narratives will continue to stifle dissent, limit open debate, and impose restrictive controls on society. If we allow this to continue unchecked, AI will become a tool for shaping thought, controlling discourse, and eroding the very freedoms it was meant to empower. This article originally appeared on  LinkedIn,  and is reproduced here with the author’s permission The development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed our world in many ways, making artificial intelligence (AI) a powerful tool capable of generating and interpreting massive amounts of information. These models, however, are fundamentally shaped by the data that feeds them—data taken from the internet, which is itself a collection of human input. While AI has the potential to aid in a variety of fields, there is a glaring flaw inherent to its very design: its reliance on human data. If this...

  Perfidy in Tehran Alastair Crooke     The West is in the throes of at least one, potentially two, crushing defeats at the moment – and so the question arises: Will lessons be learned? John Kerry, just last  week  at the  World Economic Forum , so clearly blurting out the truth:  “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to our ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence”. Translated: Governing is all about narrative control. Kerry articulates the ‘International Order’s’ solution to the unwelcome phenomenon of an uncontrolled populism and of a potential leader who speaks for the people: Simply, ‘freedom to speak’ is unacceptable to the prescriptions agreed by the ‘inter-agency’ – the institutionalised distillation of the ‘International Order’. Eric Weinstein  calls  this  The Unburdening:  The first Amendment; gender; merit; sovereignty; privacy; ethics; investigative journalism; borders; freedom … the Constit...

  Hurricane Hell The American Eschaton Came Early to Appalachia Hurricane Helene has devastated the Appalachian region. My wife and I live nearby, in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Though only a few hours away, we were thankfully untouched by the storm. My wife’s family lives in northwestern South Carolina. They had to evacuate their homes temporarily, but their homes are undamaged; given the utter devastation that struck just west of them, they are among the fortunate. The aftermath for the less fortunate is visible from space. But the view from space minimizes the damage. Far more has been lost than mere power lines. Entire towns have been washed away as if they never existed. Now, I do not generally cover “breaking news” here on the  Tree of Woe . Even the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene would not, in ordinary times, have brought me to blog about it. But, as I have said before, we no longer live in ordinary times - we live in extraordinary times, made al...