#lydia — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #lydia, aggregated by home.social.
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https://www.fogolf.com/1231798/lydia-kos-perfect-wedge-10-years-on-the-shot-that-changed-her-place-in-golf-history/ Lydia Ko’s ‘perfect’ wedge 10 years on: The shot that changed her place in golf history #10 #best #Changed #Golf #GolfNews #golfing #have #her #history #in #KOs #LYDIA #on #PERFECT #Place #Shot #Shots #that #The #There #wedge #with #would #YEARS #Zealand
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https://www.fogolf.com/1231798/lydia-kos-perfect-wedge-10-years-on-the-shot-that-changed-her-place-in-golf-history/ Lydia Ko’s ‘perfect’ wedge 10 years on: The shot that changed her place in golf history #10 #best #Changed #Golf #GolfNews #golfing #have #her #history #in #KOs #LYDIA #on #PERFECT #Place #Shot #Shots #that #The #There #wedge #with #would #YEARS #Zealand
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正義女神|高成彬Lydia好有CP感 劉倬昕喺結局嗌到聲沙
https://www.am730.com.hk/娛樂/1024441/正義女神-高成彬lydia好有cp感-劉倬昕喺結局嗌到聲沙 -
... anyone else overwhelmed with a sudden surge of nausea and deja vu?
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... anyone else overwhelmed with a sudden surge of nausea and deja vu?
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... anyone else overwhelmed with a sudden surge of nausea and deja vu?
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... anyone else overwhelmed with a sudden surge of nausea and deja vu?
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THE BIGLIEST EMPIRE, WOW
https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1881145/the-bigliest-empire-wow
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THE BIGLIEST EMPIRE, WOW
https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1881145/the-bigliest-empire-wow
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Elton John Oscars watch party: Meet auctioneer Lydia Fenet
https://misryoum.com/us/lifestyle/elton-john-oscars-watch-party-meet-auctioneer-lydia/
“What you’re looking for as an auctioneer is someone who’s truly fearless onstage,” says auctioneer Lydia Fenet. Except when they’re onstage next to Elton John, who hosts his eponymous AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party and fundraiser annually, for...
#Elton #John #Oscars #watch #party #Meet #auctioneer #Lydia #Fenet #US_News_Hub #misryoum_com
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Where to Find Kopis and Machaira Swords
A long kopis or machaira in a museum in Rimini. Not all Greek swords or cleavers were short. This one is more than nine times as long as the grip, probably around 84 cm in a straight line from pommel to point. Photo Sean Manning, 2018.Over on corporate social media, I often see people looking at copies of Illyrian and Iberian swords to understand Greek cleavers. Long war knives spread from Anatolia to Iberia before the Roman empire, but each culture had its own interpretation of these knives. The Iberian swords are very charismatic with decorative fullers and inlays and deep bends, but different from the Greek version of this weapon. Modern copies always differ from the originals, and most of them are based on other modern copies not the artifacts themselves. So this month I will talk about where to find photos and drawings of the original artifacts, then about why these images take a bit of work to find. I hope that will interest different parts of my readership and that I have time for a different topic in March.
Books with Original Artifacts
People reading this post are probably looking for in the weapons with handguards and hooked pommels in the form of a bird’s head (similar swords from other cultures often have hilts shaped like a horse’s head). However, these grew out of earlier large knives and cleavers which might have been weapons or might have been more tools for butchers and priests sacrificing livestock. Archaeologists are interested in development over time so often cover both the earlier and the later forms.
- Probably the best place to start is Marek Verčík‘s book. He has scaled drawings with cross-sections of 14 weapons, a typology with eight groups, and a catalogue of 86 from the Balkans with full citations. They are not highly technical. His drawings and measurements are taken from earlier publications. Marek Verčík, Die barbarischen Einflüsse in der griechischen Bewaffnung (Rahden-im-Westf.: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH, 2014)
- There are all kinds of artifacts from northern Greece in the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation e-Library. The online viewer is a bit awkward and there are no downloads but anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can view these books. Ask your favourite library to request a free print copy.
- There are weights, measurements, and cross-section drawings of several from Olympia in: Holger Baitinger, Die Angriffswaffen aus Olympia (De Gruyter, 2001). This is out of print but available in academic libraries and scans of the section on swords are available on thee International Hoplite Discussion facebook group under “files.”
- The sanctuary of Apollo at Kalapodi was full of edged weapons when the Persians burned it in 480 BCE. You can find scale drawings and measurements and a typology in Hans-Otto Schmitt, “Die Angriffswaffen” in Rainer C.S. Felsch, ed., Kalapodi: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen im Heiligtum der Artemis und des Apollon von Hyampolis in der antiken Phokis, Band II (Philipp von Zabern: Mainz-am-Rhein, 2007) pp. 423-551, Taf. 67-106
- Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier has excellent scale drawings of a few as well as studies of their construction and historical development. This was published in the series Prähistorische Bronzefunde but covers steel swords and long knives as well. Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier, Die Schwerter in Griechenland (ausserhalb der Peloponnes), Bulgarien und Albanien (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 1993)
- There is one very nice kopis from Golyamata Mogila in Daniela Agre, The Tumulus of Golyamata Mogila near the villages of Malomirovo and Zlatinitsa (Sofia: Avalon Publishing, 2011). You can download this book from academia.edu and I have blogged about it.
- There are photos and drawings of a kopis from Sardis on the Sardis Expedition website (Sardis no. M95.007).
- There are photos of another machaira from Seyitömer Höyük in Anatolia in an article by Gökhan Coşkun in the journal Adalya (2017) https://izlik.org/JA22RY85DF
- Yvone Innall has photos and measurements of three from Italy in section 5.3 of her PhD thesis: Yvonne L. Inall, A Typological Assessment of Iron Age Weapons in South Italy (PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2009) pp. 123-126 (type 5) http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5464
- Fernando Quesada Sanz covers Italian single-edged swords in his books and articles on their relatives in Iberia, above all: Fernando Quesada Sanz, El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). I have not seen this one yet!
There is one more from Asia Minor and many from Illyria (Albania and former Yugoslavia). I’m not going to go into those because the books and websites above will give you plenty to get started and are relatively accessible for English speakers.1 None should give your library’s Interlibrary Loan service too much trouble, but a Bulgarian article from the 1930s might.
What Those Artifacts Look Like When Excavated
The arms from a funeral pyre shortly after they were excavated. They are covered with active rust and blend into each other and the earth. The machaira sword is at the top with the handguard facing up and the point to the left. Image from Stoyanov, T., Mikov, R. and Dzhanfezova, T. (2013) “Надгробна могила от ранната елинистическа епоха край с. Кабиле, Ямболско: Early Hellenistic tumulus near the village of Kabyle, Yambol district”, Bulgarian e-Journal of Archaeology | Българско е-Списание за Археология, 3(2), figure 21.Greece is short of marshes, deep muddy rivers, and peat bogs. Most ancient weapons survive because they were buried with the dead or devoted to the gods at temples which were burned down or decided to bury some old offerings to make room for new ones. (At Olympia they used them to fill in wells and reinforce the banks of the stadium).
Its hard to keep iron and steel from rusting for 2500 years. Buried iron is often covered with active red rust as soon as it is exposed to fresh oxygen. And many of these weapons were not in good shape when they entered the ground. Weapons from burials were often ritually destroyed by heating them up and folding them like an accordion or breaking off projecting parts. Many of these were extremely quick and light weapons despite being made of soft steel (no ancient Greek, Roman, or Mesopotamian weapon is known to have been successfully quenched).2 The thinner the steel, the less has to rust away before the weapon falls to pieces. Many were buried in their scabbards which have decayed and left encrustations on the blades. This is good if you study textiles and leather from the traces they left, but frustrating if you want to understand the blade (the famous Kirkburn Sword from the Arras Culture in Yorkshire rusted into its enameled bronze and iron sheath in the 2300 years it spent in a grave). So it takes long and tedious work in the conservation laboratory to preserve these weapons, and after conservation they are blackened, twisted, and misshapen. They often fall apart into several pieces.
One of the technical terms is mineralization: the remains of these weapons are no longer iron and steel, but something like very rich iron ore in the shape of the lost weapon. You can study mineralized iron.
Archaeologists in the early 20th century were not very interested in rusted lumps of iron, and in southern Greece burials no longer contain weapons by the time that the fighting knives with handguards appear. So early excavations of cemeteries and city centres did not turn up many. In recent times, most archaeological finds are stuck in the country where they were found. Most of the serious archaeology in Greece and Bulgaria is by Greeks, Bulgarians, and Germans. So the original objects are in museums in Greece, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria and published in continental European languages. Photographs are not very helpful, you need to spend hours sitting with the objects and drawing them, after the conservation team spent weeks carefully cleaning the iron and stopping the active rust.
Books with all those drawings and measurements are expensive because they need archival-quality paper and skilled editing and have a limited audience. Tens of thousands of people are not willing to buy books about ancient Greek weapons. Often a few edged weapons are published with hundreds of other artifacts, and the price of the book has to cover all of those. There is not yet a large market of makers and reenactors who study the artifacts like in Viking Age archaeology or Imperial Roman archaeology. Without that large market, print runs remain around 200-400 copies, and the price of each copy is high.
There is now a move towards open access in academia: share the book or article freely online and let those who want a paper copy pay for it. This has only been practical for the past twenty years or so and it raises big questions of how to pay for services like layout and proofreading and image processing. There is also a movement towards open data (making individual images or databases searchable) but that requires even more IT services. In the long run open access will be the solution, but academia moves slowly, especially fields which are being dismantled. The Sardis Expedition database and the journal Adalya above are excellent open-access projects.
Why Some Museums Don’t Publish Their Images Online
Many ancient weapons are in regional museums with very limited budgets and IT staffs. Finds in big museums in national capitals are better known. For example, Peter Connolly painted a kopis from Korfu in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and today there are several reproductions of it. The thing that distinguishes this from a dozen other weapons is that its on display in a museum that almost every visitor to Greece sees, whereas only a few people see the regional museum in Korfu. Professional photography with good lighting and a neutral background is not free either, it takes time to set up and clean up and a display area may have to be closed down during visiting hours. The Royal Ontario Museum can afford to digitalize much more than a museum in rural Macedonia, even before the chatbot swarms started to use up expensive bandwidth and drove some sites offline or behind paywalls. Many museums and regional archaeological services have large backlogs of objects that need conserving and cataloguing, so anything else they do has to be better than that. And of course they prioritize sharing things in the language that the taxpayers who fund them speak.
Why Doesn’t Someone Else Do It?
Books on ancient warfare for a general audience, from publishers such as Osprey and Pen & Sword, could print photos and drawings of these objects. I think that one reason they rarely do this is that contacting institutions in another country that speaks a minority language seems intimidating. Museum bureaucracy can be cumbersome at best, and a language barrier makes that even more difficult. People who write books like this are often in a hurry, so they start with big institutions in their own country and objects that people already recognize. Peter Connolly picked an unusually well-preserved kopis to paint, and many people have made copies of that.
Another reason is that people who buy illustrated books want to see pretty things. Bronzes and ceramics are prettier and easier to understand than lumps of rust that were once edged weapons. It takes skill and money to draw a twisted and rusted weapon, and not every book is written by an artist like Peter Connolly, Ewart Oakeshott, or Roland Warzecha who can see what the original was like.
I know two people who have spent time in small museums in northern Greece sketching and weighing and photographing ancient weapons. If you can travel there, it can be done. Some museums have friendly staff, just nobody dedicated to researching ancient weapons.
Its also possible for anyone to start a list like this on a service like WordPress or Pinterest. Fans of other periods do this all the time. Closed services that you have to log in to see are not the best choice, and ‘free’ services have risks too, but anything you share and collaborate on is better than nothing. Just give as much information as you can about where something came from (reverse image search tools like TinEye are your friend).
I previously wrote about how ancient Greek kit is hard to make. Archaeologists have published most of what you need to know to make it, but you have to track down difficult books in foreign languages. You just can’t get all that information with a quick Google search, and it won’t be as easy to interpret as a sixteenth-century sword in a vitrine. That is frustrating in some ways, but its also what makes this a stimulating hobby.
(scheduled 26 February 2026)
- I am intrigued by the drawings in Maja Parović-Pešikan. “Grčka mahajra i problem krivih mačeva.” Godišnjak Centra za balkanološka ispitivanja 20 pp. 25-52. I think that her “Greek machairas” in Illyria might be like British copies of an Austro-Hungarian pallasch rather than objects made by Greeks in a style Greeks would recognize. You can download this with free registration from https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=750062 ↩︎
- The place to start is Photos, Euphemia (1987) Early extractive iron metallurgy in N Greece : a unified approach to regional archaeometallurgy. Doctoral thesis , University of London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1348990/ and Effi Photos, “Metallographic Investigation of Iron Artefacts from EIA Cemetery at Vergina,” Prähistorische Zeitschrift (Berlin) 64 (1989) pp. 146-149 ↩︎
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Friend Destiny took us on a day trip to New York City a few years ago, to see "BEETLEJUICE" on Broadway. It was amazing! #newyork #nyc #newyorkcity #beetlejuice #betelguise #ghost #ghosts #ghoststory #ghoststories #lydia #timessquare #broadway #bustrip #daytrip #vacation #hottestdayoftheyear #hightemps #theater #theatre #cococola #musical #musicaltheater #musicals
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Friend Destiny took us on a day trip to New York City a few years ago, to see "BEETLEJUICE" on Broadway. It was amazing! #newyork #nyc #newyorkcity #beetlejuice #betelguise #ghost #ghosts #ghoststory #ghoststories #lydia #timessquare #broadway #bustrip #daytrip #vacation #hottestdayoftheyear #hightemps #theater #theatre #cococola #musical #musicaltheater #musicals
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#LydiaWeltiEscher ist eine Gefangene im Korsett gesellschaftlicher Zwänge und Konventionen – und kämpft gleichzeitig für ein selbstbestimmtes Leben als Frau.
🎞 #Lydia - #AufzeichnungenAusDemIrrenhaus jetzt im kult.kino zu sehen: https://www.kultkino.ch/film/lydiaaufzeichnungenausdemirrenhaus/
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Eine Tragödie - zwei Romane - ein Film!
#LydiaWeltiEschers Leben war eine Tragödie. Diese hat die 🖋 Schriftstellerin #StefStauffer & den ✍ Schriftsteller #LukasHartmann 2018 zeitgleich zu einem Roman inspiriert & 🎬 #StefanJung zu einen Film.
Bericht auf SRF: https://www.srf.ch/kultur/literatur/eine-tragoedie-zwei-romane-die-reichste-frau-der-schweiz-landete-im-irrenhaus
🎞 #Lydia - #AufzeichnungenAusDemIrrenhaus im kult.kino: https://www.kultkino.ch/film/lydiaaufzeichnungenausdemirrenhaus/
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A young girl cosplays as 'Lydia' for "BEETLEJUICE" Night at The Mahoning Drive In Theatre, in Lehighton, Pennsylvania. #art #artwork #drivein #driveintheater #driveinmovietheater #beetlejuice #lydia #mahoningdrivein #lehighton #pennsylvania #outdoors #outofdoors #cosplay
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A young girl cosplays as 'Lydia' for "BEETLEJUICE" Night at The Mahoning Drive In Theatre, in Lehighton, Pennsylvania. #art #artwork #drivein #driveintheater #driveinmovietheater #beetlejuice #lydia #mahoningdrivein #lehighton #pennsylvania #outdoors #outofdoors #cosplay
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Vous êtes passé du Lydia à Sumeria ? Alors faites attention !
https://mac4ever.com/194150
#Mac4Ever #lydia #sumeria -
Vous êtes passé du Lydia à Sumeria ? Alors faites attention !
https://mac4ever.com/194150
#Mac4Ever #lydia #sumeria -
Attention : Sumeria (ex-Lydia) met en place des frais d'inactivité de 3 € par mois http://dlvr.it/TQJzwG #Sumeria #Lydia
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Attention : Sumeria (ex-Lydia) met en place des frais d'inactivité de 3 € par mois http://dlvr.it/TQJzwG #Sumeria #Lydia
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𝗟𝘆𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗼𝗽𝗴𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗵𝘁 𝘃𝗼𝗼𝗿 100.000 𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿 '𝗯𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗮𝗳𝗱𝗲' 𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗺 𝗔𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁: '𝗚𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗵𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗴𝗲𝗱𝗮𝗰𝗵𝘁'
Ze dacht haar toekomst veilig te stellen met een slimme investering, maar niets bleek minder waar. In 'Scam Alert: Trap Er Niet In!' doet Lydia (62) haar verhaal over hoe ze niet alleen haar geld, maar ook...
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𝗟𝘆𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗼𝗽𝗴𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗵𝘁 𝘃𝗼𝗼𝗿 100.000 𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿 '𝗯𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗮𝗳𝗱𝗲' 𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗺 𝗔𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁: '𝗚𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗵𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗴𝗲𝗱𝗮𝗰𝗵𝘁'
Ze dacht haar toekomst veilig te stellen met een slimme investering, maar niets bleek minder waar. In 'Scam Alert: Trap Er Niet In!' doet Lydia (62) haar verhaal over hoe ze niet alleen haar geld, maar ook...
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【Big Tech locks data away. Wikidata gives it back to the internet】中,作者描繪了一場關於知識與權力的角力:「當大型科技公司將資料封鎖在專屬的圍牆內,Wikidata 卻選擇將知識還給世界。」
Wikidata 是維基媒體計畫中的結構化資料庫,同時也是維基百科等計畫背後的串聯資料庫,由全球超過 25,000 名貢獻者共同維護,累積了超過 1.1 億筆資料,每天編輯近 50 萬次。
Wikidata 不僅是開放的、可查詢的,更允許任何人參與、修正與擴充。這種開放性,讓來自全球南方的開發者得以在資源有限的情況下,打造創新的應用——從巴西的事實查核平台、到奈及利亞的政府目錄,再到幫助理解納粹秘密警察暴行的歷史專案。
Wikidata 的負責人 #Lydia Pintscher ( #莉迪亞 · 平徹)強調,與其依賴可能隨時改變政策的企業 API,不如選擇一個由社群驅動、透明且可參與的知識平台。她指出,Wikidata 不僅能呈現世界的複雜與多元,還能讓不同觀點並存,尤其在處理爭議領土或文化差異時,展現出前所未有的包容性。
文中也批判了大型 AI 公司對開放資料的掠奪式使用——它們從像 Wikidata 這樣的公共資源中汲取養分,卻鮮少回饋。Pintscher 呼籲,若我們不積極支持這些開放專案,未來的科技將由黑箱主導,而非民主參與。
這是一篇關於資料自由、技術倫理與社群力量的深刻反思,也是一則提醒:知識的未來,不該被少數人壟斷,而應由眾人共同守護與建構。
完整全文:https://www.fastcompany.com/91391335/big-tech-locks-data-away-wikidata-gives-it-back-to-the-internet
備註:該網站有免費閱覽限制
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莉迪亞·平徹在【How Wikidata is Coding for Humanity】一文中提及:「Wikidata 的資料不僅對人類可讀,也符合機器可讀的標準,如 #RDF 與 #JSON 格式,這使得 AI 應用(如 #ChatGPT)能夠輕易存取與運用這些知識。」
#Stephen Harrison 透過與 Wikidata 專案經理 莉迪亞·平徹 ( #Lydia Pintscher) 的訪談,撰寫了【How Wikidata is Coding for Humanity】一文。文中揭示了 Wikidata 這個結構化知識庫如何在幕後支撐維基百科與眾多自由知識計畫的運作。
文章以作者自身的好奇心為起點,描述他如何從一場維基媒體活動中接觸到 Wikidata,並逐步理解其實際用途。Lydia 解釋,Wikidata 與維基百科不同,它不是以文字敘述為主,而是以資料為核心——例如一個城市的人口數、政治人物的職位與任期等,都可以在 Wikidata 中被編輯與查詢。這些資料不僅能被各語言版本的維基百科引用,也能支援其他公共應用。
文中舉出幾個具體例子,包括:
。 #GovDirectory:由 Wikidata 編者創建,幫助民眾快速找到政府部門的聯絡方式與社群帳號。
。 #EqualStreetNames:透過街道命名資料揭示性別不平等,並以地圖視覺化呈現。
。 #Inventaire:一個共享書籍的平台,利用 Wikidata 的資料快速建立作者與書籍資訊。然而,挑戰也存在。Wikidata 擁有超過一億筆資料,但每月活躍編者僅約兩萬五千人。此外,許多使用 Wikidata 的應用並未標示資料來源,使得其貢獻常被忽略。
文章最後呼籲更多人參與 Wikidata,因為這不只是編輯資料,更是為全球知識基礎建設添磚加瓦。正如 Lydia 所說:「如果你想真正產生影響,就從源頭開始。」
即便 Wikidata 中已經收錄超過一億筆資料,臺灣相關的資料仍相當稀少,Wikidata Taiwan 致力於持續維護臺灣主題的相關資料,歡迎所有臺灣的社群夥伴與我們共同努力!
閱讀完整原文:
https://www.stephenharrison.com/p/how-wikidata-is-coding-for-humanity -
Lydia's story: the Holy Spirit opened her heart, leading to baptism and a focus on God's will. We need to listen to what God wants in every moment, just like Lydia. #HolySpirit #Transformation #Lydia #Baptism #Faith #GodsWill #Inspiration #Christianity #Religion #SpiritualGrowth
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@geco_de
Es gibt eine europäische Alternative (aus Frankreich 🇫🇷) zu #PayPal, auf die ich vor kurzem gestoßen bin: Lydia https://www.lydia.me/
Hab noch nicht viel Erfahrung damit sammeln können, aber wirkt ganz gut. Und arbeitet bankunabhängig - nicht wie #WeroWäre neugierig, was andere davon halten.
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@geco_de
Es gibt eine europäische Alternative (aus Frankreich 🇫🇷) zu #PayPal, auf die ich vor kurzem gestoßen bin: Lydia https://www.lydia.me/
Hab noch nicht viel Erfahrung damit sammeln können, aber wirkt ganz gut. Und arbeitet bankunabhängig - nicht wie #WeroWäre neugierig, was andere davon halten.
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Episode one hundred and ninety-six is up now! Today's song is Now The One You Once Loved Is Leaving by Lydia.
I discuss the wonderful combination of vocalists, and how I discovered this band in the first place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn0mGHfI0wI
#podcast #dailypodcast #pigeon #pigeonsongspod #music #songs #nowtheoneyouoncelovedisleaving #lydia #lydiaband #leightonantelman #illuminate #emo
23h -
Q&A With Winona Ryder (Lydia) – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
#WinonaRyder #Lydia #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice #QandA #interview #film #movie
https://www.samdb.co.za/blogs/blog/2024/09/01/qa-with-winona-ryder-lydia-beetlejuice-beetlejuice/
-
The next morning,
wrecked,
I put on sweatpants and a hoodie
and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone.I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars.
“How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked.
Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt.
“I feel horrible,” he said.
“Not good.”Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything.
I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out.
We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
The next morning,
wrecked,
I put on sweatpants and a hoodie
and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone.I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars.
“How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked.
Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt.
“I feel horrible,” he said.
“Not good.”Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything.
I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out.
We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.
“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.
I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.
“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.
I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.
They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.
“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.
A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.
He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.
I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.
But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.
That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.
Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.
Murphy chortled knowingly.
“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.
“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic.
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:
Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.
They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.
“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.
A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.
He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.
I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.
But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.
That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.
Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.
Murphy chortled knowingly.
“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.
“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic.
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:
Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.
“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.
I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.
He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”“A monarchist?”he asked.
He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.
Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.
I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”
What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.
Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;
he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.
The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.
Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.
But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.
“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.
I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.
He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”“A monarchist?”he asked.
He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.
Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.
I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”
What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.
Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;
he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.
The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.
Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.
But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
We drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet,
which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community.The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees,
immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support.This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media,
and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance,
who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors,
and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation.He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers,
like America once regulated phone companies.The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.
When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election
—a view that Masters did not push back on
—the border wall,
vaccine mandates.One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp.
He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.
“Retire All Government Employees.”
The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
I asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear.He said yes.
I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances.
“That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”
“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about #Kyle #Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier,
talking about his spots on Fox News.
“And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial,
and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ”Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it.
“I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said.
“But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”
He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me.
“We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently.
“Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left.
And the progressive left just remains the enemy.
It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”
I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.
“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said,
“so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.”Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical,
or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today.“It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”
#Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”
I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.
“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”
“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”
He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.
“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”
I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.
“Maybe, yeah,” he said.
“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”
We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.
“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”
Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
-
A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.
“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.
“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.
“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”
He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.
At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.
“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.
“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”
He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”
Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.
He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.
But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.
And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”
“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.
“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”
He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,
although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.
#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents,
having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts
and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.
She said she was too “black-pilled”
—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now
—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win.“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism.
Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”
“They’re going to come for everything,” she said.
“And I think it’s sinister
—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister.But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”
This is the Cathedral at work.
#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall
when the “cool kids” start to abandon its values and worldview.There are signs that this may be happening,
though not all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe shift would want to be colored as the vanguard in a world historical rebellion against the global order.“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer Honor Levy,
a Catholic convert and Bennington grad,
told me when I called her.“I just want to have a family someday.”
Levy, who was a leftist recently enough that she cried when it became clear that Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic presidential nominee,
is friendly with Yarvin and has had him on the podcast she cohosts, "Wet Brain"
—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah blah,” she said when we got to talking about political media.
But she said she’d never even heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.
Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene
—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene
—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding.“Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed,” she told me,
later adding: “But I’m not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talking.”
I asked if she would take money from Thiel and she cheerily said,
“Of course!”She also described her cohort as a bunch of “libertines,”
and on her podcast you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a
mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex.“Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an accessory,” she said.
The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni Riefenstahl – Edie Sedgwick.”
#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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The Red Scare hosts both started out as diffident socialists,
back when it was still possible to think that socialism represented an edgy political stance,
in the little interlocking spheres of America’s media and political set.One of them, Nekrasova,
actually became known in media circles for a clip that went megaviral in 2018,
when she cut dead a reporter for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Austin.“I just want people to have health care, honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have, like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”
Fast-forward to November 2021, and Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan were posting photos of themselves
with Jones’s arms wrapped around them under an evening Texas sun.Nekrasova now has a role on HBO’s Succession,
playing a P.R. rep working with Kendall Roy;
the show itself set “right-wing Twitter”
—a sphere heavily populated by 20-somethings who work in tech or politics and seem to disproportionately live in D.C. and Miami
—alight with delight when an episode in the latest season included a litany of key New Right phrases
such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all, abortions for none.”The Red Scare hosts are only the best-known representatives of a fashionable
dissident-y subculture,
centered in but not exclusive to downtown Manhattan.“Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now,”
a bewildered friend of mine texted recently.People use the derisive term “bugman” to describe liberal men who lack tangible life skills like fixing trucks or growing food
—guys who could end up spending their lives behind the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset.Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville,
which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,”
and which named one of its lines after John Galt,
the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.People are converting to Catholicism.
“It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend texted. “Because casual sex is out.”#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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Milius was a sardonic and constant presence,
easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood and talked at warp speed in his unmistakable voice.She was by far the most strikingly dressed person there,
favoring Gucci and Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big sunglasses.She is the daughter of the conservative director John Milius,
who cowrote Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn.She grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts college in Manhattan,
so, like pretty much all the people there, she was used to living in social spaces where conservative views were considered strange if not downright evil.
She thought something had radically changed since 2015,
after she went to film school at USC and started working in Hollywood,
before she suddenly dropped everything to work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada,
eventually landing a job in his State Department.
“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought movement.
So it’s very hard to put your finger on and articulate what it is outside of Trumpism.
Because it really is separate from the man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”
She argued that the New Right, or whatever you wanted to call it,
was, paradoxically, much less authoritarian than the ideology that now presented itself as mainstream.“I get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she said, “that the right actually at this point is like almost in this live-and-let-live place
where the left used to be at.”
What she meant specifically:
“The idea that you can’t raise your kids in a traditional, somewhat religious household without having them educated at school that their parents are Nazis.”
This apparent laissez-faire obscures somewhat the intense focus that some people in this world have on trans issues
—or what they might say is the media’s intense focus on trans issues,
one of a suite of “mimetic viruses,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it,
that spread a highly individualistic liberal culture that is destructive to traditional ways of life.But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely converts.
Milius brought up "Red Scare",
a podcast that has become the premier example of this attraction
—she’d actually cast one of the hosts, #Dasha #Nekrasova, in the film she made as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America
—that history was headed in the wrong direction.“Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” Laurenson said,
just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others.“They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”
People at the conference seemed excited about being in a place where they weren’t alone.
I skipped most of the talks
—which ranged from sessions about confronting the threat of China
to the liberal influence on pop culture
to “Worker Power.”Hawley gave a keynote on the “assault on the masculine virtues,”
and Cruz offered up a traditional stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying he thought conservatives would soon prevail at the ballot box.
“I’m pretty sure a lot of the 20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,” Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk.
The 20-somethings had a bigger vision.
Up by the bar every night, hordes of young men, mostly, would descend to drink and bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and writers.
You could see #Dave #Rubin, and #Jack #Murphy, who hosts a popular New Right–ish YouTube channel
and is trying to build a fraternal group of men who believe in
“positive masculinity”
that he calls the "Liminal Order. "Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed beard and haircut
—sides buzzed short, the top longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.I didn’t see a single Black person under the age of 50,
though there were attendees of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent.
In March, the journalist #Jeff #Sharlet
(a Vanity Fair contributing editor who covers the American right)
tweeted that the
🔸“intellectual New Right is a white supremacist project designed to cultivate non-white support,” 🔸and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world:
🔸“It’s part of a global fascist movement not limited to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.” 🔸
Yet♦️ many on the New Right seem increasingly unfazed by accusations that they’re white nationalists or racists. ♦️
Masters in particular seems willing to goad commentators,
believing that the ensuing arguments will redound to his political advantage:“Good luck [hitting] me with that,”
Masters told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently,
🔹arguing that accusations of racism had become a political bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas outside the political mainstream. 🔹“Good luck criticizing me for saying critical race theory is anti-white.”
But for all the chatter of looming dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the most dystopian aspects of American life:
our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.Most people seemed more caught up in fighting what they perceived as the cant and groupthink among other members of the political media class,
or the hypocrisy of rich white liberals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in front of multimillion-dollar homes,
than they were with the raw experience that has given shape to America’s current racial politics.
#Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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By the time TechCrunch publicized Yarvin’s identity, in 2013,
he had become influential in a small circle of the disaffected elite.
In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”
The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were spreading among prominent figures like #Thiel and #Balaji #Srinivasan, formerly the CTO of #Coinbase,
and that it was possible for an intellectual fringe to
“seize key positions of authority and power”
and “eventually bring large numbers of people around,”
just as the #Koch brothers once had with their pro-business libertarianism,
a position that Thiel was quickly moving away from.In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and #Milo #Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.
“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote.
“Just plays it very carefully.”
Masters soon had an office in Trump Tower.
He and Thiel worked,
generally without success,
to install figures like Srinivasan,
whom they proposed to head the FDA,
and who himself often talked about the
“paper belt,”
in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathedral concept,and made common cause with figures like #Steve #Bannon, who wanted to pick apart the administrative state,
an idea that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE proposal.Yarvin eventually stopped working as a programmer and left the Bay Area,
moving with his wife and two children to Nevada.His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to have been devastated,
publishing searching poems about her.
But last September, a month before we spoke, he posted a dating call,
inviting women who were “reasonably pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it,and “have read my work and like it,” and who thought that “the purpose of dating is to get married and have kids,”
to email him so they could set up a Zoom date.
“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me.
“So I answered this email and I was just like,
‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”The two are now engaged.
Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual awakening that accelerated during the upheavals of the early pandemic
and the protests of the summer of 2020.“I started really getting drawn to #NRx ideas,” she said,
using a common online abbreviation for the
neo-reactionary fringe,“because I was tracking the riots,” by which she meant the violence that erupted amid some of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“I have a background in social justice,” she said.
But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”
She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating,
discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years.“I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me.
They just never told anyone about it,” she said.
“It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”
#RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook