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As the Chicago Tribune reported this morning, University of Utah Economics Professor Richard Fowles and I have just completed an important article on the 2016 Chicago homicide spike. Through multiple regression analysis and other tools, we conclude that an ACLU consent decree trigged a sharp reduction in stop and frisks by the Chicago Police Department, which in turn caused homicides to spike. Sadly, what Chicago police officers dubbed the “ACLU effect” was real—and more homicides and shootings were the consequence.

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Calling itself Falmouth Hates Students, FHS, the group sent the threatening letter to university management and media where they confessed to being behind a hate campaign that included damaging student property and vehicles.

…

Claiming the town had become overrun with students, the group blamed them for pricing locals out of the local housing market.

“The Nazis at Falmouth University have had their way for too long, wrecking the lovely town of Falmouth with too many students and overdevelopment and not accepting there own responsibility to house students on-site,” the letter reads.

“No-one listens to the good people of Falmouth so now we are taking our own direct action. We have no option but the make Falmouth a no go area for students.

Britain has a long tradition of town/gown animosity but I find this very odd.

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It has been observed that Marxism is a religion masquerading as political theory, and Islam is a political theory masquerading as religion. It is revealing that both of these organizations view the United States as their greatest enemy. I hope they’re right because that would reflect well on the United States. Because what those movements have in common is their efforts to harness the power of groups of people. This creates two major problems, in my view. First, when you are working upstream against human nature and against God, there’s likely to be significant difficulties. Second, when you set groups of people against each other using anger and envy and so on, what you’re doing is you’re creating mobs.

…

I also find it interesting that collectivist organizations tend to wear uniforms (Communists and hippies), masks (Islamists and Antifa twits), and other things to hide their individuality. That’s not a coincidence.

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It all depends on whose doing the mining.

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Note that you never see articles about Midwestern sociologists who spend years asking urban Americans why they’re such assholes.

Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country. He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington.

God knows there’s no obvious reason, right?

Wuthnow’s work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. He argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a “moral decline” in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it’s never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible for it.

Certainly it is — if you’re willing to look at the evidence. The problem is the government, the Federal government in particular. Government is run by urban degenerates, and the laws and regulations they impose on everybody else is what’s pulling the whole country down.

C’mon, Sean, be a journalist for once.

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An Argentine man legally changed his gender so he could retire earlier, according to a Thursday report.

Sergio, 59, an Argentine tax official, legally changed the last letter of his name to Sergia, assuming the identity of a woman, so he could retire five years early, the Daily Nation reported. Argentine law allows women to retire at 60 while men have to wait until they are 65 years old. Their legislation also states a woman can retire at age 65 — the same as the age of a man — but they will receive a higher pension, according to the United States Social Security Administration’s website.

And now it starts.

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Ah, the sweet sound of chickens coming home to roost.

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Polygamy nearly always means rich men taking multiple wives. And if the top 10% of men marry four women each, then the bottom 30% cannot marry at all. This often leaves them not only sexually frustrated but also socially marginalised. In many traditional societies, a man is not considered an adult until he has found a wife and sired children. To get a wife, he must typically pay a “brideprice” to her father. When polygamy creates a shortage of brides, it massively inflates this brideprice. In South Sudan, it can be anything from 30 to 300 cattle, far more wealth than an ill-educated young man can plausibly accumulate by legal means.

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A federal judge ruled last week that a federal agency’s actions to improve habitats for endangered species along the Missouri River exacerbated floods, causing damage to local farmers whose land was temporarily inundated. Although this was only the first part of a multiphase case, if the ruling is upheld it could undermine future river restoration efforts nationwide and stymie enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) by forcing the government to pay damages to any landowner affected by environmental restoration activities.

“The implications of this ruling are huge,” says Brad Walker, who headed river restoration efforts for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment in St. Louis before retiring earlier this month. “It’s attacking the heart of the legitimacy and reason for doing river restoration.” If the ruling is upheld in the next phase of the case, which is anything but certain, “it would effectively kill the application of the Endangered Species Act,” says John Echeverria, an environmental lawyer at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton.

At last, some concern for people rather than animals.

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The irony of the persistent Lefty castigation of Income Inequality is that actual implementation of Lefty programs leads to … massive income inequality.

California’s high housing prices and rising gas prices are driving away what remains of the state’s low income citizens. Those migrating from the coastal state are making way for places like Las Vegas and Arizona, where housing prices are relatively cheap compared to California.

…

California saw a loss of over 138,000 people in that 12-month period, according to the data, while Texas experienced an uptick of more than 79,000 people. Arizona and Nevada, meanwhile, gained more than 63,000 and 38,000 residents, respectively. California’s extraordinarily high gas taxes is another reason for the mass exodus, CNBC’s report noted.

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One of the “arguments” (an excuse, actually) employed by Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was, “She won the popular vote!” To which the proper reply is, “Where?” In a handful of large urban states where Republican Donald Trump did not campaign, Clinton won by huge margins, and this proves . . .? Nothing, really.

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Because no chain of causality is too obscure to be used to support repressive legislation by Nanny Staters.

If you want to read the grandaddy of all causality stories, read Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.

(This sort of shit is why I never practiced law. It’s too much like throwing darts over your shoulder at a dartboard.)

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Science-deniers are alive in well — in the ‘scientific’ community.

Eric Turkheimer seems to think that the possibility of racial IQ differences is refuted by an “ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair”. That’s an odd argument. Does it work with Downs and Fragile X? I doubt if he has ever used it for any other issue. Should I use it to deny the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, or smallpox epidemics, or asteroid strikes? If he thought that there just weren’t any such differences, he wouldn’t need special new ‘logical’ principles to prevent them from existing – would he?

Philip Kitcher advocates raising the bar for evidence supporting theories he doesn’t like. I’ve talked about this [The Veeck effect]. Why do you think he makes this argument? If populations really were effectively the same in IQ, there would be lots of easily observable evidence for it. No way to prove exact equality, but it wouldn’t be hard to show that group A and B were close. But nobody does, because nobody can. If this were true, it would show up in a genetic admixture study: so nobody will do one.

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Makes you wonder what they’re ‘proteasting’ — the fact that Farrakhan is the most notorious anti-Semite outside of Hamas or Hezbollah?

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Every now and then The Atlantic does some honest real journalism. This looks to be an example of that.

Setting the stage: The author is looking to hire someone, preferably a ‘refugee’, to clean house.

The other trait distinguishing these résumés was that nearly every one contained what I, as someone whose job often involves listening skeptically to people’s stories, would call irregularities, little details that seemed odd, that begged for explanation. An Afghan with no formal education claimed to know a language not spoken in any country she had visited; an African doctor whose CV could have gotten him a job with the World Health Organization in a week was working a cash register in Bridgeport. Two refugees claimed to be from, respectively, Zambia and Tanzania, countries without war or persecution that could justify asylum. (The refugees had almost certainly claimed different nationalities in their application for asylum.) Another said she was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a major generator of refugees—but spoke languages that suggested origin in the now relatively safe country of Rwanda. It was as if the center had sent me a dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with either missing pieces or extra ones.

All of the refugees were qualified to clean my house. (The doctor was overqualified, and I wondered whether I should be cleaning his.) But detail after detail hoisted my eyebrows. An asylum officer had heard each story—or some variant of it—and judged the claimant credible enough to welcome him into the United States. For my part, it was hard not to conclude that most of the stories were shot through with lies.

All parts of our immigration system are broken. One of the reason why people come to the U.S. illegally is that it’s like pushing a rope through an obstacle course of soda can pull tabs to get in legally. This situation is an illustrative example. Granted that government employees aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, this is TSA-level incompetence.

Remember this the next time somebody want to put the government in charge of your health care.

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No discussion of the fact that he told the truth — Gonzalez is a skinhead lesbian. She would undoubtedly have embraced that characterization under circumstances.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free … and unelectable.

Steven Hayward takes pictures of the train wreck.

I’ve been predicting, most recently in a lecture last month at Arizona State University that I’ll post up as a podcast at some point soon, that universities would soon begin to divide into two entities—the STEM fields and related practical subjects (i.e., business and economics), and the social sciences and humanities, which would start to shrivel under the weight of the degradations the left has inflicted over the last 40 years. The number of students majoring in the humanities has declined by two-thirds since around 1980.

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On March 10, “authorities say,” a 22 year-old man in South Carolina killed “his grandparents, an aunt and a cousin.” It appears that only the Associated Press has given attention to this story. By contrast, recent “mass killings” involving fewer victims received widespread national coverage. Why is that? The answer appears to be that the South Carolina attacker didn’t use a gun.

Plus the alleged perpetrator was a Person of Color. So additional reasons for it not to be reported are (a) that’s as common as dirt, Not News, and (b) that completely contradicts the narrative that Every Bad Thing Is A White Person’s Fault, so not reportable.

Read it.

Hey, how about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

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Chicago is turning into the behavioral sink of North America.

Well, that’s what decades of rule by Democrats will get you. Detroit is not far behind.

UPDATE: Video here.

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They’re all about Safe Spaces, see….

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I am totally comfortable with him doing that. In fact, if he has any kids, do them too. We don’t need those defective genes in our gene pool.

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Yeah, I know, paywall — but just the parts you can see are important.

Konrad Poplawski, a 22-year old Navy hospital corpsman, is about to be deployed as a battlefield medic with the 2nd Marine Division, which has served in deadly battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But first, he is making a pit stop at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital, which the Navy says is among few places here in the U.S. that provide experience treating the types of wounds he will inevitably see on the battlefield.

We have a city whose hospitals are effectively treating ‘combat’ wounds — and what do you see in The Press? Nada.

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It’s hard to be certain, but I propose a few reasons. First, the political left needs to recruit more people to support their agenda; the black population had a history of deep oppression, the left leadership knew it, and capitalized on that history. But they also needed to convince the citizen population that portraying the country’s blacks as victims who need to be helped by the left is an admirable pursuit. Today, the leadership plays on the emotions of the population, calling for sympathetic action toward blacks. It suggests that accomplished, compassionate people should feel guilty for their own success and feel they owe it to others who are not so successful to “do something.” The leadership convinces them that feeling guilt is the same as doing something, that they can show their generosity by shaking their heads sadly at the very people whom they have hobbled, instead of simply freeing them from their contrived restraints. They choose to feel bad for folks who have less than they do and treat them as if they are less.

By creating an underclass and “trying to help them,” the left can feel much better about themselves: they are the benefactors, the heroes for those who are suffering. It never occurs to the person on the left that he or she is perpetuating the illusion of the underclass, and in fact works to reinforce it.

Another reason to maintain an underclass arises from the arrogance of the left: they have the solution for those who suffer from the illusion the Left has created. Only their solutions can work; they assume that black Americans cannot find their way forward with their own determination and hard work. And the left is ready to help them. But their “help” further cripples their recipients and erodes their faith in themselves.

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Anybody who flies on (‘we break guitars’) United is a fool.

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Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services, Eddy Cue, said Monday the company believes “free speech is important, but we don’t think it’s everything.”

“It’s important for Americans to have debates on certain issues, but we don’t think hate speech from white supremacists is important free speech,” he continued, according to Business Insider

Free speech is important only if its the Correct free speech.

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One of the first political discussions I recall being witness to was the aftermath of the Congo carnage following the granting of independence to a lunatic by the name of Patrice Lumumba. The Belgians fled for their lives and the country collapsed into civil war, which continues today. Independent rule in Zambia and Tanzania was quickly followed by nationalization, the denial of property rights, and those economies quickly crumbling, but mountains of Western largesse poured in, most of which was stolen. Nobody was censured, of course, because the liberal socialists running Europe were on their knees saying sorry for being white.

Bryan Kaplan counts the ways.

When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment.

Rod Dreher is upset.

It’s okay to be mean to white students, so long as they aren’t from one of the Left Coasts.

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And if they were, who could blame them?

I think it’s more a case of baby-phobic women. And that’s quite understandable, too.

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Who is this guy, and why is he in the news?

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A former employee of YouTube (a subsidiary of Alphabet, parent of Google) alleged in a recently filed lawsuit that YouTube is discriminating against white and Asian men. “YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity,” the suit alleges.

Liberal discrimination against white men is nothing new, but many people are caught by surprise to see such explicit discrimination against Asian males in the name of diversity from one of the most progressive companies in one of the most liberal zip codes. After all, don’t liberals always define diversity in terms of external traits such skin colors?

For ‘progressives’, some colors are more equal than others. For being intelligent and successful, Asians are lumped in with Evil White People.

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When entire countries lose an hour of sleep simultaneously, bad things happen.

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How about that great government-provided healthcare! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Well, Obama tried.

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Federal regulator furious to discover untrackable mini-satellites in space.

Of course he was. Federal regulators are always furious when people do things without permission.

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has pulled permission from Silicon Valley startup Swarm Technologies to launch four satellites into space after what it says was an “apparent unauthorized launch” back in January.

Ask yourself why the FCC ought to have any jurisdiction over satellites. Sure, they’e communication satellites, and I could see the FCC having a say over what they emit, but actually launching them?

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Note: Not carrying; just for having the permit.

Funny how those who decry violence against women are the first in line to leave them defenseless.

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How about that great government- provided health care? Don’t you wish the U.S. had a system like that?

Victor Davis Hanson blows the whistle.

It leads to an endless race for equality and erodes prior rules.Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate eleven passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance.

Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed — late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights — most of the eleven wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out. It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight.

You can’t game the system unless there’s a system to game. And the more complicated it is, the more room there is to game it. But not to worry — our government has that covered.

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Apparently a large number of his constituents live north of the border.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

One of the fundamental concepts that are being bifurcated by this disagreement, is “we.” I, along with other people who are capable of thinking like responsible adults, do not believe life automatically becomes better when we have more rules. I’m more of a believer in what Tacitus said, “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” Gun control offends me, partly because it’s right in our Constitution that we aren’t supposed to have gun control of any kind. But it offends me even more when I recognize what it is: Something bad was done by a bad person, and so we come up with some restrictions to be placed on the ones who did not do it.

Most Proglodyte Dreams involve forcing people to do things that proglodytes have no desire to do or intention of doing. No proglodyte would be inconvenienced by a total ban on private firearms (except the ones caught defenseless in a ‘gun free zone’ when the next nutcase shooter with an illegal weapon comes along). When proglodytes say that ‘we need to do this’ or ‘we need to do that’, they never include themselves in that ‘we’.

There can be some difficulty in noticing this within certain issues. On the gun-control thing for example, people who want more rules about guns usually have no intention of ever owning a gun themselves. Many of them are protected by armed bodyguards, and intend to continue enjoying the benefits of this weaponized perimeter after they’ve won their latest victory and gotten the laws to work the way they want them to work. But on social justice issues and/or environmental issues, the man-is-outside-of-nature types don’t include themselves in the “we” when they speak of how toxic “we” are. Guilty-white-liberals droning on about white privilege, do not include themselves in the complaint even though I notice many among them are, and have been for awhile, quite privileged.

Those who complain most bitterly about ‘white privilege’ are themselves almost always white and very privileged.

Those who complain most bitterlyl about ‘income inequality’ are themselves almost always in the upper 5%, if not the %1 — and not one of them spends any noticeable amount of time giving of their unequal incomes to those poorer than themselves.

Those who complain most bitterly about ‘unaffordable’ health care are themselves almost always able to afford the best care that money can buy. The same goes with housing.

And we’re all familiar with the ‘environmentalists’ who complain about fossil fuels destroying the planet while swanning around in SUVs and private jets.

Read it.

ODF. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The GOP has an opportunity to pick up a Senate seat in Minnesota. After the Democrats forced Al Franken out of office, Governor Mark Dayton appointed his Lieutenant Governor, Tina Smith, to serve until the general election in November. Smith is a little-known and rather faceless office-holder. As an urban leftist with questionable ties, e.g. as a former senior executive of Planned Parenthood, she is vulnerable. The question for Republicans is whether we have a strong candidate. Tim Pawlenty chose to run for governor rather than senator, so the most credible candidate so far is Karin Housley, a state senator who may be best known as the wife of Phil Housley, perhaps the best hockey player Minnesota has produced.

Now a guy named Richard Painter has stepped into the perceived vacuum and thrown his hat into the ring. Who is Richard Painter? He is a classic fake Republican. At one time, he held an “ethics” position in the George W. Bush administration, and he has parlayed that brief tenure into a career of Republican-bashing. We all know the type: a nominal Republican who probably hasn’t voted for a GOP candidate in a long time, but who sucks up time on cable news, trading on his supposed status as a Republican to lend weight to his attacks on actual Republicans. It is, frankly, a despicable species.

Read it.

It was always foolish to believe that a less Christian America would be a less religious America.

The demise of religion among American youth is greatly exaggerated. It turns out that America isn’t raising a new generation of unbelievers. Instead, rising in the heart of deep-blue America are the zealots of a new religious faith. They’re the intersectionals, they’re fully woke, and the heretics don’t stand a chance.

Steve Sailer writes about No Country for White Men.

Moments after actress Frances McDormand employed her victory speech at the Academy Awards to demand diversity quotas in moviemaking, she was taught a lesson in diversity, good and hard, when her brand-new Oscar was stolen by a black megalomaniac.

…

Like Silicon Valley, Hollywood had assumed throughout Obama’s first term that the vast web of race regulations ensnaring the rest of corporate America didn’t apply to them, due to their coolness (or whatever). After the Obama reelection campaign cashed their contribution checks, however, both California industries suddenly found themselves in trouble for not hiring enough blacks, women, and, uh, that other minority, the one nobody can remember.

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

We do. Move to Canada. If they have anything seriously wrong, they come to the U.S. because the lines for ‘free’ medical care in Canada are too long.

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Watson’s suit alleges that Dick’s policy violates Oregon law against age-based discrimination for people 18 years and older in places of public accommodations. State law includes prohibitions against discrimination in stores that are open to the general public.

Watson also filed a separate suit claiming a Walmart store in Josephine County, Oregon, discriminated against him by denying him a rifle sale “on or about March 3, 2018.” As with Dick’s, the Walmart employee at the gun counter allegedly told Watson that rifles and shotguns could not be sold to individuals under the age of 21. The employee indicated that ammunition for firearms could not be sold to anyone under 21 either.

In both suits Watson alleges that the defendants, Dick’s and Walmart, not only discriminated but “advertised … unlawful discriminatory policies by issuing a press release, and other materials, stating that [the defendants] will no longer sell any firearms or ammunition to any person under the age of 21.”

You knew it had to happen.

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On Jan. 2, a Chevy Bolt EV operated by General Motors’ Cruise driverless car division in San Francisco’s Mission District was waiting at a green light for pedestrians to cross when a man “ran across Valencia Street against the ‘do not walk’ symbol, shouting, and struck the left side of the Cruise AV’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body,” damaging a tail light, according to a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

It would appear that not even in California are people down with the future.

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European governments are experts at the politician’s friend, Leave No Stash of Money Unraided.

The difference  between a European government and the Mafia is merely the language spoken.

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

– The Who, “We won’t be fooled again”, 1971

Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”

The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.”