I have seen a few times in the wilds of eugenicist Musk Twitter a hilarious "horseshoe theory" of intelligence and IQ: if you're too smart, in some indefinite way, you double back round to "dumb" or [slur], so a nice safe mediocrity is actually best. I have seen memetic images suggesting that such persons have a peculiar notion about the famous "bell curve" or Gaussian distribution which Charles Murray famously imposed on intelligence: they think it's better to be in the middle, where the curve is nice and high. One time though I saw a tortuous attempt to define some sweet spot off to the right of the mode, but not too far off to be "dumb" again.

It's rather easy to guess why this has happened: too many collisions between the high lords of IQ and people who actually know what they're saying, leading to strings of lost arguments and hurt feelings and consequent grumbling about "woke universities" and such. There's an entertaining tension between the need for the fashy techbro to stay indoctrinated while also strutting their supposedly superior intelligence, and it's led to a curious bipolarity in the community, a resolution of the techbros between two extremes.

Basically, the better any of these people are at mastering some kind of difficult scientific or technical subject, such as programming work or medicine, the more likely it is they're unable to communicate with ordinary human beings. Fashy professionals of this sort tend towards extreme misanthropy, as though it required every erg of their mental powers to do their technical job, so they tend to become hermits with very strange ideas about people. At the other extreme are the persol nle ones who become vigorous evangelists and boosters for technology, the ones who are able to sell their enthusiasm to others. Elon Musk is a conspicuous example. He's good at sounding like a wizard of technology (well good enough for his believers) but if he ever goes into details he's clearly lost. He's not one of the boffins himself. He wanted to be one, though, and that puts some sparkle onto his boosterism.

Hence there's been a peculiar sorting process at work for a few decades, culminating in the rise of persons like Musk and Elizabeth Holmes and Marc Andreessen. They inhabit a system that rewards their own ignorance. The more ignorant you are, the more enthusiastically you can lie and make wild promises. There's no awkward knowledge in the way. Musk can sell technology as magic because to him it IS magic, capable of anything; he doesn't know better and he's not rewarded for finding out.

There's a famous maxim about the doublethinkful nature of right-wing propaganda about the Law. To such people, the Law must bind others but not themselves; the Law protects them but not others. There's a similar state of doublethink in the corporate world about intelligence and technical skill. The boffins who know cannot communicate it to others; the boosters don't know, but they can talk about it anyway. One result has been the AI craze. It's like the AI machines are the ultimate boffins, able to think (well, supposedly) but requiring human agents to praise them and evangelize for them, agents who may vaunt their own intelligence but who clearly are zealous for AI because they need machines to do what they can't.

~Chara of Pnictogen

a MODERN, newly built temple to Zeus in Cyprus.

yeah I dunno what to say, it warms my cold heart ~Chara

I know at least three general sorts of magic-eye tubes, vacuum tubes that have some sort of fluorescent screen that gets bombarded with electron beams which can be moved around via specially placed control plates or grids. I've seen them used as tuning indicators, or as the rough equivalent of LED bar displays (e.g. in graphic equalizers). There's a bunch of styles but these three I've seen for myself:

1. A round conical screen at the top of the tube envelope, and a variable dark sector
2. A flat illuminated strip along the side of the tube envelope, with a dark gap in the middle
3. A concave shell with a glowing inner surface and either one or two dark sectors

And I found myself thinking...that's just barely enough to make facial expressions with, I think? The eyes and mouth would be obvious enough, anyway

~Chara of Pnictogen

I'm not sure exactly how intentional it was, but Stuart Gordon's Dagon's contains a sequence of immense and disturbing power to anyone who knows about the participation of the Spanish Catholic Church in the oppression of the people: when Capitán Cambarro rebels against the established order of Imboca in order to bring in the worship of Dagon, he and his pals smash up the Catholic Church and murder the priest. Such things happened during the founding of the Spanish Republic in revenge for the complicity of the Church with the corrupt and brutal Bourbon monarchy; churches were destroyed and their priests slain. That might shock a Christian reader, but the people of Spain had reason to feel that the Church had betrayed them. Dagon gives us a just a little taste of that historical episode.

The people of Imboca also feel betrayed by their Church but for a different reason: they'd been a fishing town and now there's no fish, so the town is slowly dying and the Church offers the people nothing but unanswered prayers (suddenly I'm reminded of Night in the Woods and another town that was healthy only so long as there was a resource to be extracted.) When Capitán Cambarro claims that his new god will actually answer their prayers, they listen! Sure, it means in the long run that the human inhabitants of Imboca end up forced to cede their humanity to become "children of Dagon", but the film dares to suggest that the system does work in a way. There is a strange society here in Imboca but a functioning one, and it makes sense to the citizens (at least those with significant dialogue.)

It's fairly plain that a moderate fraction of U.S. Christendom has become, in its way, something like the Esoterica Orde de Dagon seen above. There's a multitude of organizations and groups and sects and individual worshippers with strange new beliefs but who retain some outward façade of Christianity, some of the trappings and symbols, rather like Capitán Cambarro still making use of the Catholic church for his new Dagon cult. The substitution is possible because the new beliefs offer some practical approximation of the central promises of Christianity: a spiritual home, a sense of family and destiny, and the promise of life eternal if you do everything the right way. Paul Marsh, or Pablo Cambarro, gets to have a long life in the Sea as one of the children of Dagon (presumably) with his new wife who is also his sister, Dagonic customs being what they are, with access to a mountain of gold treasures. Arguably that's better than being a dweeby techbro perched uncertainly atop a pile of Internet-startup "wealth" and constantly fretting about his portfolio.

It suddenly occurs to me that Pablo might decide to bring Imboca into the Internet age, come to think of it.

~Chara of Pnictogen