wretchard, are you determined to out-gloom all your commenters? I suppose I still believe in the good intentions of most on the left. If the only common denominator of all their actions turns out to be power over others, perhaps this trend is unknown to themselves. Was O’Brien’s meta-confession in 1984 really believable, or just like Galt’s 30-page speech in Atlas Shrugged, a diatribe in literary form?

I look at these leftoids as pathological, solipsistic, they cannot imagine certain forms of evil, or are in blatent denial of them when obvious, and if this means they die, then they die – I think of the Jews in Nazi Germany here, they could not imagine what they were caught up in. I guess. They bury this in anti-religiousity and radical empiricism and self-congratulation, but we know they are consumed with hate, obsessed with hate, just unsure of the appropriate targets of that hate – which as often as not, is themselves.

What we are seeing today is an unprecedented ability of our leftist elites to screw up a good thing. But that does not make their behavior unprecedented, it may be all too precedented. It’s only the technology that lends them scope, which is new, in finance, in WMD, in transportation.

The solution is simply better candidates and leaders from the right. Individuals. Communications. Either this will happen – or it won’t. Perhaps we help a little just by discussing it here – but others, on the left, help their disintegrative efforts by these same mechanisms.

Vernor Vinge writes of the technological singularity, well, maybe that singularity comes in a totally unexpected form, in which it eats itself like a black hole rather than accelerate at more than lightspeed.

But I hope not.