Colin Lewis plays with the idea of William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen as a prophetic anticipation of X-risk level artificial intelligence. It’s a conceit that works gloriously. A somewhat extended illustration:
1. LO, a Shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable Void,
This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said
It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark Power hid.
To add to the ledger of Singapore as a redoubt (no doubt beleaguered) of Neoreactionary insight, an opinion piece in the most recent Straits Times begins:
China’s rise has been psychologically disquieting to many in America and the West generally, because in China, capitalism flourishes without liberal democracy. This is regarded as somehow unnatural and illegitimate because it punctures the Western myth of the universality of certain political values and of the inevitability of the development of certain political forms. And unlike, say, Japan or India, China only wants to be China and not an honorary member of the West.
The myth of universality is ahistorical, pretentious and parochial.
It is ahistorical because it ignores the inconvenient fact that every Western country was capitalist long before it was either liberal or democratic as those terms are today understood …
… much sanity follows.
Amplified when read as a follow up to #4, this piece of jiu jitsu by VXXC is a great way to invigorate some running debates (even if it can’t be embedded normally because of the ridiculous privacy option activated on his account):
Strangely so called Reactionaries coming to Fences marked Republic, Constitution, United States wish to obliterate these walls utterly. (9:09 AM, 7 January 2015.)
No one really denies that Singapore is the most functional society on earth, which is interesting in itself. Everything works here (even multiculturalism (of which they have the superior Confucian hegemony version, rather than the ethno-masochistic late-Christian fiasco)). Practical civilization reaches its zenith in the orchid zone of the Singapore botanic gardens, or somewhere close to it. This drives a lot of people — even those who profoundly admire the place — into a sulfurous rage.
No one likes an apple-polisher of Gnon (or scarcely anyone, I’m exempting myself, along with a few others). By demonstrating social functionality, Singapore makes everyone look bad, which doesn’t go down well. The Sings make us all look like useless scum. Yes, there is that.
Conversation snippets:
Just to keep Kgaard maximally wound-up (and therefore indirectly troll everybody else on the blog), Jim Quinn navigating amid a flurry of Mises quotes:
Booms brought about by credit expansion ALWAYS end in a contractionary bust. It’s just a matter of when. The level of mal-investment in Japan, Europe, China and the U.S. during the boom created by central bankers is almost incomprehensible in its scale of absurdity. The only beneficiaries have been bankers, corporate insiders, politicians, and shadowy billionaires hiding in plain sight. The illusory boom has already impoverished the working class and the coming bust will invoke civil unrest, social chaos and war.
(I’m in Singapore until the 9th, so erratic online activity until then.)
Racial healing from the Duck:
in revenge for #BlackBrunchNYC some uncool white people just flash mobbed a black barbecue joint and forcibly pulled up everyone's pants
— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) January 5, 2015
(Best way to keep up with the Sith these days is to read the Washington Post.)
This surely deserves immortalization:
A reactionary is someone who, encountering a fence with no obvious purpose, electrifies it.
— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010
(Open thread.)
Still link-deprived, so here’s a puzzle (strictly optional):
(1) Every Roman Numeral has an Alphanomic value (corresponding to contemporary alphanumeric position, or to alphabetical position +9).
(2) Are there any consistent Roman-Alphanomic numbers?
(3) The Roman-Alphanomic difference can be conceived as a disequilibrium, and the puzzle is an attempt to restore a zero-divergence through a syntactically well-constructed Roman number. Key, to this method: I (+17), V (+26), X (+23), L (-29), C (-88). Values above C are surely unusable: D (-487), M (-978).
(4) My preliminary conclusion, based on a weakly formalized application of the method above, is that there is no correct solution. The only candidate I could find is the badly constructed CLXVIIII (= 169), which — of course — syntactically collapses to CLXIX (= 117 in alphanomics).
(5) This is a specimen being collected for my qabbalistic quagmires compilation.
ADDED: On an even more incidental note (at this stage), the Time Spiral Press site is a malnourished formless mess at this stage, but it’s finally on a track to become something.
ADDED: So the solution is X-Civ (XCIV, 94, multiple interpretations available, among which various lurid options). You can’t make this stuff up.
ADDED: More productive work. (No idea how I missed CXXIX (it’s a thing of simple beauty)).
Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:
What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.
Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.