There’s enough fizzing chaos at the moment to justify one of these, isn’t there?

Special merit badges for anybody who can link at least three of these topics into a coherent insight point: nerds, Piketty (+), Thai micro-media, alien signal, killer robots, democratic crisis, and heavy whining …

(For anyone unfamiliar with local traditions: it’s an open thread.)

ADDED: “I used to think that such people were blowing smoke, deliberately lying to make a point, but I am increasingly willing to consider the possibility that they’re just stupid.” (Discuss.)

ADDED:

I dreamed I saw Samo last night Alive as you and me Says I "But Samo you're ten years dead" "You're just mindkilled" said he

— St. Rev. Dr. Rev (@St_Rev) May 26, 2014

ADDED: Cthulhoid kickstarter. (Via @PuzzlePrivateer)

With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay at the moment, some fragments:

Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx peanut gallery are now convinced that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction. Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is becoming absolutely imperative, however.

One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical sorting dispels dialectics.

***

Brett Stevens (of the Amerika blog, @amerika_blog)  has gone super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very recent gems, these two pieces, raising questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within natural science.

Why does life resist disorder? #entropy http://t.co/GGMrjqv4bq

— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 1, 2014

Also, another two on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.

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Turbulence is nonlinear dynamism, so remarking upon it very quickly becomes reflexive. In any conflict, an emergent meta-conflict divides those who embrace and reject the conflict as such, and ‘meta’ is in reality reflexivity, partially apprehended. So ignore the sides of the war, momentarily. What about war?

Moldbug really doesn’t like it. The closest he ever comes to a wholly-arbitrary axiom — comparable, at least superficially, to the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle — is exhibited in this context. Following some preliminary remarks, his first exposition of the formalist ideology begins: “The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence.” As with Hobbes, the horror of war is the foundation of political philosophy.

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