Currently in a gothic inspiration — the Otira Hotel — just beyond Arthur’s Pass. Bought for one million dollars, along with the whole village of forty houses. It’s on the rail-line, but remained on the market for years because:
1) It’s a Gold Rush ghost town with no economic base
2) It’s deep in a valley that plunges it into permanent shadow for half the year
3) There’s a massive quake due (on the fault-line it straddles) which is expected to destroy everything
The new owners have stuffed the hotel bar with Gold Rush antiques, taxidermy specimens, the first telegraph cable, freaky life-size marionettes … it should be getting dark for the full effect (but it isn’t yet) …

On an Internet ration tonight (Dec. 27.), but I’m going to try to keep this alive — meaning updates undramatized by an ‘ADDED’. Also pics (but some slight time lag likely there).

The NZ west coast is dominated by a near-continuous strip of temperate rain forest, blurring into sub-tropical rain forest in the north. The peculiar local vegetation, including numerous species of giant ferns, give the landscape a prehistoric flavor. It’s also extremely rugged, with the western slopes of the NZ alps cascading right down to the coast. The sea is brutal, and the coastline deeply mauled. The early exploration of this area was tough. It’s conspicuously Gnon-tinged geography. (Patience needed on the pix front, apologies.)

Only 30,000 people live on the west coast of the South Island — and most of them are trying with greater or lesser urgency to leave. The landscape is glorious (the British Columbia comparison is inescapable). Once drone logistics make it viable to survive in web-linked isolation in this area, it’s going to make a spectacular refuge. For the moment, it’s populated by hippies, hill-billies, and extraction-industry social detritus (a great horror fiction mix, however — drugs, guns, and expendables).

Finally — NZ West Coast pics (via the better half).

“There are many ways to stress a rat — but the easiest way is to inject it with stress hormones.”

Bonus data-burst from the same expert: According to all the rigorous cognitive tests neuroscientists are currently able to apply, crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees. (Yes, it seems preposterous, which is what makes it worth mentioning. No, I haven’t done any back-up online research yet.)

Once it slips the collar, ‘must’ reverts to its status as the most preposterous word in the English language, an instrument of sheer obfuscation. Watch it go:

The United States must review its policies across the Middle East. … It must take a stand against Riyadh’s promotion of exclusionary Wahhabism. […] … Likewise, pressure must be placed on Egypt to abandon its witch hunt of the Muslim Brotherhood. In undertaking an effective counter terrorism strategy, the United States must partner with the Arab states to undertake political reforms that ultimately lead to underwriting a social contract in which every group of the population are represented and protected. […] … If the United States and Iraqi government want to defeat ISIS, they must now ensure the inclusion and protection of Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Yazidis, along with the majority Shi’ites [this one is minimally OK]. […] … Eventually, a process of reconciliation must be initiated between Shi’ites and Sunnis. This centuries-old dispute is played out today in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which has produced a monster that threatens the national security of not only Middle Eastern nations, but also the United States. It must come to an end. […] … The Obama Administration must pursue a policy of severe sanctions against any and all countries that finance jihadist — even if they are our own allies. … What will ultimately turn the tide in the Middle East are groups that actively advocate for a democratic culture and its values around the Arab world. A campaign to promote these ideas on every level must begin, as part of the counterterrorism initiative launched by Kerry. [Emphases added.]

Must they, really? Will they? Can they?

It’s irritating to see moral fanaticism — betrayed by its distinctive combination of groundless certainty and communicative fervor — masquerading as realistic analysis. The disguise is only necessary because the prescription so exorbitantly exceeds the diagnosis, tripping eagerly into glassy-eyed deontological intellectual abandonment.

“The Middle East must stop being the Middle East, and America must help to make this happen.” It can’t, and it won’t, on both counts. The musty smell is simply annoying.

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:

Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind, so this is arriving in pieces …

Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated, techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks like.

Cables:

Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security Market:

The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t see any stacks):

(Launch topic — Entryism.)

ADDED: Anyone applying for retro-entryist special ops from our side has first to pass one simple test. Re-phrase the following statement briefly in your own words, without sacrificing any of its intellectual rigor:

gender binary is rooted in white supremacist, anti-Black and colonial logics

— Che G. (@chegossett) April 20, 2014

Once you’ve completed the exercise, you’re ready for this. ADDED: … but this was supposed to be about Project Idaho. So a little prodding —

@MikeAnissimov @Outsideness But as long as we agree on the importance of Moldbug’s neocameralist project there is no reason for conflict.

— Hurlock (@_Hurlock_) April 24, 2014

@_Hurlock_ @Outsideness I don’t agree on it. There’s no reason for conflict because my position is already dominant.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) April 24, 2014

@MikeAnissimov @Outsideness Out of curiosity, why did you abandon Moldbug’s project? (if you were ever interested in it in the first place)

— Hurlock (@_Hurlock_) April 24, 2014

@_Hurlock_ @Outsideness muh, I abandoned it nearly as soon as I found it. I care about Europeans, not some cultureless shekel-worship.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) April 24, 2014

… and just one more (for now), which exactly captures my sense of the present trajectory:

@Outsideness @_Hurlock_ Which’ll come first, do you think, Kool-Aid or cannibalism?

— Mr. Archenemy (@mr_archenemy) April 24, 2014

ADDED: Some relevant satirical free association from Fuimus.

ADDED:

“They laughed at the trailer park.”

***

Lanzhou, the major gateway city to the West, didn’t win me over. It’s congested, and — upon superficial contact — almost wholly charmless. Given its extraordinary history and contemporary frontier-hub function, that’s a great disappointment. (Despite the grunge, a modest downtown apartment there still costs US$200,000.)

The taxi-ride from the train station to the airport is unusually long because the broken country made it hard to situate runways conveniently. The route we took on the way back took us past the rapidly-arising New Lanzhou City — which is huge. There’s some prospect of a few glitzy modern buildings, if the promotional posters are to be believed. Serried ranks of comparatively tasteful proletarian residential highrises make up the bulk of the New  City so far.

***

The Chinese West is weirdly comparable to the American West, but historically fragmented. It plays a similar role in the local movie industry, as an imaginative space of heroism, violence, and civilizational fragility. It’s vast, arid, and geographically sublime — recalling the (to me) stunning fact that China’s proportion of arable land is only fractionally larger than Australia’s. Arid mountains, deserts, and harsh scrubby plains stretch endlessly. Dangerous tribes with an exotic nobility populate the Western frontier myths. Foreigners tend to understand — perhaps even overestimate — the American fascination with the frontier, but China’s is nowhere near as thoroughly appreciated. (A fake ‘ancient Dunhuang’ has been created near the real one, catering to the huge appetite of the Chinese movie industry for historical ‘Westerns’.)

***

In the Occident, the reputation of Buddhism has been almost completely devastated by New Age flakiness, but there are plenty of important things to say about it, and do with it. It’s a religion suited to philosophical appreciation, and no engagement with ontological questions can avoid the Buddhist contribution without self-impoverishment. Consider the crucial NRx topic of time-preference, which — abstractly apprehended — concerns the investment of the future with ontological weight. High time-preference amounts to an estimation of the present as more real than the future, and therefore as more worthy of concern. Buddhism, perhaps most clearly in its hyper-philosophical yogacara strain, accesses this problem with unique directness. English becomes Buddhist when it talks — with systematic ambiguity — about what matters. Attribution of reality is a sink for purpose. Is there an Eastern assault upon high time-preference that orients itself to a dis-investment of the present (as delusion), rather than — in the style of Occidental prudence — a super-investment of the future (as an irrationally-neglected inevitability)?

***

It struck we with peculiar force quite how ironical it is that those regimes (now defunct) with an overt commitment to the labor theory of value — and therefore to pro-natalist exhortation on economistic grounds — are the ones with the most consistent record of destroying the economic value of labor. To invert the same irony, Deng Xiaoping introduced counter-natalist policies at the very moment (Mainland) Chinese labor was becoming a resource of unprecedented value. Irony is destroying us all, but it isn’t something we cooked up.

***

Thanks to @ProfessorZaius for passing along the following troll-masterpiece by ‘Amazon Customer’ (reviewing Fanged Noumena, 1.0 out of 5 stars, 14 Feb 2014):

Stick to Stephenie Meyer, for heaven’s sake!
My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.
This is possibly the worst mistake I have ever made.
From being a happy-go-lucky Goth with a crush on Robert Pattinson, Tricia has become a ‘post-human nihilist’ who stays up all night listening to the sort of machine music that makes your ears bleed and gibbering about the ‘Dark Enlightenment’.
I have written to the book’s author to complain, but received no reply. I am informed by his publishers that Mr Land has in any case disowned all his previous writing and decamped to Shanghai.
None too soon, in my view – but too late for Tricia, I fear.

There are two types of people: Those who only sometimes procrastinate those who are so inclined to it that it creates havoc in their lives. Lately, I tend to be the latter of the two. […] My procrastination has been so bad today that I actually researched “procrastination” in order to procrastinate a bit longer. Then, I tweeted about my procrastination in order to drag it out even further. Then, others joined in, and it was clear that I am far from the only one. […] Well, the fine folks at The Next Web blog have posted a very timely article on the science of procrastination …

Procrastination is a time-based phenomenon, so I’m sure there’s a gripping philosophical angle, if only it were possible to extract some cognitive resources from the labyrinth of digression. Seriously, there’s a major procrastination post coming … some time later (i.e. as soon as practically possible, which always means at the last, sleep-starved minute).

The essence of procrastination (at least for me): this is far too urgent to deal with right now.

This one is here because I’m in the sand-pit, playing the German Army of the Great War. First hurl everything at the French (communist Accelerationism) and try to take them out of the game within a few months, then wheel around for a plunge into Russia, dismantling the Czarists (with a hurricane of Neocameralism). Sequenced two-front war. It’s a strategy that’s already driven me into narcoleptic disintegration, but I’m committed.

Out here in the Dark East, waiting for news about the titanic Western clashes, it’s a time to patch things together with meager resources. That’s economy, which is always worth exploring. The specific topic of micro-cognition has been nagging at me with unusual ferocity ever since crossing over into Twitter. It seems like something close to a compulsory adaptation, as the near future chews human psychology into hot techno-splinters. If we don’t accept miniaturization as an urgent and intimate problem, we’ll eventually collide ruinously with nano-hostiles we can’t even perceive.  (So, as always, I think any traditionalism without a ‘neo-‘ is already laid out on the sacrificial slab.)

Languid afternoons with long and difficult books would be the way to go — if we had a different future. In the one we have, we’ll receive the ancient tomes in scrambled streams, hurtling at us like a particle storm out of cyberspace. Lamentable? Perhaps. Avoidable? Almost certainly not. So adapt.

This is the sort of thing worth thinking about carefully — but in pieces. It’s creepypasta taken to the next level. I was totally ready for it, musing vaguely about scaling horror down to the same approximate size while in Cambodia — although nothing quite crystallized. The reception of these two-sentence micro-nasties suggests that plenty of other people were tapping into the same high-frequency shadow waves. The next stage is compression to the 140-characters of a tweet — then it goes into tweet contagion. Horrorist memetic warfare. (Did I warn you that grammar gets suspended in a scrap note?)

A few additional quick-and-dirty points about horrorist method. (1) It’s not clicked here yet, which is why this isn’t a horror story. (2) When it is, the story has to absorb enough theory to be gratingly ‘meta’ — smoothing that out will be a guiding aesthetic imperative. (3) Horrorism has to be not only ‘meta’, but also reflexive, or nonlinear, in order to deliver its payload across the fiction barrier. It will all seem hideously ‘postmodern’ if it isn’t done well, so clunky annoyances will abound in the early stages. (Consider that a preliminary down-payment on future apologies.) (4) I’m not at all sure there’s anything horrorism can’t do … (5) Experiment.

Stepping back from the harsh tracts of horror, there are numerous paths of splinter-technique to wander down. Prominent instance: numbering. Coming full-circle, the #Accelerate manifesto is composed in numbered paragraphs, which is formally appealing. It acknowledges a virtual discontinuity, as if pre-formatted for the rending to come. With different methods, it could facilitate discontinuous composition, providing the assembly codes for a whole that arrives in chunks, even out of sequence, or across intervals of oblivion. It also references traditions of fragmentary writing (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) in which brevity, or conceptual completion on constricted scales, was adopted as a principle of achievement. The Internet tide flows in that direction (Moldbug notwithstanding).

I liked this short piece by Isegoria a lot. (I’m half way through Moby Dick at the moment, and getting far more out of it than ever before.)

An Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn classic (just because I want a place to lock-down the link).

Some final horrorism material.

Disintegration …

ADDED: The machines don’t think we’re reading fast enough. (Their case is terrifyingly persuasive.)