Stranded in 90% disconnection, and completely out of touch with what the Internet has been up to — so this is a classic (link-free) CP. Open thread, as always. Turn-of-the-year themes would obviously be especially suitable — but anything (civil) goes.
If you believe in yourself, you’ll believe in anything. – Nicola Masciandaro
Based – very roughly – on a true story.
[Subsequent content carries a vulgarity and decadence warning, for sensitive readers.]
For the visitors here who are perpetually tortured by the Damn! Where is the tip-jar button? question, less-evil twin has a time-travel book out. (It should be $3.99, but it says $5.99 at my link — which might be a Shanghai-effect.)
UF (2.1) plug here.
If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode, who just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it would make an ideal present.
(Open thread, links, stuff …)
The better half has been in NY for a few days, so I’ve been juggling some unusually intense kid-management with getting my (short) time-travel book up on Kindle, and all kinds of threads have been dropped. Kindle throws me into a greater state of ambivalence than anything else I know. It’s at once a delight — raw disintermediation euphoria — and an absolute nightmare due to the obstruction the interface puts in the way of editorial control. Would it really be impossible to allow an editorial function at the MOBI end? It seems obvious that Amazon has put almost the whole of its attention into the reader-experience end, but it’s getting content-providers fused with the process that will lock-in the future. The present set-up can only be considered a flaky intermediate stage.
While I’ve been distracted, NRx seems to have been in exceptionally productive mode. Among the best things I’ve picked up on have been an epic overview of far-right practicality by Yuray, Nydwracu on the slow collapse, Anomaly revisiting the Trichotomy, Poseidon Awoke on Left-Liberal difference, and Dampier prodding traditionalists, and tech-comms (but this might have been my favorite recent Dampier piece). Feminist outreach from Jim: “A woman is like a badly behaved dog …” Machine Lords. Cathedral Cultural Studies. He‘s baaaaack.
Gamergate remains a popcorn machine. Some outer-edge of lunacy exploration here (sample: “… if South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can do it, I don’t think I’m asking so much. … America is Gamergate”). ClarkHat chats to AoS. Tactical stuff. Christian-shaming. Alexa-analytics on the great migration. The Grays. Hitler.
Ebola science. (This story is losing its grip on my mind — strange that something continuing up an exponential curve can do that.)
Clausewitz and nonlinearity (superbly done).
Games Theory simulation for Eth-Nats.
Free Northerner completes his To Be A Christian series (with internal links to the rest). And, from Matt Walsh: “We are, without a doubt, the most marriage-averse group in human history.”
A conversation with Nicholas Wade.
“I don’t care.”
ADDED: The Dampier Trichotomy-tour is completed (with a penetrating look at nationalism).
The swirling delirium at the new /pol/ is at least 80% noise, but it includes some real intelligence (in both senses of the word), and not solely of a comedic variety. The sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on connections and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss as pollution. This makes it especially suited to conspiracy theorizing, both inane and exotic.
While noting the importance of correction for narcissistic bias, which operates through selective attention, memorization, and (from commentators here) communication, it seems as if this blog is referenced disproportionately by the most extravagant NRx-sensitive /pol/ conspiracists. That is quite understandable. Occult philosophy, secrecy, crypsis, codes, and obscurity are insistent themes here. Xenosystems is inclined towards arcane cultural games. It identifies cryptographic developments as keys to the emerging order of the world.
The primary philosophical task of this blog is to disturb unwarranted pretensions to knowing, in the name of a Pyrrhonian inspiration. In this regard, confusion, paradox, and uncertainty are communicative outcomes to be ardently embraced.
Thanks to the incomprehensible virtual wizardry of Mr Archenemy, Outside in now has permalinks attached to comments* (among some other wondrous stuff yet to be explored). The function of this blog as a Micro-Neocameral Cyberstate thus enters a new phase. (Anybody operating a theme-compatible multinational enterprise from the comments section here can confidently anticipate the world’s most competitive tax rates.)
* Nested comments still resist the new regime at this stage.
(Open thread.)
Some bits and pieces, which everyone if of course free to ignore:
Commercialization of war (video). This trend seems to be huge.
The (first) Age of Unqualified Reservations has now formally passed: “I think it’s clear that UR has gone on de facto hiatus, so it seems best to adhere to my own philosophy and make it official. … UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon – and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives.”
Nydwracu crafts a conceptual tool of great value.
Action at Reddit.
William Gibson and Hyperstition (or not): “… was Gibson just a smart reader of the way things were already going, or — as Jack Womack suggested in the afterword to the novel’s 2000 re-issue — has ‘the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?'”
Alain de Benoist interviewed.
Either an extraordinary techno-scientific breakthrough, or not. (This, I’m supremely confident, isn’t.)
Singularity won’t save us (a conclusion I share, for entirely different reasons).
My Russian isn’t good enough to understand what the hell is going on in this, but NYC looks spectacular even when it’s teeming with Slavo-fascists.
Hate.
Yes, the new regime of managed disorder is already shredding its deadlines, but chaotic scheduling adds to the recursive dynamism.
Some semi-random words and terms:
Agorism, Asabiyyah, Caliphate, Communism, GDP, Liberation, Risk, Poe’s Law (+, ++, +++), Value, World War (G).
This might trigger something:
Perhaps I lack the imagination to do so, but I just can’t see Jewish feminists, homosexual restaurateurs, black power advocates, Chinese mathematicians, and Amerindian Aztec nationalists locked in any kind of permanent alliance against what they imagine anachronistically to be the WASP establishment. Their enemy has become diffuse and milquetoast, while the contenders for power and gain have at least as much that divides as unites them. I have every reason to believe these anti-WASP, anti-bourgeois activists don’t like each other very much even if they think they can use each other in a power struggle against an enemy that doesn’t show up. Over the years I’ve noticed the pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice among blacks, the revulsion for gays among blacks and Hispanics, and the escalating struggle for favor from government bureaucrats among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The question is when these contradictions will overwhelm the system. I’ve no doubt they will in the end.
(If it doesn’t, that’s OK. It’s your call …)
My Twitter Dunbar number isn’t 150. It isn’t even 99, but that’s what I’m working with as a provisional ceiling. It’s all too easy for me to see how this medium can work as really destructive junk, and I value it too much to just go along with that slide. So I’m determined to overcome social inhibition and wield the ax.
This is my public position:
Every tweet chips a piece out of peoples limited stock of attention — repetitive babblers are noise pollution.
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 23, 2014
The medium works its junkie magic because ‘unfollowing’ is an implicit act of microsocial aggression (whatever its rational motives), triggering primate brain-chemicals associated with social signalling. It’s as if you had suddenly declared an unwillingness to any longer pick ticks out of somebody’s fur. At a certain point this monkey business has to be over-ridden, or deterioration is all-but inevitable. People who aren’t prepared to to protect their time — even at the cost of social discomfort — will get nothing done. That’s the threat of social media, as a disease.