Some time fragmentation is wholly predictable until Wednesday, in Ningbo (Zhejiang), due to an end of summer family break with berserk offspring. That was to have been compounded by computer crisis until the excellent IT guy at the hotel here sorted out what had seemed an insoluble connectivity problem. We’re at a beautiful Park Hyatt out at the edge of the town, done out in an aesthetic that mixes Jiangnan elements with the company’s cosmopolitan minimalism (rough textures, earth tones, and intricate landscaping seem to be consistent themes.) Our explorations of the city isn’t likely to amount to much, but there are a couple of cool things to report on over the  next couple of days. My expectation is something like the Hong Kong activity slump, but on heavy tranquillizers, so I’m throwing in a Chaos Patch to keep the wolves at the door.

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If anyone has found difficulties reaching this blog, it’s possible that inefficient search terms are to blame. From the WordPress Dashboard, I’ve been assured that these search paths all have a record of success:

domestic robotician
racism blog
nick land goes insane
nick land date died when?
h.l. mencken heaving deadf cats in the cathderal
14 vector shot red dawn mood and sex stimulator directions
how all organisms are buckets of anachronisms
one click chicks spanking
free nude picture tubes of saddam hussein

(Some loyal commentators can take their share of credit for our emerging definition within the Planetary Cybermind.)

As requested by fotrkd: Let sonic mayhem erupt.

(The (un)sound thing is ripped off Kode9 btw — it helps that it’s an Apocalypse Now reference.)

Thales: “‘Battle of the Bands’ might prove to be an evergreen thread, easily eclipsing any previous or subsequent OI comment thread …” — macabre possibilities heave themselves from the depths …

Latest travel distraction is the world capital of the technocommercialists. Of course, it’s a city that I adore to the edge of brain-stem seizure. Just seeing the Kowloon container port is almost enough to persuade one that the process on this planet is actually going OK.

Naively, I had expected that Mandarin would have made some obvious inroads since the last time I was here (roughly six years ago). No sign of that, though. It’s quite stunning how much English there is here, and the extent to which English remains the default alternative to Cantonese. That has to have important implications in respect to the cultural foundations of Hong Kong autonomy.

Expeditionary inertialization due to exhausted children prevented exploration getting off the ground today. Nothing too adventurous is likely to happen, but I’ll try to record a few sporadic notes here. Hong Kong is an iconic city, with an exceptional intensity of sociopolitical meaning,  so it should be possible to discuss — and even argue about — it.

I’m only here (with family) for a few days, then returning to Shanghai for six weeks of solitary, extremely high-intensity production. After Thursday, if anybody has extravagant demands to make, it’s the time to make them. Whatever is ever going to be possible should be possible soon. Most likely, I’ll learn some crushing lessons about project feasibility, because all my excuses will be gone.

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The new UF blog is up and running now, with a few teething problems expected. The platform is much more reliable than the old one, but its idiosyncrasies still require some getting used to. Comments, especially, might be troublesome at first.

The intention is to use it as a platform for material that isn’t (in one way or another) off the wall. There’s nothing much up yet except some tentative posts on the structure of history, urbanization, economic development, and the recent regime transition. (There’s also a product promo, providing a clue to the underlying economic base of the blog, which is still extremely embryonic at this stage.)

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One of the many reasons to be suspicious about political activism on the Occidental off-spectrum right is the parochialism that feeds it. There is a global process that will settle what occurs in its broad structure, making local pretensions to decisive ideological agency simply ridiculous.

The fundamental economic outcome — and thus the fate of the world — is not ultimately controllable even by the central financial administrations of the major world powers (unless certain intriguing axioms of radical contemporary fascism are defensible), so the idea that extremely marginalized Western cabals are positioned to seize the political driving seat is so saturated in self-deception that it wastes everybody’s time. In addition, technological developments complicate all economic forecasts essentially, and obscurely. We cannot even approximately delimit what unforeseen technical breakthroughs could entail.

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As per request.

Weekend disorder now enabled (although I have no idea at all what to expect).

ADDED: CP#3 Topic Summary:
— Bitcoin in China (with some surrealism)
— thread instigator (Peter A. Taylor) introduces the topic of ‘Gnon polity’ with suggestions for institutional structures and reading list …
— Why not the Antiversity? (with digression into chaos theory)
— Call it Resartus (or at least grab the domain name) … a new Lunar Society?
— … cryptic chaos …
— Time-travel obviously impossible (at least without a very bad hangover)

Trolls are funny, so long as they’re ruthlessly eliminated.

Firstly, they seem to be shocked and appalled to find that neoreactionary blogs are unconstrained by the masochistic principles of ultra-liberal comments policy.

Secondly, they totally miss the way relevant incentives line up, especially right now, given the debates unfolding about our own micro-cultural dysgenics. Comments are not any kind of asset to be welcomed with gratitude, unless they’re intelligent, appropriately directed, and reasonably civil. Otherwise, they’re just pollution. Why on earth — in an environment cross-cut by discussions about keeping well-meaning, polite-but-dim commentary at bay — would anybody expect the door to be held open to hostile snarls, snarky one-liners, insults, and disposable trash-talk?

Outside in has benefited immensely from some of the most brilliant commentary on the web. It takes very seriously the warning — most insistently from Vladimir — that the rational expectation is for entropy, so that high-quality discussion cannot at all be taken for granted. In consequence, the private army here is simply itching to string up a few random commentators as a sacrifice to Malthus. And then some graffiti-clad, obnoxious drunk, drooling troll stumbles it …

So, latching onto both the theme and purpose of the Chaos Patch … Having too many places for community building is worse than not having enough of them. A lot of amazing commentary happens on all the different blogs of reaction-space, but it takes a full-time commitment to read them all.
— Survivingbabel (announcing blog plans, last time)

That says it all … or most probably not.

As SB suggests, detailed division of labor is one obvious solution to the dark-energy driven cosmic inflation problem. Perhaps overwhelming traffic congestion will catalyze that.

ADDED: The flood of darkness continues.

ADDED: CP#2 Topic Summary:– Abortion
— Tech-issues
— Environmentalism
— Does entropy always win?
— New blog announcement (Francis St. Pol)
— Khem chaos

A blog closely models a patchwork-embedded neocameral micro-state, which is to say that its governance is dictatorial, controlled by external competition. Internally, it’s God-king stuff: zero-democracy, undivided power without constitutional constraint, absolute discretion tilting into sorcerous extremities. The sole counter-balance comes from outside, sustained by a freedom of exit no less highly realized than the administrative power it evaluates. If people don’t like what’s happening, they leave.

As in the (virtual) neocameral state it models, a blog stages a dramatic collision between administrative authority and radical liberty. Admin and commentators coordinate tacitly to make things work, already conjoined in the production of value.

Commentators speak for themselves. That is their work and investment, which the blog exploits, to develop. Necessarily, therefore, from the side of the sim-neocameral Admin, there are inescapable but obscure responsibilities. Undoubtedly, among the first of these, is the maintenance of order.

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