Some initial reacto-chatter — Sex and natural law (don’t miss the comment thread). Prepare for World War P. Inception politics. Battered West syndrome. The new alchemy. A new behaviorism. Exosemantics (are we going to get a Coles Notes for this?). A routine that’s still working well. Social Matter audio. “We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property” (apparently). Secular religion. Whose side is history on? Round-ups from FN and Steves, and continuous flow here.

The compression of ritual space (and a reading list from hell). Scale-free patterns.

Putin, international man of misery. A Pope beyond hope. Romney is perfect (for 1996). Awkward words in China (related). Unthinkable fears. Much of interest here (especially this).

Gibson’s ‘the Jackpot’ — or cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe — makes a real contribution to contemporary apocalypticism (this article offers no more than a hazy clue).

More Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare reactionary succulence.

Much entertaining frivolity this week (unless it’s just me) — “quite possibly the most racist article you will ever read” (I doubt it, but still …). Racism. Racism and hate. More racism and hate. Not racist. (This is how it used to be done.)

It’s one of those movies you have to stick with — give up before you’re halfway through and you’ll have no idea what all the fuss was about, but make it to the end and you’ll know you’ve seen something memorable. The genre is becoming huge. It could probably be described uncontroversially as apocalyptic neoreactionary speculative drama. Gibson’s The Peripheral is self-consciously there. One obvious (and striking) movie comparison is Elysium. In its purest form, the genre goes to rightist places nothing else quite reaches.

It begins with a revolutionary-leftist frame, which is eventually broken on the wheel of irony (more or less occult). The more subterranean the ironization, the more comical the result. In this respect, Snowpiercer is more Animal Farm than Elysium — which is to say, a far more overtly reactionary work. “Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. … All things flow from the sacred engine.”

It follows The Heart of Darkness plot-structure — journey towards a source of dark enlightenment. In this case, ‘Kurtz’ is Wilford and (the Apocalypse Now replacement for Marlow) ‘Willard’ is Curtis, which seems quite blatant — but maybe that’s just me. The process is certainly comparable: the slow stripping away of liberal illusions over the course of a voyage into the machine-core of the real (‘the end of the river’, ‘the front of the train’) like a tender white pelt coming away under the action of a jungle-war combat knife. The Curtis-Wilford meeting at the end of Snowpiercer is Apocalypse Now-influenced even down to the psycho-cosmic / religious details of its theatrical Oedipalism and immersion into the myth of (Frazer’s) sacrificed king. Infantile rebellion against the cruelties of the realist order is metamorphosed not only into intellectual acceptance, but into an utterly ‘corrupting’ offer of consummate power and doom.

“We’ve seen what people do without leadership — they devour one another.” The cannibalism isn’t merely figurative. You’ve arrived at the front of the train (an Art Deco glory, btw.), “the eternal engine”, where the secrets of power are to be shatteringly revealed.

There’s one final step to take: “The gate to the outside world. It’s been frozen shut for 18 years. You can take it as a wall.”

ADDED:

Post: Snowpiercer Almost Gets There http://t.co/ygaHbcMlUg C'mon @Outsideness, Hollywood is not going to give us a proper rightist movie

— SOBL1 (@SOBL1) December 26, 2014

Jim’s ‘Death of Christianity’ post is the latest installment in a series defending Restoration England. It seems to me that people are being unusually cagey about arguing this out — perhaps a little scared? The religious topic, in particular, tends to draw a high level of interest, which is significant in itself. This might the place to stir the hornets nest with the latest from Pope Francis: The Koran is a prophetic book of peace. It’s not so much the appeasement, moral equivalence, or other red-rags to the right issues that intrigue me most about this — and not even the accommodation of ‘prophecy’ to an outcome that brings it close to sarcasm — but the sheer oddity of the theology behind the remark. To be trolled by the Pope is really something (but what?). (Patheos places the quote in context — which suggests the quality of the trolling is even higher than initially evident.)

Sensible strategic advice. Law and violence. Paleo-humanism. Don’t count on the robocops. 4GW lessons. Anissimov on Brin. Supplementing this link assortment, there’s a whole bunch more from ‘|||||’ here.

The ripples of Ferguson have turned all my bubbles into 24/7 carnivals of racial chaos — only fitfully interrupted by anything else. That’s even before noting the return of Unamused (plus). Black-on-Bosnian action (‘clarified‘), against the natives, and versus Hispanics. Sympathy is less than universal (last from September). Complication from The New Republic. In other animosities, Heartiste derides rice farmers (background from Peter Frost, 1, 2), and on the other side of the ledger, Slate does Watson, and the full communists do the New Atheists. This podcast discussion on Asia is recommended (directly accessible here).

Dysgenics update. The peculiar hereditarian fixation of animal breeders. Darwin’s notebooks go digital. Ridley on the (important) Dawkins-Wilson spat. HBD tweets of the week.

Cosmic and techno-apocalypse update. (More on Bostrom, 1, 2, 3, 4.) Perhaps tech-collapse will get us first.

This link (from Amerika) went is going completely berserk on my UF Facebook page.

Notable chant pieces: “We can’t do anything.” “Burn it to the ground.”

Bubble trouble. Bad plumbing.

Gaming heuristics.

My blog discovery of the week has masses of thoughtful commentary on NRx — critical in the best sense of the term.

Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a deep cosmic space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted together by a time loop. (Plug.) The involvement of Kip Thorne reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s explorations of cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan is, in any case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects them, enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary myth-making on an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is formidable.

The movie envisages a future of roughly Greerian dreariness, in which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine, earnestly promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its cultural energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers. (In this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a one-step remove from my Twitter TL.) It is thus, as Scharlach has noted, a lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme Terran regression. Engineers are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young Murphy Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates official doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.

Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is troweled on thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her intelligence. His love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and delicately portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense, because it touches upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human emotion only as a proxy for twisted cosmological process — trans-galactic voyages and time-implosion.

When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that her love for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to prioritize a visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it really could.” Within the arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated, but it is too perfectly stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan movie, and there are loops within loops.

The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic superhumanism keeps them in their place).

Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting far too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re called Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which our locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-rending magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper says. “It was not meant to die here.”

It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.

“It’s like all the things that make me human are fading away.” (140 is the key.)

Scarlett Johansson has somehow become the icon of intelligenesis catastrophe. One thing should certainly be indisputable: this one is a far superior vehicle for such cosmo-twisted blonde dehumanization fantasies than last year’s execrable schmaltz-blitz Her. (An additional data point.)

Primordial Abominations versus Ultimate Techno-Horror is so sub-NRx. Alpha-Omega, outsider-incoming is the synthesis in process.

“I was rather hoping you had a game in which the humans win.”
“Oh, that won’t be a problem sir. You should probably be looking in the sarcastic comedy section.”

From the same people (and also via Rufio).

The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case, five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but we only need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give Beijing officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of the Almighty God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong Xiuquan claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against the Qing dynasty. At least twenty million people died in the ensuing conflict.

There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be of such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties has given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns in Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people and many distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the ages, seeks to identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase of a dynasty’s cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of the classic signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive culture of corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.

Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from social revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the religious question — originally identical with tolerance — into ever deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any attribution of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite rapidly changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained far greater socio-political pertinence, largely because the common millenarian root of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.

It is possible that the Chinese approach to dissident religion remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little doubt, however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to a traditional Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary Western one. The gravity of the stakes ensures it.

There are a lot of very lethal viruses in the world, and Ebola is not the most lethal or most easy transmittable, but the main thing which makes me worry about it is the steadiness of its exponential infection curve. … The main stunning feature of it is that the curve is moving straight forward (small downward bump in May-June may be explained by the efforts of existing medical services in Africa to curb the epidemic before services had been overwhelmed). This exponential growth must be stopped, or humanity will face a global catastrophe, and it may start a downward spiral towards extinction; moreover, some estimates suggest that pandemic doubling time is actually two weeks (because of underreporting of actual cases), so in five months, seven billion will be infected: total infection, by July 2015. … Such catastrophes may not mean total human extinction, as only around 70% of people infected currently die from Ebola (and even less because we don’t know, or share, asymptomatic cases), but still, this means the end of the world as we know it. This virus is the first step towards the road of full extinction … If the virus will mutate quickly, there will be many different strains of it, so it will ultimately create a multi-pandemic. … Some of the strains may became airborne, or have higher transmission rates, but the main risk from multi-pandemic is that it overcomes defenses provided by the natural variability of the human genome and immunity. (By the way, the human genome variability is very low because of the recent bottle neck in the history of our population. …) … We are almost clones from the view point of genetic variability typical for natural populations. […] The Human race is very unique – it has very large population but very small genetic diversity. It means that it is more susceptible to pandemics. […] Also, a large homogenous population is ideal for breeding different strains of infection. … If the genetic diversity of a pathogen is bigger than human diversity, than it could cause a near total extinction, and also, large and homogenous populations help breed such a diversity of pathogens feeding on the population. … [embedded link] … “The Ebola virus can survive for several days outside the body” [link] … “It is infectious as breathable 0.8 to 1.2-μm laboratory-generated droplets” … “Also many of the greatest plagues mankind has ever known were not airborne: e.g. smallpox.” …

… Another problem is the lack of adequate responses from global authorities; they are half a year behind the situation. You can’t react to exponential threats “proportionally”. You must be several steps ahead. […] Everything they do now should have been done half a year ago. […] Unlimited exponential growth is a mark of potential global catastrophe: self-improving AI; nuclear chain reactions; self-replicating grey goo from nanobots; all examples are especially dangerous in a naïve environment. A large human population without immunity to Ebola, or any other Marburg style viruses, is fuel for exponential viral growth. … Ebola is mostly transmittable only in hard cases when a person shits and bleeds uncontrollably, but it is also contagious from non-symptomatic people, so Ebola is not naturally selecting for mildness; it may do just the opposite. It may be selected for extreme and “fluid-like” dying. … Also Ebola seems to influence behavior zombie style, as late stage patients attack medical personal, run from quarantine or even bite someone — it happened in Nigeria and Liberia — the same can be said of rabies and toxoplasma. … Here we also should mention the meme aspect of the Ebola virus, which is the psychological stigma and fear associated with the disease. The fear has led to riots in Liberia, which additionally helped spread the virus. (See for example rumors that dead Ebola patients had resurrected [link]) … So Ebola is also mimetic [sic] hazard, and the fear of it prevents rational control of the epidemic: people flee it, destroy hospitals, or they live in denial of it.

If Ebola slaughters most of the human population, hundred of millions of people will still survive the pandemic itself (if it will not become multi-pandemic with many different strains of Ebola-like viruses). […] It will end technological civilization as we know it, and it probably start the self-sustainable process of destruction, which is the consequent failure of different institutions and technologies as well as wars and general disorder. It may be a long term degradation process, which has its own logic and its bottom may be very far from now.

Many more links at the original.

So to summarize this argument: Ebola really is a zombie plague, it could sweep the earth in under a year (with ~70% lethality), human evolutionary history adds peculiar biological vulnerabilities, its virulence might be far higher than commonly understood, and the catalytic global process thus unleashed has the potential to cascade forward all the way to full X-risk. There might be a way to mash down harder on the ‘scream’ button, but right now I’m not seeing how.

Seizing the opportunity for an Ebola fest (doubtless already behind the curve):

It could already be in Britain.

Turning it into a national security issue has made it more dangerous.

Libertarian responses from Stefan Molyneux and Ron Paul.

The mathematics of contagion elucidated by Gregory Cochran.

Racism is the real threat.

ADDED: Institutional Breakdown in a Time of Ebola. (Epic.)

ADDED: Quality Ebola commentary from SoBL, Dampier, and Thompson. Dreher on Castillo. Escalating concern at Nature and the NYT. Chris Brown and 8chan try to be helpful. Dialing it up another notch. Where next? Polls, preparations, protocols, politics … Blame the Bilderbergers.

Blame Bloom for luring me into this blasted landscape. (I agree with JAB that there’s something important going on here.)

A Doom Paul video selection (1, 2, 3).

Here‘s a Paul vs. Krugman cage-match.

ADDED: Dialled up to eleven.

ADDED: The End is Close …

What’s the alternative to stupidity now? Now that they’ve gone so far it’s almost a shame not to see it through to the end. And therein rests the last remaining chance of the liberal establishment, imploring such divinities as they still believe in — luck maybe — that their hero can create a chaos so complete it will embroil the entire Muslim world, Russia and China in a vast conflagration before it consumes them.

Note: Cohen’s inclusion of a citation from Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings (in the NYT!) is a sure sign of the End Times. It makes me wonder whether the liberal media elite will be desperately chanting Moldbug poetry when Zack finally closes in.