And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

(Soon.)

“I’ve been making fun of the singularity since I first encountered the idea,” he says. “What you get in The Peripheral is a really fucked-up singularity. It’s like a half-assed singularity coupled with that kind of neoreactionary, dark enlightenment shit. …”

There’s some kind of counter-factual retro-futurist irony going on here that I’m not remotely getting:

Somebody needs to write a dystopian SF novel about a near future in which the neo-reactionaries have won.

— Steven Shaviro (@shaviro) December 15, 2014

ADDED: (The Peripheral, end Chapter 79, The Jackpot, page 322) Also cited by Erebus, in comments below, with spoilers removed.

“What about China?”
The Wheelie Boy’s tablet creaked faintly, raising the angle of its camera. “They’d had a head start,” he said.
“At what?”
“At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This,” and the tablet creaked again, surveying the mother’s lawn, “is still ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors, considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that. Blamed it, in fact.”
“Who runs it, then?”
“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”
“The King of England?”
“The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.”
“The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that.
“The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”

Here is the set up: 2017, world economy has collapsed, natural resources, food and oil are tapped, America had an economic cataclysm, the Big One hit California, a totalitarian police state (Cadre) exists with heavy security at airports, cultural activity is heavily censored except for the broadcast reality competition game shows. Most of America seems to live in squalid, third world conditions, there are political prisoners mixed in with regular prisoners, there are re-education camps, heavily armed helicopters are used to pacify rioters, but there is also a small number of people living a decent life with nice apartments, travel options, and spiffy clothes. There is a play on patriotism. Los Angeles has shiny towers and plenty of squalor with armed police members everywhere, resembling a Brazilian city. That is pretty horrifyingly close to today.

Where did I go wrong (in my own eyes)? Fundamentally, by hugely over-estimating the intelligence of ISIS. The collapse of this inflated opinion is captured by a single word: Kurds.

Just a few months ago, ISIS enjoyed a strategic situation of extraordinary potential. It represented the most militant — and thus authentic — strain of Arab Sunni Jihad, ensuring exceptional morale, flows of volunteers from across the Sunni Muslim world, and funding from the gulf oil-states, based upon impregnable legitimacy. It was able to recruit freely from the only constituency within Iraq with any military competence — the embittered remnants of Saddam’s armed forces, recycled through the insurgency against the American occupation, and then profoundly alienated by the sectarian politics of the new Shia regime. It was also able to draw upon a large, fanatically motivated, Syrian Sunni population, brutalized and hardened by the war against the (Alawite, or quasi-Shia) Assad regime in that country. Both enemy states were radically anathematized throughout the Sunni world, deeply demoralized, incompetent, and patently incapable of asserting their authority throughout their respective countries. In consequence, a re-integrated insurgent Sunni Mesopotamia had arisen, with such historical momentum that it served as a concrete source of inspiration for energetic holy war, and a natural base for the eschatalogically-promised reborn Caliphate.

The wider environment was more complicated, but also highly encouraging. The Jihadi legitimacy of ISIS made opposition from the Sunni Arab states to the south (Jordan, Saudi Arabia) unthinkable. That left four major sources of substantial hostile intervention: Israel, the United States, Turkey, and Iran. Taking these in turn:

(1) Israel, by all game-theoretic sanity, was a de facto ally. Perhaps it is. It had no intelligible motive for intervention, and were it to do so the legitimacy of ISIS would be immediately elevated to stratospheric levels. Baghdad or Damascus regimes dependent upon Israeli support would be obviously politically unsustainable. (Israeli war against ISIS puts it in objective collaboration with Iran — which isn’t going to happen.)

(2) The USA was burnt out, directionless, strategically-conflicted to the point of psychosis, and politically-toxic to near-Israeli levels. Relevant at this point only as a Jihadi recruiting tool.

(3) As a NATO member, Turkey completes the troika of Westernized states, whose intervention would naturally tend to reinforce a clash-of-civilizations escalation, to the extreme medium-term advantage of ISIS. While a Sunni state, it is not Arab, and would quickly generate extraordinary ethnic animosity. With Turks having lost the previous Caliphate, there is no imaginable circumstances in which the Sunni Muslim world would entertain the prospect of them leading — or even seriously interfering with — the next one. Turkish intervention might no doubt slow things down, but it could not conceivably stabilize the situation in Mesopotamia. The effect would be to rapidly expand the conflict into Turkey itself, and even into Turkic Central Asia. There is no reason to think Turkish popular opinion would support a strategically pointless, bloody war in the south. (We will get to the critical Kurdish factor in a moment.)

(4) From a strictly military point of view, Iran possesses a mixture of capability and commitment that makes it a uniquely formidable opponent, but here the political calculus is also at its starkest. From the moment it intervenes, the Sunni-Shia sectarian character of the war is consolidated, and generalized, into a truly global, climactic struggle between the two dominant branches of the Muslim faith. From a local (Mesopotamian) uprising, ISIS’s war would be transformed immediately into an apocalyptic religious event, setting the world to the torch. Jihadi recruitment and funding would become a worldwide deluge. For the Iranians, there is no imaginable end-point to this, short of an absolute resolution at the level of eschatology, or revolutionary world-transformation. ISIS has the base-brain juice for that, does Teheran?

… but then we get to the Kurds. Of course ISIS should have courted them, anything else is utter madness. While not Arabs, they’re Sunni. They already hate the Baghdad regime, and long for secession. They’re more than willing to be persuaded to fight Turks, Persians, or (Alawite) Syrians, if the need arises. Played with even a minimum of intelligence, the Kurds would have provided a wedge to break Iraq apart definitively, distract the (Baghdad) regime, strip it of oil revenues, keep the Turks and Iranians nervous, and even provide various kinds of active support as they saw their long-held dreams of an independent Kurdistan arising and beckoning like a tantalizing jinn at the edge of the new Jihadi Caliphate. It’s the ultimate no-brainer.

Instead, ISIS threw everything away fighting the Kurds. It’s an organization of idiots, and a whole bunch of its fighters are now pointlessly dead idiots. No Baghdad-by-early-2015 for you losers. I’m embarrassed to have been drawn out of my dismissive contempt.

(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the Moldgod under serious strain.)

More here:

The apparently inverse relation between BTC value and investment level merits further commentary.

On a trivial personal note, I seem to have carelessly lost my Bitcoin wallet somehow, so my perfect detachment on the subject is even more impeccable than you might think.

Note: There’s a exemplary anti-Moldbug prognosis cited over at the other place. “The only extent to which the United States can allow anything at all with respect to Bitcoin is the extent to which it can reform itself to work inside Bitcoin.” OK, it’s perhaps an over-stretch in the opposite direction, but it still ends up far closer to the mark.

(Image source.)

ADDED: Found my Bitcoin account again — which I’m confident everyone will be extremely excited about. Better still, my BTC 0.0005 is still sitting there securely. Phew!

Wake up, get out of bed get ready to serve my lord Schlomo II.
Year is 17 A.G., recently moved to Schlomo II’s patch after being promised a bigger bread allotment than I was receiving under Chaim III
Fuck yeah, this is progress oops I mean restoration. Fuck yeah.
King’s self driving bus takes me to the palace for work
Bus takes a tunnel underground so we can enter through the servant’s entrance in the basement
On my way in notice a group of new recruits in HR taking IQ tests at a row of terminals
One of the screens starts flashing red, electronic alarm sounds “130 IQ PLEB DETECTED”
Drones swarm in and grab the goy, er guy taking the test, drag him away
Thank Gnon, can you imagine living with such imbeciles
Get ready to start work
All real work is done by superior robots
Humans receive payment by entertaining the king
Just got a huge promotion from the groveling department
Put on my crab suit
Enter the royal throne room. Schlomo II sitting on his throne
Spend the rest of the day dancing in crab suit for King Schlomo, singing hymns to Gnon
Almost at the end of shift, master of entertainment comes in and tells King its time for the final entertainment
Dis gon be good
130 IQ pleb from earlier is brought out by drones set before king
Master of Entertainment: “Sire this man is guilty of poisoning our world with his low IQ DNA”
King: “Accused, have you anything to say in your defense”
The Accused: “Sire, I may be dumb but I have always been loyal. In the year 15 B.G. I started an NRx twitter feed with Moldbug quotes and reactionary cat memes”
The whole throne room is silent waiting for the kings reply
Crab dancers, grovelers, the royal family, hangers on, royal joke duck, all silent
King: “Ha! No man of 130 IQ could truly comprehend the sacred NRx texts. You are a mere entryist. Feed him to Gnon!”
A cheer goes up, the whole room starts chanting: “Gnon Gnon Gnon Gnon”
A screen lights up on the opposite side of the room with a cold indifferent visage
A fiery pit opens before the screen
The king’s drones drag the screaming pleb into the pit and he dies an awful death
The visage drones: “This pleases Gnon. Now more crab dancing.”
Fuck. Gotta work overtime
Shift finally ends and robo-bus takes me back to my techno-hovel
Eat my bread allotment while watching The Radish Report
What a great time to be alive

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 …

According to the World Health Organization, the number of cases of Ebola in the current epidemic is doubling every twenty days, and could reach 1.4 million by the beginning of 2015. Let’s round down, and say that there are one million cases on January 1, 2015. Let’s also assume for the sake of the experiment that the doubling time stays the same. Assuming that nothing interrupts the continued spread of the virus, and cases continue to double every twenty days, in what month of what year will the total number of cases equal the human population of this planet? […] … the steps that could keep Ebola from spreading to the rest of the Third World are not being taken. Unless massive resources are committed to that task soon — as in before the end of this year — the possibility exists that when the pandemic finally winds down a few years from now, two to three billion people could be dead. We need to consider the possibility that the peak of global population is no longer an abstraction set comfortably off somewhere in the future. It may be knocking at the future’s door right now, shaking with fever and dripping blood from its gums.

The eventual scale of the Ebola outbreak is a known unknown. A number of people between a few thousand and several billion will die, and an uncertain probability distribution could be attached to these figures — we know, at least approximately, where the question marks are. Before the present outbreak began, in December 2013 (in Guinea), Ebola was of course known to exist, but at that stage the occurrence of an outbreak — and not merely its course — was an unknown. Before the Ebola virus was scientifically identified (in 1976), the specific pathogen was an unknown member of a known class. With each step backwards, we advance in abstraction, towards the acknowledgement of threats of a ‘black swan‘ type. Great Filter X-risk is a prominent model of such abstract threat.

Skepticism, as a positive or constructive undertaking, orients intelligence towards abstract potentials. Rather than insisting that unexpected occurrences need not be threats, it is theoretically preferable to subtilize the notion of threat, so that it encompasses even beneficial outcomes as abstract potentials. The unknown is itself threatening to timid animals, whose conditions of flourishing — or even bare survival — are naturally tenuous, under cosmic conditions where extinction is normal (perhaps overwhelmingly normal), and for whom unpredictable change, disrupting settled procedures, presents — at a minimum — some scarily indefinite probability of harm.

Humans aren’t good at this stuff. Consider Scott Alexander’s (extremely interesting) discussion of the Great Filter. The opening remarks are perfectly directed, moving from specific menace to ‘general’ threat:

The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi’s Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of time and space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don’t see any of them. […] Why not? […] Well, the Great Filter. No [one] knows specifically what the Great Filter is, but generally it’s “that thing that blocks planets from growing spacefaring civilizations”.

As it develops, however, the post deliberately retreats from abstraction, into an enumeration of already-envisaged threats. After running through various candidates, it concludes:

Three of these four options – x-risk, Unfriendly AI, and alien exterminators – are very very bad for humanity. I think worry about this badness has been a lot of what’s driven interest in the Great Filter. I also think these are some of the least likely possible explanations, which means we should be less afraid of the Great Filter than is generally believed.

What SA has actually demonstrated, if his arguments up to this point are accepted, is that the abstract threat of the Great Filter is significantly greater than has yet been conceived. Our lucid nightmares are shown to fall short of it. The threat cannot be grasped as a known unknown.

While the Great Filter distills the conception of abstract threat, the problem itself is broader, and more quotidian. It is the highly-probable fact that we have yet to identify the greatest hazards, and this threat unawareness is a structural condition, rather than a contingent deficiency of attention. In Popperian terms, abstract threat is the essence of history. It is the future, strictly understood. To gloss the Popperian argument: Philosophical understanding of science (in general) is immediately the understanding that any predictive history of science is an impossibility. Unless science is judged to be a factor of vanishing historical insignificance, the implications of this transcendental thesis are far-reaching. Yet the domain of abstract threat sprawls far more extensively even than this.

“I know only that I do not know” Socrates is thought to have thought. The conception of abstract threat requires a slight adjustment: We know only that we do not know what we do not know. Unknown unknowns cosmically predominate.

Your security is built upon sand. That is the sole sound conclusion.

ADDED: “… this whole episode suggests another explanation of the identity of the Great Filter. It’s leftism. All civilizations eventually become leftist, and after that they accomplish nothing, or even actively die off.”

ADDED: “Not only do I disagree with the constant stream of soothing and complacent rhetoric from Dr. Zeke’s friends in government and media. I also believe it is entirely rational to fear the possibility of a major Ebola outbreak, of a threat to the president and his family, of jihadists crossing the border, of a large-scale European or Asian war, of nuclear proliferation, of terrorists detonating a weapon of mass destruction. These dangers are real, and pressing, and though the probability of their occurrence is not high, it is amplified by the staggering incompetence and failure and misplaced priorities of the U.S. government. It is not Ebola I am afraid of. It is our government’s ability to deal with Ebola.”