Robin Hanson on the Great Filter for TED. It’s too well done to hold back until next Friday. “Something out there is killing everything, and you’re next. … You should be worried.” (He has the nightmare smile down to a T.)

This documentary movie is superb. It has China, cyberpunk saturation, metaphysics, horror, humor, and the most extreme immersion in absolute sarcasm as a strategy of elusive dissidence ever realized in any medium. Every dimension of production is executed brilliantly, and the screenplay is a masterpiece (it’s a text I’d be almost ready to kill for right now). It’s probably not an easy cultural object to get hold of, but it’s seriously worth the effort.

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.]

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(VPN isn’t working, for some reason, which makes almost everything impossible. No trawling about on the Internet, or twittering, today. In frustration, I’m initiating a new series — it’s ‘Quotes notes’ but decadently devoted to pure style. Feel free to consider it throat-clearing.)

Not necessarily single sentences, but no more than three (as a preliminary rule). First off, from Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist (p.52):

He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.

That’s roughly Gregory Hood’s title, for an article making the case for a return to paganism. As his point of departure, Hood examines, unflinchingly, the indications of an Occidental desire for enslavement or destruction by Islam. “It’s a kind of ethical exhaustion — liberal Whites are weary of the moral responsibility of existence and survival.” (The diagnosis seems hideously plausible to me.)

Islam is Nature’s solution. Like the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded, it is Nature’s way of saying that “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.” It is stultifying, depressing, and tyrannical. It is an enemy of real culture, with the most militant variations smashing the tombs and shrines not only of other religious traditions, but of their own. Modern Wahhabism is funded by Western decadence, enabled by Western weakness, in many ways a product of Western postmodernism and self-hatred. […] And lest what I say be misunderstood, it is obviously, laughably, and comically false. It is sustained by the protective cordon it has created around criticism. Yet believing that a pedophiliac illiterate transcribed the literal word of God still makes more sense than believing all men are created equal. Islam’s refusal to allow critical analysis of itself is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Islam is the first term in Hood’s tetralemma. It’s the executioners blade for a civilization that has lost all cosmic purchase upon existence. A disgusting way to die, begged for by the broken, in the end (which is already) — because at least it’s a way to die.

The remaining three terms entertained by Hood are the “god of our grandfathers, the White Christ upon whose image the West was built” which “is dying”, faithless liberalism (including modern Christianity), and paganism. Among these options, he declares, “The Old Gods are my own choice.”

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How can a movie this preposterously stupid also be so peculiarly awesome?

“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.)

Outside in is unable to defer to the authority of this abominogram, whose degeneracy, contamination, and incompleteness are self-evident, but it seemed worth putting up for reference purposes.

(Clicking on the image opens a new cosmic door window, where one additional click brings up an expanded version.)

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The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight in accordance of a more general conservation law that its full current relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far more penetrating application.

‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive concreteness:

The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so, this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have since learnt is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.

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A (short) exercise in bombastic Halloween fiction

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Clown terror

If you’ve ever wondered what NRx looks like to “a bog standard democratic socialist, culturally cringing straight white able-bodied rich male Canadian who likes my society multicultural, my economy redistributive, my taxation strongly progressive, my capitalism heavily regulated, my state relatively large, well funded and active in social policy, and my military nearly nonexistent outside of peacekeeping operations. I am even ok with laws regulating hate speech, obscenity, libel and such” — here you go.

Almost every step of the subsequent voyage into raw horror is hilarious. Seeing the NRx reading list (1, 2, 3, 4) this post puts together is a wonder in itself. Clearly, NRx-panic is now a big enough thing to be blowing its own bubbles in the commiesphere.

‘Frog Hop’ is in the Libertarianism = Fascism school of political insight (which I expect to see a lot more of, as these creatures notice people trying to escape their death-grip).

Also worth noting: Phalanx is allotted prime place as a freak-out stimulus. As a count-me-outer, I’m not especially drawn to this kind of Broederbonding, but I have to acknowledge its truly glorious Halloween potential.

ADDED: As a festive bonus, another piece of prog. cultural action (but much better done)