A cold look at the kill list. Leftists of the right. Singularity skepticism. Why is ‘sexual orientation’ like phlogiston. Social justice and slave morality. NRx and Dixie (also relevant). Not the same people. Fragged Friday. The weekly rounds.

ISIS eyes on Saudi Arabia. Going over the cliff in Greece, and Venezuela.

What religion can do, perhaps. The thin weird line. How atheists lose it. Two religious experiences. SV hipster evangelism.

The Bellcurve, meta-review. More unwanted human biorealism (1, 2, 3). Darwinism and teleology (with vigorous discussion in the comments). The media’s race war. The chan wars. War.

The Machiavelli of India. Dampier reviews Bloom. A contrarian take on Hollywood politics. Philosophers in Starbucks.

It’s not easy to survive from the ‘Net.

Charles I’s speech from the scaffold. “For the people. And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as any Body whomsoever. But I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods [?] may be most their own. It is not for having share in government (Sir) that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a soveraign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.”

The Philly Fed’s Charles Plosser stubbornly maintains that reality still exists: “The history is that monetary policy is not ultimately a very effective tool at solving real economic structural problems. It can try for a while but the problem then is that it’s only temporarily effective, and when you can’t do it anymore you get the explosion yesterday in the Swiss market. […] One of the things I’ve tried to argue is look, if we believe that monetary policy is doing what we say it’s doing and depressing real interest rates and goosing the economy and we’re in some sense distorting what might be the normal market outcomes at some point, we’re going to have to stop doing it. At some point the pressure is going to be too great. The market forces are going to overwhelm us. We’re not going to be able to hold the line anymore. And then you get that rapid snapback in premiums as the market realizes that central banks can’t do this forever. And that’s going to cause volatility and disruption.”

Dampier unleashed: “Cthulhu’s music provides the background track to their dreams, pulling them down towards the ancient cities without names, generating an irresistible attraction to forgotten rituals performed according to laws written in incomprehensible runes.”

What happened to this? http://t.co/QAmOyvo4tJ … I was still reading it yesterday and now it can't be found. Not on internet archive.

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) January 11, 2015

ADDED: Found. NIO digs up some other relevant stuff.

NRx under thoughtful investigation at the Catalyst Club. Re-visiting the Trichotomy. Christianity and degeneration. Notes on religion. Gnonological meditations (1, 2). Bryce’s new blog. The original mitrailleuse. “Yes, they are offering pig blood to a statue of Mao.” A new NRx aggregrator (and blog).

Jihad in Paris dominates the news-cycle. Some NRx-ish commentary from the Legionnaire, NIO, Laurel, Milton, Yuray, and Steves. In any case, this isn’t working. Liberal anguish (with an unexpectedly hard edge). Additional diverse commentary from Peter Frost, Gregory Hood, Sean Gabb, Ed West, Juan Cole, Slavoj Žižek. The Houellebecq connection. John Robb on the 4GW urban combat space (from 2007), with a Dampier update. Meanwhile, in Nigeria. Religious rifting in the CAR and Pakistan.

Consciousness sweeps. The Deep City. Golden ages. Blogs as the new letters (but why not pamphlets?). Richard Fernandez ponders the Great Filter. Templex thoughts from Charlton. Geno-politics.

SpaceX on the crunchy frontier.

Reforming Austrian economics.

An HBD research prospectus.

Progressivism wears the religions it has devoured like a monster that dresses itself in the skins of people it has eaten. It has consumed Judaism, Christianity, and most of Islam, though the worst and most harmful religion, Islam, still lives and is fighting back. The martial Christianity of Charles the Hammer would serve our civilization well. The pragmatic, realistic, and cynical Christianity of restoration Anglicanism would serve our civilization very well, though it proved vulnerable to people whose beliefs were dangerously sincere, being reluctant to martyr them properly for reasons of mere pragmatism. Counter Reformation Catholicism would serve our civilization well. But none of these live, and their revival is unlikely.

(It links right through to one of the most substantial discussions that will be unfolding in 2015.)

ADDED: The Church of Perpetual Life

ADDED: Yuray’s take (and quality comments).

Edge of Tomorrow is science fiction Groundhog Day, agreed. (It would make no sense to contest this, some scenes achieve near-perfect isomorphy.) Derivative, then, certainly — but this is a point of consistency. Duplication is, after all, the latent theme. Edge of Tomorrow works better because it has formalized the time-repeat plot-system in videogame terms. Death replaces sleep, as action drama replaces comedy, but the recurrence of time is captured more incisively by the Edge of Tomorrow maxim: “We should just re-set.” Further to be noted: Edge of Tomorrow actually has a story about the basis of its time anomaly — and not an especially risible one — while Groundhog Day doesn’t even pretend to.

We should just reset is not only videogame practice, but also the recommendation of quantum suicide, another practical Electrocene philosophy. The best fictional exploration of QS (of which I am aware) is Greg Egan’s Quarantine.

Videogame ideology and quantum suicide are praxial indiscernibles. In other words, their behavioral implications are equivalent. In both cases, the relation to self is made selective, within a set of virtual clones. Whenever developments — within one of multiple assumed timelines — goes ‘bad’ it should be deleted (culled). In that way, only the most highly-adaptive complex behavioral responses are preserved, shaping fate in the direction of success (as defined by the selective agency).

Recent discussions about Christianity and Paganism raise the question: what does it take for a system of belief to attain religious intensity among Westerners today? (Yes, this could be re-phrased in very different ways.) To cut right to the chase: Could statistical ontology become a religion (or the philosophy of a religion)? Quantum suicide terrorism anybody? This is a possibility I find hard to eliminate.

Edge of Tomorrow, therefore? A more significant movie than might be initially realized. (It’s monsters are also quite tasty.)

ADDED: Thoughts on Post-Rationalist religion.

The hook, beside the obvious reversals (a sack full of children, the lashed-elf sweat shop bunker deep in the polar ice) is the peculiarity of the Santa Claus myth — which is designed to be disbelieved, as a kind of modern rite-of-passage. There’s a side to this worthy of affirmation. Discarding attractive wish-fulfillment myths is a cultural achievement whose massive generalization is long overdue. ‘Santa Claus’ as the idiot god of beneficent unreality is the proto-deity of every lunacy advanced modernity has been subjected to. There’s also another side …

“Santa won’t save us.” If that was something people really grew out of before voting age, there wouldn’t be a left-of-center political party remaining anywhere in the world. This suggests something very different is going on. A ritualized social training in disbelief seems ominously unprecedented, so one naturally wonders about the religious formation that commands this recently innovated power. If there is a disbelief that would set us free, the modern ceremony of Yule — celebrating the occult death of Santa at the Golgotha of secularism — doesn’t seem to be it. On the contrary, it represents a populist version of the Jacobin-Enlightenment Cult of Reason, symbolically purging infantile superstition to be reborn into an approved state of adult consciousness. The Death of Santa is mystery initiation into the New Church. Santa died to redeem humanity from the sins of attachment to Medieval unreason, and every year this sacrifice is ritualistically re-enacted to recall the new covenant. (Go on, tell me this isn’t the narrative.)

Someone ought to write a story about it …

Within TempleOS he built an oracle called AfterEgypt, which lets users climb Mt. Horeb along with a stick-figure Moses. At the summit, a round scrawl of rapidly changing color comes into sight — the burning bush. Before it you should praise God. You can praise Him for anything, Davis says, including sand castles, snowmen, popcorn, bubbles, isotopes, and sand crabs.

(Link.)

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.”

Much of this analysis — down to its grimmest conclusions — is highly compelling, even when abstracted from the flow of Hood’s vigorous prose. The proposed remedy, however, is by far its weakest component.

To make a choice among Gods, is that not the final expression of liberalism, and therefore of degenerated Christianity? If we have learnt anything from the manifold failures of multiculturalism, it is that religious freedom is downstream of religion. ‘Freedom of conscience’ lies at the furthest remove from a genuinely secular conception, if any such thing is even possible. If it now seems imaginable to shop for different gods, it is because of the way a distinctive religious tradition has worked out. If political considerations seem to occupy a position of meta-religious authority, the descent has been deeper still. Choice is internal to religion, even if the decayed image of religion serves to obscure this fundamental fact. Contemporary Occidental paganism remains dissident Christianity. There is no decision that could alter that.

As Hood himself states: The very fact that I frame this identity as a “choice” is itself proof of decadence — a vibrant metaphysics simply is and has nothing to do with a rational actor listing pros and cons. Ironically, those who profess the Old Gods are weakened because what they profess is so obviously new and a product of innovation and modernity. Few would even call it a real faith that actually expresses literal belief in personalized divinities. […] The new pagan cults that preach fanaticism and virility owe too much to reason and deconstruction.

A God that is not the very principle of destiny is no God at all. Are we, then, destined to rediscover the Old North European Gods? The impossibility of answering such a question with confident affirmation says everything necessary about it. The Old Gods manifestly failed against the challenge of the new One. There is no reason at all to suspect that this outcome has been rescinded by the subsequent calamities befalling the new faith.

Religions are providential. They are units of fate. The claims they make far exceed rational controversy or personal decision, in the abyss of their decadence no less than at the apex of their flourishing. If Christian Modernity is a process of escalating nihilism, as Nietzsche conceived it to be, it is nevertheless a road without turn-offs, that can only be followed to the end.

ADDED: Second long (italicized) quote has been grafted in, thanks to Irving (in comments below), who pointed out its clearly indispensable relevance to the topic. Just in case it is not already obvious, the Hood essay is a superbly crafted masterpiece — its quality only enhanced by its supple self-ironization. It deserves to be a landmark reference whenever this question re-arises, as it will continually do.

It thus naturally tends to seize semantically on the substantiality of the negative and on what might have been said otherwise but was not — a not that is felt to contain the secret of everything. For example, Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus entirely ignores the ordinary, regular sense of “and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing” (Acts 9:8) [apertisque oculis nihil videbat] in favor of a mystically literal plenitude of possibilities: “I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.”[2] Similarly, Augustine’s well-known statement as to the unknowable knowability of time — “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not know”[3] — may be (im)properly read as saying that time is known in the positively negative presence of a nemo, a not-man (ne+homo) who asks about time, a pure question posed by nobody. The presence of this no-one who is still there, a senseless letter-spirit and sudden negative indication upon which superlative understanding depends, provides a fitting structural figure for this method and an image of its divinatory, daimonic form, its sortilegic reading of received signs.

[2] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), Sermon 19, p. 142.
[3] “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions, 11.14).

Between The Nothing and Abstract Horror there is no difference. Some related hints (and others). Eventually we reach the Vast Abrupt.

Yuray the task-master. A sustained meditation on capital teleology. Another argument for teleology. Multicultural madness. Who the hell are these people? Brett Stevens lays it all out. Meta-round-up.

Elections can be confusing: “In Georgia, retiree Joyce Burns said Obama was risking a biblical apocalypse by criticizing Israel. The life-long Democrat said she voted Republican this time. ‘I believe we’re in the Latter Times,’ said Burns, 61. ‘When everyone goes against Israel, that’s when I believe Jesus will come back.'” Not that it matters: “… both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future.” Dampier has a plan. Racing it up. Some additional sound coverage.

Best of the Schadenfreude (that last one is from Morford, the gift who keeps on giving). … and one more. There’s a superficial win, and a deep win.

A few Ebola science links.

Tentacular epic now hyper-epic.

SST re-visits motte-and-bailey doctrines (patching us through to the source).

The culture and politics of Silicon Valley is absorbing ever more (highly diverse) media fascination. Company lifespans. US$22,000,000,000,000 poorer.

Evolution of anti-racism. Kicking the stone of gloom. The single most important point anyone can make about immigration: “As a rule immigration from the first world brings overwhelming economic and social benefits, while immigration from the developing world does the opposite; migration from eastern Europe is somewhere in-between. That’s a very rough rule of thumb but it is at least clearer and more rational than simply identifying oneself as either ‘pro’ or ‘anti-immigration’.” Race-rotted brain-spasm of the week.

Strange dates. Even the most hideous garbage can generate brilliant illumination.

Christians under attack (or not (or?)).

Hanson (doubly indirectly) on esoteric writing. (Bonald objects.)

UFAI is insoluble.

Hey, let’s institutionalize confirmation bias.

A fight worth following.

The multiverse is everywhere at the moment (so probably for a while).

Research time-deepening through technology.

NRx anthem? (Blame Nydwracu.)

Simply, no.