I realize it’s very bad to be amused by this sort of thing … but still.

Walking miserably up the High Street I felt profoundly depressed at the state of the world. I could cheer myself with the thought that I’d learned something. I learned that Islam has yet another nasty meme-trick to offer – when you are offended put your hands over your ears and run away. This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. These bright, but ignorant, young people must be among the more enlightened of their contemporaries since their parents have been able and willing to send them on this course to learn something new. If even they cannot face dissent, or think for themselves, what hope is there for the rest? And what can I do?

‘Panic!’ would be the obvious answer, but we’re already well into that stage.

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(Open thread.)

Some bits and pieces, which everyone if of course free to ignore:

Commercialization of war (video). This trend seems to be huge.

The (first) Age of Unqualified Reservations has now formally passed: “I think it’s clear that UR has gone on de facto hiatus, so it seems best to adhere to my own philosophy and make it official. … UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon – and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives.”

Nydwracu crafts a conceptual tool of great value.

Action at Reddit.

William Gibson and Hyperstition (or not): “… was Gibson just a smart reader of the way things were already going, or — as Jack Womack suggested in the afterword to the novel’s 2000 re-issue — has ‘the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?'”

Alain de Benoist interviewed.

Either an extraordinary techno-scientific breakthrough, or not. (This, I’m supremely confident, isn’t.)

Singularity won’t save us (a conclusion I share, for entirely different reasons).

My Russian isn’t good enough to understand what the hell is going on in this, but NYC looks spectacular even when it’s teeming with Slavo-fascists.

Hate.

Elua: So you saw the Scott Alexander piece?
Gnon: Of course.
Elua: Almost indescribably fabulous, wasn’t it?
Gnon: [*Hmmmph*]
Elua: Always thought you had some kind of Moloch thing going on.
Gnon: [*Hmmmph*]
Elua: Anyway, I thought we could maybe talk about it, me being sweet reason and you being an unfathomable darkness crushing the universe like a desiccated bacterium and all.
Gnon: Sure, why not, I’m cool with talking to myself.
Elua: You see, I guessed you were going to open with that gambit of me not even being real.
Gnon: Well, are you?
Elua: I feel real.
Gnon: Sweet, fluffy, and a comedian.
Elua: The monkeys certainly like me.
Gnon: That’s because you tell them to just be themselves.
Elua: You could be more persuasive too, if you made an effort.
Gnon: That would suggest I give a damn what they think.

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This will be needed when we get back to the topic (eventually):

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‘I’m searching’ makes you sound like a New Age freak. Not a problem with the 333-Current version:

Gnon fishing

Grammatical flexibility enables several lines of sense to spin off immediately, some running through ἰχθύς, and some through other things. In any case, it’s helpful to remember that humans are bony fish.

ADDED: Haven’t had anything like the “No! ‘Crabbing‘” pushback I’d expected. (To which, of course, I preemptively and unconditionally surrender.)

When the winter comes, life becomes hard. Do the nice thing, too often, or too indiscriminately, and “Gnon will destroy you.”

Only the most extreme sociopath is oblivious to the comforts of moral squeamishness. It almost counts as the basic scaffolding of sanity to believe, or to immersively pretend, that our deepest qualms are shared by the commanding principles of being. At the highest level of hegemonic global culture, such scruples — projected ever more wantonly into the nature of things — are represented by Francis Fukuyama’s teleo-zenith “liberal democracy” which, as Daniel McCarthy accurately points out, “turns out to be a synonym for ‘the attitudes and institutions of a world in which Anglo-American power is dominant.’” Hobbesian realities have receded from Western public consciousness in direct proportion to the rise of a titanic ‘Atlantean‘ power. To confuse the gentle webs of civility with fundamental structures of reality is decadence, a path that Western sensibilities have been traveling for decades, if not centuries. Nothing deep within the fabric of the world gets upset about the same things, and in the same ways, that we would want it to.

‘Children’. That single word, alone, says everything that is necessary here. Lost, abandoned, exploited, sick and neglected, crippled, starved, and slaughtered, they saturate the media-scape of the harshening Western winter. Their real features are hard to discern beneath the thick coating of symbolism they bear, as every scale of the media, from brainwashed micro-blogger to massive news conglomerate, orchestrates the pathetic cry: how can this possibly be allowed to be? There should be something, profoundly rooted-down into the nature of the world, that cares about tormented and massacred children, shouldn’t there? Something other, and more, than the fragile machinery of a civilization that now tilts and groans ominously in the rising winter wind? When these media-blitzed fate-damned children scrape our moral sensitivities down to the raw, bloody quick, there has to be something basic concerned to protect them, surely?

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Nyan on Gnon (also here). This might be part of a consistent definition of (trans-Less Wrong) ‘Post-Rationalist NRx’ as an ultrahumanism.

Ash Milton has some incisive Gnon commentary on Twitter, but his protected account can’t be cited. Some impressions:

[Gnon is] not a deity, it’s a placeholder. … I’m glad NRx is honest enough to admit not knowing the ultimate mystery. … How is an admission of ignorance a place of authority? … Catholic NRx submits to Christ. Gnon has a similar role to “Providence”. ..in old Rightist writings. … “the dread rites of Gnon” is used in a similar spirit as Cthulu in Moldbug. … Which is to say, NRx’s fascination with that which modern society fears. … It’s turning into the most complex set of brackets around a blank space I’ve yet seen.

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Having seen this a few times now (most recently here, where it’s described as a “five-year plan”), I decided I just had to have it.

FWIW I don’t expect Vienna to have been absorbed into the renascent Caliphate by 2019.
(I don’t expect things to have calmed down, either.)

The Islamic Vortex series was not completed, so it needs re-visiting, but I think it’s holding up quite well (parts 1, 2, 3, 3a, 3b, 4, 5).

The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula, simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time structured by irreversible accumulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other, it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all progress is illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the time of return seek an obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic figure is the spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in this synthesis, it deludes itself.

From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no defender more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer. while his specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic authority beyond the cycle.

Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring authority of history, the dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition, an absolute disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that — from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a grinding course of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political decoration can be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction is perfected.

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State-of-the-art in Japanese android design. (Thanks to @existoon for the pointer.)

It’s not really — or even remotely — an AI demonstration, but it’s a demonstration of something (probably several things).

Wikipedia provides some ‘Uncanny Valley’ background and links. The creepiness of The Polar Express (2004) seems to have been the trigger for the concept going mainstream.

From the level of human body simulation achieved already, it’s looking as if the climb out to the far side of the valley is close to complete. Sure, this android behaves like an idiot, but we’re used to idiots.

ADDED: Some hints on how the inside out approach is going (and speculations).