(Open thread + links)

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.

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… even just the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by casual over-use, but I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not finding it. This has to be one of the best uses of a website out there — meaning: really out there.

(Via.)

(Also via Singapore Airlines.)

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.

From a fascinating dining companion, rather than a literary source. The Gothic potential is self-evident.

“There are many ways to stress a rat — but the easiest way is to inject it with stress hormones.”

Bonus data-burst from the same expert: According to all the rigorous cognitive tests neuroscientists are currently able to apply, crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees. (Yes, it seems preposterous, which is what makes it worth mentioning. No, I haven’t done any back-up online research yet.)

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.)

Every public institution of any value is based on distrust.

That’s an elementary proposition, as far as this blog is concerned. It’s worth stating nakedly, since it is probably less obvious to others. That much follows from it is unlikely to be controversial, even among those who find it less than compelling, or simply repulsive.

One major source of obscurity is the category of ‘high trust cultures’ — with which neoreactionaries tend naturally to identify. There is plenty to puzzle over here, admittedly. This post will make no serious effort to even scratch the surface of the questions that arise. Instead, it contends that the culture primarily commended for its trustfulness has been conspicuously innovative in the development of trustless institutions. These begin with the foundations of Occidental reason, and especially the rigorous criterion of logical and mathematical proof. A proof substitutes for trust. In place of a simple declaration, it presents (a demanded) demonstration. The compliant response to radical distrust has epitomized Western conceptions of rationality since classical antiquity.

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The heated controversy running through biology right now — pronounced, at least, in its zone of intersection with the wider public sphere — seems like something that should be inciting fission within the NRx. The collision between Hamiltonian kin selection (defended most prominently in this case by Richard Dawkins) and group selection (E. O. Wilson) drives a wedge between the baseline biorealism accepted by all tendencies within the Neoreactionary Trike and the much stronger version of racial identitarianism that flourishes within the ethno-nationalist faction. Until recent times, proto-Hamiltonian hereditarianism has been strongly aligned with classical liberalism, while ideological racial collectivism represents a later — and very different — political tradition. Not so much as a chirp yet, though. Are people unpersuaded about this argument’s relevance?

On a slight tangent (but ultimately, only a slight one) Nick Szabo’s epically brilliant essay ‘Shelling Out’ is remarkable — among other things — for its profound biorealist foundations. It makes an excellent theoretical preparation for Jim’s paper on ‘Natural Law and Natural Rights’, which also draws productively upon John Maynard Smith’s game-theoretic model of the ‘evolutionary stable strategy’ as the natural substrate of psychological and cultural deep-structure.

This is an important opportunity to put down some discriminatory markers. Can we turf group selectionist ideas out of NRx entirely, or do we have to fight about it?

(Open thread + links (I’ve been in Hangzhou over the weekend so some symptoms of partial disconnection are probable))

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.

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From Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, which can be found here, but adopted in this case as translated by Sir Edmund Whittaker (in his A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricty, Volume I, p.3):

There are innumerable niceties concerning notions, relations, instants, formalities, quiddities, and haecceities, which no-one can pry into, unless he has eyes that can penetrate the thickest darkness, and there can see things that have no existence whatever.

Appealing enough, already, in its light-footed philosophical modernism, it becomes utterly sublime when tackled — inversely — by the method of ‘hyper-literal anagogy’. It then suggests a Miltonic recovery of ancient philosophy, undertaken — with blind irony — by modernity itself.

John Michael Greer is a writer with whom, ultimately, I agree on almost nothing. Yet he turns up here a lot, and rarely — if ever — as a target of disparagement. It is understandable if that confuses people. (It is not a phenomenon that is lucidly intelligible even to myself.)

The most obvious reason to return so incessantly to Greer is the sheer consistency of his deep cycle theorizing, which achieves a conceptual elegance rarely seen elsewhere. At some point, the UF series on his historical thinking (1, 2, 2a) will reach some articulate conclusions about this. Still, there’s more to the engagement than that.

A recent Archdruid Report post on the limits of science (and, as always, many other things) added further indications of profound error, from the perspective of this blog. It hinges its overt arguments upon an impregnable fact-value distinction, which is a peculiarly weak and local principle, especially for a mind so disposed to a panoramic cosmic vision. Yet the post is also provocative, and clarifying. Responding to one of his commenters, who suggested that without the prospect of continued scientific and technological advance life loses all meaning, Greer repeats the lines from Dante that have just been hurled against him, and encapsulates them — by explicitly activating their own irony:

“Consider your lineage;
You were not born to live as animals,
But to seek virtue and knowledge.”

It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing about this passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put those words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so deeply in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these are the words with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all known seas — a voyage which took them straight to a miserable death, and sent Ulysses himself tumbling down to eternal damnation.

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