(Via.)

Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a deep cosmic space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted together by a time loop. (Plug.) The involvement of Kip Thorne reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s explorations of cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan is, in any case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects them, enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary myth-making on an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is formidable.

The movie envisages a future of roughly Greerian dreariness, in which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine, earnestly promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its cultural energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers. (In this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a one-step remove from my Twitter TL.) It is thus, as Scharlach has noted, a lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme Terran regression. Engineers are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young Murphy Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates official doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.

Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is troweled on thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her intelligence. His love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and delicately portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense, because it touches upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human emotion only as a proxy for twisted cosmological process — trans-galactic voyages and time-implosion.

When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that her love for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to prioritize a visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it really could.” Within the arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated, but it is too perfectly stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan movie, and there are loops within loops.

The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic superhumanism keeps them in their place).

Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting far too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re called Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which our locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-rending magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper says. “It was not meant to die here.”

It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.

Someone insulted a POC With Whitey on a comet They didn't use the pronoun zhe And Whitey's on a comet

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

Zhe can't pay tuition bills But Whitey's on a comet Just cleaning up these mocha spills While Whitey's on a comet

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

You know, the Patriarchy's filled with mirth Cause Whitey's on a comet There's a gender pay gap here on Earth But Whitey's on a comet

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

Why is it I can't compete? Cause Whitey's on a comet? The War on Womyn has me beat And now Whitey's on a comet

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

Straight white males deny us voice They want to kill us and our choice Just read our blogs, tweets, and columns

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

And you'll learn what are the true problems Someone insulted a POC With Whitey on a comet

— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014

Celebrating this, with reference to this (to labor the obvious). In decayed modernity, mere technical competence is a political provocation. Any resources not devoted to the Cathedral agenda counts as a win.

(Links and video here)

ADDED: The sonic dimension. Harpoon failure.

ADDED: Slingshot targeting.

Earth is dying, unable to further sustain human life. Mankind has thrown their last resources into creating a space ship that can reach a habitable planet. However, the space ship can only carry 10,000 people and little is known about the planet beyond gravity and oxygen levels. With the literal fate of humanity lying before us, who do we send and why?

After that, it gets WEIRD (+ ++). In a nutshell, Lutter’s ‘we’, while — apparently in absolute innocence — employed to represent the voice of humanity as a whole, is self-evidently processing the problem in a way that would make no sense beyond its own peculiar thede. ‘We’ could probably all come to the reasonable conclusion that only the Swiss get to survive. (Right?)

In passing, he notes that ‘we’ all agree multiculturalism is a dysfunctional mess: “For all the praise of multiculturalism, no one would seriously bet a diverse group of cultures would give the greatest chance for success. …” (The whole paragraph is a jaw-dropper.)

The main point, however: “Picking a cultural group to colonize a new planet and save humanity forces the mind to focus on positive and negative attributes of the cultural group.” This perfectly exemplifies the weirded out intelligence of libertarians, expressed as a detached universalism wholly incognisant of its own deracination. The obvious rejoinder: No one thinks like that (except you guys). It might be over-compensation to suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population would respond to the total extermination of the Swiss with vague amusement, but it’s at least as plausible as Lutter’s assumption that the good people of Helvetia would be neutrally evaluated, selected, and then cheered on as the sole remnant of ‘humanity’, to such an extent that not being Swiss would be cheerfully accepted as an ethnic death sentence.

This isn’t meant to be any kind of denuciation — it’s very possible Lutter is playing his (weird) audience hard, and doing something subversively dark around the back. As barb-hooked bait for libertarian nuttiness, his post is really something. I can’t wait to see what his comment thread looks like.

ADDED: “I do not believe anything I wrote was terribly controversial …” (At least one of us has to be psychotically dissociated — not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

ClarkHat took the #Gamergate discussion to the next level (to massive and sustained applause). If we’re framing this as the long war, argues Ben Southwood, then there’s only one way to bet: “Like it has won almost every major political battle since the Glorious Revolution ([if slowly, sometimes]) the left is going to win this one because it controls the commanding heights of the media, allowing it to bring the mass public on side, and because its adherents follow their faith with a religious zeal. … Gamergate is one of the most interesting things to happen in years, but I don’t think it will win.” In any case, we shouldn’t get too excited about the players here, or believe much that is attributed to them. Best to focus on Gawker losing it completely. On the creation of nerds. Dissymmetry.

On the Ebola-Channel, it was New York, Mali, and bio-warfare rumor week. The highlight article was Richard Preston’s New Yorker piece, but there was plenty of additional quality commentary. Also, a variety of political responses, and policy review pieces. (other diseases are falling through the cracks.)

Strongest-ever defense of hardcore patriarchy? (This, however, seems slippery.)

A propertarian take on Neoreaction. Thoughts on Neoreaction and spontaneous order. Social-tech and anarcho-tyranny (I’m still a hold out on whether ‘social-tech‘ is a theoretical advance, rather than a fuzzy regression). A massive torrent of stuff from Bryce, including the start of an intriguing series. A superb overview piece by Dampier. Priority NRx research areas (with a strong socio-historical emphasis). Post-Anathema provides a home for questions of NRx aesthetics (any signs of convergence yet?). Stalwart EA Gray has a new blog. A calm detached glimpse.

Amerika is unimpressed by the JQ. An underwhelmed response to Tatu Vanhanen’s new book, Global Inequality as a Consequence of Human Diversity (plus, some investigations in a similar vein). Genetics of caste. Inbreeding can seriously mess you up. Racist horror off the southern belle. Has the dysgenic tide turned?

Some State-busting stuff. The State as singularity. Plus regular Mitrailleuse secession round-up.

American democracy is fraud. The insatiable left. Lucky Occidentals.

Gregory Clark on English markets before capital ignition.

The best money in history. A complete theory of economics (still at the ‘hmmmm’ stage for me). Bitcoin in Japan.

On Straussian writing, plus fiction and the real.

Solidarity, sacrifice, and truth.

Musk on Mars and the demon (+). Lesser-god-level engineering.

What should the philosophy of cosmology be asking?

A pre-history of peer review.

Spurious correlations.

We might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever encounter one another. Or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone minds in a Universe that stretches to infinity.

Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

Most models of dark energy hold that the amount of it remains constant. But about 10 years ago, cosmologists realised that if the total density of dark energy is increasing, we could be headed for a nightmare scenario – the “big rip”. As space-time expands faster and faster, matter will be torn apart, starting with galaxy clusters and ending with atomic nuclei. Cosmologists called it “phantom” energy.

Phantom energy is an underdog theory, but the consequences are so dramatic that it’s worth testing, Huterer says. The weakness of the evidence is balanced by the fact that the implications are huge, he says. “We will have to completely revise even our current thinking of dark energy if phantom is really at work.”

(If I’d been making this stuff up, about the entirety of cosmic space being a concealed monster poised to rip every particle in the universe apart, I’d have named the hero ‘Dragan Huterer‘ too.)

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.

The first — tentative and unconvinced — post here went up in mid-February, so Outside in is a creature of 2013. There’s nothing remotely unusual about that. Other 2013 reactionary monster babies include Radish, Anarchopapist and Occam’s Razor (January); Habitable Worlds, The Reactivity Place, and Amos & Gromar (April); More Right (May); Theden (July); Handleshaus and The Legionnaire (August) … which is just to scoop from my regular reading list. The sheer quantity of explicitly reactionary writing has to have surged by at least an order of magnitude this year. This timeline (by Handle) sharpens the contours of the phenomenon (expanded to encompass the burgeoning new genre of excited anti-reactionary push-back). Even if many of the greatest Outer Right blogs preexisted this wave of dark energy, 2013 was surely the year in which Neoreaction really established itself as a thing.

Outside the reactosphere, the world put most of its energy into fueling the reactosphere. The Obama Administration entered full-spectrum accelerating collapse, flailing about in the wreckage of the the most incompetent government initiative in American history, shredding the last tattered remnants of the Constitution in public, and stumbling about the Middle East setting things on fire at random. Detroit imploded, the NSA digested the world, Political Correctness went berserk, the Fed fell into the hands of an unabashed Ctrl-P fanatic, and the economy continued to fall apart (although its descent was significantly slowed by manic fracking). More zombies. (Sadly, conservatism still exists.)

On the massively positive side, after a roller-coaster year on both sides of the Pacific, Bitcoin was becoming so big it had begun to seriously scare people (Cowen’s comment thread is better than the post). The dawn of monetary anarchy glimmered.

Bitcoin, free association, uncontrolled speech … with every day that passes, the Web pushes the Left a little further into fuming insanity. There’s an Internet-shaped hole in the Cathedral’s vision for the world, which the Obamacare website turned into theater.

Off-planet activity notably quickened too. The search for an exit under conditions of terrestrial confinement reached an unprecedented level of itchy-footed eagerness, boosted further by repulsion.

2013 saw a change of leadership in China, and in the Vatican. New US ally Al Qaeda did great, Venezuela not so much.

The AGW comedy became even more farcical.

Many people remained very annoying.

Snowden, Zimmerman, Kim Jong un, the Boston Marathon, Benghazi … what did 2013 mean to you?

ADDED: Radish takes retrospection to a whole new level.

ADDED: Spandrell takes it to a wholly different new level.