Actually, hell, let’s just monetize this explicitly:

If you’ve enjoyed my NAB posts, I’d really appreciate it if you went and gave Josh Fredman’s work a look.

Crowdfunding is great, and it is great when you can use the internet’s viral potential to get more eyes on your work.  There’s a (barely) crowdfunded writer whose work interests me a lot, who’s in dire financial straits, and who has not gotten this kind of viral attention.  He currently has all of … five Patreon patrons.  If I’ve build up any kind of viral potential energy recently, I would love to sling some of it his way.

Real talk though: I think NAB is actually becoming an unhealthy anxiety-related obsessional target for me, like Undertale was a while ago.  This became clear to me earlier on, but I ran with it for a while because it was producing tumblr posts I felt proud of.  But even after finishing up those posts, my brain is still doing the thing, and it’s making it hard to like … relax or read books or do normal stuff like that

(I don’t blame anyone for this, this kind of thing just happens for me every 4-6 months or so, the things it latches onto are in part arbitrary, and in this case I even encouraged it a bit myself)

The upshot for you guys is mostly (1) I’m actually doing a hard commitment not to talk about the book anymore, at least for like say the next month, so hold me to that, and (2) I may start blacklisting “neoreaction a basilisk” and “NAB babble” so if you could tag related posts with one of those, that would be helpful

(I’ll be seeing Esther in person on Tuesday [!!!!!] and then staying with her for a whole month, so that should nip all this in the bud anyway)

argumate:

nostalgebraist:

Just a quickie, riffing on @anosognosicredux‘s post here:

The way I’d personally sum up Meditations on Moloch is:

“Capitalism produces horrors.  It does so in the same way as a lot of other things that produce horrors, namely, the horrific logic of natural selection: the things that appear in the world tend to appear because they have the quality of Being Better At Propagating Themselves Than Other Things That Were Around.  Companies that try to make a compromise between ‘competing’ and ‘being not terrible’ get ‘outcompeted’ by companies that just focused on ‘competing’ and thus we see the latter everywhere.

We want to fight against this, and we have various ways.  It would be great to institute Fully Automated Luxury Communism.  But a country/region/group/whatever that does Fully Automated Luxury Communism will care about ‘being not terrible’ and thus will not devote 100% of its time and resources to ‘competing.’  Something terrible which cares only about ‘competing’ will arise and ‘outcompete’ it, and then we will see the latter, not the former.  And our FALC period will be a great time for people who lived in it, but those with the bad luck to be born too late will not see it.  They might try again themselves, and succeed for a while, and then get ‘outcompeted’ again.

Horrifically, this is just the underlying logic of reality, and on a long enough timescale, it will always get you.  You will build something that cares about ‘not being terrible,’ and your great-grandchildren will look around and not see it, because it was ‘outcompeted’ by something terrible.  You are in fact the great-(great-etc.)-grandchildren of many people who have done this.

And even worse, is getting harder to not be terrible.  Technological advance is going to unleash even more and more ‘competitive’ (although inane, ugly, and destructive) forces.

There appears to be no way out of this, not without something that can oversee and guide the entire cosmos, overruling every possible manifestation of the horrific logic everywhere it might arise – that is, God.  If you don’t believe in God, you might at least believe it’s not impossible to create God.  This sounds both implausible and hubristic, and it is, but it’d be even more hubristic to think that we can ever create anything else that won’t be ‘outcompeted’ and leave our great-grandchildren in yet another shithole.  So: let’s create God.”

(N.B. Scott puts the last bit as “killing God” because in that section he’s using “God” to mean “the horrific logic,” but the point is the same)

Anyway, that’s the hip monster on the block these days, if you were wondering.

this is shorter and more meaningful than the original, although I did appreciate the use of Howl in the original.

I thought this was all pretty clear in the (gorgeously written) original, although there all are the usual blinders making me overly inclined to think everyone will see the same thing I see

But in light of things like this I thought writing my own shorter version might be useful – distilling what I take to be the core and seeing whether it’s that that makes me slapworthy or something else

(via argumate)

@froborr

Hey there. Back when Phil sent me Neoreaction a Basilisk a couple of months ago, the part where he discusses antisemitism was one of the ones he specifically wanted my input on. (Presumably because I’m Jewish and he’s seen me take part in a number of Tumblr conversations about antisemitism, so he knows I have Thoughts on the subject.)

And yes, I can confirm that you have absolutely misunderstood what Phil’s saying in that passage, due largely to taking it out of context. (Which is exactly why I told Phil he needed to more frequently and clearly mark when he was giving his own view and when he was describing his subjects’ views, because here we have a passage where he’s describing someone else’s antisemitism and comes out looking like he agrees with it. Yes, that’s obviously not true if you take into account the text surrounding this bit, but the book is designed to be easily digestible on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level and really fucking convoluted on higher levels, so it’s very easy to lose track of the context.)

Anyway, in context the quoted text is part of a larger discussion about how whiteness is largely defined by what it’s not. Phil never actually refers to markedness, but that’s what he’s describing: generally in American culture, whites are treated as default or “normal” and all other ethnicities are treated as Other. This is where the porous boundaries of whiteness that @nostalgiabraist talks about come from: as the definition of what’s accepted as a “normal” ethnic background shifts, groups which previously were treated as Other become a subgroup of whites, like Irish and Italian people. (Jews not so much. In some places some Jews are regarded as white. But there are still plenty of Jews who are not regarded as white anywhere (anyone who’s not light-skinned, for starters) and plenty of places in the U.S. and ESPECIALLY in Europe where no one regards Jews as white.)

Anyway, Phil ties this treatment of whiteness as the unmarked ethnicity to white nationalists’ fear of corruption and invasion. Antisemitism is being presented as an example of that fear–so of course it follows that Phil isn’t suggesting that Jews are a kind of white person. (Believe me, he’d have heard from me if he had.) And indeed, he specifically describes antisemitism as the fear that “the most crucial institutions of power have already fallen into the hands of the Other.” In other words, he’s well aware that white nationalist antisemitism positions Jews as an Other, not as part of white culture.

And this actually is an accurate description of a thread within antisemitism that goes back centuries–it’s at least as old as the stereotype of the Jewish banker/moneylender, which dates to the Middle Ages. This form of antisemitism does not assert that white culture is being threatened with conquest, infiltration, or destruction, and thus stands in contrast to most other white nationalist rhetoric–for example, anti-Muslim rhetoric couched in terms of fear of terrorist attacks, or anti-immigrant rhetoric couched in terms of fear of invasion. Rather, this kind of antisemitism is about the fear that white culture has already beeninvaded and conquered, even destroyed.

It is this fear that Phil is referring to as a “deep-seated element of white culture,” the fear that, as something defined by what it’s not, white culture is empty or void, or worse still (in the eyes of a white nationalist) that it’s defined by and hence already controlled by the Other. To the white nationalist spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, the horror is that there never was a white culture, that the invasion they fear occurred thousands of years ago and nothing exists untainted by it.

Thanks for this reply – it is helpful.  I’m trying to commit to not talking about the book any more for the time being, but since this is about a really specific thing and not about the grand themes of the book (which were starting to my brain stuck in obsessive loops), I’ll indulge myself a bit.

I should also say that I’m not Jewish, and that I’m not here to argue over “whether Phil is right” so much as I’m interesting in learning more about the history/nature of anti-semitism, which I understand on the basic level I displayed in the OP but perhaps not much moreso.

Keep reading

(via froborr)

Just a quickie, riffing on @anosognosicredux‘s post here:

The way I’d personally sum up Meditations on Moloch is:

“Capitalism produces horrors.  It does so in the same way as a lot of other things that produce horrors, namely, the horrific logic of natural selection: the things that appear in the world tend to appear because they have the quality of Being Better At Propagating Themselves Than Other Things That Were Around.  Companies that try to make a compromise between ‘competing’ and ‘being not terrible’ get ‘outcompeted’ by companies that just focused on ‘competing’ and thus we see the latter everywhere.

We want to fight against this, and we have various ways.  It would be great to institute Fully Automated Luxury Communism.  But a country/region/group/whatever that does Fully Automated Luxury Communism will care about ‘being not terrible’ and thus will not devote 100% of its time and resources to ‘competing.’  Something terrible which cares only about ‘competing’ will arise and ‘outcompete’ it, and then we will see the latter, not the former.  And our FALC period will be a great time for people who lived in it, but those with the bad luck to be born too late will not see it.  They might try again themselves, and succeed for a while, and then get ‘outcompeted’ again.

Horrifically, this is just the underlying logic of reality, and on a long enough timescale, it will always get you.  You will build something that cares about ‘not being terrible,’ and your great-grandchildren will look around and not see it, because it was ‘outcompeted’ by something terrible.  You are in fact the great-(great-etc.)-grandchildren of many people who have done this.

And even worse, is getting harder to not be terrible.  Technological advance is going to unleash even more and more ‘competitive’ (although inane, ugly, and destructive) forces.

There appears to be no way out of this, not without something that can oversee and guide the entire cosmos, overruling every possible manifestation of the horrific logic everywhere it might arise – that is, God.  If you don’t believe in God, you might at least believe it’s not impossible to create God.  This sounds both implausible and hubristic, and it is, but it’d be even more hubristic to think that we can ever create anything else that won’t be ‘outcompeted’ and leave our great-grandchildren in yet another shithole.  So: let’s create God.”

(N.B. Scott puts the last bit as “killing God” because in that section he’s using “God” to mean “the horrific logic,” but the point is the same)

Anyway, that’s the hip monster on the block these days, if you were wondering.

Just deleted my first superfluous after-the-buzzer NAB post mere seconds after making it, so I think the 12-step-program is working out

I’m trying to go cold turkey on NAB now (seriously), so this post is the kind of thing you should discourage, but just to address one quick and relatively clear-cut thing – in Phil’s response to my final post, he says

You also didn’t assert that the book did something it didn’t or vice versa. For instance, the claim that sparked “not even wrong” was “PS couldn’t use Lovecraftian horror as a framework,” which is bewildering because Lovecraftian horror is absolutely the framework, right down to the reasonable-seeming protagonist whose serious-minded efforts at untangling a mystery go horribly wrong.

We don’t seem to have been reading the post the same way.   I mean of course your book was using Lovecraftian horror as the framework – IMO that’s the sort of thing that is so obvious that a flat denial of it is almost always a deliberate paradox meant as part of a subtler point.  Just as, if someone began by writing “Barack Obama is not the president of the U.S.,” I would read on in search of what they meant by that, not think “well, actually, Barack Obama is the president of the U.S., I dunno what this fool’s on about”

I’m not sure I have a complete handle on the post in question but as I interpreted it, they were saying your book isn’t fully Lovecraftian in spirit because it focuses so heavily on the trio’s failures as thinkers, rather than portraying their discovery of monsters as the unfortunate consequence of thinking well and not knowing when to stop.  Which @anosognosicredux claims is a key part of Lovecraft’s deal.  I don’t know how right that is, but it struck me as interesting.