@argumate has been reblogging my NAB series, which is making me nostalgic.  I’m still, like, legitimately really proud of those posts (which add up to over 13,000 words, making them a sort of mini-book in themselves).

The weird thing is, I thought those posts added up to a really damning takedown of the book.  They did concede (self-flatteringly!) that the book provoked a lot of thought and creativity in its readers, but they came down pretty hard on the book in every other respect.  And yet, Sandifer kept reblogging them and saying they were great, and not really disagreeing with them except for minor quibbles.

In response to this, I tried making them more and more pointed and personal, until by the last one I was criticizing Sandifer for liking my posts too much.  Even this did not succeed in getting him to disagree more with me.  In the final version of the book, I am thanked in the acknowledgements:

Particular thanks are due to Rob, aka nostalgebraist, whose thoughtful comments were an honor to have inspired.

Since this may lead readers to google my name and read my posts, it almost makes them a part of the book itself.  I have no idea what a typical reader would make of the cocktail (given to them as a cocktail).

I also think @oktavia-von-gwwcendorff‘s massive NAB series was a masterpiece, and was sorely disappointed that Sandifer seemed to have missed the basic joke and thus been unable to engage with it.

On the monster at the end of Neoreaction: A Basilisk

@philsandifer

The broad form of the problem you’re identifying here is a pretty common one when doing any sort of cultural or media criticism in which gender comes up. For the most part, my approach tends to be to be more interested in dealing with existing culture than to try to deal with an imaginary utopian culture, and to accept that the centuries of connection between femininity and purity are not simply going to be wished away, so one has to engage with this sort of thing, mess and all.

OP’s discussion of trans women seems particularly apropos here - as she notes, trans women subvert gender. And yet they’re fundamentally invested in its reality. To be a trans woman is not only to say that “women” and “men” are real and meaningful categories, it’s to say that there exist things (like yourself) that decisively do not fit within one - an absolute denial of the idea that you could possibly be a man.

I don’t think “I want to avoid it, as much as possible, when I’m thinking about actual flesh-and-blood people” is quite the right disclaimer, therefore. Something more like “I want to remain mindful of its problematic elements and always think about what harm using this culturally prevalent concept might cause.”

But when, as with NAB, I’m dealing pretty directly with white patriarchy, I tend to think that a straightforward embrace of the feminine in its sense of “that which is consciously excluded and marginalized by patriarchy” is fairly safe and doesn’t need too-constant disclaiming.

I disagree with the last paragraph.

The reason is that I don’t think the senses of femininity (empathy, receptiveness, purity) mentioned upthread are anything like “that which is consciously excluded and marginalized by patriarchy.”  They are in fact ideals constructed by patriarchy.  Patriarchy has room for women as long as they’re like that.  The ones who get excluded are (among others) the ones who aren’t.

Victorian patriarchy had plenty of room for femininity, if in the form of the Angel in the House.  She was empathetic, receptive, and “above all – I need not say it – she was pure” (as Virginia Woolf put it).  If we lived in Victorian times and you proposed to embrace those “feminine” qualities, you wouldn’t be embracing something excluded.  You’d be embracing an existing ideal, the kind of thing people would laud in book-length poems.

Or back in ancient Greece, we have Penelope, who retains her “purity” for ten years while her husband is away, and who doesn’t mind that he was sleeping around the whole time.  Somewhat different ideal, same purity and domesticity.  The ideal Odysseus (and his fellow Achaean soldiers) embodied was pretty violent and awful, but I don’t think the solution is to demand that everyone be Penelope.  Many, perhaps most people are unable to tolerate being Penelope.  Or the Angel in the House.  Or the yamato nadeshiko.  Etc.

Patriarchy doesn’t just devalue femininity, it constructs its own ideals of femininity; as a woman, you’re still lower even if you do femininity “right,” but if you do it wrong, hoo boy.  It seems to me that “embracing” a patriarchal ideal of femininity will largely comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.  After all, that ideal has already been embraced, and the women who can’t or won’t meet it are getting the short end of the shortest stick.  (Some people are very tired of hearing “be pure, be empathetic, be yielding.”  Some people can’t, and are punished for it.)

(See also @polyaletheia‘s point #3, about how white supremacism doesn’t exclude femininity from its notion of whiteness, but specifically includes it as a thing that must be preserved from defilement.)

(via eruditorumpress)

On the monster at the end of Neoreaction: A Basilisk

philsandifer:

froborr:

stormingtheivory:

memory-of-amalgamy:

I was talking to Keeper about this earlier but I think that the “monster at the end of the book” for Neoreaction: A Basilisk is, well, me. I mean, maybe not you, but definitely me.

What I mean by that is that the feminine seems to be positioned within the thought of these three thinkers so as that it straddles both the inside (Hauntological) and outside (Weird), since women are simultaneously part of humanity but also completely foreign and alien in this kind of thought. There’s also a lot of feminine imagery especially towards the end that’s lovely and subtle (“the right to be invaded” is a pretty Feminine concept, as is empathy, Kleio the Muse of history is mentioned throughout, the gendered aspects of the Turing test, Blake’s goddesses and eroticism, and of course Yudkowsky’s weird sex novel of course too but that’s hardly subtle). And of course, we only ever actually get women in the book in the final third or so. It also turns the wonderful recurring first line of the book-“Let us assume that we are fucked”- into a double entendre, and frankly this kind of awful punning seems exactly like the kind of thing Sandifer would do.

Plus, it’s hard not to note that Sandifer misses, seemingly on purpose, two very obvious places where he could have stuck in the transfeminine: he discusses the Matrix without ever mentioning its creators, and he discusses Hannibal without ever discussing The Silence of the Lambs. In both cases the absence is pretty telling, and in the latter case he even explicitly makes clear that he’s jettisoning it. And of course, trans women have a lot history of being considered monsters. We’re creatures of horror for subverting gender. The absence does seem to be purposeful since Sandifer isn’t like, not knowledgeable about transness, even if he is a cis dude himself.

So I’m pretty certain the feminine is the monster, and gender is the eschaton of the book. This fits even more perfectly with the fact that the book constantly sets up binaries only to subvert them. Even each of the principle “characters" have these inherently contradictory dualities that they deal with: is Nick Land believing what he says vs Nick Land as an incredibly elaborate troll; Curtis Yarvin the genius programmer vs Mencius Moldbug the fifth-rate philosopher; Eliezer Yudkowsky as proponent of rationality vs Eliezer Yudkowsky as cult leader.

The pathology metaphor throughout is also hard to avoid: the book’s final sentence even invokes it. This is definitely one of the motifs I’m having a hard time working into this overarching theory, but let me think. We get recurring references to health a few times, at least once per thinker: Land’s Great Filter as possibly bioterror, as well as Yudkowsky’s mammogram example for Bayes’ theorem, and Moldbug’s idea of memetic immunology. Yudkowsky’s even also invokes gender directly. Health also directly relates to purity, which is a concept all three but especially Land is very concerned with- and purity, of course, is a Feminine kind of quality.

So to summarize my half-formed thoughts, then: Whiteness is inherently negative (the state of being not-other ethnicities), and it is a perpetual ruin, and the thing that haunts the ruin is the feminine. And so from there… the positive version of Whiteness that Sandifer attempts to derive at the end still eludes me. If only because I don’t know if Sandifer means positive in the sense of “something present rather than absent”, or in the sense of “something good rather than something bad"; both lead down very different paths. (I mean, I also feel I could compellingly argue that NRxaB is advocating that everyone should become a girl, but that’s 1. probably not what cis dude Phil Sandifer was going for, but also more importantly 2. utopian, and therefore against the premise of the book.) But I feel that this is a step in the right direction, although of course having finished the book I know that I can’t ever actually know if it’s a step in the right direction.

Or to put it the way I put it in chat, maybe the real skulltopus was the trans girls we made along the way.

We are the skulltopussies.

Given that Phil used to call himself a misandrist (and probably still does, I just haven’t seen him do it in a year or two), the book’s discussion of the alt-right’s obsession with being cuckolded and use of the word “cuck” to refer to men they see as feminized or emasculated, the “right to be invaded” and empathy, and the double entendre of “let us assume that we are fucked” that you point out, I think that Phil very likely is arguing that the key to creating a positive version (in both senses) of whiteness is to feminize it.

All of this is thoroughly consistent with my thinking - I’m intending to pick at some of these threads in the TERFs essay, though not entirely straightforwardly, of course.

FWIW this is what I was expressing wariness about in my post from earlier today

(Sure, ideas like this about Masculinity and Femininity – capital M, capital F, essential/universal or at least able to be mentioned without getting into any cultural specifics – are longstanding literary tropes and they’re worth having in mind if you’re reading an author who uses them.  But it’s another question entirely whether we ought to actually carry concepts like this around in our heads and use them to talk even obliquely about real people and situations.

Like, I recognize that “purity is a Feminine kind of quality” is the sort of idea I need to be conversant with in order to interpret a great deal of existing culture, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also say “this idea ultimately arose from a harmful cultural obsession with female virginity and I want to avoid it, as much as possible, when I’m thinking about actual flesh-and-blood people”)

(via eruditorumpress)

thathopeyetlives:

One lingering mystery about NAB: 

Like, I have been inclined to agree with Nostalgebraist as far as one can (though this has more to do with Stormy and some of the LW Opposition Culture than NAB since I have not and will not read NAB). 

But… people have claimed that the book advocates forming some kind of sex cult. (possibly connected to the creepy empathy drive?)

(which is mildly ironic given, well, the whole poly rationalist thing). 

But very few people have discussed this at all even when they’ve summarized the rest of the book in considerable detail. 

There’s really no support for this claim.  IIRC it was only mentioned in @socialjusticemunchkin’s review, and flippantly, without much confidence:

The much-vaunted proposition for dealing with the unimaginable horror awaiting us is to screw our brains out in a pagan sex cult, because anything else would be arrogant. Or something like that, my eyes kind of glazed over from the bullshit and boredom.

I think this is a response to a passage in the last few pages of the book, in which Sandifer suggests using “the erotic” as a starting point for somehow escaping the monstrous end in our future.  But he’s clear that he doesn’t literally mean “screwing our brains out”:

But let’s skip the easy masturbation metaphor and try instead to genuinely use the erotic as a launchpad, seeing how far we can actually go towards escaping the jaws of the fast-approaching monstrous end. Not sex, but what sex represents.

The thing about Promethea’s review is that it’s clearly an exercise in style and creative misreading which isn’t at all meant to be taken directly – something which seemed pretty obvious to me even before she pulled back the curtain in the final installment.  But yes, Sandifer does not actually advocate pagan sex cults.  Or if he does, he doesn’t say so in NAB.  (ETA: having re-read that final installment, I see now that she specifically mentioned the “sex cult” thing as a deliberate “exaggerated misunderstanding,” so there you go)

Incidentally, this part in NAB comes after a brief discussion of Yudkowsky’s “light novel” – “simply because it is in material point of fact just about the only exception to the ‘there really aren’t any women dealt with in all of this’ observation (those keeping score will note that Catherine Blake was the only nonfictional one, while Martin and Fanon were the only people of color).”

It’s not entirely clear to me what Sandifer means by “in all of this,” since there are plenty of prominent, nonfictional female rationalists, and even a number of prominent, nonfictional female neoreactionaries [Justine Tunney, Sarah Perry, hbd chick, Rachel Haywire].  I think he’s saying that these women don’t explicitly come up in the writings of his core trio, but even that doesn’t seem right; if we’re paying attention to EY’s recent output we’d have to note how much of his current intellectual bubble, including MIRI employees, consists of women.  But of course if I start doing this I could be here all day, and then all week

I need to work soon, but right now I’m re-reading parts of TNC while listening to Hamilton, and experiencing Feels

I think TNC is a probably better “response” to Neoreaction A Basilisk than any of the stuff I actually wrote about the latter.  Admittedly I wrote it before NAB even existed, but then that’s thematically appropriate, isn’t it

ursaeinsilviscacant:

froborr:

philsandifer:

ursaeinsilviscacant:

“The result was a frankly hilarious community meltdown in which people lost their shit as ideas they’d studiously internalized threatened to torture them for all eternity”

dude’s going to literally die laughing when he hears about Christianity

Christianity would have been so much better if Tertullian had written panicked all-caps screeds.

I mean, I think it’s funny because they arrived at the ideas themselves? Like, raising a child to believe in hell isn’t funny because that really sucks for the kid. But AI cranks arriving at the idea of hell on their own? Hilarious.

Plus it’s hilarious the degree to which their entire belief system is just a reconstruction of pop-Christian eschatology, complete with noticeably, specifically Christian concepts like eternal life-after-death as an incorporeal entity who is one with god, eternal torment for people who displease god, millennialism, mortification of the flesh, and so on.

I forget, have you read Desolation Road? Because there’s a hilarious subplot toward the end about a cult of cyborgs who talk like a cross between medieval monks and tent-revivalists and believe in spiritual purification via replacing their body parts with machinery, with the ultimate goal of creating a messiah who has no living parts at all. It’s pretty great.

Okay, this was a somewhat snarky post about a quote from a book I have not read yet (and I don’t have an opinion on the book as a whole, yet.) It’s possible that the context redeems it; I would have to read the full book to know. 

But my snark is kinda personal. I was raised Catholic. I believed in Hell. It really messed me up. Like, really messed me up. (I wrote and deleted a very long description of the exact ways Catholicism drove me crazy, but so many people have heard this so many times that it’s not worth re-describing.)

And I don’t think a person being messed up in the way I was messed up by my belief in Hell is remotely funny, even if “they did it to themselves.” I someone is bleeding out in front of me, I don’t care whether they are an assault victim or a freshers’ week idiot doing something incredibly stupid with power tools for a drunken bet - all I care about is that they are in pain and need immediate medical attention. I will call an ambulance, apply direct pressure to the wounds and hope they are okay.  Maybe in the long term, compassion necessitates a serious conversation about alcohol and power tools, but in the short term, no matter how much of an idiot they’re being, their suffering is not a joke. Pain being caused by stupidity does not make that pain funny, even if you think everyone upset buy Roko was stupid (which is debatable.)

So yeah, “lol @ ur suffering” is not a good look. And when it’s a specific type of suffering I have personally experienced, a type that still occasionally gives me nightmares, I get a little angry that people think it is funny. I know what it’s like to live your life in constant fear of everlasting torture and it’s horrible. I still have nightmares about Hell and I left the church more than 3 years ago. I can say “it gave me depression and anxiety and an eating disorder and I spent years and years wishing I had never been born” and this does not accurately convey how bad it is. I have written thousands and thousands of words about how bad it is, and I cannot accurately convey how bad it is. Even if I were a Great Writer, I could not accurately convey how bad it is - James Joyce comes very close, but he still doesn’t fully succeed. 

I doubt that Sandifer is a cruel man who rejoices in the suffering of others. I think he just has no idea what it’s actually like to actually live in constant fear of Hell, and he thinks it’s funny because he doesn’t understand. (Maybe I’m wrong. I know he mentioned a Catholic grandmother in some argument with John C Wright - for all I know he was also raised Catholic and he has experienced exactly the fear I have and he is mocking people who have experienced a similar thing as some kind of bizarre coping mechanism.) It’s just really, really grating to hear someone’s anxiety about eternal torture be described as funny.

(via ursaeinsilviscacant-blog)

OK I’m not supposed to do this, but, on the plane, I was flipping through PDFs in a sleep-deprived stupor and looked at NAB for a little while, and this is basically to just a copyediting thing so I might as well post it – this is in a paragraph about Moldbug’s “Antiversity”:

One wonders why he picked a name meaning against truth given this, but hey, it’s Moldbug.

But “Antiversity” doesn’t mean “against truth.”  The “vers” bit in “university” comes from Latin vertere meaning “to turn.”

This fits with a pretty regular pattern in English: words containing the string “vers” have no relation to truth and often some relation to turning (reverse, anniversary, verse, version).  Words relating to truth always (?) have “ver” without an “s” (verdict, verify, veritable).

(Note connection of “against” + “turning” to reaction, of course)

Overreation: A Basilisk

multiheaded1793 replied to your post “Re: that Moldbug post… I feel like “father [established before as…”

yes i vaguely remembered you posting about moldbug’s racism before, that was part of my surprise.

I decided to edit the post and add the link back in – on reflection there’s no good reason to leave it out, I think