Elizabeth Sandifer

For the third of our series of Neoreaction a Basilisk (currently available on Kickstarter) podcasts I’m joined by Sam Keeper of the thoroughly phenomenal site Storming the Ivory Tower for a conversation that talks a lot about the structural aspects of the book, as well as my secret traumatic origin story that explains my weird obsession with the alt-right. It’s an absolute blast of a podcast, as you’d expect from someone as brilliant as Sam (and seriously, Sam is one of the best and smartest voices in the quasi-academic pop culture blogging circuit right now). 

That’s for download right here.

The Kickstarter also hit $9000 last night, which means that “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” will be going up on the blog when I finish writing it, and that the next stretch goal is “Lizard People, Dear Reader.” Which is another essay I’ve not thought too much about, but I promised that if we hit $9k yesterday I’d offer some disorganized thoughts about it, so here goes.

The basic topic is something I’ve wanted to play with for a while, just because I’ve always had a soft spot for weird Illuminati conspiracy theories. And the lizard people conspiracy theories are some of the best. I mean, how can you not love theories that say the world is secretly run by lizard people? But although the piece will start with lizard people, it’s really my big conspiracy theories essay, which just feels like a natural fit for a book about eschatology.

In a lot of ways it’s easiest to talk about what I don’t want to do. I’m still going back and forth over how much Robert Anton Wilson to put in. Wilson’s fantastic and obviously a huge touchstone for this sort of thing, but he’s such a huge touchstone that he feels almost overdone. I also did a fun little bit on the Illuminatus Trilogy in TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4, so I’m loathe to go back. So yeah, I think I just talked myself out of Wilson.

Another thing I want to avoid is duplicating “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” which is about a particular kind of paranoia and dodgy reasoning that you can certainly find in lizard people conspiracy theories. So not an essay that’s based on close-reading David Icke, and certainly not a debunking type essay. I also don’t want to get into “what does it all mean,” not least because the answer tends to just be “it’s antisemitism with the serial numbers filed off.” 

So that’s the obvious angles to avoid. As for what I do want to do… since the Kickstarter began, I’ve found myself mindful of the way in which Glycon is kind of a tangible absence in the text. I mean, here I am talking about serpents and philosophical horror and I don’t have any Glycon. And part of that is just that I wanted to talk about new stuff in Neoreaction a Basilisk, but the omission grates. I’m tempted to try to make an opposition between lizard people and Glycon – two very different models for how reptiles secretly control the world.…

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This will be the last excerpt I post here, unsurprisingly from fairly late in the book. The epigraph early on marks the closest thing the book has to chapter breaks. (So this is the end of the fifth and start of the sixth of seven quasi-chapters.) This may be my favorite excerpt, just by dint of how much it highlight’s the book’s ability to move among and synthesize a wide variety of topics. Anyway, Neoreaction a Basilisk is available on Kickstarter, and I’ve linked a PDF of it in a backers-only update, so if you want to read it, you can do so right now.

And this is, in a nutshell, what’s scary about white nationalists – a fear eloquently articulated by Land’s heroic racist John Derbyshire, whom he quotes in the epigraph to Part 4a, the start of his “multi-part sub-digression into racial terror” as saying, “my own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk, underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead theories, underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at people like me, there is a deep and cold despair. In our innermost hearts, we don’t believe racial harmony can be attained.” And it’s true – the possibility that racism is an intractable and permanent problem is a scary one that has to be considered regardless of one’s certainty that there is no moral or rational basis for discrimination based on race. It’s just that the reason racism might be insoluble is less, as Derbyshire suggests, a fundamental “trend to separation” and more that there are still white people like John Derbyshire who are inclined to wax poetic about the precise reasons they hate black people, and that they exist in dangerously high numbers. This is not to deny the existence of racism even on the progressive left, nor to say that progressive racism is not just as much of a long-term danger. Rather, it’s to point out the practical scariness of white nationalists: their presence ensures that an intelligent or productive discussion of race is always going to be poisoned by a bunch of dipshits chiming in to rant about human biodiversity.

Underpinning all of this is the fact that the white nationalist horror is a mythology. This is what underlies the “Zimmerman is white in every way that matters” issue that underpinned the Trayvon Martin shooting – that his whiteness is almost wholly negative, coming from the ability to avoid being viewed as black or Hispanic or anything else. But there’s an inherent paranoia at the heart of this: the white nationalist monster, historically significant as it is and will be, has a glaring weak point in the form of its own monstrous terror of being invaded or violated. And moreover, that monster carries a power of its own, and one that is based in the same mythology as white nationalism.

Because, of course, the other way to describe whiteness instead of being not-seen-as-nonwhite is simply as being seen as “normal.” And the idea that appearing at first glance like someone who probably has European ancestry is “normal” is a concept that emerges out of historical systems of power that emerged from Europe – systems of power, notably, that include both Moldbug’s beloved monarchy and hated dissenters.…

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A stunner, paying off not only the (we can now confidently call it) deliberate pace and structure of the first three episodes but on numerous longstanding pieces of storytelling. In this regard, you can’t not start at the beginning, which for a half-scene feels like “oh god can we start an episode anywhere other than the Wall” until, abruptly, it switches into an event the show has been building to since the Stark diaspora commenced in the second episode. It’s a moment that shifts the entire show on its axis, and it’s structured beautifully, given all the time in the world to breathe. And that’s the opening. It follows that up with an immensely satisfying scene in which Sansa becomes the dominant figure of the relationship (and also well done owning the slight arbitrariness of their relationship – Benioff and Weiss claim they’ve never actually been on camera together before this episode, which is hard to believe but entirely possible), and then a lovely grace note of Brienne meeting Davos and Melisandre.

There’s an obvious question of how to end an episode that starts that big. The answer – to lean on the way this reaches back to Season One and recreate the cliffhanger of “Fire and Blood.” I howled with laughter as she torched the Dothraki – a charmingly direct solution that served as a satisfying reminder of what constitutes a Daenerys-scaled problem at this point. Although the earlier, fairly large Daenerys scene is also satisfying, giving Daenerys a small moment of victory – her first of the season – that quietly prefigures her later one. So much of what makes the last scene work is its beautiful inevitability – Daenerys is already safe as of the time Jorah and Daario get to her. That’s already a reasonably-sized moment that is keeping up the episode’s momentum when it happens. So Daenerys’s casual acquisition of the entirety of the fucking Dothraki is wonderful icing on top of the cake.

But the fact that Daenerys is on a fast ticket back to Meereen also enlivens that plot satisfying, which is good, as Tyrion is one of the bits of this episode that isn’t quite working. The general momentum and direction of this episode lends credence to his claim that he’s going to have the advantage over the slavers. Tyrion is good at what he does. In many ways, it’s been seasons since he had a substantial moment of victory, and so he’s massively overdue to get something. And yet the scene is pointing overwhelmingly towards him making a mistake – to the point where you wonder for a moment if he’s about to Stark it up completely and get put down by Grey Worm or Missandei. The sense of marking time would be frustrating were it not for the knowledge that there has to be a breakthrough coming at this point.

Because literally everything else is just plowing forward. Even the two smallest scenes – the Greyjoys and Osha’s death – have weight to them.…

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I’ve been blasting review copies of Neoreaction a Basilisk (currently available on Kickstarter) out to the world, including an open offer to send it to Yudkowsky-style rationalists and neoreactionaries if they want to trash it. So here’s a roundup of the reaction it’s gotten, which has mostly been within the rationalist community so far. (But do stick around for the end, where there’s one great big of neoreactionary response, and an announcement of a new stretch goal.)

First, though, the big one, whcih is that Eliezer Yudkowsky weighed in on the book’s existence. Well. Sort of. Actually he told everyone to stop talking about the book while referring to it only as “[CENSORED].” Say what you like about the man, he’s at least very consistent in his reaction to basilisks. I’m sure it’ll work just as well.

Meanwhile, in the “good reviews” department, Tom Ewing, of the mad and epic blog project Popular, penned this very insightful, funny, and complimentary review, which I 100% promise you that you will want to stick around for the last line of. No, no. Don’t skip ahead. Just let it happen.

Tumblr user nostalgebraist wrote a lengthy series of posts on it, of which this is the last one (but it has an index of the whole thing at the start). It’s a mixed review in terms of what it thinks of the book, though I’m inclined to think it makes the case for the book just by having such a lengthy and nuanced engagement with it. It definitely sent me back to the draft manuscript to shore up and tinker a few passages, and is a thoroughly good read. (Nostalgebraist is also the author of The Northern Caves, which is by many accounts brilliant, and which I’m hoping to get to and write about, but you know how the schedule is these days.)

Also on tumblr was psybersecurity’s three-part review (again linking to the last part as it has an index). The main review (the post with review in the title, that is) is what I described as a “good bad review,” which is to say that it makes a serious effort to understand what the book is doing and has entirely sensible and justifiable reasons for it not being his cup of tea. The post actually linked, “Pwning Sandifer,” is a middling deconstruction, but middling is a hell of a good result for your first effort at deconstruction, and it’s worth reading for bit where it gets entertainingly excitable in its sheer horror that anyone would ever say the things that Thomas Ligotti says, culminating in a declaration that Ligotti is “nothing more than pure unadulterated evil,” italics his. 

In a similar genre of “Yudkowsky fans attempt to pastiche the literary style of Neoreaction a Basilisk” is socialjusticemunchkin’s sort-of-ten-part review, which I link to Part 8 of, again because it has the index of the whole thing. In a reasonably clever joke about Mencius Moldbug’s failure to ever write Part 9c of A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Part 9 was deliberately excluded.…

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All-New All-Different Avengers #9

Confusion over whether I had dropped this for Standoff or for good meant it was in my pulls today, so I figured why not. Answer: because this is simply a bad comic. An issue anchored by a Jarvis-level perspective in which Jarvis is a figure of cartoonish, stupid excess. The result is that all emotional resonance the book has is that Jarvis is screaming bloody murder at the newly introduced Wasp, a cipher of a character with outsized potential for a fridging or heel turn. (And is Janet dead again?) Meanwhile the larger book is all Kang and superhero neoclassicism, while the new bunch characters remain basically wasted; Waid is depressingly incapable of writing either Ms. Marvel or Miles Morales well. Add Asrar’s bland and flat art and you have a complete waste of a good book. Definitely drop for good. 

Silk #8

Spider-Women is back on track, with an issue that actually makes a semi-compelling case for reading Silk by dovetailing nicely into what was apparently the book’s pre-crossover status quo as the Black Cat dramatically enters the plot. Meanwhile, the overall arc is elegantly poised for Jessica Drew to come back into the narrative. Really, everyone seems set to come out of the crossover on interesting and compelling terms. I’m still utterly unsold on Silk as a character, but when I hit post on this I’m going to quickly check if Robbie Thompson is writing anything else, cause he’s good.

Black Panther #2

Ta-Nehisi Coates is still awkward – he’s putting too much in every issue, and making the book a very slow burn. I suspect it might come off in trade, but as a monthly comic, this is a rough sell. Still, you can see him learning and starting to find a rhythm. There are scenes where, while he doesn’t quite soar, he at least gets some lift and the possibility implicit in the concept of him writing this book starts to shine through. This remains something that could be incredibly special. But it isn’t yet. Coates is terribly endearing in the letter column, though, and seems to have a sense of how much he has to learn, so that’s good.

The Ultimates #7

Al Ewing, meanwhile, is a confident, polished pro who elevates the brief “lead up to that barely coherent Civil War II thing we released on Free Comic Book Day” into an entertaining team book. The chess pieces are being put on the board for the crossover so elegantly you don’t even really notice, and yet Ewing is clearly laying himself a fun path to bounce off the crossover onto – one that, due to the cosmic scale of the book, feels substantial in its own right. This is the proper Avengers book right now.

Darth Vader #20

Typically sharp stuff, with Vader’s confrontation with Thanoth being climactic and surprising while remaining faithful to Thanoth’s understated demeanor. I suspect a neoreactionary influence on Thanoth’s stated worldview, and I suppose more broadly on the book as a whole, which remains very Uber For Kids.…

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This week I sit down with Eruditorum Press’s resident gothic Marxist, Jack Graham, and have… basically exactly the conversation you’d expect us to have about Neoreaction a Basilisk. Horror philosophy, Marxism aplenty, Moldbug’s failed Marxism, eschatology. We get the Hugos in there too. It’s a doozy – as fine and entertaining a slice of Sandifer/Graham as you’ll listen to. Well, “slice” is perhaps a bit dainty for a two-and-a-half hour podcast. But you get the point.

At the time of posting, incidentally, we’re $23 away from Jack getting brought on for an essay. And while Jack is of course too Marxist to ever vulgarly advertise, I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m giving him a healthy chunk of the money between this stretch goal and “Theses on Trump.” So if you want to corrupt Jack’s principles with filthy lucre, this is probably your last chance. Soon I’ll be pocketing it all again so I can give it to lizard people.

Anyway, here’s the podcast. …

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A fourth excerpt from my currently Kickstarting book Neoreaction a Basilisk. Here we pick up mere moments after the revelation of Mencius Moldbug’s most fundamental and inescapable philosophical monster.

But Land isn’t going to yield so easily. (Hell, even Yudkowsky requires more than Stanley Fish’s reading of Milton to comprehensively dismantle.) His project is not in the least bit utopian, and the notion of intrinsic rightness is not so much absent from his thought as largely irrelevant to it. Certainly he’s no stranger to postmodernist conceptions of language; they were a primary subject of his early academic work, which followed in the same Burroughs “language is a virus” tradition as cyberpunk. That’s the entire point of essays like “A zIIgōthIc-==X=cōDA==-(CōōkIng-lōbsteRs-wIth-jAke-AnD-DInōs)” (excerpt: “AusChwItz-Is-AlphAbet—euRōpe-fuCkfACe—AlChemICAl=tRAnsubstAntIatIōn—AnD—metRōpōlIs—+——+——AusChwItz-Is-the-futuRe”). His stated mission was to “hack the Human Security System,” by which he meant the basic parameters of human consciousness. And so the suggestion that language itself is a tool of the Cathedral would hardly bother him. That’s more or less his point. I mean, we’re talking about a guy whose endgame is “and then the rich elites evolve face tentacles.” (Tentacle is the new cannibal.) The point isn’t the retention of human civilization and its trappings. Humanity is just the prison that capitalism might escape from.

Still, we’ve at least clarified our problem a little. Note that both Milton’s trap and our takedown of Moldbug hinge on a similar moment – one where the author sets up an absolute, inescapable either/or. In Milton, either you submit to God or you sin by separating yourself. In Moldbug, either you support order and thus the inherent legitimacy of authority, or you are an evil, chaotic dissenter. Moments like this are ripe for hacks, Satanic inversions, and other such tomfooleries. Unsurprisingly – they are moments where a thinker is going to behave in relatively predictable ways. If you can reduce a question to a matter of order versus chaos, Moldbug’s position is inevitable. If you can reduce one to sin or obedience to God, so is Milton’s. And it’s usually pretty easy to do something tricksy with a binary opposition. You either find a third way, take the one the author didn’t take, or show that the choice is an illusion. So let’s look for such a moment in Land.

The obvious choice is the Great Filter. It is, after all, the ultimate in binary oppositions, which is why Land positions it as the ur-Horror in the first place – the great cosmic matter of life or death. And it’s ultimately the backstop his entire face tentacles ending hinges on. Survival either requires tribal loyalties and large piles of guns or it requires capitalist acceleration towards the bionic horizon. In one option we enjoy a slow extinction at the hands of the Malthusian limits of our planet. In the other we become something monstrous and unthinkable, that being the only sort of thing that can possibly make it through the Great Filter.

The trouble is, Land’s already anticipated all the usual tricks.…

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