Elizabeth Sandifer

EDIT: Text of a Twitter DM exchange where Jack and I accidentally started hashing out the essay appended to the bottom.

The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter is presently having its second-best day so far, meaning that it’s stormed through the “Theses on Trump” threshold, and we’re now looking at the $8000 stretch goal of me and Jack writing an essay on Austrian School economics. (Also, there’s now a Twitter poll for what the order of the next two stretch goals should be. And a $7000 mini-stretch goal on the Kickstarter to check out.) Unlike “Theses on Trump” and “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” there’s no demo of the Austrian School essay written – it doesn’t even have a for-certain title yet. But I can at least talk a little about why it’s a thing, and why I asked Jack to write about it. (And Jack will be along later to add his perspective.) And if it sounds interesting, well, the link’s at the top of the post.

So, first of all, why this goes in a book with everything else. Which is pretty simple – the Austrian School is a tremendously influential school of thought within libertarianism. Moldbug’s a huge fan. So is Vox Day. So were Ted Cruz’s advisors, hence his insane plan to go back to the gold standard. So like Trump and Gamergate, it’s firmly in the alt-right constellation. But that’s why it’s relevant, not why I’m doing it.

The thing that doesn’t come up a lot with the Austrian School is that they’re insane cranks. And I mean that in an almost good way, because I’m an occultist and have a soft spot for lunatic crackpots. But there’s no question that’s what the Austrian School is. They reject the utility of both empiricism and mathematics to economics, instead building their entire system out of what they call “praxeology,” which is a narrative-based approach whereby the entire system of economics is derived as a set of supposedly necessary implications of the allegedly self-evident premise “individual human beings act.” They are not taken seriously by any actual reputable academic economists – their influence is entirely down to the fact that their conclusions flatter libertarianism, so their obvious methodological madness is largely overlooked or, even more humorously, adopted in spite of its flaws.

One of the things Neoreaction a Basilisk definitely is is a critique of the entire model of philosophy from first premises, so this sort of “start from an axiom and build an entire theory of how the global economy should function” argument is a particularly apt target. But I’m also fascinated because one of the default positions of libertarians tends to be that Marx is an economic crank. And there are certainly ways you can argue this – he’s not working in any traditionally mathematical/empirical mode either, after all, and has a similar tendency towards narrative approaches. As I said, I don’t think being a crackpot is a problem. But it’s definitely weird that they dismiss Marx out of hand as a crank while taking Mises and Rothbard seriously. …

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A-Force #5

You can pretty much see Marvel deciding this isn’t actually a book they care about anymore. Its lineup seems incompatible with Civil War II, its star writer is gone, and it’s clearly biding time til cancellation. Thompson is a perfectly fine writer – it’s notably not as though Wilson was slaying on it – but there’s an awkwardness here, such as Nico needlessly re-explaining the restrictions on her powers to a character who should know already. Meanwhile Ben Caldwell, much as I loved his Wonder Woman strip back in Wednesday Comics, is an awkward fit here, and the book as a whole just feels like disposable ballast for the lower end of the sales charts. Alas.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #8

The Spider-Women crossover finally has a bit of a dud. Only a bit – this isn’t a bad issue or anything – but the decisiveness with which it’s moved on to Act Two is a bit jarring, and the structure of this issue ends up having Gwen be a spectator to the mostly less interesting Cindy Moon. Still, this is heads and shoulders above most Marvel crossovers, and I’m hoping this is just a bum issue (which, let’s face it, Spider-Gwen has been guilty of before). 

Invincible iron Man #9

The primary suspense of the issue is “is Tony Stark dead?” The answer to this is not hard to surmise. In his absence we get a scattershot assortment of scenes with the supporting cast, which are I suppose intriguing, but at this point “the road to Civil War II” is clearly a muddy slog down a meandering path that one highly doubts the payoff of. I’m half-tempted not to buy it. 

The Punisher #1

Picked up on a lark after realizing Cloonan was joined by Dillon on art. Largely enjoyed, but it’s Punisher-by-numbers at this point without anything that you can credibly call a new take on the character. Nobody draws people getting shot quite like Steve Dillon though. Anyway, if the Punisher is a character that appeals to you (not a statement you expect to get much traction at Eruditorum Press, let’s face it), this is probably one to check out.

New Avengers #11

Slid pleasantly easily back into this book post-Standoff, which is nice. Ewing’s usual enthusiasm for the over the top thrills of superhero books is on full display, with the best Squirrel Girl he’s ever written, along with some damn fine Hawkeye, a fun late twist, and generally a reminder of how much I missed this book while it was doing a stupid crossover. And oh look, next issue is… a stupid crossover. Well, I guess that’s a point in Civil War II’s favor.

Klaus #5

The book’s failure to be a natural fit for when it’s coming out continues, but this remains some of the best work Morrison has done. Particularly fun this issue, though, is Dan Mora’s art, which flits between cartoonish excess and dark grandeur in a way that’s probably not suited to a lot of books, but is self-evidently the right angle for this one.…

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This month I’m joined by a variety of cool guests to whom I sent preview copies of Neoreaction a Basilisk to talk about the book. First up is David Gerard, who’s been volunteer copyediting the book, and to whom I serialized it as I was writing it in 2000 word chunks. We talk about why on Earth he agreed to do such a ridiculous thing, and about what’s so interesting (and frustrating) about the three major figures of the book, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land. It’s a fun chat, and you can check it out here.

And, more importantly, you can back Neoreaction a Basilisk on Kickstarter here – we’re just over $1000 away from “Theses on Trump.”…

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Thanks to all who have been making the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk such a success – at $4469 right now, and happily plugging along towards “Theses on Trump.” Here’s a third excerpt from the main book, as we digress into another discussion of red pills and the notion of “pwning” a person, as in Moldbug’s multi-part essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” before, inevitably, arriving at Hannibal Lecter. As always, if you enjoy, please consider backing the Kickstarter here.

Moldbug unpacks this in terms of Dawkins’ own famed biological metaphor for ideas as “memes,” focusing on the idea of a parasitic memeplex, which is to say, a hostile and destructive cluster of ideas. Being Moldbug, he approaches this in preposterously manichean terms, proclaiming that “when we see two populations of memes in conflict, we know both cannot be healthy, because a healthy meme is true by definition and the truth cannot conflict with itself.” Which, hahaha no. I mean, you don’t even need to plunge into postmodern notions of multiple and variant truths to recognize that, when we’re working in any sort of immunology, biological or memetic, the notion of “healthy” and “unhealthy” is not a straightforward binary nor a situation where something is reliably one or the other. Readers interested in theorizing this in detail might try introducing words like “chemotherapy” into the discussion.

But to this end, Moldbug contemplates the idea of a “generic parasitic memeplex” and how one might come up with a generalized immune response to it. The goal here is, as Moldbug puts it, “a formula for total world domination,” which is to say, spoilers, he’s just looking to reverse engineer the Cathedral according to a more or less arbitrarily imported heuristic of contagion, morbidity, and persistence. This results in most of the mistakes you’d expect, which is to say that he identifies seemingly random parts of the Protestant tradition and then comes up with reasons why they’re especially clever and vicious adaptations suitable for maximum pwnage. The high point of this is when he decides that asceticism offers “a clear adaptive advantage” because the only people who can be ascetics are the rich and powerful, so it serves as a status marker. (Yes, you read that right – Moldbug suggests that asceticism is a fast track to popularity.)

But there’s a larger problem, which is that Moldbug is, broadly speaking, using the engineering technology of the red pill to try to build the Cathedral. Pwnage is clearly a red pill sort of concept. Indeed, they’re both firmly from the same technophilic cyberpunk aesthetic that is, at the end of the day, the fundamental connection among Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land. And that aesthetic is very much based around a sort of individual targeting. The word we’re circling around, obviously, is “hacking,” and as oversignified as the word is, it’s not actually a bad image for what we’re talking about. The red pill, pwnage, and for that matter the horror reading, monstrous offspring, and Satanic inversions all follow the same basic pattern – a sort of conceptual infiltration of someone’s thought in which their own methods and systems are used against them.…

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Well, the Kickstarter hit $4000 overnight, which means we’re on our way to our second stretch goal, “Theses on Trump,” projected to be another lengthy essay. This was an odd topic for me – present-day electoral politics aren’t my normal beat, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of Trump thinkpieces in the world. But I think I managed to find an angle on the topic that would work with my psychochronographic approach. Here’s the first 1500 words. The plan from here is to get weirder and weirder, of course.

Schedule for the next couple days is Super Nintendo Project Tuesday morning, a Neoreaction a Basilisk excerpt Tuesday afternoon, and a podcast with David Gerard, who got Neoreaction a Basilisk serialized to him as I was writing it, on Wednesday morning. Then normal schedule for the rest of the week.

For now, “Theses on Trump,” or at least the first 1500 words of it. If you enjoy and want to read more, I’m sure you can surmise how to make that happen.

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0.

Let us accept that categorization is pointless, and that any attempt at it will eventually collapse under the basic fact that he is contradictory and in his own way even contains multitudes like some Deleuzian/Guattarian Rhizome. He is what he is, in his own way as deific as that makes him sound. He does not have immediate political analogues in 1930s Germany or 40s BCE Rome any more than he does in 1650s Britain or 2013 Australia. Similarities abound, but every case is unique. It is not even useful to call him liberal or conservative. He is right-wing, I suppose, but only insofar as he is adamantly not a leftist. On the whole, however, he is simply not particularly ideological. He is an aesthetic wedded to a perversion. In the end, most people are, and virtually all politicians. Still, one has to start somewhere.

1.

It is not quite possible for anyone who did not grow up in the greater New York area to understand him. It is not that rich idiots in the general case are unique to the Atlantic northeast; the British class system is founded on such people, after all. Rather it is the particular subspecies of rich idiot that he occupies; one that is, so far as I can tell, unique to the white-assimilated second and third generation immigrant populations of New York. Post-Gatsby empire-builders, inevitably rooted in the idiosyncratic infrastructure concerns of the northeast. Insistent, often not without reason, that an ethos of grit and ambition has driven their success, but where that success is always expanding the family business, not starting it. And there’s always a family business. Their chief talent is braggadocio. Their favorite movie is The Godfather, but they don’t have the patience for Part II.

It would be cruel to recount immediate analogues from my own tri-state area childhood, but they abound. Instead I’ll pick another vivid memory of the region; the day after the Sandy Hook shooting, in a local breakfast-and-lunch diner called King’s that people actually from Newtown still call Leo’s.…

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At the moment we are $368 away from funding “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” over at the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter. So The Super Nintendo Project will either post Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, depending on when that happens and I have to get the “Theses on Trump” preview up. Personally, I’d prefer Tuesday morning, so please consider backing.  

In many regards the episode everyone expected to watch last week, which I suppose means we should start with the end, in which Jon Snow is resurrected more or less exactly how everyone expected, right down to it being the cliffhanger. It is in some ways puzzling why this couldn’t happen last week, not least because the mechanics of Jon’s death back in “Mother’s Mercy” required that there still be Wildlings at the Wall (as there are in the book), so the inevitable collapse of Thorne’s regime in the face of the reality that they can’t hold Castle Black against a bunch of pissed off Wildlings could easily have happened last episode. Which in turn probably could have made the resurrection work in one. Should they have?

There are clear advantages to not having done so, most obviously that the incredible Davos/Melisandre scene really benefits from the end of “The Red Woman.” (Carice van Houten in particular is amazing here.) But even with that, it remains tough not to be at least somewhat frustrated by the underwhelming start to proceedings. But that declaration, in many ways, requires looking at only one plot. The amount that would have had to happen at Castle Black to make it fit in the first episode would have been an awkwardly-sized – only the Sansa/Brienne scene really would have had a chance of standing up to it in scale. Here, however, it finds an episode that can actually support it, and the result is consistently satisfying.

Perhaps the biggest thing in helping balance this episode out is the return of two long-absent sets of characters. Neither are historically plots it’s easy to get excited about, and the Iron Islands are in some ways difficult to straightforwardly get invested in by dint of things hinging on a mysterious new character who’s not even named. But even if it’s not entirely clear how events in Pyke are going to suddenly stop being excruciatingly dull (especially given how awful the book material is for this plot), Balon’s death at least constitutes a major shift in the status quo that could in theory be interesting, and makes returning to the Iron Islands feel like a significant decision. Likewise even though little of import comes of Bran’s journey into the past, the basic fact that the show now has an easy means to go look at the past is interesting, not least because that sure looks like the Tower of Joy in next week’s trailer.

Also substantial is the death of Roose Bolton. There are some distinct problems with this scene – the timing of the Maester’s entrance is painfully contrived, and the sequence of Ramsay killing Walda and her son is a tedious bit of Ramsay being Ramsay, and one that’s tough to be invested in given that all the significant fireworks have already gone off in that plot.…

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The full version of this essay is now available here.

Thrilled to announce that the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter hit goal twelve hours in, which means we’re on to stretch goals, the first of which is a long essay to be titled “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” about the tortured and short-circuiting logic of everybody’s least favorite hate group. I wrote up the first 1500 words of both it and the next stretch goal essay as demos to make sure they worked as concepts, so here’s a preview of it. It even turns out to be timely. (I wrote it weeks ago.)

Anyway, thanks to everybody who’s backed the Kickstarter, and if this looks interesting to you, we’re only about $1500 away from my having to finish it.

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One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

“In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.”

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history.

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game”;  “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point.…

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So, the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk is up. That’s the link right there. In case you’ve missed the hype machine for it over the past few weeks, it’s a book why far-right politics are stupid and also about the end of the world. The official description’s on the Kickstarter page over here. We’ve posted two excerpts on the site so far (Excerpt One – Excerpt Two) and there’s more coming over the next few weeks, along with some fantastic podcasts about the book. This post, on the other hand, serves as a bit of backstage commentary on it all for the Eruditorum Press regulars.

First, a simple pragmatism. My wife and I are moving next month. We’re excited for this, and it’s almost certain to have good effects on my work, but it’s expensive as moves are. So that’s part of why I’m Kickstarting this book, and doing it now. That said, I hope the ideas appeal. Certainly I found them interesting, hence, you know, accidentally writing it.

This gets to the other big reason why I decided Kickstarter was the way to go with this one. One of the problems with accidentally writing a book is that certain important planning steps involving figuring out how you’re going to describe and market a book get skipped. Typically these steps exist to kill off or heavily modify ideas that, while potentially interesting, are potentially undisciplined and difficult to explain to somebody else. This, of course, is also one of the major advantages to accidentally writing a book, but it doesn’t do wonders for the conventional marketing campaign.

It also makes it suitable for having a bit of fun with. As purchasers of Recursive Occlusion will be aware, despite (or perhaps because of) being a digital-centric author, I love the book as an object. It’s part of why I love Blake so much. So with a kind of eccentric and inadvertent book, it seemed like a good time to do something I’ve kind of always wanted to do, which is a book that serves as an homage to the pre-ebook, pre-POD self-publishing tradition of zines and half-baked conspiracy theories. (I’ve literally been considering something like this since the Deadly Assassin post in Eruditorum.) You can see a preview of the visual style I’m going for here.

This also nicely solves one of the harder things about Kickstarters, which is the lengthy period between taking everyone’s money and knowing how much giving everyone their stuff is going to cost. Especially important when you’re using one to fund a short-term expense like a move. With a manuscript in hand and an intended format that’s a bit odd, I could do a Kickstarter where all the rewards would ship more or less upon completion, making all the idiosyncratic editions Kickstarter-exclusive. Which they are – I’m never going to sell any of them again.

To balance that, if the Kickstarter funds I’ll be doing a permanent edition with, assuming we hit any stretch goals, some extra essays on topics like Gamergate, Donald Trump, and Austrian School economics (the last of these would be co-written with Jack).…

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For obvious reasons, I will not be providing links here, however I am happy to provide them privately to anyone with a legitimate interest in the information, including law enforcement.

It was brought to my attention today that “kukuruyo,” one of the artists that Vox Day put on the Rabid Puppies slate in Best Fan Artist and that made it onto the Hugo Ballot recently posted to his blog a commissioned drawing of comic book character Ms. Marvel in which her genitalia is clearly visible and provocatively displayed. Ms. Marvel – whose comic won last year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story – is a sixteen-year-old girl in the comics. Under US law, this would seem to legally be child pornography. 

Although the drawing post-dates Day’s placement of the artist on his slate, the hypocrisy of Vox Day endorsing the work of a child pornographer is particularly glaring given that he continues to throw childish insults like this around:

#SJW logic: Pedophil Sandifer complains that #RabidPuppies are “bullying fucks” while declaring that they are outnumbered “3,800 to 200”.

— Supreme Dark Lord (@voxday) April 30, 2016

and has been vocal in accusing sci-fi fandom of harboring pedophiles, including slating two works with arguments to this effect in Best Related Work.…

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