Last War in Albion this afternoon. 

So, there’s been a line of complaint about Neoreaction a Basilisk (my new book, currently funding on Kickstarter) that accuses it of being an attempt to slander “rationalism,” and specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky, by linking them to neoreaction. And of being part of a communist propaganda campaign to this end. It’s not. 

This weird theory mostly been pushed by a guy who blogs under the name nydwracu who’s active in both circles, which highlights the irony of the complaint(though he’s been pushing it on social media, not that blog)  I’ve sent him a preview copy, so he can at least trash talk it honestly now. Of course, he’s a white nationalist, and we know how good they are at intellectual honesty. 

All the same, it’s a serious enough concern that I want to address it, if only because it’s a concern Yudkowsky himself raised while news of the book was first flitting about the aether, and while there are some significant ways in which I do not respect Eliezer Yudkowsky, he seems a nice bloke, and I genuinely don’t want to cause him any distress. So allow me to say with absolute explicitness: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a neoreactionary. He repudiates the philosophy in explicit terms. He has shown no sympathy for and ative hostility to its most noxious beliefs. If I have ever suggested otherwise, I apologize profusely for the infelicity of writing, and if it is possible to edit the text in question I will do so.

That said, this has also been read as an attempt to smear “rationalism,” and that’s a subtler thing worth unpicking. First of all, I want to be clear that the book’s topic is complex, and is not an equation of all of the elements within it. To nick an analogy someone made when defending the book on Tumblr, it’s a book that has Eliezer Yudkowksy and neoreaction in it; it’s also a book that has Frantz Fanon and China Miéville in it. It no more implies that Yudkowsky is a neoreactionary than it implies that Moldbug is a socialist or Nick Land is black. This is a pretty self-evident principle, and I’m not going to harp on it, but come on guys, be serious.

Still, the book’s title binds together two things – Neoreaction and the word “Basilisk,” which comes from Roko’s Basilisk, a bit of Internet infamy involving Yudkowsky and his website LessWrong. Obviously I’m insinuating something. It’s fair to ask what it is. To some extent the answer has to be “read the damn book,” of course; I’m trying to make a living here. But we can talk about this without undue spoilers, so let’s do so. To frame the question in a way that makes complete sense given my past work, what the fuck do I have against Eliezer Yudkowsky? 

After all, he is in many regards the odd man out in Neoreaction a Basilisk. That I would take a pop at Mencius Moldbug, a neo-fascist nutjob two doors down from Vox Day, is easy enough to understand.…

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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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