First of all, we hit the Game of Thrones reviews threshold on Patreon, so I’ll be back tomorrow night for “The Red Woman.” 

I also just cut a podcast with David Gerard, who probably very few of you have any idea who is, but has been an online friend for literally over a decade, starting in the Wikipedia trenches and evolving to… the Tumblr trenches. He ended up being the beta tester for Neoreaction a Basilisk by dint of being mad enough to volunteer, and kept me confident that this fifty-thousand word piece of madness was actually working despite all common sense that this was a very bad way to write a book. Anyway, that’ll be out in a few weeks, along with some other people who’ve gotten preview copies of it.

Also finally wrapped the backmatter of the “Fearful Symmetry” chapter, and am about to make a tilt at not having to take a break before “The Abyss Gazes Also.” Which brings me to my question, which is really just “so who’s being obsessive enough to track my structural gimmicks there?” To be clear, literally no problem at all if you aren’t; if the chapter doesn’t work for non-obsessive readers the chapter fails. I, who complain regularly when I can’t follow monthly superhero comics, have no right to whine if I can’t make a Watchmen pastiche work. But those posts get low comments, which is totally understandable – they don’t lend themselves to comments. So I don’t really have a sense of how that aspect of it is landing at all. Or any questions people want to throw out about that project.

Actually, since the Neoreaction a Basilisk excerpts aren’t necessarily comment friendly either, I should explicitly solicit Eruditorum Press reader questions on that book as well. 

Obvious answers to questions on both topics, then. 

1. Last War in Albion Volume 1 will be out in late summer.

2. The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter will start in May.

3. I don’t know for sure whether the specific work you’re wondering about will be covered in Last War in Albion, as I’m only just starting to have my first serious “actually write things down” thoughts about the structure of Book Three in the last few weeks, but broadly speaking it’s probably got a pretty good chance of at least coming up.

4. Monday’s Super Nintendo Project post is a hoot.

That last one’s not really an answer to a question. It’s just true. …

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…their sovereign’s dominant role is to inspect
Row after row of the state’s armed forces –
Broken down in training, reconfigured from scratch
And then programmed to kill on command.

The sovereign is crucial to the lubrication of Britain’s wars
By its gulling soldiers into dutifully dying;
Then, after paying homage to such victims of state carnage,
By its encouraging arms-trade profiteering.

Arms-makers and their customers are brought together
At Windsor Castle to be honored with fly-pasts –
Monarchy and military business being intimately connected:
The UK’s ‘Defense Industrial Base’ is a royal brand.

A landowning cabal with its heraldry denoting privilege
Still forms an elite network that stakes out the land,
And retains monarchy as its god to deceive those living here
Whose Common land they once stole and enclosed.

The monarchy’s militarism echoes a time when royalty wasn’t flouted –
When to criticize royalty was treason and when those threatening
The status quo could be seized, and their limbs tied to horses
Which took off in every direction as they were whipped.

On seeing royal victims torn to shreds while still alive,
Royal minions sliced their hearts into sections
Then dispatched them across the country for public display,
As a warning to anyone considering rebellion.

In the past, the brute power of the monarchy was this unrestrained
Whereas now it pretends to more decorum
By dressing in fancy costumes, and awarding itself unearned medals,
And laying wreaths to those dying in its name.

For its politicized charisma still yields a large body-count;
Lives are still culled by its ‘Queen and country’ spell;
Royalty routinely pays its dead subjects with a march-past
When they’re boxed up and returned to where they once lived.

Meanwhile royalty’s own patriotism bears scant inspection:
It being revealed in 1915, in World War One,
That when millions were dying in Flanders for King and Country,
The King himself was tobogganing in St Moritz.

He returned to set a record for shooting Sandringham pheasants
As he cut his annual swathe through its wildlife;
Similarly, in 1939, George VI determined that the war
Shouldn’t “interrupt the grouse season at Balmoral.”

The UK’s military-monarchy-complex is a cynical industry
For which the Queen was groomed by a General Browning
And, likewise, Prince William’s mentor has been Blair’s wartime apparatchik:
The UK’s former man in Washington, David Manning.

“It is Manning who is running the conflict with Iraq.”
Wrote John Kampfner, the author of ‘Blair’s Wars’.
Thus the heir to the heir is being initiated by a prime mover
In Britain’s centuries-long killing sprees.

While all the time royalty profits from arms, due to its Crown Agents
Who tend to its shares in Lockheed, makers of cluster bombs
And nurture bundles of the royal investments in BAE Systems –
In its Depleted Uranium shells and its landmines.

The latest landmines are designed to leap up out of the ground,
Triggered by children playing or walking nearby.
They’ll detonate in mid-air and they’ll sever limbs as bodies fall
While the shareholdings of the super-rich rise.…

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You were supposed to be getting Shabcast 18 this week… but it vanished into the ether, owing to a malicious and inexplicable failure of my recording software.  The Mailer Daemon collected it and conducted it to internet Hades.  It was great too.  I had Gene Mayes and (at last!) Jon Wolter in, and we chatted about Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, etc, in a podcast that was a lot sillier, funnier and more ribald than the subject matter really warranted.  But, as I say, it is lost forever, doomed to live on only in the memories of the three men who experienced it… which, in a way, makes it all the more precious.  One day, it will be the most sought of all lost Jack Graham-related media, and take on a near-mystical reputation, rather like London After Midnight, or Orson’s cut of Ambersons.  I actually remember very little about it, as I was somewhat drunk and we were recording in the wee small hours here in Britain, and I spent most of the discussion in a haze of fatigue and mild inebriation.  I seem to recall that we talked about the hip-hop musical Hamilton, which apparently at least one podcast listener is desperate to hear me talk about.  Well, that listener lost their one and only chance.  They’ll never hear what I said.  Not even the bit where the three of us imagined a hip-hop musical about Garibaldi, written by Umberto Eco, and I said I’d go to the theatre heavily armed and force the cast to perform for me at gunpoint.

So, as I say, this Thursday was supposed to be release day for the April Shabcast, which means I had no writing anywhere near ready.  Which means I had to either scrabble and really work hard, or fob you off with something I dashed off in another drunken haze the other night, and hope I get away with it. 

Guess which option I chose.

What follows is actually a revised and much-expanded version of something I wrote as a result of an online discussion I was having with Daniel Harper.  It is not a cogent argument.  It has become, to put it humblebraggingly, the outline of a groundwork of a personal theoretical position.  It is not meant to masquerade as an original and profound work of philosophy.  I am not an original thinker and I make no claim to be one.  I am not a philosopher and I make no claim to be one.  It is a semi-refinement of the outloud thoughts of a intoxicated man who, determined to embrace intersectional discourses while retaining the (to him) irreplaceably valuable core of Marxism, has been mulling this stuff over for a while and, even if he doesn’t fully realise this himself, needs someone tolerant to talk at.

Please feel entirely free to ignore everything below if Marxism does not interest you.  People interested in Marxism should, perhaps, feel even freer.

*

Classical Marxism has basically nothing specific to say about human diversity, sex, identity, gender, sex, stuff like that. …

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James Bond: Vargr #6

This really fell apart for me in the denouement. It’s hard to be surprised by how many times Ellis did “and now for a long action sequence” in this book; it’s one of his preferred tricks, and the subject is suited to it. But as a conclusion to a six-issue arc an action-heavy ramp-up to a mournfully ambivalent conclusion is, to say the least, unsatisfying. Always a pleasure to watch Ellis at work, and he’s right to say that Jason Masters is visibly improving over the course of the series, but this is unquestionably a minor work.

Cry Havoc #4

Starting to have some trouble keeping everything straight here, though it’s firmly in “reread the first arc when it’s done” territory and not “annoyed at this” territory. Or perhaps just to obey the still-brilliant “for more information reread comic” edict and better parse out exactly what happens in Afghanistan this issue, as it all gets a bit odd and dependent on a firmer knowledge of how the supernatural is meant to work in this story than I have. Interesting, but definitely a comic in a lull for me.

Karnak #3

Ellis in full-out “my reading list, let me share it with you” mode, the basic perversity of Ellis being that this is generally preferable to Ellis writing action sequences. This time we have an issue based heavily on the work of Eugene Thacker (a significant figure in Neoreaction a Basilisk) and also on Karnak literally screaming at people until their heads explode. This is a ridiculous comic in all the best ways, and the new artist is a strong choice as well. …

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In preparation for the May launch of our Kickstarter for it, we’re running excerpts of Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is from quite early in the book while I’m introducing my three main characters of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land.

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk, indeed, haunt the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to an even vaguely Marxist-familiar reader, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

The most obvious symptom of this is how rarely Moldbug actually takes a swing at Marx himself, despite the fact that he’s self-evidently the biggest single villain of his philosophical system. It’s not a pattern that’s quite noticeable on the paragraph-to-paragraph level; it’s just that when you do searches on his blog you discover that in the more than one million words he published as Mencius Moldbug he’s mentioned Marx a mere hundred-and-thirteen, and that’s including his uses of “Marxism” as a generic term of derision. And none of them constitute anything like an extended engagement with Marx’s thought. Sure, you can argue that this isn’t so much an oversight as a demonstration of contempt, but the fact remains – there’s a confrontation that’s obviously waiting to happen that Moldbug endlessly deferred. (Hitler, by comparison, makes four hundred and sixty-nine appearances.)

Indeed, at one point late in his blogging career he proclaimed (not for the first time) that he was finally going to offer the red pill in a compact form before dramatically unfurling the statement “America is a communist country.” He even reduces it to an acronym. “AIACC can be interpreted in countless ways,” he proclaims. “All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional, obviously idiotic strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are obviously true, sometimes surprisingly true. They are always true. Because America is a communist country.” And then, as you’d expect, he begins to go through various interpretations to show how they are either obviously idiotic or true. And yet there is one interpretation that, astonishingly, never seems to occur to him: “America is in some meaningful fashion run according to the philosophical principles of Karl Marx.” In fact, literally none of the hundred-and-thirteen uses of the word Marx appear in the essay in question, “Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare.”

Moldbug posted five more times on Unqualified Reservations after that essay, and then retired the pen name.…

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