Okay, so this popped up on my Twitter feed:

Now, it’s tempting, isn’t it?  A really desirable little chunk of cheese, just sitting there, saying “eat me!”, conveniently arranged on a nice wooden platform, framed by a kind of metal wire sculpture of some kind…

I mean, there are so many possible responses.  The person who I saw sharing this on Twitter responded with the admirably direct “because they’re stupid as shit”.  I myself contemplated several possibilities.  There was “So near and yet so far” and “Because they don’t know about Ockham’s Razor”, and a more serious one, which was “Of course they discriminate!  You have to when giving out grades!”  And so on.  It was gonna be great.  I was going to flip the right-wing narrative, revealing them to be – yet again – projecting their own sense of entitlement onto the people they hate.  I was going to point to their own desire for special treatment, their own snowflakehood, their own yearning for victimhood as a great big excuse, their own spoiled sense of grievance, which leads them to assume that they’re right because they feel they must be, and anyone who doesn’t let them win is evil.  Etc, etc, etc.  This is their narrative about liberals and socialists and feminists, and young people generally, and, of course, it is a far better description of themselves than it is of their targets.  And they remain blissfully unaware of how utterly they confuse their own babyish malcontentment with the legitimate complaints of others.  So this was a great opportunity to make this point again on Twitter.

But, yeah, to cut a long story short: it’s fake.  Because of course it is.  As they say: if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. 

The only thing that gave me pause was… well, this is Charlie Kirk, we’re talking about here.  A man so profoundly stupid its a wonder he remembers how to get his trousers on in the morning.  A man so deceiving of both himself and others that it isn’t too implausible to imagine him sticking his own head that far up his own ass and then waddling proudly into the town square and waiting for applause.  If anyone was going to self-own this spectacularly, it’d be… well, it’d be Ian Miles Cheong. Or Paul Joseph Watson. Or quite a few other people.  It’s a fairly long list, actually.  But Charlie Kirk’s definitely on it.  As I said recently, libertarians don’t understand their own dogma – they think the doctrine of ‘self-ownership’ requires them to constantly self-own in public. 

But, as it happens, Charlie Kirk doesn’t seem to have said this.  I searched for the quote and found only the meme.  And the meme is not to be found on Turning Point USA’s website, or in the festering cesspool of bile and bigotry and aggrieved whining and deluded ignorance that is their Facebook page.  And I trawled through a lot of their memes looking for it. …

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So this just got announced. Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovich writing a 7th Doctor comic for Titan. This is, on the face of it, absolutely landmark. Comics were a huge influence on Cartmel, who drew a lot of his style from 2000 AD while freely plundering Alan Moore’s catalog. So having him do one of his periodic returns to the McCoy era in comics is immediately interesting. It’s a shoo-in for the McCoy book. Except I’m really out of stretch goal slots. So instead I’m doing a flash goal. If we can hit $10k by the end of the weekend, I’ll cover this miniseries in the book. Here’s the Kickstarter link. This would be an excellent time either to back it or to link it. We’re at $9192 right now, so $10k by the end of Sunday is ambitious, but it’s doable.

The fact that we’re closing in on $10k also means that the next stretch goal is an interview with Kate Orman. The last two books have both had interviews with prominent creators who are openly fans of the era being covered—Gareth Roberts talked about the Graham Williams years, while Rob Shearman offered a rousing defense of Davison and Colin Baker. And while Orman wrote some of the best 7th Doctor stories, I’m not going to be asking her about those. For one thing, I already did in a podcast a few years back. I’ll probably transcribe those answers for the book too, but this interview will be about the televised episodes and Kate’s own Doctor Who fandom, with an eye towards talking about why the McCoy era was able to spawn the New Adventures.

Finally, I stopped by the Galactic Yo-Yo podcast to promote both the Kickstarter and the Patreon (which reached $350! Still, backing it helps make sure it’ll stay over $350, so it’s still a good idea). I talk a bunch about McCoy, the New Adventures, and scads of wildly off-topic shit because I’m me, and then we settle into me explaining why Kill the Moon is a thing of perfect beauty. That’s available here for your listening pleasure/endurance. 

And Jack and I will be getting in the studio Tuesday for what I assume will be a Shabcast so we can provide one last exciting promotional kick at the end of the campaign. So look for that late next week.

Thanks for all the support.…

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Since I did my usual “forgetting to queue Proverbs of Hell for a Monday,” I figured I should provide a Kickstarter update instead. At the time of writing, we’re at $8069. We hit the Algebra of Ice stretch goal over the weekend, which means we’re now approaching the $9000 stretch goal of The Unknown, which from Big Finish’s Diaries of River Song series. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it sounds fascinating. The hook is simple: River Song meets the Seventh Doctor. This is self-evidently a good idea. River’s entire M.O. is that she destabilizes the Doctor’s place in the narrative. She can do the things they do, and knows more than them. That’s especially true in stories before A Good Man Goes to War, which obviously this is. The Seventh Doctor, on the other hand, stands out even among the Doctors. He’s manipulative and has foreknowledge of events in ways they don’t. That’s a stereotype of his character in the same way “the loud obnoxious one” is of Six, but it’s also similarly true. So having River meet him is, in its own way, as much of a limit point for her character as meeting the Twelfth Doctor was. It’s a hook that does to River Song what she usually does to Doctor Who. Outside of pornographic fanfiction (where the answer is clearly the Third Doctor) the Seventh Doctor is straight-up the most interesting past Doctor for River to meet save arguably the First? Can Guy Adams rise to the occasion and hit his obviously laid out marks? Can Big Finish avoid screwing up a self-evidently good idea for once? I don’t know. I’m actually kind of nervous to find out because I am so often frustrated by Big Finish and I do so love this idea. 

So if me tackling that sounds interesting and you haven’t backed the Kickstarter yet, now is a great time. If you have backed the Kickstarter and haven’t spread word on social media, now is a great time. If you’ve done all of those things, on the other hand, now could be a great time to do them again. But it could also be a good time for some self-care. Get a drink of water. Have a small and healthy snack. Look at some cute cat videos on YouTube. You’ve earned it.

I also wanted to give an update on the Patreon campaign for the Peter Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum. Right now that’s at $345, a mere $5 away from The Full Eruditorum, complete with Pop Between Realities, You Were Expecting Someone Else, and Outside the Government entries. One way or another that will start on March 19th. But will it start with Deep Breath (currently readable by Kickstarter backers) or Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea (Captain America: Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows)? While odds look good for the latter, it’d be good to get well over $350 so that’s nice and secure and we don’t suddenly drop down to going episode-only in the middle of the run.…

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Let’s be cheeky and try to understand something about the Austrian School using the ideas of the Frankfurt School.  The two are, in any case, now permanently locked-together in a Reichenbachian struggle.  At least, the bastard ideological descendants of the Austrian School seem to imagine this.  For some reason.  So fuck it, let’s ignore the fact that this is actually a delusional notion (at least as it is generally meant), and see what happens when they actually fight.

In his 1941 book Fear of Freedom, the Marxist-Freudian Erich Fromm elaborates a dialectical account of human consciousness in late modernity through the prism of a dichotomous conception of the concept of freedom.  For Fromm, freedom can be divided into the very dyad of ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom) that we have already raised in connection with Hayek.  Hayek, the Constant Reader will remember, is (ostensibly) concerned for the most part with ‘freedom from’, that is: absence of coercion.  Fromm says that freedom from (hence ‘FF’), while desirable and often fought for, carries dangers within it.  It is not a guarantee of happiness.  Indeed, it can generate unhappiness, and from thence destruction.  (To be clear: Fromm is not offering this view as an apologia for tyranny.)  Essentially, Fromm’s idea boils down to saying that the absence of political or social coercion can be deeply unsatisfying because FF, being essentially negative (one does not, for instance, actively experience the absence of a policeman’s boot in the teeth as a pleasure), leaves us without ‘freedom to’ (hence ‘FT’).  In capitalist society, we remain alienated.  

Fromm goes on, in Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), to describe humanity, alienated in capitalist society, as having a self-orientation which he calls a “marketing orientation”, in which

man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. … His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I am a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” If you ask a man “Who are you?”, he answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor–or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and his answer has pretty much the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way he experiences himself, not as a man, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success.

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Just wanted to use a dead day to give an update on how the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter is going and to highlight one of the reward tiers I’m offering for this Kickstarter that I know will be of interest to some of you. So, after the best first couple of days any of my Kickstarters have ever had (yay!) the Kickstarter has dried up pretty significantly (boo!), ticking up only $60 or so the last two days. At the moment we’re stuck pretty grimly in the low $7000s, which is fine and delightful, but a ways off from some pretty attractive stretch goals like the Kate Orman interview at $10,000 or me slogging through The Pit at $14,000. So if you haven’t backed yet, well, now’s a great time to. But more importantly, even if you don’t have the money to back, I want to beg you again to spread the word about the Kickstarter. Post to social media. Right now a dozen and change of you have posted to Twitter about the Kickstarter. That’s great, and thank you, but I know more than a dozen of you are reaeding this, so please. Post the Kickstarter link. Here it is again. Just say something like “hey, here’s a cool Doctor Who Kickstarter I’m really hoping will make some stretch goals.” Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, anywhere. I promise, your friends won’t hate you for it, and it really does make a difference. More than $2000 of the current Kickstarter total is from social media links. 

OK. That’s the begging done. Now for some fun bits. First, I want to highlight the high-roller reward tier, the $150 signed and numbered hardcover versin of the book. After doing the Sigil and Color editions of Neoreaction a Basilisk, I came to the conclusion that Kickstarter-exclusive special editions are a hella fun reward perk. And so I’ve decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do, but that didn’t really make financial sense before, namely have a hardcover edition of the book. I haven’t looked too closely into printing on it yet, but my plan is to have it be a nice, high-quality edition of the book. And if you’re worried it won’t match the rest of your books, I’ll make a deal with you. Right now there are 11 hardcovers sold. If that number gets to 20, I’ll figure out how to do hardcover editions of Volumes 1-6 for the truly ridiculous few. (And no, those won’t be $150 a pop. They won’t  be cheap, but I’ll make sure catching up is as affordable as possible.)

Second, I want to talk about the next stretch goal, Lloyd Rose’s The Algebra of Ice. Or, rather, I want to edit and expan on Twitter thread from a few days ago about why this book would be super cool to cover:

I can’t hype this on the basis of Big Name Authors like I could Nightshade or Springhill, or even Master. This is by a woman named Lloyd Rose.…

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