Eruditorum Press

Doxing gods

Monday Stumbling Blearily Into a Dunkin Donuts

9

“Proverbs of Hell” will run tomorrow because I forgot to screenshot the images on my desktop before leaving the house for a laptop-only day. So instead we bring you a general update on where the site is, since we let the two year anniversary pass without any real mention. There’s a fair amount to cover, but let’s start with blog stuff, as it’s where things get interesting. Obviously Proverbs of Hell is my current project. It’ll run more or less uninterrupted until late February. After that, my desired next project is the Peter Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum.

Yup. It’s happening. Well, hopefully. RIght now it’s the $300 goal on the Patreon, which is at $283. I’m not really worried about it hitting $300 for new TARDIS Eruditorum. But what I’m curious whether we can make the $350 goal happen. At $300 I’ll blog all the episodes from Deep Breath through Twice Upon a Time, but just those. At $350 you’ll get all the other bits – the Pop Between Realities, the Outside the Governments, and the You Were Expecting Someone Elses. (And maybe a Time Can Be Rewritten. We’ll see if there’s any rewritten time in time.) I suspect a lot of whether that happens is going to come down to where the Patreon is in early February when the big push towards the finish line happens. If we enter February well past $300, I think $350 is doable. So if you want me to write about Rick and Morty, The Lego Movie, Blackstar, Class, or the Titan comics, consider tossing a dollar or two into the Patreon now. 

Book-wise, I’m mostly in crunch on Neoreaction a Basilisk, which is now to the point where I’m out of “this book outright cannot be published in this state” issues and down exclusively to “I’d like to fix a few more things about it” issues. It’s not quite to “it’ll be out any day now,” but it’ll go to “any day now” any day now. There’ll be an announcement here, obviously. And in January or February I’ll run a Kickstarter for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7. This’ll be the model for all EP books going forward, for the basic reason that it’s easier to plan a workflow around and I make more money that way. 

Once Neoreaction a Basilisk is out the door, I’ll finally get back to Last War in Albion. My hope is that I’ll be able to run Chapters 7-12 of Book Two before I run out of Capaldi Eruditorum, and that Book Three will then take over as the weekly blogging project, but we’ll see how feasible that turns out to be. But Chapter 7 will probably drop in early 2018 – I expect to start work on it, like, next week. 

So basically, the theme for 2018 around here is going to be getting back to the classics.

Meanwhile, we’ve finally got Jack back from his long exile writing about the Austrian School of Economics. You’ve seen the offcuts of that essay over the past few weeks, and you can get the whole thing when Neoreaction a Basilisk drops, but if you want to read it right now, today (and why not – no Proverbs of Hell to read) you should toss some money at his Patreon, where it’s currently available for all backers.…

Continue Reading

Consider the Reagan, Episode 1

, , 10

At long last, here is the first episode of a new strand of the ‘Wrong With Authority’ podcast supergroup, in which we (sadly we were Murphyless this time, but we expect to be fully Jamesed-up in future episodes) record commentaries on the movies that shaped and misshaped us, movies released between the first inaugurations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder.

This is 80s pop culture we’re talking about pilgrim, so expect sickness.
 
This time, we mcfly backwards and forwards through time in a shitty car to discover that the deep psychological structure of America’s understanding of its own history is best viewed through the prism of the oedipus complex. 

Who’d have motherfucking thought it?

Downloadify here.

 
 
…

Continue Reading

Oh Schmitt, Hayek!

, , , , , 3

Okay, so Phil is now editing the full text of the Austrians essay for Neoreaction a Basilisk, but you can read the whole thing ‘as I left it’ (so to speak) at my Patreon in return for a monthly donation of just one measly dollar, thus proving that labour isn’t the source of value. 

Meanwhile, I will continue to post sections here which were cut from the essay for length reasons.  My Patreon sponsors will get those at least a week before they’re made public.  For instance, next week’s public post will go up at my Patreon – for patrons only – later today (probably).  My patrons will also hopefully get early access to podcasts before they go up.  Daniel and I just recorded a WWA Footnote cum Shabcast (Wrong with Shabthority?) on our mutual researches into the Right.  That’ll be along soonest.  We also have three other podcasts in the works, including a WWA Footnote featuring all four of us talking about the Trumpaversary. 

By the way, I want to publicly thank those patrons of mine who stuck by me during a long period when I was finishing the Austrians piece by racing to turn huge piles of notes into (hopefully) readable prose.  During this stretch, they were basically getting fuck all for their money.  I don’t blame any of the people who jumped ship – totally fair enough – but I’m extra double fond of those who felt able to stick around.

Anyway, back to me – i.e. a nobody with a second rate degree from a third rate university – explaining why one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century was shit.

 

*

Neoliberalism is not a simple reiteration of the principles of classical liberalism – a defence of the ‘market society’. It has its origins in an authoritarian reconfiguration of liberalism, beginning in the early twentieth century, specifically designed to meet the challenge of mass democracy and the welfarist demands that came with it.  The great pioneer of this shift was Friedrich Hayek… [who] obscured his real sympathies regarding the state with talk of the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market. But it is clear that he thought a very strong state necessary for various reasons. One such was to cope with the pathologies of democracy.

…

…since neoliberals recognise that human beings are not necessarily predisposed to embrace ‘the market’, the law must not only protect the market order from popular attempts to subordinate it, but also help create neoliberal subjects. People must be compelled to embrace their ‘entrepreneurial’ selves, to treat every aspect of their lives as a self-maximising quest, and to embrace the calculus of risks and rewards in the market, including the inequalities that come with it, rather than seeking to control it. Attempts at circumventing or subverting the economic order, whether through political activism or criminality, must be harshly punished. The neoliberal state is a big, interventionist state, particularly in its penal mode.

– Richard Seymour, Against Austerity

 

All law is situational law.

…

Continue Reading

Permanent Saturday: The Call of the Wild

, 3

Garfield is made great by the thin line it walks between comfort and banality. The strip is defined in equal parts by both concepts, and it’s impossible to have one without the other. Indeed, when it is one, it is so precisely because it is also the other at the same time. Like everything about Garfield, its running gags play into this: We expect to see them and thus enjoy the thrill of recognition when we do. And while the strip can dispense a seemingly endless series of variations on the same handful of setups, the structure itself must always remain fundamentally comforting, familiar, recognisable and, necessarily, banal.

Like the Wise Man of the Mountain we looked at last time, Garfield’s Echo Point is a running gag whose setup is based around one of our characters (usually the cat in question) interacting with an unseen aspect of Nature outside of the panel. And this time, it’s a comedic double-act built out of a literal call-and-response. Garfield reads the sign, understands that this is a place where echoes can be heard and meows into the canyon awaiting some kind of answer. Usually he gets one. In these strips then Garfield is more often than not playing the straight man again, with the punchline coming in the form of the comedic response the echo provides him with.

An echo is a captivating, almost magical thing. It’s a disembodied sound, sometimes your own voice, reverberating off of the surrounding landscape and coming back to you in such a way it seems as if it’s materializing out of thin air. Or, perhaps more accurately, as if it’s coming back to you from somewhere across the horizon. This is, after all, the sensory experience of an echo: The feeling that there’s someone somewhere in a faraway land who can hear what you’re saying, is listening, and responding back in turn. And yet, they can only respond by repeating what you yourself just said, as if they are your own ghost or shadow-self. Garfield itself has already explored this sensation, having the punchline of one Echo Point strip from a Sunday in 2011 be two cats meowing to each other from across the canyon’s expanse, with neither aware of the other’s existence. Cleverly, the Echo Point backdrop in that strip is mirrored across the divide between the final two panels, with Garfield and his interlocutor walking away marveling at the natural wonder. For of course, neither can see what or who exists beyond the boundaries of the comic strip panel’s border.

This time, the response comes in the form of a text message on Garfield’s smartphone (there is the inherent ludicrousness of a housecat owning a smartphone, but Garfield stands in for the modern human. Isn’t it just as ludicrous that statistically everyone has one of those things?). On its own, a telephone can be read as a suitable metaphor for the sensory experience of an echo: An unseen, perhaps even ghostly, presence on the other end of the line is listening to and interacting with you.…

Continue Reading

The Proverbs of Hell 27/39: Antipasto

, 2

ANTIPASTO: And so we move to Italian cuisine for seven episodes. Antipasto is the starter course, distinct from the amuse bouche or sakizuki in that it is a heavier dish, often with cold meats, as befits this unusually dense premiere.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones.
HANNIBAL: Ethics become aesthetics.

I have suggested in the past that my interest in Hannibal is that Hannibal presents a vision of the perfected man. This exchange is central to that contention. I had made an assertion along the same lines as Bedelia’s assessment many times prior to “Antipasto” airing (although its relevance was improved in shooting, where the line changed from “ethical problems”), routinely making the claim that I had abandoned ethics in favor of aesthetics. That said, Hannibal’s retort here is, to my mind, flatly incorrect, suggesting that aesthetics are a degraded (or ascended) version of ethics.

My contention, on the other hand, is that aesthetics are in fact the base form of philosophy from which all other forms follow. Our sense of aesthetic pleasure is fundamental knowledge from which our wider understanding of the world is structured. Even epistemology extends from aesthetics – what we recognize as true is rarely based on logical analysis (though even if it were, rationality is little more than a sense of harmony and balance) but on a notion of truth that is clearly akin to beauty or sublimity.

What is crucial about aesthetic judgment is what Kant describes as the “subjective universal” quality of them. They are, in empirical fact, individual and private judgments. But they are made with a sense of normativity – a belief that others ought to agree with them. (Kant believed that this only applied to beauty and sublimity, as opposed to the agreeable [judgments of visceral pleasure – “this human leg tastes good”] and the good [ethics], but this is wrong in both directions. Our notions of agreeableness are clearly made with at least some normative force, whereas ethics are not nearly as objectively determined as he’d like to think.) It is from this sense of normativity that the faculty of taste – the idea that aesthetics can be cultivated and refined. Which is where the notion of the perfected man comes in. Hannibal’s ontological force comes mostly from the fact that he has better taste than anyone else, both in literally sensory terms and in the sense of refined desires. It is this, for instance, that his ability to manipulate so effectively comes from: he understands what the most exquisite temptations are. Similarly, it is what his astonishing capacity for improvisation is based on. It’s not merely a hyper-intelligence and cleverness, but an immediate instinct for what the most interesting course of action would be.

All of which raises the question of what Hannibal’s aesthetics actually are. Which, helpfully, is much of what this episode is about. We can set aside the myriad of accurate but glib answers. Yes, Hannibal detests rudeness and values the confirmation of his own superiority (his line about being “happy to sing for his supper” is particularly funny), but these are obvious details that don’t do much to reveal the whole.…

Continue Reading

By ‘Eck, Hayek!

, , , 13

The early Austrian School was actually subject to a split.  It stemmed from the first wave of the followers of its founder Carl Menger.  Mengerians Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Philippovich were both a bit like Fabian socialists in their outlooks.  Wieser, for instance, seems to have believed that marginal utility (the radically subjective basis of modern mainstream economics) provided a theoretical foundation for progressive taxation.  But Wieser’s brother-in-law and fellow teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, was of the classical liberal tradition.  Böhm-Bawerk was a strident anti-Marxist who developed many of his own theories – which became foundational to the subsequent Austrian School – in the course of his criticisms of Marx.  Böhm-Bawerk is still routinely credited by some with having demolished Marx… which he accomplished by systematically misreading, misunderstanding, and misrepresenting him.

The split was transmitted.  Böhm-Bawerk was Mises’ teacher, and Mises became fanatical in his rejection of state intervention (except when he wasn’t… it’s complicated).  Wieser was Hayek’s teacher, and Hayek is still thought by some hardliners to have been almost a socialist owing to his ability to countenance some welfare measures.  Hayek also believed a state was necessary… which makes him a cuck by anarcho-capitalist standards.  In Ancaptopia, law and order would be seen to by private security firms.  The principle task of ‘law and order’ (as capitalism sees it) being the protection of private property, we’d actually be talking about capitalists with private armies.  Which… would be great, obviously.

Initially, Hayek leaned in Wieser’s direction, apparently having one of those quintessential left-wing ‘phases’ in youth that inoculates a certain kind of person for life.  (You could say the same about the Austrian School as a whole.) 

Hayek then became Mises’ employee and protege, and drifted in the direction of Mises ideas, though he claimed he was never completely won over… which can be seen in his rejection of outright praxeology in favour of Popperian empiricism.

Despite being the prime mover behind early neoliberalism, an ideology devoted to attacking social provision, Hayek never completely abjured every possible form of welfare state.  In the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (published in 1979, a long time after his youthful socialist phase) he makes noises about how Universal Basic Income may even be “a necessary part of the Great Society”.  (Indeed, Milton Friedman the monetarist also refused to completely rule out some form of provision for the poor.  His ‘Negative Income Tax’ proposals are testament to that.)

But then neoliberalism does not, and will not, eliminate all social provision.  I think the neoliberals – the saner ones anyway – understand that you can’t actually have functioning modern capitalism unless there is a state that takes on some of the burden of making sure capital has a surviving workforce.  The insistence upon eliminating welfare is a tactical ideological aim more than an actual plan.  And many thoroughgoing neoliberals will defend social provision of some kind, as indeed did Hayek and Friedman, etc.

As has been noted by many left-commentators, neoliberalism is not actually anti-state except with reference to the state’s capacity to exercise any semblance of public control over capital flow.…

Continue Reading

Commentary: BloodRayne and Bloodmoon

15

 

I hope you’re not all sick of BloodRayne yet.

There’s a new video on my YouTube channel. It’s a rambling, half-lucid live replay of the first few stages of BloodRayne. Yes, the ones I already showed off.

There is a reason for this, as I explain in the video. Since I lost all my progress from the original filming of the first block of Bloodmoon episodes, I needed to go back and replay the opening hour to get a point to continue from, and I used the opportunity as an excuse to talk about the conceptual origins of the Bloodmoon series, why on Earth I chose to spotlight BloodRayne so heavily and my ever-deepening fodness for and connection to this silly, silly game.

If you like delerious, circuitous ramblings as points, arguments and conclusions slowly come into and out of focus, this video is for you. If nothing else, it’s a decent snapshot of how my mind works.

I do have to apologise though for the video cutting out briefly during the cutscenes. BloodRayne plays cutscenes in a different window than the gameplay, and OBS doesn’t like that.

 

You know the drill:

 

BloodRayne on GOG

BloodRayne on Steam

Mods used:

BloodRayne XBOX 360 Controller Support…

Continue Reading

An Accurately Named Trilogy III: The Dark Knight Rises

, 17

The Dark Knight Rises offers something with no counterpart in Nolan’s career: it’s a hot mess. That is not to say it’s a bad film, and certainly not to say it’s the worst of Nolan’s career (that’s clearly Interstellar). But there is a mad unruliness to it that is utterly uncharacteristic of Nolan’s work. Nolan is, as I’ve said before, an enormously fussy director. His work thrives on constantly trumpeting his presence as an auteur, inviting the audience to feel smart for keeping up with him. This is not inherently a bad thing – it’s nothing that isn’t true of Steven Moffat, for instance. It’s just how Nolan rolls. When it works, as with The Prestige, the result is a gripping puzzle box. When it doesn’t, as with Inception or Interstellar, you get something more akin to a stupid person’s idea of what a smart movie is like. But The Dark Knight Rises is neither of these things. Instead it’s a film Nolan simply loses control of – that becomes a sprawling tangle of competing ambitions that doesn’t know what it wants to do even as, at any given moment, it’s doing it with characteristic hyper-focus.

To some extent this is visible just from its sense of what comics it’s adapting. Sure, Batman Begins had a vague relationship with Year One and The Dark Knight is in some tangential sense based on The Long Halloween, but for the most part they were built out of bespoke parts. The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, is mashing together The Dark Knight Returns with Knightfall. These already two borderline incompatible works, offering two very different accounts of Batman’s limits. Nolan, however, combines them while also including Catwoman’s plot from Year One, the introduction of Talia al Ghul, Robin, and the lingering plot threads from the other two parts of the trilogy. This is nuts. These are not parts that have any natural reason to go together – instead it’s as though Nolan, out of clear-cut ideas on what to do with his third film, just raided all the remaining bits of the mythos that sounded interesting and put them in a blender.

The result is oddly satisfying. It’s not quite that Nolan is working outside of his comfort zone – it’s nearly impossible to imagine him doing a comedy, or even something that can fairly be described a small and intimate. Rather, it’s a strange combination of Nolan letting his hair down and having something to prove. The sense is that the need to top himself twice over has finally put a bit of pressure on him, and he’s not entirely confident of how to handle it, so is spreading his bets. But his attitude towards this is pleasantly relaxed – as though he’s just letting this film happen as his big obligation between Inception and Interstellar. And as a result, it’s a better film than either, because another way of putting that is that Nolan recognizes the impossible scope of this movie and so has decided to actually have some fun with it.…

Continue Reading

Spare Kochs at an Orgy

, , , , , , 6

As some of you will be aware, especially those of you who’ve been following my whining about it on Twitter, I’ve recently been finishing up something I’ve been writing about the Austrian School of economics (y’know, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, right-libertarianism, etc).  It’s my side of a collaboration with Phil for his next book.  It’s taken a long time (my fault) but I just finished.  One of the reasons it took so long was because I kept falling down rabbit holes, so to speak.  The good thing about that is that it has left me with excess material I can write up.  And here’s the first bit. 

By the way, people who give me as little as $1 per month on Patreon saw this days ago.

*

The Koch Brothers.  Billionaire reactionaries whose dad co-founded the John Birch Society, and who now act as money-pits and eminences grise for huge sectors of the US Right.  Greasers of the wheels of the Tea Party.  Suffice to say, they – along with others of their kind including the DeVos family – have also funded organisations like CPAC, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute (co-founded by Murray Rothbard, by the way).  They’ve helped bankroll – directly or indirectly, via organisations they fund – climate change denier Willie Soon, and speaking engagements by people like Bell Curve author Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, arch-Islamophobe David Horowitz, and erstwhile alt-Right darling and Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos.  Relatedly, think tanks they fund and control are responsible for creating a model ‘campus free speech’ bill, complete with draconian punishments for students who protest guest speakers, which several state legislators are eying approvingly.  They have spent incomprehensible amounts of money on direct support for politicians and political candidates.  Though critical of ‘establishment’ candidates in the 2016 US Presidential race, they did not back Trump… but they didn’t exactly back out of politics.  As Salon.com notes, in 2016

the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered 58 Koch-funded candidates for state legislative seats in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. The actual number could be much larger, for the bulk of the network’s donations go through “dark money” channels that hide the names of donors and recipients.

Though some people suggest the Kochs feel distaste for Trump, the likelihood is that they’re starting to think, as InsidePhilanthropy.com put it, that

investing in libertarian ideas through think tanks and universities offers more bang for the buck [than political donations]. And they’ve recently indicated that such philanthropic giving is likely to take priority over political giving in coming years.

To see why they might think that, I want to look at some of this sort of ‘philanthropy’. 

There is much to say about the Kochs.  Google their names.  It’ll keep you busy.  Here I will follow one tiny trail.  It leads to no massive revelations, as far as I can see.  But it’s a trail I haven’t seen followed elsewhere.  It follows Koch money and influence into Austrian-inspired, right-wing, libertarian academia.…

Continue Reading

Unreal Tournament 2004: Arena Shooters and Metroid Talk

1

Come join me on a night in as I play a few rounds of Unreal Tournament 2004 and talk mostly about the Metroid series. Because that’s just how I do things.

Topics discussed (or really, rambled back and forth on) included arena shooters, my history with the genre and why I like them, the differences between Unreal Tournament and Quake, the things the genre needs to do to come back, and of course, the Metroid series. Particularly Metroid Prime Hunters, which is an unjustly overlooked Metroid-themed arena shooter for the Nintendo DS. This is probably as close as I can get to doing a real Metroid project right now, so I hope I was able to answer at least some of the questions you might have had about how I feel about Nintendo’s most fraught video game franchise.

 

Because I mentioned him, here are some links to the good work video game historian Liam Robertson has done on the Metroid series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lMLRIwiB_c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpLm3Dg7Yg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22E5ectnU4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7WNYpOJ0y4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoV5SbM_V8M

 

Here are the games used and mentioned in my video:

Buy Unreal Tournament 2004 on GOG

Buy Unreal Tournament 2004 on Steam

Get the Samus Aran mod for UT2004

Get an emulated version of Metroid Prime Hunters from the WiiU eShop

 

This is kind of an impromptu, experimental test for a new kind of video series I’m debating starting. If you like me being this unscripted and freeform, please let me know: I have a couple of ideas for ways I can use this approach for other games.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 74 75 76 77 ›»