Scrap note (#11)¶
With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay at the moment, some fragments:
Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx peanut gallery are now convinced that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction. Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is becoming absolutely imperative, however.
One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical sorting dispels dialectics.
***
Brett Stevens (of the Amerika blog, @amerika_blog) has gone super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very recent gems, these two pieces, raising questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within natural science.
Why does life resist disorder? #entropy http://t.co/GGMrjqv4bq
— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 1, 2014
Also, another two on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.
***
Mark Steyn comes out as a Sailer reader. No huge surprise there, I guess, but the darkness grows …
***
My crown of thorns is itching.
From what I have seen of the Transcendence response, the movie has been almost universally misunderstood. Immodestly, I think my as-yet-unwritten blog post on the topic gets it with the title Easter of the Nerds. Idiotically, most reviewers describe it as being about the dangers of artificial super-intelligence. In reality, it’s about the human sin of fear and denial of God, culminating in the murder of the Messiah (as computationally-incarnated divinity), and his quiet return, in a garden, framing the entire picture in the promise of resurrection. It thus exposes Transhumanism not only as a Christian sub-clade, but as a remarkably conservative sub-clade (certainly in comparison to Mainline Protestantism). The significance of this needs exploring at some point …