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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3192 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist. So far, mixed feelings. I have found his attempt to dissolve assumptions of racial difference very humanizing, and of practical merit. On the other hand, while he sounds perfectly innocent when discussing race with other minorities, when prodded far enough it always seems to come back to "whiteness" in the end. In fairness, Kendi's take on white individuals is fairly nuanced.

Paper I'm reading: Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

I've only read the first chapter but I just bought No More Manifestos by Eisel Mazard based on what I've seen from his Youtube channel.

On paper he should be very off-putting to me: a committed vegan and atheist who argues that the American continent is built on genocide and it all needs to be rebuilt from the ground up on Greek democratic principles, with an often dramatic presentation in his Youtube videos that can come off as cringey. But the positives are too intriguing for me to not want to read this book (and even buy it a second time after I lost the first copy):

(i) Very well read in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
(ii) A degree of commitment to his political goals and personal asceticism which gives him the motivation to learn dying languages and live in 3rd world conditions to really see the inscriptions on the temples in Laos and Cambodia and really talk to the monks that live in them instead of having a substandard education in a university.
(iii) A degree of skepticism that allows him to reject the modern study of Buddhism as being full of frauds and religious partisans after sinking so much into it himself, reject his hardcore communist upbringing and become a harsh critic of that ideology, and criticise the vegan movement as practised despite agreeing with its goals. This skepticism also makes placing him into a leftist box a very poor model for predicting what he is going to say next: very pro gay-rights: very opposed to trans surgery, very atheist: acknowledges that religious people are some of the closest to himself in adhering to strict standards of personal behaviour and doing the practical humanitarian work which he sees as so important, very sympathetic to American blacks and natives: harsh critic of BLM as a movement and charity.

A book about Art Deco written for the 2003 V&A exhibition. I am a big fan of the more modernist and streamlined 1930's American Art Deco and own several artbooks, but this is a quite dense tome that tries to cover the style from its pre-WWI roots to the titular 1925 exhibition to the death in the fires of WWII and across the continents, from Europe to the US to Latin America and Asia.

Could I get a title? I'm reading too much of Pol/Phyl/Hist right now, I need some arts and sciences to balance it out.

Art Deco 1910-1939

Thanks, my dude. Gotta get some culture in me if I'm gonna war about it.

Finally went through BAM, very straussian, but a real core there underneath the baby talk and performative offensiveness. Probably doesn't speak much to the average, but I wonder what Kulak thinks of the exhortation for men to form piratical bands of mercenaries, biker gangs etc. Prince and Prigozhin would seem to be the models, and the recent abortive coup in Russia would seem to provide support for the BAP-ian worldview.

Interested in his footsie with christianity, how he squares that particular circle, because it's a glaring problem with his philosophy.

but I wonder what Kulak thinks of the exhortation for men to form piratical bands of mercenaries, biker gangs etc

I think this is just, like, politics as aesthetics totally divorced from practice? Biker gangs and pirates never really stopped existing, they just stopped being effective. People defend BAP by saying there's a lot of irony and aesthetics mixed with deep truth, but after interacting with many people who love his stuff - either BAP is very wrong, or all of his followers are failing to parse the Straussianisms.

I've generally been very ... confused ... by the last three years of the new right/dissident right. Moldbug's dream of a new elite that is just visibly better and more correct than the existing elite just didn't happen. Almost all of the big personalities in the new right are now visibly less scientifically literate than good vox writers.

and the recent abortive coup in Russia would seem to provide support for the BAP-ian worldview.

Given the (very effective!) private military company couldn't even make progress in russia, what chances do a much smaller operation have in the much more stable and hostile environment that is the west! Again, it's not like BAP invented the idea of a junta or a coup. And Russia isn't just weak because of the ukraine war. Like, a lot of Bellingcat's exposes come from the fact that you can buy cell phone data on the black market and use them to expose Russian spies.

Actually, could you elaborate on how that supports the BAP worldview? I'm having trouble parsing that. How is a coups by an army run by a single person in an unstable state surprising to a liberal but not surprising to a bap? "Russia: no democracy, poor economy, political instability and coups".

Russia has the world's second most powerful military, but even they are largely reliant on a private army to provide their most skilled and motivated soldiers. So much so that the leader of such a force has the apparent ability to reach Moscow from Ukraine to express his displeasure, defy the government and even if he's assassinated tomorrow, live to tell the tale.

Out of curiosity, how does the microcoup support it? I understand how a Bronze Age mindset would lead to more such coups. But…that feels like a good reason to avoid such a mindset. Prigozhin is likely to spend the rest of his life thinking about polonium.

I meant more that the rise of partially independent private armies with even the capability to march on their own capital indicates that history is trending the way BAP predicts.

Prince is in no condition to march on Washington, for comparison.

I've been reading a bunch of fiction on Royal Road, including Industrial Strength Mage, Tunnel Rat, Paranoid Mage, and A Practical Guide to Sorcery although each typically releases one chapter per week which is why I've been keeping up with all of them simultaneously. While none of them are exactly rat-fic, they scratch a similar itch with protagonists that win by thinking, planning, and outsmarting opponents, and trying to munchkin the magic system of their world in ways that other people don't.

When waiting for chapters on these I've been browsing other stuff on Royal Road, but have kind of been missing having an actual proper completed series to binge, so am probably going to find a new series from elsewhere to pick up.

If you haven't already read it, you should check out Worm, Set in Stone, HPMOR (of course) but also the unfinished (as far as I can tell) Project Lawful, and Unsong.

Finished Eye of the Bedlam Bride. It was pretty fun. Also got caught up on Super Supportive; it was already enjoyable but took a turn towards fantastic recently--I definitely recommend it. In the meantime I'm continuing to read Path of Ascension which is still OK.

I read Yumi and the Nightmare painter, Brandon Sanderson's new bonus novel. He's so far published three of four bonus novels this year, in addition to his regularly scheduled novel coming out in November. It is, as usual, not all that deep or meaningful or artistic, but pretty fun, with nice art, and what more can a person expect from a writer publishing five novels this year?

I just finished the 2018 Marvel Comics series The Immortal Hulk. it started off by reimagining the Hulk as a body horror series, and ended up in some conventional comic book places to restore the status quo to some degree. The fascinating things focused on were identity and destiny, personhood and drive.

By the end, they were using the terms associated with disassociative identity disorder (system, alters) in ways the Internet had also picked up on, and kids on social media had mutated into a fun, jazzy, interesting disorder to have. Still, the entire 50-issue series is an important series in the Hulk’s continuity, and clears up who exactly killed Bruce Banner’s father, as well as identifying the bottom-most Hell in Marvel’s cosmology and its devil: God’s Hulkish alter-ego.

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