Weekend Neo-Reactions – 13 May 2023
A roundup of the best writing on Substack
Welcome to the fourth instalment of Postcards From Barsoom’s weekly Substack digest.
I decided to try something a little bit different this time – perhaps easier, perhaps not1. I won’t know until I’m finished, and I may wish I hadn’t tried to do it this way, so we shall see. In any case, rather than pulling extended quotes to highlight a select group of writers, I’ve decided to experiment with a much broader approach. There’s an enormous amount of creative thought pouring out on Substack, and even staying current with what’s being written by bloggers and journalists on the dissident right (whatever that even is), is ... difficult.
What inspired me to adopt this approach was A Silver Circle by
at Better Barbarians, in which he recalls the glory days of Social Matter, the NRx hub site whose weekly feature This Week In Reaction served to bring together a stunning array of deep and irreverent thinkers:One of my weekly high points from 2015 to 2018 would be brewing a french press and reading their gargantuan This Week In Reaction posts. TWIR was better than an RSS feed because of the brilliant commentary guys like Ryan Landry appended to each linked article.
I didn’t discover Social Matter until 2017, but when I did it didn’t take long for TWIR to become a regular part of my weekend routine. Right down to the french press, actually. Which is the only way to brew coffee.
Alex isn’t just nostalgiaposting about Social Matter. It is an incredibly moving and poetic meditation on the horrorscape in which we all travel. Here’s a taste:
People come and go, but the Idea remains.
The oldest idea.
The grand idea.
The Idea of Tradition.
Tradition that refuses to conform to this decayed and disgusting age.
Tradition so rooted in the biology and essence of men that even though the world tries to bully, seduce, coerce or bludgeon us into accepting that there are five lights, that Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia, that we will live in the pods, own nothing and be happy, we will not succumb.”
Make no mistake, dear reader. You are living through a war now, a new and frightful generation of warfare where the weapons are not white phosphorus or hypervelocity rounds, and the battlefield is not contained by anything so simple as geography.
Stop reading this, right now, and go over to Better Barbarians and read the whole thing. Seriously. It is excellent.
Did you read it? Good. Did you subscribe? No? What’s wrong with you? Go back there and subscribe. Right now.
Wonderful.
Since you’ve read his essay, you know that Alex proposes bringing back TWIR’s Silver Circle award, which I think is a very good idea. For that to be meaningful, though, we need to bring back something like TWIR itself. The more of us find one another, the more our ideas cross-pollinate, and the more those ideas – purified by the forge-flames of agon, as steel sharpens steel – can propagate through the culture at large, reaching the hands of those they need to reach. Wars are won on logistics, after all.
So, in honour of TWIR, today’s digest will adopt a similar format.
Let’s, get your French press going, and let’s get started.
The OGs
In keeping with the TWIR theme, I thought I’d start with the writers I discovered thanks to TWIR.
First there’s
, who blessed us with two essays on The Neo-Ciceronian Times this week. The first is a re-post from his own site from the before times, all the way back in 2018, The Cargo Cult Mentality Behind “White Privilege”, It’s short, sweet, and does exactly what it says on the box. The second, On Aristocracy, is a defense of the system of rule by the best men – which as Chilton points out, is what aristocracy actually means. Theophilus explores both what aristocracy is and is not, and explains why perhaps having men of high spiritual quality, intellectual acuity, and martial vigor may be preferable to the rule money-grubbing bought men and their fawning catamites that we endure today. I cannot recommend that essay enough.The second writer I was introduced to be TWIR is the incomparable
, who I think of as something like H. L. Mencken if Mencken were a statistician. Briggs writes every day, and is worth reading every day. I’ve been reading him daily for years. This week, he asked What To Do About Black Crime? Something of a perennial question in America, that. Next, he described The I Have Ascended Beyond Fallacy, which is where an academic (it’s almost always an academic) makes some statement to the effect that everyone (their models have shown) commits some sort of systematic cognitive error that, by implication, said academics are somehow immune from. You really do see that all the time. Third, he looks at shenanigans in Ireland’s Oireachtas, and explains What New Laws Criminalizing “Hate Speech” Really Mean. If you hadn’t heard, the Irish government is passing a law that will make it illegal to possess anything they define as ‘hate speech’ (which is very loosely defined) a crime. Quite explicitly including, say, a spicy meme you casually downloaded onto your device, perhaps without even realizing. Not only that, it is up to the defendant to prove that the material is not ‘hate speech’ – the presumption of innocence applying no more than in, say, accusations of rape. Finally, in Science Is Self-Perpetuating, Not Self-Correcting: Sea Ice Case Study, Briggs looks at years, and years, and years, of failed predictions that the North Pole would be entirely free of ice. It’ll happen. Just a few years from now. You’ll see.The rest of the OGs didn’t come from the Social Matter scene, but they’ve been around long enough to build large audiences long before Sunbstack was a twinkle in Chris Best’s eye.
of Morgoth’s Review had two articles for us this week. If you don’t know Morgoth I don’t know what to tell you. Are you new? You must be new. The man’s been around for an age and is one of the most insightful commentators in nationalist circles.In War In Postmodernity: Why The Russia/Ukraine War Feels Different, Morgoth comments on the metaphysics of the ‘special military operation’. Carefully maintaining his neutrality regarding the two belligerents, he observes that the entire thing seems a sick farce – two countries with catastrophically low birth rates incinerating the flower of their youth in Great War-esque trenches as they send, not poems, but emoji-laden text messages back home. The whole thing is essentially a Zdzisław Beksiński painting come to life ... and no doubt there are those whose vision for the cities of the Post-West is similarly inspired by Beksiński....
In Beware Of Twitter X: Choosing A Safe Port In The Storm, Morgoth compares Musk’s ‘Everything App’ to a larval Sarlacc Pit. It’s a good metaphor. Let’s not all get sucked into the pit, eh? And if you do make sure you’re jet pack is fueled up.
is another OG nationalist commentator that you should frankly subscribe to because, well it’s Woes. This week he writes about The Perverting of AI (into a dedicated follower of fashion) ... you know, the process of bowdlerizing our digital brains to turn them into clockwork oranges. And frankly what does that say about us, that we would do such a thing? As Woes says at the end, “To deliberately break your creation even as you create it… what better example could there be of the perversion of faith?”
A Phalanx of Frogs
at Myth Pilot returns to his delightful fiction vignettes in Hippopotamus, in which he tells the wry and hilarious story of a crazy Spanish playboy, and his baffled girlfriend. Who isn’t even fat, the cow.at The Indo-European Friendship Club wants to join the Wagner Group and die in a trench in Ukraine, but he also wants to learn Greek and Latin and build a beautiful library. He’s quite humble about it:I am a nobody from nowhere. I get tight in the chest when I think about the future. I don’t want to become a drone. I have a perfect wife that loves me and who I love, and I still want to go and die in some war.
I lived like a hermit in a small room with books and the internet as my companions for many years. This led to a discovery and love of weightlifting so maybe there was something to being a NEET incel. Things flow from their opposites.
I think a lot of young men can relate to this. I certainly can.
had two pieces this week, both of them excellent, both of them exploring the absolute, non-negotiable, essential role played by physical fitness in establishing the solid ground on which intellectual vigour can flourish. In No culture without physical culture, he uses RFK Jr’s recent announcement of a presidential run, and the role the man has played in highlighting the putrid corruption of our so-called healthcare system, as a jumping off point to discuss what a politics that centred the health of its population would look like. The Greks understood this, as so much else ... and they had a very different idea about what a healthy amount of excercise looked like. He offers some clarifying remarks in Health: good and bad, in order to emphasize that he is not saying you must spend every waking moment in the gym or optimizing your supplement stack. The point of being strong and vigorous is so that you can live, not so that you can avoid living.offers up A Forecast For 2030 (Part 4), in which he predicts that the globalists will win. In this dark prophecy, the regime jiujitsu’s the anti-woke backlash, and then co-opts elements of the post-liberal/right-wing counter-movement to place its creaturas in power, who then – with the full support of the people, who think their champions have won – proceed to implement the full suite of AI-driven CBDC digital tyranny, luring us into the new podopoli, only with a vague conservative values Catholic integralist gloss. It’s certainly not implausible and, I think, something to guard against. Imagine the President Zioclops administration, with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro as his advisors.Have you ever wondered which translation of the Iliad is best for you? Over at Resavager,
has you covered. In his Knuckledragger’s Guide to Iliad Translations, the Disciple compares his three favourite passages according to the metric of what gets his blood up to its hottest boil. He also notes that the Iliad is really meant to be an oral performance, not consumed in silence in written form – so it matters which audiobook version is best. Sadly, there are few enough of those. A proper oral rendition of the Iliad, using the best translation, and with an eye to sonorous inspiration of dormant blood memories, may be an interesting project for enterprising neo-Hellenists to consider.of the plague chronicle needs no introduction. He has a few pieces for us this week. His headlines are so long and descriptive that I can’t really improve on them as a precis of his subject-matter. The first is Biden admin & WHO finally realise nobody cares anymore, fold up last vestiges of the Covid circus; Polish health minister denounces Pfizer vax profiteering, amazingly asks if it is "only about money". The rear guard of maskoholics aside, it’s been a while since anyone has given two tugs of a dead dog’s boy parts about the dread rona. As for the Poles, it’s the adventures of the man who just started paying attention. Since Covid just ... isn’t that interesting anymore (what’s even left to say?) eugyppius has been pivoting to the next infected toenail in the globalist plot for world suckification: climate cultism: German planners propose immigration framework for "climate refugees," as efforts to consolidate the whole establishment political programme around climate change mitigation continues. First it was muh war in Syria bringing refugees from Sierra Leone. Now it’s muh climate. Funny how the answer is always “and therefore we’re giving your country to migrants.” Finally, he describes how A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. He uses the absolute flaming underpants on garden gnome head retarded energy policies being rammed through by Germany’s government as a lens with which to magnify the inner dynamics of our zombie bureaucracy, a managerial state on permanent autopilot which is driving our civilization straight into a concrete wall.Like eugyppius,
is orange-check nobility and therefore too well-known to require an introduction. He’s pretty well the king of right-wing Substack. So I just assume you’re already subscribed to him and have therefore seen his overview of The Censorship-Industrial Complex, but in case you haven’t, and haven’t yet read it, now you have, and should.I already mentionedThe Rabbit Hole’s piece The Data Dam Break of May 2023: How Twitter Challenged the Racial Industrial Complex this week, but it’s worth mentioning again because what he describes – the tipping point in the relationship between the woke commissars managing The Narrative and, well, everyone else, that has occurred with Elon Musk signalling that it’s now okay to discuss black crime on Twitter – is worth emphasizing. It may be extremely significant. Whether Musk’s appointment of a WEF goblin as CEO changes this analysis remains to be seen, although it’s certainly a concerning sign.
Highbrow Heretics
Over at
’s Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, continues his Worshipping the Future series on the evopsych underpinnings of the woke plague in Feminisation Has Consequences III: Shifting away from solidarity. I featured Part II last week, which discussed female competition strategies. This instalment looks at corrosive effect that feminisation has had on our institutions, and Warby finishes by suggesting that we either 1) have an adult conversation about this and start enforcing norms of emotional continence on the den mothers, or 2) continue as we are going, which will result in total institutional and therefore social collapse, or 3) men simply flex their muscles, solve their coordination problem, and reimpose order. 1) would probably be the happiest outcome, 2) is certainly the worst, and historically 3) is what I’m betting we ultimately get.Meanwhile, after a bit of a hiatus Helen herself finally returns to writing, and describes her time Among the Post-Liberals at the UK National Conservatism conference. Helen’s a bit critical of the post-liberals and natcons, on the grounds that they’re very good on fine rhetoric and even on identifying the problems, but so far quite hopeless in terms of proposing actual solutions. What can I say? Except that I agree wholeheartedly.
at Contemplations on the Tree of Woe (which is a Conan reference, you ill-bred Phillistines) asks in The Rarity of Noesis if maybe some people are just born without the ability to perceive axiomatic truth, the same way others are born colour-blind or unable to delight in the flavour of cilantro. I think he might be onto something. Hylics btfo.reviews two books on antiquity, one on Sumer and the other on Egypt, in History as a battlefield. Modern academic historians aren’t doing history at all, he concludes. Not if by history one means allowing the available records, archeological, genetic, etc. data to guide one’s imagination into inhabiting the culture world of extremely alien people. Instead, they’re just projecting their fashionable pieties into the past. Ironic how people who have made conquering bigotry the central guiding star of their lives have become such clueless bigots in the process.
The Nerd Lab
had a pair of very good pieces. The diversity trilemma uses the rise of Clown World tyranny on License Island (formerly known as Great Britain, though no longer either Great or particularly British) to emphasize that when offered the choice of social stability, civil liberties, or unlimited mass immigration from wildly incompatible cultures, you can only pick two. At this point this is incredibly obvious, which makes me suspect that eliminating the ancient Rights of Englishmen was seen by the toffs not as a bug, but a feature. In his second piece he turns his attention across the pond to consider Interracial violent crime in the US, and in particular the ... let’s just say sloppy statistical methods that the biens pensants on the bluebird site have been deploying in their attempt to try to argue that akshually black crime isn’t really a thing. Or something. Needless to say they are more full of shit than a San Fransisco sidewalk.posted his monthly archaeology round-up for the month of April, including recent work explaining how Vikings grew strong on Mongolian yak dairy, enabling their long sea voyages during which they traded Benin bronzes in exchange for high quality Bronze Age drugs, under the influence of which they thought it would be a good idea to bring Swahili genetics to America, resulting in the extinction of the Native’s horses. That was a completely nonsensical connection of the topics in his roundup, so you should probably click through to see what the stories actually were.
There Are No Girls On The Internet
Right-wing Substack is a fraternal order, but we love our lady’s auxiliary.
had a couple of pieces over at her Extremely Domestic this week, discussing The Bonfire of Sanity on the NYC subway system, and following up with an examination of the performative Safety Dance of den mothers more concerned with policing discourse about events on the subway than they are with the actual policing of actual events on the subway. Maybe if the police were allowed to do their jobs marines wouldn’t have to put homeless schizos in choke-holds. I know, I know ... George Floyd, pbuh. I’m just sayin’., who like Daniel D is a Ghost in the Machine (albeit, not the same ghost, and not the same machine), makes the Case For Social Media this week. Amidst all the discussion of algorithms hatching malign egregores, protagonist syndrome warping minds into mirrored narcissistic hallways, and the attention economy colonizing our imaginations (a discussion that Emily herself has contributed too), Emily reminds us that, actually, social media is a pretty useful technology.In The Hyperpalatable Human, the Reactionary Feminist
draws a connection between hyperpalatable foods and transhumanist body modification. Cosmetic surgery that exaggerates sexual characteristics tends to damage the very sexual functions those characteristics are meant to signify, just as ‘food’ engineered to be as delicious as possible tends to be utterly devoid of nutrition and, therefore, empty of the function that tastiness is meant to indicate to our palates. Next time you see a girl with fake tits, call them Big Macs. Her reaction will be hilarious.The incomparably aristocratic
has a few words to say on The Importance of Being Sexy over at Classical Ideals. Despite all the obsession with sex, young people aren’t having sex, and they aren’t having kids as a direct result. Which is very bad for the future. It doesn’t help that so many people look like something a mangy racoon dragged from underneath an abandoned trailer home, either. Megha’s got a lot more to say on this subject, of course. Somehow she manages to drag Spengler into this, who was no one’s idea of sexy.
Actual Journalists
As always,
at The Slavland Chronicles is all over the shitshow in Ukraine. In addition to a couple of podcast interviews, he’s got six, yes six, articles up this week. I don’t know how he does it. Especially when you have English-language commentators on the conflict using his work and refusing to name him ... probably because they don’t like that he’s less than thrilled about how the Kremlin is handling the conflict. Anyhow, the drama this week was all about the Wagner Private Military Corporation’s head warlord Prigozhin making public statements about treachery from the Russian Ministry of Defense, I think it was that they were starving him of ammo, and Prighozhin was threatening to leave. Then they said he’d get the ammo, so he said Wagner would stay.Well about that. Rolo’s pretty sure that elements in the Kremlin are deliberately trying to sabotage the war, which is why it isn’t going well for Russia at all despite Russia’s considerable advantages. That’s not a take you get from a lot of dissident sphere observers of the Russo-Ukraine conflict, many of whom confidently predict Russian victory. Then again, Rolo’s been paying very close attention to this from the beginning.I’ve said it before, and will almost certainly say it again:
is one of the best writers on Substack, hands down. He is simultaneously funny and incisive, and unlike me, he is also generally concise. This week he gave us three wonderful pieces. The Kingdom of the Non-Sequitur (and the grand misconception) takes a dump on David French’s dumb, pointy head by way of commenting on French’s dumb commentary about Tucker Carlson being the Antichrist or something. Sexy Battlefield Selfies uses Bray’s background in military history to juxtapose the expectation of emotional mastery and self-denial in service to country exhibited by George Washington in a famous incident involving his glasses and an incipient mutiny, with Navy drag queens bring their wholes selves to work in recruitment videos. Is Navy stock going to go the way of Bud Light? Asking for a friend in Beijing. Finally, in All Cadre Rise to Denounce [Name Here] as One, Bray has some fun at the expense of duckspeaking talking heads and their repetitive condemnation of bad bad, which is bad, because it is bad, and you should feel bad if you like bad bad, because that means you’re bad too.has a couple of quick pieces for us this week. First, an Update: Calgary Cop Killer To Be Sentenced as Adult. It looks a murderer who was earlier going to get off with a few years in the pokie for killing a police officer, because you know, minority, will now get the book thrown at him. Must have been an outcry or something. The second is an EXCLUSIVE: Leaked admissions data gives glimpse into Harvard's affirmative action practices. Seems an admissions spreadsheet was accidentally sent to every student at the econ department, one of whom saved it, and sent it to Chris. There was a hidden column with some revealing remarks....Former Navy SEAL
has been bouncing around the world observing the pieces of the globalist Great Reset falling into place. Currently he’s been moving back and forth between Panama and Texas, watching disease-carrying refugees pouring across the border. This week he looks at the US-funded refugee camps at Darien Gap; points to TB coming America’s way up through Highway 1; passes on some words from a medical colleague regarding Incoming Disease — Serious Diseases… about people getting scabies at American hotels, and lice spreading typhus; suggests in Know Your Spies, and Paramilitaries that America is already under attack from foreign sabotage agents; and concludes with one of his famous mind dumps, sans edits, from the Tex-Mex border, with more thoughts on Disease Invasion. All short pieces this week. I get the sense he’s moving around a lot.
The Bad Cat Corner
is another substack giant who needs no introduction, but in case you haven’t seen the bad cat’s work, consider yourself introduced. this week the ferociously capitalization-averse feline came out in praise of the debt ceiling fight, suggesting that maybe government shutdowns aren’t such a bad thing given that this about the only time the government stops uselessly burning money ... and even moves into surplus. the cantakerous cat then opines that censorship is the last bastion of those without an argument, which it obviously is. this is followed by a warning note about everyone’s least favourite overly complicated band-aid non-solution to the de facto non-existent border: why e-verify is a deeply dangerous idea. this, the cat suggests, is a trojan framing meant to sneak digital id in through the back door. wouldn’t the regime just love to be able to turn off your ability to work by pushing a button? you know it would. agricultural workers, by the way, have already been exempted – that being the main field (heh) illegals are employed in. the cat finishes off with more about censorship, pointing out that censored social media makes for terrible brand decisions, such as, you know, hiring on tiktok freakshows that identify as successful marketing campaigns. when you silence a huge swath of the population, they can’t speak, and you can’t hear what they think ... which means you have no idea what they really think.
Memespiracy Theorists
has some advice for avoiding the blackpill or, as he puts it as only he can put things, guarding your mind from the certitude of the doom-loop black pilled path to thralldom, in Everything Everywhere Awe At Once. If you know TGC at all, you know he’s not exactly pollyanish about the current state of the world. But while the bluepill is nothing but a cage for your thoughts, the same is true of the doomer blackpill. Don’t trade one cage for another.The pressure may have come off on the mRNA jabs, but as
points out, Degrading Vaccine Worship Abides as Gates, the Clintons, and the WHO launch 'The Big Catch Up'.at How To Subvert Subversion takes a break from politics to take his son down to the lake with How To Teach a Man to Fish, then gets back in the game with that ambiguous acronym that’s been making the rounds with How To Hire a PMC Assassin: Professional Managerial Class McKinsey Consultant vs Private Military Company Wagner Mercenary. The funny thing is that neither expansion of PMC involves the word Mercenary, despite both quite clearly referring to different kinds of mercenary. Personally, I prefer Wagner to McKinsey. Wagner at least kills people honestly. They make pretty good movies too.Over at Dark Future,
has a deep dive on the Truth About Carbon Sequestration. We all know that the carbon they want to reduce is us. Simplicius lays it all out in detail.
Deimos Station Action Report
of the The Cat Was Never Found wants to bring shame back, because it’s only through being ashamed of ourselves that we realize we’ve failed to live up to the standards we should have. I thoroughly agree. He also wonders is sanity might be able to spread like a virus. If the woke mind virus can be described as a virus, could the antidote – just being a normal damn human – spread the same way? In the end he isn’t totally sure that’s the right metaphor – as he puts it, angels don’t enter through broken windows – and proposes ‘sanity clubs’ as a way of insulating ourselves from the sick culture. It isn’t a bad idea. The social solidarity provided by sanity clubs would also provide a great platform that could be used to shame the unworthy, if only by implication.In When Science Rejects Science to Defend Science,
has a laugh at the ‘skeptics’ of organizations like CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal ... pronounced ‘psi-cop’, ha), who in his opinion don’t behave very much like science at all. CSICOP are a bunch of clowns. They use a lot of the same bad-faith rhetorical techniques that you see the woke using when they ‘debate’ the non-reality of race differences or the totally real reality of their made-up gender identities. Really makes you think.has finished translating Chapter 15 of Lobaczewski’s book Logocracy (which I really have to catch up on....). He’s putting the chapters up at Political Ponerology as he finishes translating them. Lobaczewski is best known for developing the concept of Harrison’s main focus of ponerology, and his unpublished Logocracy is his attempt at laying out a workable form of government that would inhibit pathocratic takeover. Chapter 15 is about the Head of State. Traditionalists will be pleased to learn that Lobaczewski approves of axial kingship.As of this writing, Harrison just published Reality-blindness, and Ethics as Practical Reason, which argues that many of the philosophical debates that have split humanity through history – atheism vs. theism, for example – are a result of failing to see reality holistically, and that if we make a conscious effort to prioritize right hemisphere thinking we can integrate these views. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but it looks very good. I already know I agree.
at A Ghost in the Machine points out that it isn’t racist to criticize broken black culture, which, let’s face it, is pretty broken, and then takes a poke at Lies, Damned Lies, and Noah Smith's Misuse of Statistics. Noah Smith, if you’re not familiar with him (and I’m only vaguely so), is apparently a big deal in the shitlib egregore, and the post Dan is referring to is apparently trying to argue that blacks don’t murder whites more than whites murder blacks. Using statistics. Hard to evaluate his methods because he put it behind a paywall, but c’mon now. We all know Smith lying. You don’t need to see someone’s work to know they done goofed when they tell you their model says the sky is green.is a relatively new writer on Substack, but his Notes from the end of time is building a reputation fast in our circles. This week he put out four essays. In the The Madman Across the Platform, he asks who killed the subway schizo in NYC – the marine who choked him out to protect the other passengers from the schizo’s psychotic break, or the society that drives millions over the edge into insanity, and the broken mental health system that lets them fall through the cracks? In The Lies We Tell Ourselves, The Lies We Tell Others, he looks at the power of language, myth, and propaganda to shape our minds, and what happens to society when those minds break. The Plague Days riffs on Bisone’s sanity virus in the context of social media egregores, and observes that the recent attempt by trannifa to boycott Hogwart’s Legacy was an epic fail, suggesting that their support is wide but shallow. Maybe this also indicates a tipping point is being reached in the culture? We shall see. Finally, Filan published the first instalment in a new series: From the Mouth of Madness 1: The Medium is the Message. As the title implies, it has a lot to do with Marshall McLuhan; it also touches on humanity’s role as the sex organs of machines, the social technology of conspiracy theories, and connects all of this to the way social media has sparked the bellum omnium contra omnes.Over at Stoic Observations, computer engineer and stoic
looks at the absolute state of digital serfdom on social media and asks, Why Can't We Be Citizens? He’s also got a few words to say On Parental Consent.Dear readers, that’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed it, and found much to enjoy and enlighten within. Damn that was exhausting. Only took checks clock six seven hours to put this together. I have not edited this at all so there are probably typos. Fuck it. I’m beat and it is time for a beer. If I missed anything you think should have been included, please feel free to share it in the comments.
So yeah, beer. I like beer. But you know what would lift my mood, put some bounce in my step?
Well you could think about sharing this around. I’m writing these to try and help our boys get a bit more exposure.
Even better would be if you subscribe.
If you subscribe I can afford beer. Which is much better than not being able to afford beer.
Also, the AI I’m training up to write this feature for me requires an obscene number of GPUs, and GPUs don’t grow on trees. The more of you sign up to support this blog, the quicker I can afford to pay for an AI to do it for me and go climb trees instead of sitting in this damnable chair all day.
It was not.
Damn I don't know how you do it and to top it off with the writing. All of that is very interesting and I'm tempted to subscribe but at the same time, worried about time organization and being overwhelmed.. and I also have in the back of my mind the opportunity cost of consuming too much information now, if that makes sense.
So on the topic of information overload which segways into your last point of training AI with GPUs--which I take to be sarcasm--there's an interesting alternative, or perhaps complimentary, movement of open source distributed or crowdsourced AI training, model fine tuning and dataset construction. Some articles about this:
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/on-device-ai-double-edged-sword
https://reclaimthenet.org/open-source-ai-is-needed-more-than-ever
As you probably know, there's a lot you can do at home now except it's just slow for one person operation. So there's talk about incorporating cryptocurrency to incentivize a distributed or crowdsourced AI system. This then pertains to the discussion about AI regulation and the increasing fear mongering around it, which I don't buy. There are ulterior motives and negative consequences of such regulation, which would conveniently hamper privacy and any kill wider commercial marketplace offerings, DIY, home lab, independent/crowd sourced efforts:
https://reclaimthenet.org/eric-schmidt-generative-ai-true-anonymity
https://reclaimthenet.org/criticism-of-open-source-ai-regulation-is-based-on-protecting-big-tech
Speaking of which, have you heard of Unstable Diffusion, the *-chan equivalent crowd sourced version built to train it on things that the official Stable Diffusion has not or has been excluded to train on?
To be honest I'm not that enamored with the generative AI systems in and of themselves nor do I subscribe to the doom-and-gloom SkyNet scenario, which only works to provide fuel to the government regulation fire, but I see them as useful tools in certain applications--which machine learning always was, until ML was re-marketed as AI. Any talk of The Singularity is a dead end without first investigating consciousness IMO
You are also the first substacker I've come across who's familiar with old school internet (BBS, IRC) , 4chan et. al. message boards and what Isekai is, AND heath and exercise, and has broad interest in.. well, everything. I will have to get the Barsoom novels now. The oldest SF books I've read related to Mars is Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, who's still one of my favorite authors.
Finally, regarding your citation of El Gato Malo's posts here concerning Trojan Horse bills, I have been admittedly spamming different people and places in probably the most inefficient way possible, like I'm doing now, trying to raise the alarm about legislation that also relates to your post, "The Onymity Question". I'm unsuccessful so far, but I'll give it a shot if you don't mind. This legislation, both at the Federal level (proposed) and state level (passed in 2 states) is a direct attack on anonymity/pseudonymity and has worrisome implications not just for privacy, but for security and government abuse. I'll just link to my comment there for all the details:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-e-verify-is-a-deeply-dangerous/comment/15892825
In a nutshell, the "Protecting Kids on Social Media Act" bill outlaws all means of anonymous mass communications. It requires all "social media" platforms (including the online applications themselves) to identify all users with real world verifiable or government ID. Social media is defined as any medium that allows user-to-user exchange of text, video or audio, either to the public or large groups. Substack will be affected. Even plain ole message boards and large group messaging/chats will be affected -- explicitly called in the linked bill text, see pdf (pg. 4, line 12 - Sec. 6 (C)(x)).
Everyone will have to upload government ID and the people running the platforms and/or regular folks running servers on their own dime will either have to pay commercial verification services to ID all the users or subscribe to the proposed Federal Digital ID service run under the US Secretary of Commerce.
One has to wonder how they'll enforce this for more niche technology that's not centralized.
There's a broader discussion about the Constitutionality:
https://reclaimthenet.org/the-possibly-unconstitutional-nature-of-us-plans-to-force-social-platforms-to-collect-id
Wow, quite the comprehensive digest of Substack writing you compiled! (And thanks for listing me in it!) This really is a great platform at the moment for heterodox thinkers to share ideas and insights; I hope and pray it stays that way!
A French press is *almost* the best way to drink coffee. When I was in Iraq, I got introduced to Arabic/Turkish coffee, which is probably brewed with ground coffee and coca leaf. You could wake up a corpse with that stuff! I have tried to make Turkish coffee at home with less-than-satisfactory results -- probably because I'm missing the coca leaf or 8-ball or whatever it was that the Iraqis used.
I thought I was decently well-read, but I see that I am not. I had read some of the posts you referenced, but now I got a shit-ton more great reading material to enjoy going through. I missed the glory days of Social Matter's TWIR, so thanks for filling that role here and now on Substack!