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Saturday, February 16, 2013

Apartment Hunting

Not fun.

12 comments:

ray said...

Little Mikey Anissimov is an out proud fascist now too! He is calling himself "Oracle" now, isn't that just _precious_?

https://twitter.com/MikeAnissimov


Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
The reactionary book database is Good to Go https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nvb72llmdkr3sxn/aWWV0lNRcr

Kuehnelt-Leddihn ‏@ErikvonKL
American liberalism is like a compendium of nearly every nonsense that we in the West have produced since the Enlightenment.
Retweeted by Oracle
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Feb 9 Kuehnelt-Leddihn ‏@ErikvonKL
Democracy, the rule of the worse part of the people for their own benefit.
Retweeted by Oracle
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Feb 15 Kuehnelt-Leddihn ‏@ErikvonKL
Polite doubt or relativism will not protect us against the assaults of the organized or unorganized left, old or new.
Retweeted by Oracle

Dale Carrico said...

I find it hard to believe that MA has really gone off the deep end hard right. I did note tho' his glowing genuflection tweet to a more transhumanoid Glenn Beck. And I have occasionally castigated an embarrassingly uncritical SDI militarism his gizmo-fetishism has lead him into. But in the past he has angrily rejected my diagnoses of the unmistakable structural tendency to support corporate-military elite-incumbency in futurological discourse and membership organizations even when they mouth certain broadly libertarian kinda sorta lefty pieties like he himself has done. The false belief that neoliberals are really truly on the left because they make techno-fixated blandly hippy-dippy noises, when the truth is they are really just blissed-out anarcho capitalists and hyper-consumers, is of course a widespread Bay Area fallacy. Anyway, as I said, it is hard to believe Anissimov would really embrace the American wingnut right even tho' he has embraced American Robot Cult nuttery -- rather than, say, just occasionally ineptly stumbling there in his political and historical ignorance and skewed technodeterministic priorities. But I will say that if he has done, it is yet another data point reminding us that not only do futurological prophets claim an expertise in predicting future outcomes despite being flabbergastingly wrong much more often than not, but that futurologists are so wrong about everything that they usually cannot get even the present right. I mean, what actually intelligent person, hell what actually awake person, would chose to embrace the American right NOW of all times? Talk about a clown college on a sinking ship! If one was stupid and evil enough to opportunistically glom onto the American right the time for that was the 80s and 90s for heaven's sake (heyday of the extropian irrationally exuberant brand of Robot Cultism by the way). But that's way yesterday, certainly not tomorrow.

ray said...

if it goose steps and tweets like a right wing duck...

Dale Carrico said...

As I said, maybe he has indeed turned hard-right, poor mite, I'm the last to deny that futurology makes people stoopid, but again after years of ongoing conversation with MA, however relentless have been my criticisms, even I would be a bit taken aback if his futurological journey has taken him to so explicitly and utterly reactionary a place. I do agree by the way that the new "Oracle" self-moniker is a bit sad and worrying, even if he might claim some self-mockery is in the mix. It is a hard thing to avoid the PR energies that drive the public transhumanoid who is not independently wealthy ineluctably over time into the precincts of charlatanry and fraud.

jimf said...

You know, there's a new word I've seen used on some
of the forums discussing the LessWrong phenomenon.
It's "Yuddite". It's used to refer to the folks who
have been roped in to the SIAI/SI/MIRI LessWrong orbit,
and who take all that stuff all too seriously.

In any case, **if** you take that stuff totally
seriously, you could conceivably end up anywhere on
the political spectrum (all the while denying any
kind of association with politics-as-we-know-it),
depending on the "utility function" du jour
being propagated by the guru.

BTW, the latest section on RationalWiki's LessWrong
talk page is funny and sad at the same time.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:LessWrong
-------------
Doing something for people distressed by the basilisk

I have started getting messages from people upset by the basilisk,
Dmytry's had a few too and tries to respond helpfully.
I am not sure how to respond. . . the hard part is how to talk
someone down from an emotional reaction when I'm not sure I'm
accurately modelling the person getting upset and don't know
how to talk down someone prone to obsession over an intellectual
epiphany. . .

- David Gerard 16 February 2013
-------------

I used to know somebody who had a lot of the stigmata of
what would probably nowadays be thought of as Asperger's
syndrome (a diagnosis about to be subsumed, in the DSM V,
in some broader category of Autism Spectrum Disorder)
who, among other quirks, would sometimes wake up in the
middle of the night convinced that nuclear war had broken
out (and who then had to be talked down by his
roommate -- himself awakened out of a deep sleep by
his roomie's panic). Of course, there are also
separate diagnostic categories for anxiety disorder
and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Unfortunately, Mr. Y. (and by extension, presumably,
the LW community) is not keen on psychiatric medications.
(I don't know whether they're in favor of megadoses of
certain vitamins instead, as are the Scientologists.)

jimf said...

Speak of the devil:

Michael Anissimov - Media Performance of Transhumanism - Humanity+ @San Francisco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9KEIpUzGkk

There's an allusion to politics in this talk,
in fact ("paranoia on the Left about advanced politics,
so positive mention of >H in the New York Times is
a real milestone"). He wishes there were more negative
mentions of >Hism so they had somebody to argue with!
(Dale! You've been shirking!)

I did, in fact, overhear two random subway passengers last
week talking about the singularity.

Dale Carrico said...

Dale! You've been shirking!

This month especially, I've been shirking abominably.

Dale Carrico said...

I did, in fact, overhear two random subway passengers last
week talking about the singularity.


Who, on the subway, has NOT pined for transcendence?

I submit, Exhibit A.

ray said...

Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
"Democracy -- the God That Failed"

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nvb72llmdkr3sxn/sGEv3GSNOC/Hans-Hermann%20Hoppe/Hoppe%2C%20Hans-Hermann.%202001%20Democracy__the_god_that_failed.pdf


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2 hrs Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
"While a king is not opposed to debt, he is constrained by the fact that he and his heirs are personally liable for government debts."
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2 hrs Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
"A presidential government caretaker is not held liable for debts incurred during his tenure of office."
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3 hrs Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
Who was Otto von Habsburg's favorite scholar? Kuehnelt-Leddihn, of course. http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=742&theme=cotho&loc=b …
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Feb 14 Kuehnelt-Leddihn ‏@ErikvonKL
It is difficult to find a single large area where we do not have to say: "Here leftism has caused suffering, mischief, and destruction."
Retweeted by Oracle
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Feb 15 Kuehnelt-Leddihn ‏@ErikvonKL
This crisis of our time is also a crisis of manliness and true masculinity which the left always suspected as "reactionary."
Retweeted by Oracle
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12 hrs Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
We call him Kuehnelinks: @ErikvonKL
Expand


12 hrs Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov
Rachel and I have been continuously talking about Erik von Kuehnhelt-Leddhin for a week now. We only realized he was dead a couple days ago.


sooo... the "Future" is now Pre Revolutionary France? Is this the set up for the robotic King? This is all very muddled for "Futurists" to be adopting the politics of the 19th century and prior! They use the word 'reactionary'? and the are "Futurists?"

ray said...

Let us begin with what is most excellent and lasting in the work of the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn—his profound understanding of, and unyielding opposition to, the Left. According to the Austrian-born polymath, the Left has its roots planted firmly in democracy. In its modern form, that object of near worship owed its birth to the French Revolution, but once loosed upon the world it soon transformed itself into socialism—international and national. Contrary to received opinion, that is, Kuehnelt-Leddihn regarded communism, fascism, and nazism as rivals rather than enemies, brothers under the skin; like their progenitor, democracy, they were all ideologies of the Left. That is why the Hitler-Stalin Pact should have occasioned no surprise.

The Left, then, comprises a number of ideologies, all of them, in Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s view, toxic. But although he insisted that the French Revolution was a primal act of rebellion not only against monarchical order, but against God, he failed to draw the logical conclusion—that ideologies are substitute (or secular) religions. Man, Edmund Burke wrote, “is a religious animal,” and he warned that if Christianity be suppressed or rejected “some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it.”


http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/kuehnelt-leddihn-and-american-conservatism

transhumanism and archaic monarchial far right politics make not merely strange but _insane_ bedfellows....

Dale Carrico said...

To the extent that Robot Cultists regard themselves as a sooper-genius elite and/or explicitly worship gurus and celebrity tech CEOs they regard as a sooper-genius elite and/or implicitly worship plutocratic elite/incumbent interests through their devotion to hyper-consumption, gizmo-fetishism, technofixes for disease/climate crises/poverty, etc. it isn't the least bit difficult to grasp the structural affinity of the transhumanoid/singularitarian techno-transcendentalists to reactionary politics. One hears a self-congratulatory pining after aristocracy in many of their works (sometimes inflected with eugenicism, sometimes just scarcely stealthed class privilege/nationalism), and, needless to say, the sorts of "spontaneisms" that crop up so often among futurologists of both the crypto-right market and the pseudo-left luddic anarchisms almost always amount to an endorsement of maximal consumption and acquiescence to the status quo. It is no surprise to me to find futurological discourse in the service of reaction, as I always say, "Every futurism is always a retro-futurism."

joe said...

The Oracle see's all, knows all....

"Oracle ‏@MikeAnissimov

Dale Carrico and friends debate whether "MA has really gone off the deep end hard right." http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2013/02/apartment-hunting.html …"


We have been put on notice.....