when it's two rat inflected guys with bad politics doing this sort of thing
i love seeing tracing pop up! a true heel to toe bootlicker incapable of seeing himself as anything but the MOST independent thinker
new odium symposium episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/13-joker-is-both-154123315. links to various platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com
we read umberto eco's essay ur-fascism (we have mixed feelings about it) and then apply it to frank miller's 1986 batman comic the dark knight returns
there's a lot i want to pull out from this comment by ngo
first, shorn of context, i don't know that this sort of power fantasy reflects so poorly on the rationalists. or perhaps it does, and in that case also reflects poorly on me, since it's my preferred power fantasy. the world sucks and it would be nice to magically make it better. EDIT: ok im noticing that the naruto fanfiction excerpt is just straightforwardly jerking off about doing a fascist coup
second, we must remember that rat stories are implicitly either recipes for social change or warnings that society ought to stay away from particular demons. rationalism is in large part a political movement with what they believe to be practical aims
third, if ngo's marxist fiction from the 1800s all ended with communist revolutions, the worrying thing for a member of the movement would not be a fantasy of triumph or a sense of certainty of triumph, but rather an inability to connect triumphant outcomes to action under the present conditions. as you highlighted, the fantastical element of these stories is in conflict with the practicality of their aims
fourth, as far as i can tell, that is not ngo's objection at all. what he seems to be concerned about is the possibility that rationalists will make serious progress on actually taking over the world and make terrible things happen once they do. i don't take this possibility seriously at all. fundamentally, rationalists are lapdogs, forever licking the negligently outstretched hands of billionaires. they cause real harm as lackeys of the ultrawealthy and vectors for the diseases of racism, eugenics, etc, but to take ngo's concerns seriously i would have to buy into the same fantasy of magical omnipotence he's pointing to, because there seems to be no other path from here to rationalist dictatorship.
in all honesty we would love it if doing this were our job but there is no pathway to that that we can see. we just do it b/c it's really fun
to say that i wouldn't trust the boundaries at a rape party with aella is understating things
our pay is our satisfaction in having inflicted it on others as well
new odium symposium episode. we examine the foundational TERF text, janice raymond's "the transsexual empire," which turns out to be about how trans people are a big pharma conspiracy
https://www.patreon.com/posts/12-invasion-of-w-152915964
www.odiumsymposium.com for links to other platforms
new development in ontology: "the ontology that makes ai models valuable is american"
one of the brain geniuses at bluesky
wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he's honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he's appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn't understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there's a subtler game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don't realize that's just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.
wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i'm very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that's the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience's relationship to nick, and vice versa
archive link: https://archive.ph/ONKkm
contextualizes the topic beautifully. you might learn a lot about how american racism relates to capital and art from this article
highlight: most of these guys are into classical art fascism but one of them, a bitcoin guy looking to build a 450 foot tall statue of prometheus, appears to be specifically into italian fascism. his favorite aesthetic is futurism and he hired a futurist sculptor with this "manifesto" on his website:
We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.
but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.
grew out of that though.
really want to highlight the phrase "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks." what the fuck is he talking about?
in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.
he knows how to tune it up, though.
hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be...?
OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!
what the fuck is polytopia?
this is polytopia:
sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:
this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry's nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i'll tell you right now that polytopia doesn't have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.
this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character's huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.
this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:
For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it's a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the "four Xes" of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.
not so with polytopia:
so yeah, it's baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like... really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.
This puff piece is sourced from "Benzinga," a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson's biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won't click on:
that's the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.
saying "I am just wired for war" because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game's developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.
i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:
flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article...
... except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???
and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren't constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he'd have turned on it just like he did chess.
before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.
his brother seems to feel the same way
(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):
here's what i think: elon musk isn't learning shit from polytopia. he's a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he's projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.
why the fuck would anyone want a raisin catalog
- curtis yarvin
new odium symposium episode is now available on all platforms. we look Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini's Gender Without Identity, a contemporary work of queer psychoanalytic theory. then we look at a case study in which it all goes wrong.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/14-just-call-me-155052365
also we're starting a discord for the podcast https://discord.gg/7tEEE39Fx
also also we're going to release our first subscriber episode next week, where we look at the pseudoscientists of paper repository viXra