perfidy

Scalzi's AMC column talks about coolest rides in sf moviedom.  He opines that the speeder bike from Return of the Jedi is the sweetest ride evah.  I have to agree.  When I was eight, the landspeeder was the coolest, but that was only because I hadn't seen the speeder bike.

Despite the many flaws of episodes 1 , 2, 3, and 6, the series as a whole has some of the sickest gear in sf, movies or books.  My morning commute into our nation's capitol would be significantly more tolerable if I could motor down the HOV lanes in a speeder bike.  So, unlike a lot of sf gear, there's actually a use case for the speeder bike despite it's lack of seat belts.

Any spaceship would of course be cool.  Assuming you could keep it away from the government.  A blaster would be about as useful as the guns I already have, but probably not a lot more so.  An artificial intelligence, secreted away in a small jewel box?  That could be handy, provided it was friendly.  Make a run at the stock market.  Set myself as up as a new delphic oracle or something.  R2D2 could mix drinks and vacuum the house.  But without the larger world that gives these gadgets context, a lot of them aren't going to be much more than conversation starters.

The single coolest, though - perched in solitary magnificent coolness atop a mountain of cool, looking down at lesser things huddled in the steaming jungles below - is the light saber.  Despite its manifest awesomeness, for our world, there's probably no more useless sf gadget.  I know, that even if a UFO landed and the little green man handed me one tomorrow, I'd have no earthly use for one.  I'm not a Jedi.  There aren't any Sith lords locally that I'm aware of.  I'd probably slice my own arm off.  It might make a decent flashlight.

But damn me if I wouldn't just sit on the couch, and turn it on and off.  Wave it around.  Listen to the hum.

Maybe I'd cut some firewood with it.

I subscribe to Slickdeals - it's an rss feed that gives me links to user-located internet shopping deals. Moderately useful. By combining slickdeals and consumer reports, I located a very nice, very large tv for a quite reasonable price. So this morning, I saw this in my feed:

I've not the slightest clue wtf a compound action bypass lopper is, yet I feel compelled to order one. I don't even want to find out what it is. That would just spoil it.

By way of Boing Boing, we find this absolutely delightful post: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis.

This example, from the middle of the second page, most closely resembles the typical couch cushion fort assembled in Festung Buckethead on a weekly basis:

Drawing from the saw-tooth roof structures of industrial Europe, the orthogonal volume cleverly employs a swing hinge access door, popularized by the mid-century modern masters. Grade: B+

Given the materials at hand, that's usually the best that gets built. Not that the boy (now 7) doesn't occasionally get more ambitious. However, hubris has the same tragic end in our house as it did in ancient Greece - the boy's younger sisters are every ready to follow the the poet:

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius

By subtly undermining his efforts, first through work slow-downs and general intransigence, later through competing projects requiring the same materials he needs for his fort (and requiring parental adjudication of resource allocation) the boy becomes increasingly frustrated.  Still, he perseveres.  Over time, and by overcoming great obstacles, the fort is completed.  He has attained to a fragile, precarious sort of satisfaction.

And that's when his sisters really go after him hammer and tongs.  They demand equal use of the fort.  Once in the fort, they refuse him entry.  If he makes a secondary entrance, they'll destroy the first.  Fixing that, he'll start to notice problems with the roof.  Lifting up a roof cushion to readjust its fit and finish, the girls will kick out the support.  They'll steal the blanket that acts as  a sort of glue to keep the cushions in place.  They fill the interior with stuffed animals.  And then, they've dashed it all to pieces.

He comes to me, and presents his litany of fully justified complaints.

And then I tell the boy to stop whining.  Because whining is for pussies.

The wife showed me this the other day.

<flash no longer exists>

Classic.  Full story here.

Over at Aretae, another post is getting some good comments - Devin Finbarr seems to have a bit of teh smarts.  He mentions that he's working on a draft summary of Formalist/Moldbug ideas, you can see it here, it's worth a look.

I mention the Bilderbergers in a post, and on the same day, an article about same appears on Drudge.  It must be a conspiracy or something.  My mustache is all a-twirl.

Aretae had a post up earlier today, and another yesterday, that hit right at what I've been thinking about. The one thing that holds me back from going full hog Moldbug is just the idea of Freedom. Moldbug would likely say that I'm just confused - that without order, you can't have liberty. And I can see that. Anarchy is not freedom, it's a free-for-all. "What is good?" someone famously asked. Is it better to be able to do whatever you please, or to have a peaceful and ordered society that allows you a maximum, if not theoretically absolute degree of liberty? Does having the vote magically make us free? Clearly not and I think that that points out a key confusion in our modern estimations of freedom, liberty, authority and the like.

Now I know Johno thinks I hate his Freedom, but I think it might be a case of that word not meaning exactly what we think it means. Do we feel more free because we have the right of franchise - does this give us some sort of idea that we are involved somehow in the direction of our ship of state? I think yes to the former, but only to the extent that the latter is operational. We voted, we did our part, and we are satisfied for the next four years no matter what sort of horrific actions are taken in our name - be they the passing of a universal healthcare bill or starting a land war in Asia. That keeps us complacent while dark forces align against us. The permanent civil service bureaucracy, academia, the vast right wing conspiracy, corporate interests, the Bilderbergers.

True liberty is vanishingly absent. I cannot put in a light fixture without paying a $250 fee and filing plans with my county. I can't light up a smoke in a bar after work. I can't have my son sit in the front seat of my car. I can't kill any of the hundreds of deer that wander through my woods. I can't start a business without navigating a frightening wicket of regulations and tax laws. I can't, I can't... Most of these restrictions would be anathema to our founding fathers, who basically started a whole damn war over the equivalent of a postage stamp fee.

So, yeah, I'm on board with the libertarian liberty thingy. Free up everything so we can have that mad economic growth. But how does that society run itself? How does it not encrust itself with all the things we hate, or get invaded by heavily armed agrarian reformers? What if there's a dispute between my private security firm and yours? Do they select champions and let God favor the right?

And really, is liberty everything we need? Equality, I think we have a surfeit of. Fraternity is doing fine, seeing as I'm an only child. What perhaps we are lacking is tradition and order. Look at large parts of our nation's capital and ask yourself if liberty and equality are more important than order. A while back, Aretae had a post about how traditional, conventional wisdom is going to be most right, most of the time, for most people.

In the comments to one of Aretae's posts that I linked up there at the top, I commented:

I'm torn. On the one hand, your defense of libertarianism is righteous and strong. On the other, Moldbug's got history at his back.

Something you said a while back in regard to traditional advice is going to be best for most people, moist of the time has been crouching in the back of my mind, waiting. Could it be, that while the our desired end state is something like what you are advocating - minimal government interference, economic growth, unicorns - requires something more? That the place of a king who is not a dictator is to provide the traditional bulwark for libertarian wackiness?

Back in the late 1700s, as you've argued, we had freedom that was unprecedented, in an intelligent populace largely isolated from danger. This resulted in the growth! growth! growth! that you go on about. It seems that our current system, can't maintain its current vector without running into something ugly sooner or later. We've layered and slathered it with all sorts of things that you, I and Moldbug can all agree are very bad indeed.

The problem with libertarianism for me hasn't been the economics - that, to me, is or should be fairly self evident. But the idea of private security companies does not fill me with joy, exactly. And other like problems. Why not have a king? It would provide something more than an abstraction for the ordinary run of citizen to latch on to, provide a framework of tradition that would provide maximal outcomes for most everyone. We'd have pageantry. Which isn't crucial, but hey, shiny! And still freedom, the "Rights of Englishmen."

To have a monarch that was concerned with foreign relations, maintaining a justice system (with jury nullification, to be sure) and maximizing his profit by creating as close to an ideal business climate, well that would be cool. If someone created a floating Atlantis a la Stephenson's Diamond Age, I'd likely want to move there.

What is lacking, though, is a populace with traditions of living in a society of that sort, the kind that is very aware of their rights as Englishmen even though they do not, and likely never would have the right to vote.

A couple years ago, I ran across - I can't remember how - a peculiar website. Unqualified Reservations is a reactionary anti-democracy advocacy site. It's pseudonymous (I hope, for it would require some truly cruel parents to be otherwise) author Mencius Moldbug argues at great length that our current system of government is irretrievably broken, and that our only hope is a complete do-over. And that when we start over, we should be leaving all the democracy business behind us.

Well, that sounds weird, doesn't it? One's natural instinct is to judge the author mad, and go about one's affairs. But if you dig in a bit, you see that there are two aspects to his voluminous writings. (Those who remember fondly the USS Clueless will not be staggered by their length. But everyone else will.) The first aspect is an incisive critique of what we have right now. The second is a prescription for what we should replace it with, and how. In the first, I find myself more or less completely convinced. The second - I have issues with.

In the time since I first happened upon UR and Moldbuggianism, I've read his entire archives. Which is a metric buttload of stuff, to be sure. Without a whole lot of exaggeration, I can say that it had a serious impact on how I view the world. This may sound cheap - but one of the reasons I've not posted much over the last couple years is that I can't comment on anything related to current affairs without thinking about Moldbug, and I wasn't quite ready to out myself as an anti-democracy reactionary. But I guess that time has come. And I find myself surprised at how much I've resisted actually admitting that, even on a little-read blog with a single digit audience.

In my discussions with intelligent and well-informed individuals over the last decade or so, I often found myself looking at problems, arguing about solutions with a distinct sense that something was missing. While I am temperamentally conservative, I guess, I as often found myself attacking conservatives as liberals. Some cases could be explained away as those politicians or pundits failing to live up to conservative ideals. Or they were idiots. Or they were just politicians of whom i shouldn't be expecting anything. Or in the case of George Bush, some would say all three. Railing against all sides of the political spectrum makes you either a libertarian, I conspiracy nut, or just bitter and confused. I was trending toward the latter, with dalliances in the other two.

I felt that there should be a unifying explanation for everything I hated. A grand unified theory of hate. The whole process was similar to what I went through with dark matter and cosmology, and like then, I found an answer.

Back a couple months ago, I went looking for people who were commenting on Moldbug in an intelligent way, and I do believe I hit the jackpot in finding Aretae, Isegoria and Foseti. (I've been reading them, and dropping a few comments here and there, for a couple weeks now, and I recommend them highly.)

To them, most of what I'm about to say is old hat. Perhaps they can add some thoughts. This is for my fellow Perfidians, and my reader. (Hi Bram!)

Okay, how to summarize Moldbug? The dude has written probably a million words in the last four years. But, thanks to the magic of the internets, we have this: Condensed Moldbuggery. And you can start where I started with "How I Stopped Believing in Democracy" or dive into the first part (of 12!) of "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" The basic idea though, is that progressivism is a cancer, descended from universalist protestantism and metastasized into a number of horrific tumors including Nazism, Communism and the US Government. Along the way, he demolishes modern conservatism, takes swipes at libertarianism, and sings the praises of people we've largely forgotten, like the nineteenth century historian Thomas Carlyle.

It's hard to digest in one lump. But his critique of what we have before us is, I think, spot on. It gives us reasons for why the left acts like a religion. Because it is. It gives us a hint as to why conservatism fails, utterly, at most things it tries to do. Because, for one, it is merely warmed over thirty year old progressivism fighting against current progressivism. And for another, it fails to understand what it is. It survives because the dominant religion needs heretics, and because it is a home for traditionalists who don't like change. It explains why the State Department behaves so oddly, why the military is not allowed to win, and any number of other things.

The short of it is that a reactionary believes that the real struggle is between order and chaos. Modern progressives are, at heart, anarchists and the enemy of civilization. True liberty can only occur after order has been secured - the emergent order of markets, networks and the like depend on an underlying real order. And the store of civilizational order that we had built up has been pissed away by ten generations of democracy, the result being the crap heap we see before us.

To take one hypothesis and use it to explain a wide array of phenomena is, to me, a good sign of a powerful theory. So I dig it. It resolved issues that I had long had with politics - and gave me a way of looking at things that was entirely outside the bipolar democratic/republican thinking that had long been unsatisfactory. Moldbug's analysis of the modern world now has a comfortable apartment in my brain.

I have more issues with what he proposes as solutions for these problems, but I'll save that for the future. In the meantime, I really suggest - despite its length - reading the open letter series. Even if you remain unconvinced, I think you'll at least be entertained.

Now go read the post that justifies, in a roundabout way, this picture.

Here's a couple more Hogan articles on funky electric cosmology.