new odium symposium episode (at the link and on all platforms). we talk to professor of africana studies danielle procope bell about her recent paper “‘Pick-Me’ Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere.”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/17-introduction-159058420

oh my god lmao. finally we understand how that happened

fun fact: even vixra has had an anti ai paper policy for idk how long, at least ten months

https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3lsek4cpnpk2n

so we now have an invitation to do an episode of posting through it, which is a (really really good) podcast on the far right. we pick a topic, no other specifics. i am thinking this can be something to do with rationalists and the far right, probably something race sciencey.

SSC leaps to mind but im not sure that’s where ill want to start for an audience that doesn’t necessarily know anything about rats. any thoughts?

it’s a golden… bowler hat?

i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not

When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.

this is the level the median hackernews poster thinks on

anthropic is the most moral ai company in the universe

guys

People generally do not like being killed.

source?

i’m in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn’t understand what makes REAL monarchism good:

https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1iy4fto/moldbug_morons_and_monarchism_an_xpost_of_my/

someone in the replies asks the obvious question

Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant

and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch

It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they’re supposed to do don’t happen? There’s more of everyone else than One Person.

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

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.

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

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 transexual 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”

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mguiup62lt2j

one of the brain geniuses at bluesky