All Thoughts Being Equal

I've written some fiction stuff that might still be worth reading, but I don't consider it finished because not many people have read it at all. So I might as well keep up my post schedule and devote Fridays to publishing poems, excerpts, or serializations that I've written. Comments and critiques are welcome, or just ignore me on Fridays. The Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow, pt. 2 The door, for all its massive size and stony bulk, slid aside easily at Tyr's sinewy insistence. The sepulcher's antechamber yawned ahead of him, devouring all the light from outside. Heeding the sparrow's advice, Tyr wrapped a bundle of reeds and lit them with flint and steel, and carried the improvised torch into the gloom. The graven sarcophagi of long-dead men lined the walls in their square slots, dreaming of some forgotten era of bone-garnished warlords and green stone idols to strange gods. In some places the granite coffins lay smashed on the floor, the bones in a ...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

I. The other day (N.B. months ago at this point) I got into a very interesting discussion with C. Michael Pickens, a prominent member of the Washington State Libertarian Party, on what principles should form the proper ground of a theory of liberty. In his original Facebook post, Michael claimed that "Liberty is an optimistic concept based on the philosophy of self-ownership." Someone else asked whether liberty could be grounded in concepts of free will and autonomy; Michael replied that these are themselves based in self-ownership. In the discussion, I (and the other guy) both raised the possible issue of indentured servitude—I had in mind specifically the condition of indentured servants during the early American colonial period, which was a condition of chattel slavery in all but name. Michael wasn't arguing that slavery was permissible—obviously it isn't, regardless of your libertarian principles, unless you're a Confederacy-fetishist douchebag like, s...

Yes, this is where I'm going to express an official blog-opinion on #GamerGate—in the most abstract way possible. [WARNING: This post is very long... one might even say excessively so.] I. Richard Feynman, in a 1978 commencement address at Caltech (and also in the last chapter of his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), describes a phenomena he calls "Cargo Cult Science": I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land....

Now I've gone and done it. This week I've found myself in tiresome social-media sparring matches not once, but twice, over matters I thought were relatively uncontroversial. I should have learned that lesson a long time ago, perhaps, but in this case it was strange: my interlocutors this time were atheists, and we were debating philosophical points. And yet, for all that they were nominally in my own "tribe," they weren't, and in the end I found them more distasteful than the far-left social justice crusaders of yesteryear . I. I'll start with one that didn't actually involve me, except on the side. Michael Luciano, a staff writer at The Daily Banter, wrote a piece called Atheists Don't Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing , criticizing social-justice-oriented atheists for presuming to speak for all atheists. I think he was only partially right: it does seem a bit presumptuous to say that one can only be a "good atheist" (or the f...

I've written some fiction stuff that might still be worth reading, but I don't consider it finished because not many people have read it at all. So I might as well keep up my post schedule and devote Fridays to publishing poems, excerpts, or serializations that I've written. Comments and critiques are welcome, or just ignore me on Fridays. The Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow, pt. 1 The seer spoke: This is the tale of Tyr Haefest and the Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow. Know it, traveler, and know it well. Tyr was a man of broad chest and mighty thews, whose name was known from the chill wall of ice in the farthest North to the sun-kissed dreaming seas to the South. A demon-slayer was he, they said. A vanquisher of the agents of Chaos and the Outer Dark, they said. A true champion, they said. On his wide-ranging journeys he never declined to aid even the lowliest peasantry, if some evil threatened them. He wandered according to the will of the Light Immacu...

In my previous post I wondered about the common feminist narrative of an overwhelming fear: that women face so many threats and imminent dangers that it's mentally exhausting just to get through the day. Rather than diagnose that directly (because politics is war and arguments are soldiers ) I want to examine another case of overwhelming fear: that of white male reactionaries. Why? Well, because I'm going to give a presentation on neoreaction later this month, but also because this is prima facie a "safer" discussion topic. The last section of Nick Land's summary of neoreaction (also known as NRx or the "Dark Enlightenment") includes a "multi-part subdigression into racial terror," and attempts to explain the deeper motivations behind stuff like John Derbyshire (formerly of National Review ) giving his son "the Talk" about basically avoiding black people unless a few prove themselves sufficiently safe to befriend. For the recor...