links

link roundup 14

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i think i forgot to mention, i graduated with a BA in history last month. i have some truly excellent links this week, though:

reading

As the LTTE grew from a guerilla movement into a quasi-conventional army, they built up a naval capability as the Sea Tigers (கடற்புலிகள்). This was strategically vital as the Tamil Tigers relied on their sea lines of communication for supplies. The Sea Tigers only ever had a limited open ocean capability, far inferior to the Sri Lankan Navy, but sought to make up for it inshore with a range of innovative asymmetric capabilities, including explosive suicide boats, divers, semi-submersibles and crude submarines. These were built in clandestine jungle factories in LTTE held territory.

Throughout the conflict the LTTE published photographs and video of a range of capabilities for propaganda purposes. These often showed interesting and novel Sea Tiger craft. Additionally the Government showed off captured prizes and still displays an impressive array of Sea Tiger craft. Between these sources the internet is rich with imagery of Sea Tiger craft (especially if you search in local languages).

this whole site is a real treat – be sure to check out the page about narco subs as well

Granted that one of the purposes of history is to supply us with picturesque and instructive anecdotes, it must be insisted that this requirement cannot override the obligation on writers of history to keep to the truth. On the contrary, tales of the perfidy of fortune or the folly of princes are instructive precisely to the extent that they are true. In most branches of history, counsels of good sense along these lines have prevailed, and the public expects of its historians a certain complexity in their explanations and reasonably high standards of evidence. It is no longer possible to ascribe the course of events simply to the ambitions of great men or to class hatred, nor can anyone just repeat a story using as sole evidence the assertion of some previous historian. The examples above, though, make one wonder whether these laudable developments have taken place in the history of ideas, at least of the more popular kind. The subject is still a morass of colourful falsehoods and sectarian myths handed down from generation to generation with no more foundation in evidence than those genealogies whereby royal houses once sought to connect themselves with the heroes of Troy. And here I do not use “myth” in any technical sense, as some avant garde theologians are said to do, according to which a myth may be in some way essentially true. By “myth” I mean “lie”.

The tales about the medieval thinkers and Galileo are little lies. The big lie of which they are the foothills is the Renaissance.

We insist, then, that there is no promised land, no socialist Prester John waiting ready and hidden either in the icy winds of human political temporality or in the solar-hot chaos of urban intensity. Far from discouraging the unconditional accelerationist or beckoning her to the grim convent of asceticism, however, the ruins in which this realisation contemptuously leaves us are the terrain of a genuine, even, properly, horrific aesthetic freedom that is liberated from the totality of a one-directional political teleology. ‘Do what thou wilt’, since with human agency displaced, the world will route around our decisions, impressing itself precisely through our glittering fractionation. Taking the smallest steps beyond good and evil, the unconditional accelerationist, more than anyone else, is free at heart to pursue what she thinks is good and right and interesting—but with the ironical realisation that the primary ends that are served are not her own. For the unconditional accelerationist, the fastidious seriousness of the problem-solvers who propose to ‘save humanity’ is absurd in the face of the problems they confront. It can provoke only Olympian laughter. And so, ‘in its colder variants, which are those that win out, [accelerationism] tends to laugh.’

Whereas the new left are funded to be inherently toothless against power, the alt-right and neoreaction do it for free. The only significant difference is that they espouse a suite of neoliberal/ unsecure power liberties that are different to the new left’s. Whereas the new left pushes a horizontilaism and negative liberties based on the liberation of the individual’s racial and gender identity from formal authority, the alt right and neoreaction come at you from the angle of economics and law, calling for a liberation of the individual from economic complexity and formal control. Both sets in effect offer a suite of negative liberties which are intrinsically what someone once correctly labelled for me as primitivistic. Both espouse a rejection of organisational complexity, masking it with a referral to a mystical individual level spontaneous order which lacks any coherence and which has real affinity to the most extreme crass fideistic referrals to God as a cause for events. How does the economy work? Invisible hand. How do markets work? Competition is good. How does technology develop? Markets. How will society work if everyone is supplied negative liberties? Their natural goodness will come out. How will change occur? people will awaken spontaneously. Each time the discussion stops exactly where it is believed it supports anarchistic and primitivistic interpretations of events.

To offer any sort of threat to the neoliberal/ unsecure power system, a movement will need to be avowedly hegemonic. Either by developing alternative hegemonic institutions or converting the neoliberal/ unsecure power institutions into absolutist hegemonic institutions. We also need to reject negative liberties which are the basis of neoliberalism and the unsecure power system in favour of true liberty offered by an absolutist accelerationist state. A basic guide is supplied by the actions of Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping and the other Asian developmental states of the mid-twentieth century. The west has nothing to offer intellectually except mindless neoliberal friendly destruction and autism in this regard.

The timing of the DoJ release was clearly premeditated to send a message to would be leakers that the long arm of the law moves fast. The implied narrative is that mere hours after the leaked document was released they had already collared the leaker. Additionally, the search warrant is worded to throw as much blame on The Intercept as possible. The truth is that Ms Winner was doomed, regardless of what The Intercept did to protect their source – which was, basically, nothing.

[…]

The DoJ affidavits and press release do a lot of heavy lifting to place as much blame as possible on The Intercept, but they had almost no material impact on the investigation. The language of the search warrant affidavit implies that The Intercept was not operating safely and essentially grassed up their source in the rush to get a scoop — apparently the Russians were involved in hacking during the 2016 US election (something that has been heavily reported on since June 2016…a year.)

The MSS unit with which Claiborne became involved was the Shanghai State Security Bureau (SSSB). Largely unknown outside of the small group of people who look at Chinese intelligence operations, the SSSB has surfaced only a few times in public. In 2009, the SSSB raided the China offices of Australian mining firm Rio Tinto. The office director, Stern Hu, came under investigation, because his aggressive approach to investment cost the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises several hundred million dollars. A year later, the FBI arrested Glenn Duffie Shriver, who applied to work at the State Department and CIA in exchange for $70,000. The SSSB recruited Shriver in Shanghai when he responded to an essay contest on U.S.-China relations and encouraged him to take a position in the U.S. government.

The affidavit reveals that the SSSB can operate all over China and the world, not just in Shanghai. In communications with Claiborne, her SSSB contacts—identified only as Co-Conspirator B and Co-Conspirator C—offered to meet her in Beijing as well as any third country if and when she left the United States. Co-Conspirator B also made references to business trips in Italy and Africa.

be sure to check out the linked affidavit if spycraft interests you

The myth of progress may not yet be dead, but it is dying. In its place another myth has been growing up, a myth that has been promoted especially by the anarchoprimitivists, though it is widespread in other quarters as well. According to this myth, prior to the advent of civilization no one ever had to work, people just plucked their food from the trees and popped it into their mouths and spent the rest of their time playing ring-around-the-rosie with the flower children. Men and women were equal, there was no disease, no competition, no racism, sexism or homophobia, people lived in harmony with the animals and all was love, sharing and cooperation.

Admittedly, the foregoing is a caricature of the anarchoprimitivists’ vision. Most of them — I hope — are not quite as far out of touch with reality as that. They nevertheless are pretty far out of touch with it, and it’s high time for someone to debunk their myth. Because that is the purpose of this article, I will say little here about the positive aspects of primitive societies. I do want to make clear, however, that one can truthfully say about such societies a great deal that is positive. In other words, the anarchoprimitivist myth is not one hundred percent myth; it does include some elements of reality.

A more serious worry for psychological-continuity views is that you could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at once. If your cerebrum—the upper part of the brain largely responsible for mental features—were transplanted, the recipient would be psychologically continuous with you by anyone’s lights (even though there would also be important psychological differences). The psychological-continuity view implies that she would be you. If we destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would also be psychologically continuous with you. (Hemispherectomy—even the removal of the left hemisphere, which controls speech—is considered a drastic but acceptable treatment for otherwise-inoperable brain tumors: see Rigterink 1980.) What if we did both at once, destroying one hemisphere and transplanting the other? Then too, the one who got the transplanted hemisphere would be psychologically continuous with you, and would be you according to the psychological-continuity view.

But now suppose that both hemispheres are transplanted, each into a different empty head. (We needn’t pretend, as some authors do, that the hemispheres are exactly alike.) The two recipients—call them Lefty and Righty—will each be psychologically continuous with you. The psychological-continuity view as we have stated it implies that any future being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you. It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty. But that cannot be: if you and Lefty are one and you and Righty are one, Lefty and Righty cannot be two. And yet they are. To put the point another way, suppose Lefty is hungry at a time when Righty isn’t. If you are Lefty, you are hungry at that time. If you are Righty, you aren’t. If you are Lefty and Righty, you are both hungry and not hungry at once: a contradiction.

In dozens of articles posted over several years, Yahya demonstrated knowledge of classical Arabic—the notoriously difficult language of educated religious speech—and familiarity with Islamic sources and history. His Arabic was stunning even to Cerantonio, an extremely self-confident religious autodidact. Cerantonio told me that another Muslim in their internet discussion group had once challenged a theological point Yahya had made. “Then Yahya did something that shocked us all,” Cerantonio said. “He responded to the guy in traditional Arabic poetry that he devised off the top of his head, using the guy’s name in the poetry, explaining the situation, and answering his objections.” For any claim, it seemed, Yahya could instantly spout textual support, and confronted with any counterclaim, he could undercut the argument with a sweep of the leg.

[…]

The couple indulged, too, in their other shared passion: getting high. Islamic orthodoxy considers cannabis an intoxicant, and therefore forbidden. But Yahya’s practice of Islam was unconventional even then. In a historical essay titled “Cannabis,” heavily footnoted with classical Arabic sources, he made the Islamic case for pot. There was evidence, he wrote, that early Islamic leaders had taxed hemp seeds. Since Muslims generally cannot tax forbidden substances, such as pork or alcohol, Yahya reasoned, they must have considered pot permissible. As for psilocybin: Yahya cited an obscure hadith (a report of the sayings and actions of Muhammad) that he said described Muhammad’s having descended from a mountain after meditation and extolling the medicinal properties of mushrooms—particularly as a cure for diseases of the eye. Yahya and Tania took this to mean that God had sanctioned the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms. So the young lovers blissed out under the Texas sky, shrooming after the example of the prophet himself.

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live –moreover, the only one,” says Cioran. Nihilism is the first step in an active annihilation not of reality, but of the human illusions of reality; and of humanity itself as a primal illusion, one that must be rendered null and void. Karl Marx himself would say “religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself.” (Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge In Dresden (1842)) With the death and murder of the gods, and God, we began that slow and methodical destruction of the illusions that have bound us in a cage of madness for millennia. Yet, this step into freedom was captured and turned against us, an act at once of enslavement and total evisceration, a systematic unveiling of an order of obstinate sociopathy, a recursion to a formalism of a voidic disaggregation enclosing us in a a non-time, a present without outlet; a static conveyance that has no other goal than its own continuance: an aberration of the death-flows it seeks to evade, a cage for the desires that it seeks to bind from the inherent movement of death. Civilization is this system: capitalism is its engine, an alien form of life that has no inherent objective other than annihilation.

“We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.” – Emile Cioran Ours is a culture of the excrescence of death, a thanatopic pursuit not of profit but of total annihilation. The principle of deregulation inherent in global capitalism is indistinguishable from the total acceleration of a deterritorialized, systematic and efficient cannibalism (one that seeks to incorporate every last niche of biopower within a machinic phylum) – and a civilization of machinic and technocratic infestation from which there is no reprieve. The question is whether one accepts the truth of this and joins the comedy of destruction and implosion (helps it along, gives it a push), or whether one spends one’s time in the factories of oblivion, illusory worlds of decaying narratives of disorder and madness spinning out of control, reversions to outworn heresies of a bankrupt and decadent ethno-apocalypse by way of irony and fake solutions.

Where does this get us? From the perspective of early 20th century rationalists: global commerce and dazzling new technologies vs. peasants who insisted on setting their own crops on fire for a bizarre religious ritual. That’s not hyperbole, by the way, that’s an example from the book. The rationalists were maybe aware that they had spotty or incomplete data on growing practices, but the data they did have was quantified and supported by labs, whereas the villagers couldn’t explain their practice using any kind of data. The peasants, it turns out, were right, but would you have guessed that? More importantly: would you guess that now?

The only way that I can see that one would is if there’s a genuine admission of ignorance on the part of the “scientists”. Even reconsidering one’s position requires some kind of counter-argument, and the problem here is that the counter-argument doesn’t make sense in the language of the scientists. Indeed – a solid counterargument requires some kind of power (you’re not going to listen to some random guy on the street screaming about [whatever]), but legibility inherently reduces that power.

A common takeaway from Seeing Like a State is “reality is a lot more complex than the state simplifications”. And that is extremely true. But I think the far more interesting, under-discussed, and disturbing takeaway is about mutual incomprehensibility. Note that this part is still quite relevant. Even in a democracy where the citizens have a voice – and let’s say that politicians actually listen – the way they explain things will not make sense to outsiders. This limits their ability to counteract a given proposition.

a review of james scott’s seminal seeing like a state – i only found this blog yesterday but i can tell it’s going to be one of my favorites. his writing also reminds me of both scott alexander and the last psychiatrist, if you’re a fan of either (both, i hope!)

misc

  • Rationality: From AI to Zombies – yudkowsky’s sequences, which i haven’t read but may now that this nice site is an option

  • welder – “Welder allows you to set up a Linux server with plain shell scripts.”

  • StatiCrypt – “Based on the crypto-js library, StatiCrypt uses AES-256 to encrypt your string with your passphrase in your browser (client side). Download your encrypted string in a HTML page with a password prompt you can upload anywhere”

  • ゆざめレーベル - yuzame label – a japanese netlabel i’ve just discovered (with free dl’s natch)

link roundup 13

Published:

reading

While any particular variant of implicit or explicit Protestantism has its distinctive theological (or atheological) features, just as any stage of capitalistic industrialization has its concrete characteristics, these serve as distractions more than as hand-holds in the big picture. The only truly big picture is splitting. The Reformation was not only a break, but still more importantly a normalization of breaking, an initially informal, but increasingly rigorized, protocol for social disintegration. The ultimate solution it offered in regard to all social questions was not argumentation, but exit. Chronic fission was installed as the core of historical process. Fundamentally, that is what atomization means.

Protestantism – Real Abstract Protestantism – which is ever more likely to identify itself as post-Christian, post-theistic, and post-Everything Else, is a self-propelling machine for incomprehensibly prolonged social disintegration, and everyone knows it. Atomization has become an autonomous, inhuman agency, or at least, something ever more autonomous, and ever more inhuman. It can only liquidate everything you’ve ever cared about, by its very nature, so – of course – no one likes it. Catholicism, socialism, and nationalism have sought, in succession, coalition, or mutual competition, to rally the shards of violated community against it. The long string of defeat that ensued has been a rich source of cultural and political mythology. Because there is really no choice but to resist, battle has always been rejoined, but without any serious sign of any reversal of fortune.

  • Bugger by Adam Curtis – bbc.co.uk

It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.

But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

The following sections will describe four macro-trends which, if they continue, may in combination facilitate the emergence of more jihadi activism in Europe some five to fifteen years from now. I identified the trends one by one over the past two years as I conducted my own research and read that of others. It was when I realized there were several of them, and that they combined to a worrying whole that I decided to write this article. The four trends are: 1) a growth in the number of economically underperforming Muslim youth, 2) a growth in the number of veteran activists, 3) persistent armed conflict in the Muslim world, and 4) persistent operational freedom on the Internet.

While the list of trends is inductively generated, its relevance is to some extent theoretically underpinned. The four trends all touch on elements prominent in “resource mobilization” approaches to political activism. Resource mobilization is a perspective from the social movements literature that views surges of activism less as a response to broader socio-political strains and more as a function of the ability of entrepreneurs to craft activist networks and exploit protest technologies.[18] The first of the four trends concerns the availability of recruits; the second affects the number of entrepreneurs available to build networks; the third relates to the availability of political grievances and safe havens outside the West, while the fourth affects operational capacity. In an ideal-type jihadi network-building effort, each of these variables is presumably important: activism requires entrepreneurs; entrepreneurs need manpower; manpower comes more easily with political grievances; and both recruitment and operations are improved by online freedom.

To make all of this worse, down I-91 from my old university, Yale sits on a mountain of money, and yet receives more and more from public funds. The degree to which our government subsidizes the immensely wealthy Ivy League schools defies belief. A report from Open the Books, an organization that works for transparency in government spending, estimates that the federal and state governments spent over $40 billion on the Ivy League schools in tax exemptions, contracts, grants, and direct gifts from 2010 to 2015. The eight Ivy League universities – small, elite institutions from one region of the country that serve a tiny fraction of our college students and who could scarcely need government support less – receive more money annually from the federal government, on average, than 16 states. Four in ten students from the top 0.1% of families by income attend the Ivy League or similarly elite institutions; in 2012, 70% of Yale’s incoming freshmen came from families making more than $120,000; the median family income for Harvard students is triple the national average. The overwhelming majority of these students go on to lives of economic security, and many to the upper echelons of our economy.

Global aridity has increased substantially since the 1970s due to recent drying over Africa, southern Europe, East and South Asia, and eastern Australia. Although El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), tropical Atlantic SSTs, and Asian monsoons have played a large role in the recent drying, recent warming has increased atmospheric moisture demand and likely altered atmospheric circulation patterns, both contributing to the drying. Climate models project increased aridity in the 21st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years. Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.

We’re starting to live in a time when such terrible and wondrous things are not only technically possible but socially acceptable. Headlines were made last month over a fetal lamb being grown in an artificial uterus. The creature, invaded with tubes, suckles and kicks inside its bulging, rippling enclosure. The juxtaposition of twitching organism and sterile, utilitarian plastic is simply cyberpunk. Gender is going the way of that thug’s cartilage-grown face. Male and female is looking more like Coke and Pepsi, with some opting to make their own artisanal cola blends. As rootlessness moves from exception to rule, obligations to others begin to look like hindrances. It isn’t difficult to see how three-parent babies in polycarbonate wombs fit into all of this.

Change is fast these days. We can feel acceleration that was once only perceptible between generations. At the same time, the past is more crystallized than it’s ever been before. Today’s everyman, immersed in a data-sphere orders of magnitude more efficient than any library, can see more clearly than ever that things were different in an ever-familiar past. A world with meaning resolves ever sharper as we speed away from it.

Millions of millennia ago, in our own Milky Way galaxy, but far upstream of where we are today, two neutron stars spiraled around each other, each embodying the mass of a sun but smaller and faster than a speeding planet. Each of these tiny gigaworlds, millions of times denser than our sun, had been produced, not by a mere exploding star, but by a far more powerful supernova. Each supernova, burning a nuclear fire with a far greater power density than a normal star such as our sun, had besides a neutron star also produced a cavalcade of new elements. For elements lighter than iron, this nuclear fusion releases energy; but for elements heavier than iron, including copper, silver, and gold, nuclear fusion requires a net energy input as well as astronomical power densities. Our supernovae were powerful enough to create many metals, including copper and silver, from the fusion of lighter elements. But they were not powerful enough to create gold. Gold awaited the current, far more powerful and rarer event.

Our two stars, fortuitously set into collision course by two separate supernovae, approached each other and then, captured by each others’ gravity, entered a death spiral. They collided in an unimaginable explosion, unleashing a power density far greater than that of a mere supernova and trillions of times greater than if a mere mountain-sized asteroid had hit the earth. The collision was so intense that it created a black hole and a burst of extremely high energy light called gamma rays. Escaping the black hole along with the gamma rays was a spray of new, heavier metals, including gold. This gold-rich cloud in part expanded and in part coalesced, participating in the subsequent formation of new solar systems, including our own. Due to this collision of rare intensity, our unusual solar system was seeded with astronomically rare heavy metals such as gold along with the more common supernova products such as copper and silver.

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes). Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic commonalities) raised together are utterly dissimilar to each other—despite in many cases having decades of exposure to the same parents and home environments.

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that cyber operations have limited coercive value. It theorizes that cyber operations contribute to coercion by imposing costs and destabilizing an opponent’s leadership. As costs mount and destabilization spreads, the expected utility of capitulation surpasses that of continued defiance, leading the opponent’s leaders to comply with the coercer’s demands. The article applies this ‘cost-destabilization’ model to the 2014 North Korean cyber operation against Sony. Through cost imposition and leadership destabilization, the North Korean operation, despite its lack of physical destructiveness, caused Sony to make a series of costly decisions to avoid future harm.

Open marriage, on the other hand, is a uniquely modern pathology in that it appeals to those who resent having to conform to a standard but for whom the existential terror of not conforming to any standard is too great. Like so much of our culture—co-working arrangements, the self-help and self-care industries, service apps, etc.—it encourages people to dwell in a state of perpetual adolescence, enjoying all the comforts of the old way of doing things while discarding all of the inconveniences (which are repackaged as, in the trendy, millennial market lingo of Silicon Valley, as “inefficiencies”).

As all the best observers of the human condition from Erich Fromm to Quentin Crisp have noted, one of the most natural of human tendencies is to foist responsibility for your life onto someone else. Economic arguments aside, this is probably the best social or moral critique of traditional marriage. But what is open marriage if not the foisting of responsibility for your life onto someone else while conveniently avoiding your responsibility to them?

(and a cute response…)

The final triumph of modern individualism is an afterlife ensconed in a giant stone structure, carefully segregated from any other souls, based entirely around stuff. No county churchyards here. No slow surrender to nature and the weeds. Just piles of golden goblets and jeweled necklaces, carefully guarded by snake-infested traps. And, of course the bones of dead servants, guaranteed to keep serving you in the great beyond. Of course Heaven is neoliberal. There is no alternative!

misc

  • kbsecret – a password/secret manager using keybase’s kbfs

  • slap – “slap is a Sublime-like terminal-based text editor that strives to make editing from the terminal easier.”

  • OMNI magazine archive – scifi, 1978-1994

link roundup 12

Published:

reading

Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.

If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing. But one still has to ask – everywhere had Jews. Why Hungary in particular? What was so special about Budapest in the early 1900s?

After Trump’s election, accelerationism seems to be going mainstream among left-progressive political thinkers. The election has ushered in the adoption of this new theoretical stance, and with it has come what I suspect will be a sleeper aesthetic macro trend. This haute baroque capitalism is maximalist, super-ornamental, and takes capital as a first principle.

If I’m right about baroque capitalism, we should be able to find early examples of it wherever else visual culture is highly concentrated. Accepting the aesthetic as a generative and formal expression of capital sheds some retrospective light on the vaporwave phenomenon, which can be seen as a precursor to baroque capitalism. It shares many of the same sensibilities in terms of using physical manifestations of capital as an expressive tool. But vaporwave considered capitalism to be incapable of providing meaning. Vaporwave attempts to show the lifeless, dead shells of consumer “culture” that capital has left behind. Politically, these empty luxury objects and urban spaces aren’t too far off from Gean Moreno’s grey goo critique.

Sarah noted later in the essay, “Sometimes a sacred entity is personified, as with gods or demons or the centers of cults of personality. At other times, the sacred entity is composed only of abstract ideas, refusing to personify itself. Why might it benefit such an entity to hide its nature?”

My guess is that certain egregores — or certain sociocultural interpretative frameworks — tend to lose their potency when the bearers recognize them. When you figure out how they function, you see the way that you’ve acted as a cog in the meaning-making machine, and you’re able to decide whether you still want to serve that role.

For me, the content-versus-process dichotomy worked like that. In the past I’ve held the content stance. More recently I’ve held the process stance. In fact, I still tend to gravitate toward and defend the process crowd by default, despite being aware of the blinding effect of dogged adherence to a single simple framework. But recognizing the structure of both dogmas loosened the hold of the entire duality.

…and a response:

The flaw in the model, as I see it, is that the content side doesn’t just think “it’s okay when we do it.” It would be easier to swallow if that were the going premise, openly admitted. No, it’s that they insist up-and-down that rules are absolutely necessary for everyone. That diversity officers and arbitration committees must be established, with official seals of approval (and handsome paychecks to boot). The net result is that the language of compassion and tolerance can be seamlessly used to paper over destructive and vindictive personal agendas.

None of this is in the rulebook, but it doesn’t have to be. The rulebook is the foot in the door, used to legitimize everything else. It is undoubtedly well intentioned, but it is wide open to abuse, and the 0-day exploits have been in the wild for years. Good intentions are worth nothing when bad actions consistently result.

In the resulting discussions, there’s a particular flip that occurs, too. These problems are denied, at first, up until a plaintiff demonstrates a solid enough case. Then, without skipping a beat, we are told nothing is perfect, and that the alternative would be far worse. The rationale that the ends justify the means only comes into play when pressed. The argument has actually changed completely, but the emotional valence is the same: we’re right, we’re the good guys, and you’re bad for not following along. Cognitive dissonance averted. The resulting radioactive fall-out is fine by them, as long as it’s aimed in the general vicinity of the right group of wrong people.

the whole piece is truly excellent commentary on the current state of (parts of) the net.

This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then “leaked” to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique “tainted leaks.” The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society.

President Trump’s proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation’s spending on so-called intelligent systems by 10 percent, to about $175 million. Research and development in other areas would also be cut, though the proposed budget does call for more spending on defense research and some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private American companies like Google and Facebook.

“The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. “They were talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being significantly affected.”

I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

as you may have guessed, this essay was influential on the design of bitcoin a decade later.

Every era has its dangerous ideas. For millennia, the monotheistic religions have persecuted countless heresies, together with nuisances from science such as geocentrism, biblical archeology, and the theory of evolution. We can be thankful that the punishments have changed from torture and mutilation to the canceling of grants and the writing of vituperative reviews. But intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning. Time and again people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. The fear that the structure of our solar system has grave moral consequences is a venerable example, and the foisting of “Intelligent Design” on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we liable to be enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate?

It’s this sense as I suggested in my recent essay The Apocalypse of the Human: Technicity, Magic, and Integral Reality that we are going through a phase-shift, a temporal short-circuit that is merging and unifying the magical world view of our ancestral pool with the hypertechnification of our contemporary accelerationist investment in NBIC technologies. Things are happening so fast that time is reversing itself and the future is imploding toward us rather than the other way round. We are not moving forward toward the future, but rather the future is moving and imploding onto us at the speed of light. The notion that the apocalypse has already happened is this sense of revelation, of a knowing more than can be known, a gnosis that is sending messages back from the future into our now. Caught between a sort of Philip K. Dick schizo episode of Exegesis and a William Gibson meta-fictional Peripheral we seem to be entering a intermediated realm or twilight zone in which almost anything is possible rather than impossible. Our reality systems are falling apart even as new one’s replace them, forcing us to shift our very notions of the human into realms that have no meaning beyond the nihil.

…and referred above:

At the heart of the Weird Tale (think of H.P. Lovecraft!) is this keen sense of contact between incommensurable worlds. The notion that one comes up against something that one can neither explain (Explanandum and Explanans) or interpret (reduce to human meaning). As Hempel and Oppenheim would explain it: “It may be said… that an explanation is not fully adequate unless its explanans, if taken account of in time, could have served as a basis for predicting the phenomenon under consideration…. It is this potential predictive force which gives scientific explanation its importance: Only to the extent that we are able to explain empirical facts can we attain the major objective of scientific research, namely not merely to record the phenomena of our experience, but to learn from them, by basing upon them theoretical generalizations which enable us to anticipate new occurrences and to control, at least to some extent, the changes in our environment”.2

It’s in this sense that we are losing control over our reality systems, our sciences are hedging their bets, and the predictive force of the sciences are coming up against the incommensurable. Over and over I’ve related this to R. Scott Bakker’s notion of ‘medial neglect’: the notion that our brains through a long emergence in the evolutionary process were fitted (adapted) to the natural environment for purposes of survival and propagation. But that with the emergence of agricultural civilization our submergence in the natural world was short-circuited, and we began a process of abstraction – a cutting away from our natural environmental constraints through a process of artificial construction of abstract environments. In our latest phase we’ve displaced the natural for the artificial to the point we are entering what Scott terms a ‘crash space’ beyond which our human modes of explanda and meaning are forever lost and cannot be bridged, ever.

this blog is one of my favorites. and, since he links it above, and i find myself reading it again, an r scott bakker essay from last year:

And this is basically the foundational premise of the Semantic Apocalypse: intentional cognition, as a radically specialized system, is especially vulnerable to both crashing and cheating. The very power of our sociocognitive systems is what makes them so liable to be duped (think religious anthropomorphism), as well as so easy to dupe. When Sherry Turkle, for instance, bemoans the ease with which various human-computer interfaces, or ‘HCIs,’ push our ‘Darwinian buttons’ she is talking about the vulnerability of sociocognitive cues to various cheats (but since she, like Barrett, lacks any theory of meaning, she finds herself in similar explanatory straits). In a variety of experimental contexts, for instance, people have been found to trust artificial interlocutors over human ones. Simple tweaks in the voices and appearance of HCIs have a dramatic impact on our perceptions of those encounters—we are in fact easily manipulated, cued to draw erroneous conclusions, given what are quite literally cartoonish stimuli. So the so-called ‘internet of things,’ the distribution of intelligence throughout our artifactual ecologies, takes on a far more sinister cast when viewed through the lens of human sociocognitive specialization. Populating our ecologies with gadgets designed to cue our sociocognitive capacities ‘out of school’ will only degrade the overall utility of those capacities. Since those capacities underwrite what we call meaning or ‘intentionality,’ the collapse of our ancestral sociocognitive ecologies signals the ‘death of meaning.’

link roundup 11

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reading

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

Much of the contemporary discourse on the question of automation assumes, intentionally or not, a basically Hobbesian perspective. Machinery is subsumed as part of the perpetually urgent ‘maintenance and motion’ of the state. Machines today are used to carry out war, to conduct surveillance internal and external, to abet industry, produce manufactures. They are inextricable from the modern regimes identified by Foucault, himself drawing on Hobbes, of territory, population, security. Mass production, mass politics, mass government—crossing and interpenetrating the state, they are radically interlinked. Wherever industrial revolution takes place, an enormous expansion of the capacity, the power, and the reach of the state, or more fundamentally of politics, seems to follow in its wake. This was the reality of machine massification and escalating cybernetic interconnection that Carl Schmitt called ‘total technology’, worrying that it would ‘quantitatively’ destroy the distinctive character of the political by infecting all the spheres of human life with politics while forcing a disastrous invasion of the political itself by the economic and social considerations of the machine. It was also the realisation that drove Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s, for instance, to reformulate Japanese imperialism on a mass plane, with Kanji Ishiwara perceiving in this technoindustrial process a geometric transformation of war from the pursuit of elite aspirations to an impending ‘final war’ that would volumetrically involve and engulf the entirety of society, and not just society, but the very territory—‘rivers and trees’—itself.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.

[related reading from last week – How to Spot a Spook & Leopard Spotted]

So what does ‘white left’ mean in the Chinese context, and what’s behind the rise of its (negative) popularity? It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

But the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It’s just a fact of life - like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.

All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night’s carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May’s statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be “defiant”, but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells’ Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

Macroscopic cortical networks are important for cognitive function, but it remains challenging to construct anatomically plausible individual structural connectomes from human neuroimaging. We introduce a new technique for cortical network mapping, based on inter-regional similarity of multiple morphometric parameters measured using multimodal MRI. In three cohorts (two human, one macaque), we find that the resulting morphometric similarity networks (MSNs) have a complex topological organisation comprising modules and high-degree hubs. Human MSN modules recapitulate known cortical cytoarchitectonic divisions, and greater inter-regional morphometric similarity was associated with stronger inter-regional co-expression of genes enriched for neuronal terms. Comparing macaque MSNs to tract-tracing data confirmed that morphometric similarity was related to axonal connectivity. Finally, variation in the degree of human MSN nodes accounted for about 40% of between-subject variability in IQ.[!] Morphometric similarity mapping provides a novel, robust and biologically plausible approach to understanding how human cortical networks underpin individual differences in psychological functions.

A young woman who had been working as a teacher in Morocco gave one of these presentations. Surprised to discover that many of her students harbored romanticized views of the United States, she resolved to inculcate a much darker—and, she believed, more accurate—picture, emphasizing racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. This campaign was so dispiriting to the students that her Moroccan fellow teachers pleaded with her to relent; one bluntly told her: “You’re destroying their dreams.” But she doubled down. Even a student’s comment that “Mark Twain was a great American writer” occasioned a rebuttal. From Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, a cranky, satirical travel book, she read a passage that Moroccans would find unflattering. “You see,” she reported telling the class, “Mark Twain hates you.” The one bright spot in American history seemed to be the election of Barack Obama who had, however, ordered drone strikes to “kill people that look like you.”

This grantee acted less like her country’s ambassador than her country’s prosecuting attorney. And she was pleased to report that, by the end of the barrage, her students no longer viewed America the same way. Distressingly, the audience of several dozen Fulbright grantees and administrators, who represent a diverse cross-section of the most educated Americans, failed to express outrage at this betrayal. Perhaps this was from a desire to avoid confrontation, but I think something else was at work. Fulbright applicants tend to be “globally-minded” liberals who are eager to distinguish themselves from the flag-waving rubes. This implies an ability to see your country at a cool distance. Condemning America demonstrates a transcendence of parochial loyalty. Hostility may not be objectivity, but it certainly isn’t slavish devotion, and that’s the main thing.

Ghost in the Shell takes place in the year 2029, when the world has become interconnected by a vast electronic network that permeates every aspect of life. People also tend to rely more and more on cybernetic implants, and the first strong AI’s make their appearance. The main entity presented in the various media is the Public Security Section 9 police force, which is charged to investigate cases like the Puppet Master and the Laughing Man. However, as the criminals are revealed to have more depth than was at first apparent, the various protagonists are left with disturbing questions: “What exactly is the definition of ‘human’ in a society where a mind can be copied and the body replaced with a synthetic form?”, “What exactly is the ‘ghost’—the human soul—in the cybernetic body, or ‘shell’?”, and “Where is the boundary between human and machine when the differences between the two become more philosophical than physical?”

It’s perhaps how you’d do computing in a post-singularity world, where computational speed and bandwidth are infinite, and what’s valuable is security, trust, creativity, and collaboration. It’s essentially a combination of a programming language, OS, virtual machine, social network, and digital identity platform.

The basic concept is that Urbit is a global computer combined with a global filesystem. Each physical hardware component on the network is represented as a ‘ship’. These ships range from carriers (the largest, only 256 in existence) down to submarines (the smallest, effectively infinite). Ships are used to run computation locally, and to send and receive encrypted messages with other ships.

note that the boat metaphors (besides ‘ship’) are deprecated; and some more of the thinking behind urbit:

In other words, feudal search posits a content namespace which, because ranked feudally, is a much more desirable neighborhood than the Internet. At least, if you don’t want to wallow in the slums, you don’t have to. You will not turn the digital corner and find yourself in a digital favela. Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building.

A feudal search engine (Feudle, perhaps) separates the task of reputation assignment into two levels. Feudle assigns reputation not to pages, but to communities - a much smaller task. For pages within a community, it defers strictly to the community’s own reputation system, connecting directly to it with an actual, standard API.

Thus we have two reputation values, perhaps on the unit interval, which multiplied produce another unit - global reputation. More generally, every search engine assigns every community a reputation transform, effectively grading its grades.

Thus, as a user, my map of global reputation gives high ratings to high-reputation pages at high-reputation communities, medium ratings to high-reputation pages at low-reputation communities, etc. Doesn’t it seem to you that this makes sense?

misc

  • Kryptonite – store your ssh key on your phone, unlock it to authenticate; the key never leaves your phone! on an iphone, this is obviously much more secure than a pc in most cases. i’m really loving it.

  • Yubikey for LUKS

This enables you to use the yubikey as 2FA for LUKS. The Password you enter is used as challenge for the yubikey

The keyscript allows to boot the machine with either the password and the Yubikey or with a normal password from any key slot.

link roundup 10

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First, it seems to be a fact that the genuinely intellectual wings of the alt-right or neo-reaction (NRx) or whatever you want to call it, are probably too intelligent and sophisticated for bourgeois intellectual workers to engage with, let alone compete with. The reason I know this is because I have only been able to really explore this world with the privilege of my sabbatical; bourgeois intellectual workers typically just don’t have the time to read a bunch of long essays on the internet. So if those essays are actually pretty smart and a legitimate challenge to your institutional authority as a credentialed intellectual—you are functionally required to close ranks, if only with a silent agreement to not engage. As an academic political scientist, I have at least average comfort with the history of political thought, yet when I really peruse all the independent NRx intellectuals, if I’m being honest I’d have to admit that I would need to go back to the books to really grok and engage what some of them are trying to say. I am on research leave and I don’t even have the time (or interest) in really doing that as deeply as would be required to engage all of it meaningfully. This is how I can very confidently call bullshit on any currently full-time bourgeois symbol-manipulator who pretends to know with any confidence the alleged uselessness or harmfulness of the NRx intellectual ecology.

Now, as soon as anyone from this non-institutional world produces effects within the institutional orbit, it is actually a really serious survival reflex for all institutionally privileged intellectuals to play the morality card (“no platform!”). If all these strange, outside autodidacts are actually smart and independently producing high-level intellectual content you don’t have the time to even understand, let alone defeat or otherwise control, this is an existential threat to your entire livelihood. Because all of your personal identity, your status, and your salary, is based directly on your credentialed, legitimated membership card giving your writings and pontifications an officially sanctioned power and authority. If that door is opened even a crack by non-credentialed outsiders, the whole jig is up for the respectable bourgeois monopoly on the official intellectual organs of society.

The shrinking of the middle is largely due to a recent rise in the share of women (who also represent a majority of college students) who identify as either liberal or far left. The share of female respondents, but not male respondents, who describe their political views this way was at an all-time high (41.1 percent for women, 28.9 percent for men). Left-wing views peaked for men way back in 1971, at 43.6 percent.

The share who labeled their political beliefs as either conservative or far right peaked in 2006 for women, and 1989 for men. Another milestone was hit this year: the largest gender gap in self-reported liberalism to date (12.2 percentage points).

Slobodchikoff, an emeritus professor of biology at Northern Arizona University, has been analyzing the sounds of prairie dogs for more than 30 years. Not long after he started, he learned that prairie dogs had distinct alarm calls for different predators. Around the same time, separate researchers found that a few other species had similar vocabularies of danger. What Slobodchikoff claimed to discover in the following decades, however, was extraordinary: Beyond identifying the type of predator, prairie-dog calls also specified its size, shape, color and speed; the animals could even combine the structural elements of their calls in novel ways to describe something they had never seen before. No scientist had ever put forward such a thorough guide to the native tongue of a wild species or discovered one so intricate. Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language.

In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.

you may have seen this make the rounds, but did you notice steve sailer in the comments?

It is well to repeat that none of the frogtwitter stars who collaborated with Lucia to create the exhibition are Nazis. Kantbot, who wrote the script for the video, summarised frogtwitter as “the last bastion of indiscriminate and all-embracing cultural criticism”; a space not for ideology, but for pure, truly unfiltered critique. It is an anti-political sphere, in many ways, or perhaps one of a politics of pure aesthetics. He points out that the takeover of conventional activism by corporations, creating a world where supposedly heroic, radical ideologies have become just more brands, has made plentiful artistic space for a truly nihilistic satire.

The magic of frogtwitter lies in the balance between the darkness of their nihilism and the joyous, majestic, life-affirming vitality with which they express it, buttressed by a fierce intelligence. Teeveekwa, the star of the video, told me that they were aware of the likely antifa reaction, and deliberately created the show in such a way that it could subsume the resulting violence ideologically, enhancing the narrative and providing more material for future creations.

The Foreign Service List provides another clue, in the form of diplomats’ official assignments. Of all the jobs real State Department representatives perform, political reporting is generally considered to be the most important. Although genuine FSRs frequently hold administrative and consular slots, they are almost never given the important political jobs. So where an FSR does appear in the listing with a political job, it is most likely that the CIA is using the position for cover. There is an exception to this rule: A comparatively few minority-group members who have been brought into the Foreign Service as Reserve Officers under a special program. They are found exclusively in the junior ranks, and their biographic data is complete in the way the CIA people’s is not.

Finally there is another almost certain tipoff. If an agent is listed in the Biographic Register as having been an “analyst” for the Department of the Army (or Navy or Air Force), you can bet that he or she is really working for the CIA. A search of hundreds of names found no legitimate State Department personnel listed as ever having held such a job.

…and related – Leopard Spotted:

[Instead, KGB officer Yuri Trotov‘s method was] a clever combination of insight into human behavior, common sense and strict logic. Bureaucracies … are fundamentally creatures of habit and, as any analyst knows, the key to breaking the adversary’s [operational security] is to find patterns and repetitions. From the late 1950s at the Soviet mission in Thailand and later Japan, Trotov first applied his methods to identifying U.S. intelligence officers in the field. He began systematically combing the KGB archives for consistent patterns observable in the postings of CIA counterparts. What Trotov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Why? Because the CIA personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

The haystack needle Mehta presented Monday now connects Lazarus to WCry, although the tie connecting the two isn’t precisely clear just yet. WCry’s creators may have deliberately added code found in Cantopee in an attempt to trick researchers into mistakenly believing Lazarus Group is behind the ransomware. Researchers at antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab said such a “false flag” is plausible but improbable. The Cantopee code snippet, the researchers explained, was removed from later versions of WCry, making it hard to spot and hence ill-suited to act as a decoy.

“For now, more research is required into older version of WannaCry,” the Kaspersky Lab researchers wrote in a blog post headlined “WannaCry and Lazarus Group—the missing link.” “We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack. One thing is for sure—Neel Mehta’s discovery is the most significant clue to date regarding the origins of WannaCry.”

One of the most unnerving aspects of footwork is how it withholds catharsis. Drums and samples stutter repeatedly, like a gas stove that sparks but never lights. It can feel relentless, uptight, spooky, and desperate; you don’t nod along so much as try to find your path through a maelstrom of way too many snares and high hats. Samples are sped up to a surreal, chipmunk whir or slowed down to a dirgelike pace, at times clashing with the furious rhythms. But there’s something hypnotic about the sound of different rhythms coming together on a track. The music and the dancing can feel wildly free, or aspirational, as though it’s up to the rest of the world to catch up to their speed and vision.

[…]

Many people argue that we’ve exhausted the possibilities of the human voice, and that this has led pop artists to tinker with digital processing. Listening to “Black Origami,” I wondered if the same could ever be said about rhythm. I keep returning to the album, because it keeps me off balance. A song begins with a steady rhythm, and then its parts rearrange themselves into something frenzied and nightmarish. Nothing is where you expect it to be. “Holy Child”—a collaboration with the minimalist composer William Basinski—seems austere and slow, as a woman’s chants are tracked by sparse, muted drumrolls. Her voice is slowly stretched apart, then reinserted alongside a massing riot of snares and kicks, until it becomes its own kind of sputtering rhythm. This is the most enchanting aspect of “Black Origami”—its willingness to turn anything into a beat. There are kick drums and high hats, tambourines and claves, handclaps and foot stomps, the staccato stabs of a singer’s voice; I also felt as if I were hearing the sound of change clattering around in a bowl or a car door being slammed, someone dropping a drum kit down a flight of stairs.

music from the future. also, pitchfork’s bnm

misc

an easy script to set up a full fledged seedbox with minimal configuration. intended for a vps, but works perfectly well on my ubuntu desktop.

fork of sonarr, automated downloading of movies from usenet and trackers (including ptp and btn!)

japanese netlabel list

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here’s a collection of japanese electronic music netlabels. if you’re familiar with this kind of thing, you likely know maltine, but there’s a handful that are a little more obscure and are worth checking out. all of them have free high quality releases.

label highlights
Maltine Records guchon, madmaid, dj newtown, iserobin
Bunkai-Kei Records nyolfen, elect-LO-nica compilation
Sayonara Records [defunct] gigandect
tuxu records the つくしEP collection is seriously stellar
Otherman Records iserobin, xacksecks
edsillforRecordings dunno, this one’s new on me but it’s breakcore

link roundup 9

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to begin with this week – two links that should be read sequentially, but if you only read one, i recommend the first. (but read both!)

the guardian piece about accelerationism is also surprisingly good.

reading

Anyone in the art world who has gained the privilege of speech is someone for whom the system is working, and who is working for this system. In formal terms, the discourse which they generate reflects their status and their aims. The “content” is inconsequential. What is required is a form of speech which can supply opinions on a range of subjects (valuable for arts professionals, competing in an industry in which meaning constitutes a form of value) which is theoretically directed against massive global forces (glamorous, since it aligns the spokesman with the rebels, as well as flexible, since it can be applied with minimum variation in almost any country) but doesn’t implicate anyone personally (it is acceptable to run an anti-neoliberal program, which is sponsored by a bank, or arrange a biennial about freedom in a country employing slaves). This is a discourse which fulfills the need to speak, but has no fundamental connection to a concrete object.

The reality is that international contemporary art promotes multicultural left-wing sentiments, for obvious reasons: it is a State-supported, global capitalist industry. Capitalism isn’t itself racist, sexist, or right-wing: it’s beyond ideology because it sells ideology, and the more manufactured it is, the more capitalist. Capital liquidates patriarchy because it it liquidates tradition and nature in insatiable hunger for profit — that is Marx’s argument. It’s anti-racist — it annihilates all human differences into quantitative units; on the same basis, if feminism lowers wages, and creates consumer markets, it’s pro-feminism.

[…]

The power of the networked media — this machinery of viral replication — was something to behold. But it wasn’t inexplicable. The speed through which the campaign [to shut down the LD50 gallery] escalated was possible only because of a shared interest of elite cultural institutions, and the radical Left in presenting the specter of a “fascist” enemy as their opposition. The Hackney Gazette, e-flux, the Guardian, and The New York Times all recirculated propaganda legitimating the campaign. The Mayor of Hackney supported it. Art Monthly, funded by the Arts Council, carried a piece by Larne Abse Gogarty describing “a delusion of free speech only permissible to those who never have to feel vulnerable on the street.” (I wondered how facing a mob screaming Nazi at you ranks in the vulnerability sweepstakes.)

I asked Land what he thought of left accelerationism. “The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism,” he said, “is a deep theoretical error.”

The visit, along with group discussions, they said, had pushed the jihadist contingent to be more communicative. They had kept to themselves before the debate, their lives and rap sheets a mystery. “Now we begin to understand a bit more,” the North African told me. One of the jihadis “had a breakup, others had family problems.” Some of them, he added, had begun to talk a bit differently about their prospects after swapping stories with other inmates doing longer sentences. “They had this idea that we’re fiche S” — the designation used for monitoring potential terrorists — so “there’s no future. Now they seem to understand there is a future. They talk about having jobs, marriage, kids. There’s a positive evolution.”

But when the two inmates talked about life outside prison, their own optimism faded. France, they said, seemed to be building toward a confrontation with Islam. It was the same in all of Europe, they said, and even in the United States (they made clear that they spent much of their time watching TV news). For young men from the French banlieues, assimilation and radicalization appeared to be two sides of a coin that never fell in their favor. “All the profiling, the discrimination, it adds up,” the North African said. He continued, referring to the numeric code for France’s most notorious banlieue: “Ninety-three — if that’s on your C.V., it’s hard to get a job. There’s frustration among the young. That becomes hate, and hate becomes radicalism.”

Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. But that isn’t what happened here — instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts.

Now, along comes the demographic transition—the recent shift to lower death rates and then lower birth rates. Malthusian catastrophe was averted, but the price of relaxing selection has been moving the mutation-selection balance toward an unsustainable increase in genetic diseases. Various naturalistic experiments suggest this meltdown can proceed rapidly. (Salmon raised in captivity for only a few generations were strongly outcompeted by wild salmon subject to selection.) Indeed, it is possible that the drop in death rates over the demographic transition caused—by increasing the genetic load—the subsequent drop in birth rates below replacement: If humans are equipped with physiological assessment systems to detect when they are in good enough condition to conceive and raise a child, and if each successive generation bears a greater number of micro-impairments that aggregate into, say, stressed exhaustion, then the paradoxical outcome of improving public health for several generations would be ever lower birth rates. One or two children are far too few to shed incoming mutations.

We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun’s galactic spiral arm crossings cause mass extinction events on Earth. To do this, we created a new model of the Milky Way’s spiral arms by combining a large quantity of data from several surveys. We then combined this model with a recently derived solution for the solar orbit to determine the timing of the Sun’s historical passages through the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Our new model was designed with a symmetrical appearance, with the major alteration being the addition of a spur at the far side of the Galaxy. A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy’s various spiral arms. Also, we briefly discuss and combine previous work on the Galactic Habitable Zone with the new Milky Way model.

misc

huge list of resources for learning russian that i posted earlier this week

this game is really really fucking cool – think minecraft plus starcraft, autism-fuel resource extraction simulator with guns; pirate downloads, wiki, and (mostly russian) community attached to this unofficial site

”I want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.”

link roundup 8

Published:

finals next week! graduation the week after assuming i didn’t fail my online class 😑 lots and lots of reading in the meantime.

reading

When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous — not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs — because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke — freighted with political meaning — suddenly in the news.

[many more links and reading inside this piece]

For the next month, cryptographically unique coupons representing an undisclosed number of Jordanian dinars will be sent to dozens of shops in five refugee camps across the nation. Then, instead of using a smartphone or a paper wallet to access the funds, recipients will rely on yet another emerging technology.

Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

[highly recommended; i’m surprised i hadn’t come across this piece before, rip mark fisher]

Perhaps you noticed: I said that I used to enjoy #FrogTwitter. I haven’t lost my taste for heterodox shitposters, but Twitter keeps banning my faves. @menaquinone4 was knocked out of the sky. I don’t want to link to his current account — both because I’d rather not see him torpedoed again, and because I have no way of knowing whether the current iteration of Mena is run by the original Mena. I never followed @BronzeAgePervert, but he’s another community figure who has been suspended (although not banned… yet… as far as I know).

[…]

I’m a pretty mainstream type of person. You could say that I’m a run-of-the-mill Blue Tribe coastal elite! But I tend to gravitate toward the social fringes. I like people who are outgroup to almost everyone but themselves. I feel more comfortable with those people, because they tend to be nonjudgmental and open to exploring surprising ideas.

Dimitry Kiselev, director general of Russia’s state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya media conglomerate, has said: “Objectivity is a myth which is proposed and imposed on us.”3 Today, thanks to the Internet and social media, the manipulation of our perception of the world is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest vulnerabilities we as individuals and as a society must learn to deal with.Today, many actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities. The situation is complicated by the increasingly rapid evolution of technology for producing and disseminating information. For example, over the past year we have seen a shift from the dominance of text and pictures in social media to recorded video, and even recorded video is being superseded by live video. As the technology evolves, so do the vulnerabilities. At the same time, the cost of the technology is steadily dropping, which allows more actors to enter the scene.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

That points to two options. The first is that the [Shadow Brokers] files came from Hal Martin. He’s the NSA contractor who was arrested in August for hoarding agency secrets in his house for two years. He can’t be the publisher, because the Shadow Brokers are in business even though he is in prison. But maybe the leaker got the documents from his stash: either because Martin gave the documents to them or because he himself was hacked. The dates line up, so it’s theoretically possible, but the contents of the documents speak to someone with a different sort of access. There’s also nothing in the public indictment against Martin that speaks to his selling secrets to a foreign power, and I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that the NSA would leak. But maybe I’m wrong about all of this; Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s him.

The other option is a mysterious second NSA leak of cyberattack tools. The only thing I have ever heard about this is from a Washington Post story about Martin: “But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.” But “not thought to have” is not the same as not having done so.

Debuting during the twilight of the Clinton presidency and spanning much of Bush II’s, it predictably vacillated somewhat in response to events while remaining grounded in a general liberal ethos. Having writing credits for all but one episode in The West Wing’s first four seasons, Sorkin left in 2003, with Executive Producer John Wells characterizing the subsequent direction as more balanced and bipartisan. The Bartlet administration’s actual politics—just like those of the real Democratic Party and its base—therefore run the gamut from the stuff of Elizabeth Warren-esque populism to the neoliberal bilge you might expect to come from a Beltway think tank having its white papers greased by dollars from Goldman Sachs.

But promoting or endorsing any specific policy orientation is not the show’s true raison d’être. At the conclusion of its seven seasons it remains unclear if the Bartlet administration has succeeded at all in fundamentally altering the contours of American life. In fact, after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever. Even in their most unconstrained and idealized political fantasies, liberals manage to accomplish nothing.

How bad is this

That depends. Unless you’ve explicitly enabled AMT at any point, you’re probably fine. The drivers that allow local users to provision the system would require administrative rights to install, so as long as you don’t have them installed then the only local users who can do anything are the ones who are admins anyway. If you do have it enabled, though…

misc

Climate is the ultimate command line tool for Linux. It provides a huge number of command line options for developers to automate their Linux system. This tool can be extremely helpful to learn various unix commands too. There is an option to print each command before they’re executed to help you memorize them over time.

Security tokens are small hardware devices one uses to prove physical access to a computer system in addition to traditional text credentials like a username or a password. The larger an organization gets, the higher the potential of a smartphone or a computer might be accessed by an unauthorized third party.

While adding the requirement of having to physically insert or touch a device to a username and password may seem simple, it is something one can not do remotely. This makes it a highly effective and simple way to greatly limit damage and data theft from remote attackers.

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall. […] OpenSnitch is an application level firewall, meaning then while running, it will detect and alert the user for every outgoing connection applications he’s running are creating. This can be extremely effective to detect and block unwanted connections on your system that might be caused by a security breach, causing data exfiltration to be much harder for an attacker.

link roundup 7

Published:

two more weeks until graduation and whatever the rest of my life is. we’ll see how it goes!

reading

At the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes twenty-first-century France as “an ‘American’ society like any other, unequal and multicultural.” It’s a controversial premise—that inequality and racial diversity are linked as part of the same (American-type) system and that they progress or decline together. Though this premise has been confirmed in much of the West for half a century, the assertion will shock many Americans, conditioned to place “inequality” (bad) and “diversity” (good) at opposite poles of a Manichean moral order. This disconnect is a key reason American political discussions have turned so illogical and rancorous. Certain arguments—for instance, that raising the incomes of American workers requires limiting immigration—can be cast as either sensible or superstitious, legitimate or illegitimate, good or evil, depending on whether the person making them is deemed to be doing so on the grounds of economics or identity.

At a practical level, considerations of economics and ethnicity are getting harder to disentangle. Guilluy has spent years in and out of buildings in northern Paris (his sisters live in public housing), and he is sensitive to the way this works in France. A public-housing development is a community, yes, and one can wish that it be more diverse. But it is also an economic resource that, more and more, is getting fought over tribally. An ethnic Frenchman moving into a heavily North African housing project finds himself threatening a piece of property that members of “the community” think of as theirs. Guilluy speaks of a “battle of the eyes” fought in the lobbies of apartment buildings across France every day, in which one person or the other—the ethnic Frenchman or the immigrant’s son—will drop his gaze to the floor first.

Initial analysis of DARKAPOLLO and AREA51’s public PGP key indicated that both keys were registered to the same email address: Adashc3l@gmail.com. A social-media search for the phrases Adashc3d31 and Adashc3d resulted in the discovery of a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook account belonging to someone identified as “Ahmed Farooq” or “Ch. Ahmed Farooq” (Hereinafter referred to as FAROOQ). The Facebook profile belonging to FAROOQ indicated that he resided in Brooklyn, New York.

In fact, al-Baghdadi creates what Benedict Anderson calls “an imagined community” through the use of powerful propaganda, tapping into the emotions of many Muslims. This isn’t just a cynical attempt, Graeme Wood is right here, ISIS are True Believers-zealots. They may have been former secular officers who were thrown into Abu Ghraib but, just like the F.L.N commander in The Centurions, they had rediscovered their religion, their reality had been shaken with the fall of the modern Iraqi state. These highly trained officers couldn’t just return to the coffee shops to smoke a fat Zaghloul and drink bitter coffee, lamenting the presence of US marines on their streets. That jarred with their sense of honour, no, they would return to Fallujah and Mosul where their families were and fight. These officers did what an Algerian officer in The Centurion did, they gave their failed country “a history and a personality.” They grabbed the black ‘Abbasid’ flag and made it synonymous with Islamicate. Heavily reliant on ‘salvation history’, they created a vision that the banner of Islam spread from East to West. They ignored historical reality where at one point there were three caliphates that vied for power with each other, and that even after the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, no caliph existed at all for several years. ISIS did what Lartéguy says happened in Algeria, they created a history based on the cemeteries of the dead not based on historical reality. It was Fake News caliphated.

Land and Moldbug also raise the question of alternatives, which, in the spirit of Thiel, requires “recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism.” In “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Moldbug related his own trajectory from a progressive to a Jacobite. He rejected the political correctness and politeness of progressives by proposing to instrumentalize Hitler and the reactionary thought of fascism. This is a form of ideology critique descended from radical left thinking about what happens when ideas and practices are institutionalized. It is only in the “cathedral” that ethics and dogma overlap. But while for the non-academic left, this dogma is ineffective and benign, for the neoreactionaries it is an existential threat; political correctness becomes a toxic threat to Western Civilization.

It’s as if some alien intelligence was reprogramming humanity through the immanent transforms of our own socio-cultural matrix of possibilities. Those like Nick Land on the extreme edge of philosophical speculation, or those like R. Scott Bakker from within the naturalist scientific paradigm both agree we are undergoing and entering a crash space that is rewiring our physical and mental systems to the point of no return. That all our connections to the human meaning systems and realities that have guided us during the great Agricultural phases of civilization and kept us connected to the rhythms of the natural world and the phases of the cycles of moon and stars is at an end. We are becoming machininc and artificial, bifurcating our cunning intelligence from its natural roots and entering the digital civilization of a new connectionism that is undermining the human and replacing it with the inhuman or neohuman.

Many will see this as pure fantasy and literary humbug. Many will continue to resist such as tomfoolery and madness. Many will refuse the great transition and will try to stabilize and remain in their traditional worlds, bound to the old ways of earth and the natural. And, yet, they will be few and far between, creatures of a subworld that will not become other, transcend their human heritage and will be left behind in a world of dying embers. Traditionalists and reactionaries of every stripe hold onto the old sovereign mythologies of power, control, kingship, Great Leaders, and the power of tyranny and authoritarian monarchical thought and regulation.

here, I’ll limit myself to the abstract form of these “runaway suppressors”. they are complimentary to the runaway producer of techno-commercialism: the less it happens, the less it happens. in such a way that they intrinsically contain a program for their own dissolution: as soon as their object of suppression vanishes – thus liberating the productive process that engineered them – they themselves vanish. it’s friction that produces them.

suppression, in such analysis, means compensating the compensators. a few forms for that to happen:

  • counter-taxation: mechanisms through which taxation is dodged or reversed (anything from tax dodging, money laundering, corporate welfare, etc).
  • illegibility: ways through which agents become invisible to the state apparatus, and thus can operate beyond, behind or beneath its regulations.
  • cypherpolitics: becoming grey to the colorful politics, effectively avoiding social outcomes based on political discourse. cryptographic media use, in a way that allows science to become neutral because anonymous. also, other uses of unidentity. (seriously, the link explains way better)
  • exit: if some idiot thinks tariffs are a good idea, you move. neo-nomadism should be a thing already.

That notion of impartial, universal caring has been, if not abandoned, then at least grossly distorted by certain academics on the far-Left. Over the past several centuries, our scope of moral concern has been expanding. Many of us now appreciate the virtue of caring for people of other races, cultures, religions, and gender identities in a way that nearly all of our ancestors didn’t. My worry is that identity politics is morally regressive—encouraging the spread of ideas which will contract the scope of our moral concern. Instead of promoting a notion of caring characterized by universality and impartiality, the far-Left seems to be pushing a localized and deeply partial notion of caring which extends only to those with whom we can personally identify.

But the thing I don’t understand is why do you care? This was the final question of my Rhodes nomination interview. I can’t properly express the frustration I feel whenever this question is put to me. Every time I try to explain the importance of extreme poverty, and every time my answer isn’t good enough.

misc

LinuxBBQ is a multi-purpose operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux “sid” branch, spiced up with kernels and tools from siduction, grml and our users!

The BBQ offers different flavours and desktops to build up from (“Roast Your Own”) that can be customized and remixed by the user. Community contributions are consequently implemented.

Furthermore, special purpose desktop solutions are being actively developed and released.

The editions - coming in different setups of WM/DE and applications - are designed to be configured and customized by the end-user, producing redistributable ISOs that are bootable from USB, CD or DVD can be easily produced in short time.

link roundup 6

Published:

reading

I don’t remember much about 2009 — I think I was in 9th grade, or maybe 10th — but I know almost every line of dialogue in that year’s finest YouTube video: “Hanwei Practical XL Katana Unveiling HD,” posted by the user “That Sodding Gamer.” If you haven’t seen it, you won’t be disappointed. In it, a man who looks to be in his late 20s unboxes a mid-range replica sword with the help of his mother and younger brother. He recounts his past encounters with low-quality swords as he struggles to remove the plastic packaging. His demeanor is alternately bored and petulant, even as he comes face to face with his long-awaited $210 purchase. His mother, entrusted with the camera, seems to annoy him. Her bemusement at her adult son’s interests is palpable, but she sounds resigned to her fate: Her grandchildren will be swords and sarcastic T-shirts. Such is life in an austerity economy.

The findings, published March 24 in Science, offer a critical insight into how and why the body’s ability to fix DNA dwindles over time and point to a previously unknown role for the signaling molecule NAD as a key regulator of protein-to-protein interactions in DNA repair. NAD, identified a century ago, is already known for its role as a controller of cell-damaging oxidation.

Additionally, experiments conducted in mice show that treatment with the NAD precursor NMN mitigates age-related DNA damage and wards off DNA damage from radiation exposure.

Nick Land’s neoreactionary, right-wing accelerationism is racist in any conventional sense of that term. Yet Land is also a quite interesting thinker of capitalism, and because capitalism, broadly defined, is the reality that structures and will continue to structure human existence throughout the foreseeable future, he is perhaps worth paying attention to. His overriding political and ethical ‘goal,’ from which his racism, his eugenicism, and technological fetishism spring, is optimize for intelligence, which for him is both the Darwinian law of the universe (‘Gnon’), as well as a functional description of what really-exisiting capitalism actually does. Even to call it a ‘goal’ is misleading, as for Land capitalism is an abolition of Hume’s is/ought distinction. What capitalism ‘should’ do (optimize for intelligence) is, as a matter of fact, what it does. Land’s Acclerationism, insofar as it can be understood as a political program, simply counsels that we let this process be, because we don’t really have the capability to control it anyway.

But the progressive detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor poses a threat to our nation’s future prosperity. It can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth than we might otherwise expect. And the troubles posed by this male flight from work are by no means solely economic. It is also a social crisis – and, I shall argue, a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family. It casts those who nature designed to be strong into the role of dependents – on their wives or girlfriends, on their aging parents, or on government welfare. Among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of civic responsibilities, it instead encourages sloth, idleness, and vices perhaps more insidious. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, this feature of the American condition – the new “men without work” normal – is inimical to the American tradition of self-reliance…

Attackers that have capabilities to deliver high intensity acoustic interference in close proximity to the target MEMS sensor [embedded accelerometers in consumer electronics] can spoof the sensor to output arbitrary, attacker–chosen, signals. Our experiments demonstrate the spelling of the word “WALNUT” over the output signal of a MEMS accelerometer. With proper knowledge of the algorithms that are utilizing the polluted sensor data, adversaries may be able to control the behavior of a system that relies on the sensor data to make automated decisions.

It’s not just about the emerging economies in general, but rather one such economy in particular: China. By purchasing power parity measures China is now the No. 1 economy, and the world’s leading exporter, in addition to its longstanding role as the world’s most populous country. It has had an almost unbroken string of high-growth years since 1979, often at double-digit rates, and it avoided much of the negative fallout from the financial crisis. Its geopolitical influence and its military have been gaining on the U.S. or Europe for decades.

If several generations of Westerners were intrigued by communism, Marxism, Stalinism and even Maoism, is it so implausible to think they might feel some kind of magnetic attraction to the less liberal systems that are flourishing today?

How much of a threat is postmodernism to science? There are certainly some external attacks. In the recent protests against a talk given by Charles Murray at Middlebury, the protesters chanted, as one,

“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.'”

When the organizers of the March for Science tweeted:

“colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues,” many scientists immediately criticized this politicization of science and derailment of the focus on preservation of science to intersectional ideology. In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative.

link roundup 5

Published:

not so many posts this last week or two. i’m getting close to graduating and i’m a little preoccupied between that and my girlfriend. i still have a few ideas for interesting things besides regular features, though.

onward!

reading

In the realm of military action the particularity of this vision of reality via lines of force or faith lines is that the world will be observed through the target tube of a weapon, or, to put it simply, through a weapon. This kind of vision is also most commonly applied in video war games by which the aesthetics of ISIS’s visual material is heavily influenced. A picture of two ISIS fighters inserted into a still from the game Call of Duty symbolizes the video game affinities of ISIS culture and has become famous as it has been widely circulated on the internet. In general, ISIS appropriates aesthetic codes from action movies and video games or it even appropriates entire games. The ISIS video Grand Theft Auto: Salil al-Sawarem is entirely made out of sequences from the video game Grand Theft Auto, reproducing only the most violent scenes and making the nasheed chant the only original contribution.

The popularization of Bitcoin, a decentralized crypto-currency has inspired the production of several alternative, or “alt”, currencies. Ethereum, CryptoNote, and Zerocash all represent unique contributions to the cryptocurrency space. Although most alt currencies harbor their own source of innovation, they have no means of adopting the innovations of other currencies which may succeed them. We aim to remedy the potential for atrophied evolution in the crypto-currency space by presenting Tezos, a generic and self-amending crypto-ledger.

Tezos can instantiate any blockchain based protocol. Its seed protocol specifies a procedure for stakeholders to approve amendments to the protocol, including amendments to the amendment procedure itself. Upgrades to Tezos are staged through a testing environment to allow stakeholders to recall potentially problematic amendments.

Lenin and Wilson both believed that ideology could liberate mankind from imperialism. Articulated within days of each other, their competing messianic visions both aimed to de-Europeanize global geopolitics after three centuries of the Old World’s dominance. One knows a systemic crisis when it spawns challenges from both geographic and political extremes. Aiming to overcome the geopolitical legacy of the “long nineteenth century,” Wilson and Lenin assumed that the proliferation of ideologically similar regimes would ensure peace. Their visions’ competitive symbiosis would define the fate of the world for the rest of the century. But although the age of ideologically driven foreign policy had begun, it did not evolve in a linear fashion.

The FBI first launched its advanced biometric database, Next Generation Identification, in 2010, augmenting the old fingerprint database with further capabilities including facial recognition. The bureau did not inform the public about its newfound capabilities nor did it publish a privacy impact assessment, required by law, for five years.

Unlike with the collection of fingerprints and DNA, which is done following an arrest, photos of innocent civilians are being collected proactively. The FBI made arrangements with 18 different states to gain access to their databases of driver’s license photos.

If Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s, promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, the Ccru responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme. They saw capital itself as the protagonist of history, with humans as grist for the mill. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land wrote in his essay “Machinic Desire.” For Land, the Basilisk was already here.

At the time, Benjamin Noys took note of this philosophical trajectory, initially calling it “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Eventually, in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, he gave it a pithier name, the application of which has been both broadly extended and hotly contested: accelerationism. Noys focused his critique on a particular misreading of Marx as a hybrid technological determinist and catastrophist, which licensed the idea that if the accumulation of capital generates and exacerbates the conditions that lead to its dissolution, then it is the duty of radicals to urge capital to fully realize and hence negate itself. Broadly conceived, the futurist telelogy this term denotes demonstrates the basis for its alignment with the Singularitarian ideology, seeing the exponential growth of technology as the key to the next stage of human species.

What Chiang really wanted to talk about was science fiction. We spoke about free will (“I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”), the literary tradition of naturalism (“a fundamentally science-fictional approach of trying to work out the logical consequences of an idea”), time travel (he thinks of “A Christmas Carol” as the first time-travel story), and the metaphorical and political incoherence of Neill Blomkamp’s aliens-under-apartheid movie “District 9” (he believes that “Alien Nation,” in which the aliens are framed as immigrants, is more rigorously thought through). Chiang reframes questions before answering them, making fine philosophical distinctions. He talks more about concepts than he does about people. “I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that’s not my primary goal as a writer,” he said, over lunch. “My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas.”

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpolitics and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

Algo VPN is a set of Ansible scripts that simplifies the setup of a personal IPSEC VPN. It contains the most secure defaults available, works with common cloud providers, and does not require client software on most devices.

vim links

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i’ve been spending the last couple of weeks trying to dive into learning vim, and i’ve made at least a little progress. in the misc links section of link roundup last week, i pointed to my vimrc. i’ve been incrementally adding features to it, and it’s really been shaping up – i have a default layout and color scheme i genuinely enjoy using, and i’ve remapped a few shortcuts most recently.

i’m only just beginning to learn the vim syntax – the way it uses verbs, nouns and modifiers, and i’m genuinely impressed with some examples i’ve seen of what it’s capable of. i’m putting this post together as a collection of resources i’ve saved, to pass along to anyone interested in giving it a shot.

link roundup 3

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i’ve got a little pattern down now – i have a page on my vimwiki where i record my candidate links for the week, then burn off a few when i decide to post. i also finally linked this blog to the outside world today. if anyone got here from twitter, let me know in the comments. on to the links:

reading

Whereas in the past tongue mutilation was the last resort to use in order to preserve your secrets, the digital realm has developed a material base where multiple identities can flourish and harden into protective obscurity. Cypherpolitics is advanced by these tools, but only to an extent. Technological migration is a necessity. The minute one tool is compromised, depleted, it is best to find a replacement. Resorting to deletion is not succumbing to an opponent’s or system’s pressures, but something cypherpolitics actively encourages. Deletion immediately refreshes anonymous intergrity and anonymity is the backbone of cypherpolitics- its most powerful feature. If your identities coincide across various platforms, forming patterns, your traces will lead clues. The data sniffer forms beliefs from this picture; denunciation follows. To avoid this, it is necessary to encrypt yourself.

In response to emailed questions, Williamson said that although the list price for Evzio is more than $4,000, that’s “not a true net price to anyone … due to numerous discounts and rebates that are negotiated in the supply chain that make up our healthcare system.”

In other words, even though the price tag for his company’s easy-to-use, lifesaving device is ridiculous and indefensible, there’s no need to worry because backroom deals by assorted players in the healthcare food chain make that price tag meaningless.

This stunning advertisement does a thorough job of showcasing Philadelphia’s many features, including the ability to generate PDF reports and charts of victims “to track your malware campaigns” as well as the ability to plot victims around the world using Google Maps.

“Everything just works,” claim the proprietors of Philadelphia. “Get your lifetime copy. One payment. Free updates. No monthly fees.”

The laughter has now stopped, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons systems. “This idea that these things were just bargaining chips — something that was true years ago — is superseded by the fact that there is now a rocket force . . . with a commander and a headquarters and subordinate bases, all with missiles,” said Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “This is now a living, breathing thing.”

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.

The emergence of post-rationality/post-truth/post-systemism/etc is the final triumph of what we might call Irony. The iron-clad position of ultimate immunity to everything, the ferrous dark tower against which pin the world must be turned aside, the point of nuclear stability from which no further action can be extracted. Not merely to unthink your thoughts, not merely to meet a stop-sign and turn back, but to unthink the thoughts about unthinking, and the thoughts about that, quine the whole thing and be done with discourse forever. Ironic detachment beyond merely a new level, but taken to a whole new realm of smug disengagement, an Alcubierre drive running on exotic logic, causally disconnected from the rest of reason and already accelerating away to some absurd infinity.

Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about “rich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas” more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it: “Could quantitative easing help end wage stagnation? Instead of asking macroeconomists, let’s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!” But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.

  • tilda terminal – drop-down terminal à la guake, but lighter-weight and plays nice with i3

  • teach yourself computer science – i probably won’t have enough time to plow through much of this on the remainder of my break, but it looks promising

  • syncany – self-hosted spideroak alternative

link roundup 2

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this week’s link roundup. two of them are from scott alexander’s newest link post, apologies for redundancy 😛

mostly editorials and longform, but a little more varied than last week’s.

The construction cost of the printed house amounted to $10134, which is approximately $275 per square meter, taking in account that partners have provided the highest quality materials, and building itself has an extraordinary shape. This cost includes all the works that were done to make a complete house: work and materials for the construction of foundation, roof, exterior and interior finishing works, installation of heat insulation of walls, windows, floors and ceilings.

The decision to intensify the cyber and electronic strikes, in early 2014, came after Mr. Obama concluded that the $300 billion spent since the Eisenhower era on traditional antimissile systems, often compared to hitting “a bullet with a bullet,” had failed the core purpose of protecting the continental United States. Flight tests of interceptors based in Alaska and California had an overall failure rate of 56 percent, under near-perfect conditions. Privately, many experts warned the system would fare worse in real combat.

So the Obama administration searched for a better way to destroy missiles. It reached for techniques the Pentagon had long been experimenting with under the rubric of “left of launch,” because the attacks begin before the missiles ever reach the launchpad, or just as they lift off. For years, the Pentagon’s most senior officers and officials have publicly advocated these kinds of sophisticated attacks in little-noticed testimony to Congress and at defense conferences.

We should try and appreciate why fields like psychology have integrated biology so much more quickly, and so much more completely, than others like sociology. In large part, sociology maintains certain “sacred values” — beliefs that cannot be challenged and lines that must not be crossed — that make integration very difficult. The history of scientific inquiry is one of violence done to human intuition. Sometimes that has meant trading in our sacred ideas when presented with new information. Sociology seems loath to do this.

While the EU is distracted with the fallout from Brexit and Russian meddling in national elections, militant jihadists will be streaming back into Europe, some of them determined to strike. And while transnational terrorists will undoubtedly flock to Libya and Yemen, the real challenge will be preventing further attacks around the globe, including in major European cities.

According to the former senior U.S. special operations official and a current military consultant, both of whom were briefed on the raid, the SEALs discovered by the time they arrived in the village that their operation had been compromised. It is still unclear how those on the ground were tipped off, but a current consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees SEAL Team 6, said the command is investigating whether UAE forces involved in the raid revealed the details of the mission before the SEALs arrived in al Ghayil. (However, local residents, who are used to hearing the buzz of drones in the remote area, said they noticed the unusual presence of helicopters around 9 p.m. the night before the raid, which raised concern.)

Yet, the arrangement where Middle Eastern rulers relied heavily on the religious elite for legitimacy also meant that they were hesitant to take actions that would undermine the religious establishment. This included intruding on the religious establishment’s authority over commercial law. So long as Islam remained a powerful source of legitimacy, the benefits to employing religious legitimacy outweighed its relatively modest costs (i.e., ceding authority over certain aspects of the law) to such a degree that Middle Eastern rulers did not feel the need to bring the economic elite to the bargaining table. Indeed, merchants, money-changers, and others engaged in large scale commerce rarely had political power in the Islamic Middle East.

related: What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by bernard lewis (ebook)

Now, Saunders also links to a study which suggests that “half to three-quarters” of the difference can be accounted for by socioeconomic status. Maybe so. But crime is crime. If you’re the victim of assault from a Syrian refugee, you don’t really care if it happened because he’s Syrian or because he’s poorer than average.

She herself is wary of any alignment with the right wing. Back in the ’90s, she took umbrage when she was sometimes branded a conservative, and would respond by stressing her rebel credentials: She was out as a lesbian back in the late ’60s, she hated censorship, hated prudery, wanted to liberalize alcohol and drug laws — how could she possibly be a conservative? And yet, by the logic of shared mutual enemies, her attacks on liberalism make her work useful artillery (with the added credibility of coming from someone ostensibly in the enemy camp). She hasn’t paid much attention to the rise of the alt-right, but, she said, “elite discourse about gender has become so nonsensical and removed from reality that rowdy outbreaks of resistance and rebellion are unsurprising.”

Ransomware with the ability to enforce payments would provide a potent funding source for another type of autonomous agent: a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or (DAO). These systems are “corporations” that consist entirely of code that runs on a consensus network like Ethereum. They’re driven by rules, and are capable of both receiving and transmitting funds without (direct) instruction from human beings.

that last link has given me some ideas for a short story – i’m still mulling over it, but there are a few ideas i’m excited about. watch this space, but no promises.

foss software

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i switched to linux about 2.5 years ago, after using windows my entire life, starting with 3.1 on a desktop in my room that i got in 1997. i have to say i am absolutely delighted with the state of desktop linux. i tried using linux on my computers a few times over the years without having it stick – first with suse on a laptop in 2002 using cd’s i picked up at a used bookstore, then with ubuntu in about 2010. both times i got fed up with minor annoyances that required much more work to fix than i was used to, inside an unfamiliar paradigm that frustrated me.

what changed this time? well, i put openwrt on a router, and had to use vi to edit the configuration. i finally sat down to learn basic cli functions beyond simply copying commands verbatim from tutorials, and found that it had a relatively straightforward logic to it. i wanted to try unix-like operating systems again and see if i could hack it. this time around, my computers worked flawlessly out of the box, and i didn’t have to fix any fundamental issues. i did one online tutorial in particular – learn the command line, by codecademy – which left me feeling genuinely excited about understanding how computers worked for the first time since i was a kid.

i’ve since switched to linux on every pc i own, and i’ve become one of ‘those guys’ when i talk about computers with friends now. but i can’t help it, i think this stuff is genuinely really fun.

currently i use xubuntu (ubuntu with xfce) on my desktop, an asus vivopc – nothing very special, but a cute little box – and galliumos on my toshiba chromebook 2, which is an xubuntu derivative distro meant for chromebooks.

galliumos is a real treasure – it’s very lightweight, very fast, and all of my hardware works perfectly. my toshiba was chosen almost arbitrarily, just trying to balance between reviews and pricepoint, but i made a really good choice with it on one particular point: it comes with a 16gb ssd, which i swapped out for a 128gb. that was the main constraint on it in its stock configuration, but with the 128 i don’t have to worry about a crowded disk. even with full disk encryption (via luks, which is selected during install), it goes from boot to logged in in under ten seconds.

i intend to dive in a little deeper at some point, and will probably try installing arch on a machine once i’m comfortable restoring from backups, but for now i’m very pleased with my software configurations and workflows.

anyway, the reason i wanted to make this particular post was to share some of the software i’ve found that i’m excited about – the stuff that justifies switching to linux, in my opinion. so are some of my favorite examples:

  1. sshuttle

    • this was the first piece of linux software that got me seriously excited: if you have a user account on a remote server you can ssh into, you can tunnel your whole connection through it – a poor man’s vpn. vpn’s aren’t expensive to begin with, but i pay $15/year for one with ramnode. it’s also much simpler than configuring openvpn or similar on your server, and requires much less overhead (somewhat necessary when your vps has 128mb of memory!). one small issue: on every computer i’ve tried running the sshuttle client on, on the first attempt after a boot, it will give an error message and drop the connection immediately. not to worry though, because it will work on second attempt with no hitches. if you have rsa key auth set up on ssh, you don’t even need to enter a password. simply alias sudo sshuttle -r user@server 0/0 to ‘proxy’ or something. voila! you have transparently forwarded your connection. a friend uses it with a vps in the uk to watch geolocked content.

  2. vimwiki

  • a personal wiki inside of vim, which uses markdown, and autoindexes entries. i use this to take notes for school, and keep my working directory in a folder in spideroak to sync between my computers. it also has an excellent export to html function. mostly, i’m using this to work on my vim abilities.
  1. atom
  • cross-platform, extensible, and beautiful text editor developed by github. i use this for editing the markdown files for this blog, primarily, though i intend to use it if/when i force myself to learn some programming. it’s a real pleasure to use, especially with a dark theme.
  1. borg/borgmatic
  • cli backup software, which deduplicates and supports encryption. backup to anywhere you can ssh into, and encrypt it if you don’t trust whoever controls it. borgmatic is a script to automatic the backups, and enforce rules – eg pruning old backups.
  1. pass
  • cli keepass/lastpass alternative. saves each entry into an individual gpg-encrypted file, making it similarly portable (and combine well with) borg. to be honest, i don’t use this because i’m stuck on lastpass’s convenience, but i’m glad it exists. if i (or you) ever decide to switch, there is fortunately a script to export lastpass-to-pass. if lastpass ever has a security breach that shakes my faith in them, this is what i intend to fall back onto.
  1. redshift
  • this is simply an open source clone of f.lux – if you’re unfamiliar with it, it shifts the light temperature of your monitor towards warm/orange tint as the sun goes down. the idea is that blue light disrupts your internal clock and can hurt your sleep. instead, your monitor has a warm cfl-like glow as the night goes on. i find it much easier to look at, in any case.
  1. fish
  • shell with syntax highlighting, autofinishing for commands and tabbing through flags, auto-generated manpages(!), and generally a much friendlier feel than bash. i’ve just switched to this as my default shell and i’m very pleased with it. “finally, a shell for the 90s”.