You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King
Card was the most savage author from that period by a long shot, "I Put My Blue Genes On" basically described the last year to a T.
Ender's Game is great, but he will never be appreciated for what he actually did. Ender's Game came after he worked through that earlier horror.
Or "Breathing Exercises," or whatever that story was called
If you haven't read it you can't argue with me, these stories were all nightmares
Dogwalker, or The Fat Farm, holy fuck, nobody understands how terrifying Card's stories were. Eumenedies in the 4th Floor Lavatory. Card was utter horror, an actual madman, and no one remembers this
These are from Maps in a Mirror, if I'm remembering right. Orson Scott Card was the greatest horror author since Lovecraft, hands down, these stories terrorized me. I'm gonna dig them back up
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To understand leftism, you just have to understand its fundamental animating goal, which it turns out is very straightforward: to dissolve us all into interchangeable human gray goo
Once you've got that in place, everything else follows from it
The mind naturally recoils from this goal, because of how unnatural it is. It throws up all kinds of rationalizations, "No, it's about protecting those who can't protect themselves"
Yeah, you're making my point. The value of harm reduction, continued to its end goal, is gray goo
This basic principle immediately exposes the flaw at the core of Marxism, which the modern liberal "right" treats as Ur-Leftism, because the "liberal right" is itself a ridiculous contradiction, doomed by its inability to reach back *beyond* Communism
"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
lol, right. "We at the highly scrupulous Intercept would never 'expose' our political enemies, who we definitely don't report on because we hate them. We just wait for any outlet with even lower standards to make these people a matter of public interest—and *then* we expose them"
This is Activist Journalism 101, it's a completely incestuous movement, "respected" outlets know they can just sit back and wait for millennial bottom-feeder outlets to "do the work" for them
Then they're allowed to link to it, as legitimate journalism, and launder it upwards
As this process has continued it's become even more pathetic than that, their justification isn't even some VICE article written by a 21-year-old college girl, it's literally "online speculation"
Oh wait "Multiple links to speculation," so now we get to launder it into fact
So while it's true that Trump really didn't even want to do anything that outrageous, the reason the system spent five years squealing like it was dying was because even that much would have kneecapped it
Not ended it, not at all—but crippled it, yes
Look, to me, neoliberalism has two core modules: its economic module, and its social module
Leaving the latter aside, its economic module is globalism, there's no arguing that. And two of the core components of globalism are free movement of goods, and free movement of people
I don't really "believe" this. But as the traditional means of manipulating a population toward the desired goals become less and less effective, actual supervillainy is going to become more tempting—esp as you still own the means of propaganda. They'll defend whatever you do