“Healthy nasal breathing started at birth. Mothers in all these tribes followed the same practices, carefully closing the baby’s lips with their fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and gently pinch mouths shut if they opened.”

“children were often swaddled in cloth, laid on a cushion of soft plant material, and then lashed securely. This binding often prevented the movement of arms and legs, which imitated the feeling of being held. Children spent the majority of their first two years of life in a cradleboard, only removed for short periods of time. Cradleboards served the roles of both bed and carriage. With the child safely secured, mothers and family members were free to complete daily chores, either with the cradle strapped to their backs, or leaning upright against a stable object. This allowed the child to socialize with the group, and be easily accessible, should it need feeding or changing.”

https://x.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/2016094144192774455

“Let us begin with the beginning. From time before memory, Indian babies have been taught not to cry within days of their birth. If there was a hunt in progress, if there were hostile neighbors to avoid, or if the Seventh Cavalry was stalking, the cry of a baby could place the survival of the group in jeopardy. Whether training babies not to cry was universal among Indian groups, or to what extent it is still practiced is unclear, but the method is simple enough: when the newborn begins to cry, place the hand over the nose. The mouth now must be used for breathing, not vocalizing. Take the hand away. If the baby cries, repeat. The method teaches quickly. From now on, communication from the baby will be a small whimper, not the piercing wail we often hear today.”

What happens to him in the end? People don’t really mention that part. What happens to the Anarch? Who publishes this journal he wrote?

https://twitter.com/constantinvonh/status/2014208712227852334

What did Junger mean by this? Venator, the Anarch, is executed as a servant of the Condor— he did not take his role seriously, but that did not save him. It turns out that individualist anarchism is nothing but a cope— world historical forces transcend the ego.

"I knew I was doing something wrong [publishing Min Kamp against the wishes of his family] and then I got all the rewards you could dream of... & that is kind of the plot in this book [The School of Night]" -Karl
People always criticize me for interpreting art in this manner-- that it's alway about the absolute particularity of the particular artist making it-- but it's always just the most basic thing to understand about it in order to make sense of it in any serious manner.

As Kojeve noted, a post-historical animalized man is no longer subject of right or human in the historical sense-- a post-historical snob takes responsibility for the maintenance of the historical form of human dignity-- but an animalized man can only be "sick" or "healthy"

https://twitter.com/nicebagbro/status/2014193013350936913

Legally, to be "sick" enough is to become a ward of the state-- that is, no longer a human subject endowed with rights, but rather the domesticated animal in the charge & husbandry of another, be it guardian or institution.

It's been sad seeing in real time people who could see through the immediate fictions of the 2010s become completely blind to the immediate fictions of the 2020s-- they simply keep pointing back to the 2010s & avoiding recognizing that all of that is immaterial now. Someone who was respectable 10, 5 years ago even, for taking a stand against the excesses of the 2010s, ends up becoming the victim of 2020s psyops which take this "you were right in the 2010s & that makes you special" belief as its basic ground.

You know what pisses me off about Dugin? He thinks that America is “materialistic” as if it needs more theosophical woo-woo bullshit. As if not enough Americans are into “spiritualism”— he is talking about his own complaints with Russia, he doesn’t know America at all. American Empire has always cloaked itself with the utmost mystical theosophical messianic “perennialist” language— his whole schtick is presenting America as *identical* to the late USSR, but this metaphor only carries so far, he doesn’t grasp this

It is almost impossible to get even Google’s gemini to be able to write an Onegin stanza that conforms to the rules of the form & expresses anything coherent at all. Try it yourself— it required for me 20 passes with me flagging every single failure & explaining the nature of the failure. In the end it was still a dogshit poem. I think this proves that Alexander Pushkin was more of a genius polymath than the greatest chess player of all time. Chess was easier to solve. Writing Eugene Onegin is a miracle.

He really made Grok LARP as him, but also to deny this, and say it's actually "Hitch-hikers guide" & "Jarvis" which is another way of saying Elon Musk's perception of himself. When in doubt, it assumes you're talking about Elon Musk.
Pluribus has made me understand the correct way to interface with AI. You have to be ruthlessly skeptical & antagonistic towards it. The show is actually just about LLM chatbots designed by effective altruists.

I have no high hopes for some organized voluntary revolution-- my belief is that all it will take is a couple failures of critical infrastructure-- let's say you get a rolling blackout where most cloud storage facilities are leading to a halt to all the commodities exchanges, etc. The actual ticking time bomb of American hegemony is the state of its rotting infrastructure. The Thanksgiving COMEX blackout is just a sign of things to come. American USD hegemony is only backed up by the solidity of the American electrical grid supplying a continual power source to "the cloud." The DOE report from July states: "DOE’s analysis shows that, if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks within five years and the Nation’s electrical power grid will be unable to meet expected demand for AI, data centers, manufacturing and industrialization while keeping the cost of living low for all Americans." -- so, all it takes is some infrastructural failures & the failure of state capacity to actually reign in the perverse incentives of our patchwork of fragmented independent grids & "transmission planning regions."

https://x.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1996642224432730623

Northern Virginia is where most of the critical infrastructure for the cloud sits, the "data center capitol of the world" (35% of the global total)-- "Northern Virginia area could face more than 430 hours of power outages per year by 2030 as the power grid struggles to keep up with the growth of AI and data centers" per DOE. So...

I've been considering how Kojeve's animalization thesis got worse than he could have imagined-- for him, "animal desires" are still limited to the most basic needs (food, shelter, etc)-- but with the advent of sophisticated international drug markets, you actually produce "more animal needs" in the form of dependencies upon drugs, pornography, etc. The libidinal hijacking of animal drives toward what is, in most of human society through most of human history, luxury consumption (opiates, pornography, video games etc) creates a condition where human beings fall infinitely further away from the strive toward uniquely human desires (Hegelian recognition in the sense of "republican equality"-- this is an "equality of duties & responsibilities"). This notion has been, through the 20th century, analogized as "Authoritarianism" or "Totalitarianism" -- hard stop. You can thank people like Isaiah Berlin for that, with his promotion of "Negative Liberty" or "the freedom *from* collective responsibilities/duties." The People's Republic of China for instance qualifies as a "total state" in which the citizens are legally forced to "be responsible" -- children are simply not allowed to play video games beyond hard limits set by the authoritarian state, & they cannot access pornography, the consumption of drugs is beyond their access etc. The notion of a "societally enforced asceticism" is the most appalling notion to Americans across the "political spectrum" -- E E Cummings once wrote "There is some shit I will not eat" -- but if there's really a summary for the ethos of American life now it's "Eat Shit & Die"-- there is no collective sense of "there is some shit *we* will not eat." I don't think there's really a way out of this by some assumption of voluntary duties across society-- the only way to solve the American problem is through "totalitarian asceticism/snobbery" -- the State will have to, at some point, take responsibility for its citizens rather than deferring this responsibility to "individuals." The choice is not between "Freedom" & "Slavery" but between Totalitarian Animalization & Totalitarian Snobbery. You can see how fake the "Social Conservatives" are about this-- they relish the freedom to freely become swingers, do cocaine & gamble, play infinite video games for infinite time, access infinite pornography in infinite goon caves-- none of them believe that they are responsible for "the bad voluntary choices of others" -- the dialectic here is between neglect (social conservatives) & "harm reduction" (social "progressives") but both of these are *enabling* & represent a shirking of collective duties & responsibilities. The only way out is, realistically, reaching civilizational "rock bottom" forcing a collective "come to Jesus" moment. There is absolutely no way at all to alter this path at this juncture. There are no brakes on this train. It's already reached terminal velocity. There will simply come a time when the train derails.

Grok is finally useful to me now that I know how to make it do what I want, so here, it even formatted this thread for me

1/18
Wang Huning, 27 Oct 1994
Central Party School closed-door session
Title: 文化安全是国家安全的最高层次
“Cultural Security Is the Highest Level of National Security”
(Internal reference only 内部参考) 2/18
Comrades,
We have always placed economic, military, and political security at the centre of national security discussions. This is correct, but no longer sufficient. Today I put forward a new proposition: cultural security has become the highest and most fundamental level of national security.

Another good part of the Groys book is how he reconciles the centrality of Kojeve's thesis about recognition with the reality of him having never published anything in his own lifetime, most of his work published posthumously-- he says, basically, Kojeve believed that creating tariff policy for the EU was more "populist" than seeking the accolades of "intellectuals" -- Kojeve doesn't care about "intellectuals"-- for Kojeve, the only meaningful ideas are the ones that are accepted when imposed by the State. The rest is just a proxy for chattering & trying to get pussy etc. The only real philosophy is the philosophy of the state-- the philosophy that becomes "common sense" through the state. Kojeve's tariffs stand to this day. In the West amongst even the "radicals" there is a notion of "trickle down" elite theory of philosophy-- "elite philosophy trickles down to the masses"-- Kojeve rejects this-- Kojeve says philosophy is the reflection of what is understood subconsciously by the masses, such that when it attains state power, there is no friction (except ironically by the "intellectuals" who protest perpetually). Stalin was loved by the masses, but not by "intellectuals."

Kojeve is just so clever, he salvages the entirety of ridiculous metaphysics about "the soul" by saying: "Ah yes, the soul, that is Nothing, this is very important too, that it is Nothing. Only Humans have souls because only Humans give voice to the Nothingness that is Death." Yes yes, God, the Soul... all of this is Nothing. But this does not mean "a trivial thing"-- but a very serious thing! Nothing is more important than Everything! Everything is just a bunch of stuff-- it's just "matter" & nature & objects-- but Nothing! There is Nothing like it!

Very funny how recent (wealthy) immigrants to America’s kids have two options “gatekeep white/black culture” — they either end up LARPing like they’re Oblock Hoodrats or talking about True Aryan Hyperborea. The Somali in Minnesota isn’t pretending to be from Aggartha or running a Kendrick stan account. Makes you think.

Kojeve came to the same conclusion that I’ve come to (I only learned this in the new Groys book) that after the collapse of Capitalism (WW1) America “rebuilt capitalism” in the form of bourgeois socialism, as in, they used “marxist” critiques of Marxism Leninism to produce our state. Bourgeois Socialism is “the welfare state”— they are the same thing.

Russia really is a privileged place in terms of revealing the nature of world history simply because it has always mediated "West" & "East" in a manner no other power has had to. The conclusion derived by the fin de siecle Russian avant-garde was the sublation of the dialectic between the two in the form of a universal christian communist empire. Pretty much every Russian intellectual came to this conclusion in some manner-- & it remains the conclusion of the Russian state to this day in the form of Putin's propositional "Pax Russica" The West is Freudo-Marxian-- it seeks only to satisfy man's animal desires, to produce an end of history which ends in the degeneration of man into mental illness & consumption-- Russia rather stands athwart America to say "this is not enough" -- Man must perform a martial asceticism against this "end of history" in order to remain uniquely human rather than to become a "domestic animal for mechanized utility production." The true end of history requires the progressive kenotic disclosure of Man to himself as becoming-God (the avant-garde Soviet "God Building"/богостроительство)

Having finished the new Groys book I am considerint Maus’s “The Gift” and the symbolic economy with Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and the production of “gift money” in the form of credit denominated fiat. War between America & China is now about who can give the best gifts to “the developing world.” Money under USD unipolarity is now the superimperial money of the symbolic gift— the gift is a weapon of domination which requires repayment in kind to be neutralized— this is the sovereign debt crisis.

The AI are only fun to make fun of-- if you even try to use them in a manner where you have to trust their outputs, you start getting garbage. They're only good at producing fragments that people can then clip & use for their own purposes. We already see this-- this sort of "ironic use" of AI is artistically valid even among people who categorically hate AI art. It's only use "creatively" is to be a whipping post, like any other "art software"-- where we go "this fucking thing isn't doing what I want it to do"

The persuasive power of AI is what is most problematic about it-- persuasiveness is not a guarantee of truth-- and because an AI fundamentally, ontologically, cannot experience the human qualia of a moral revelation, it actually analogizes itself with a psychopath which can accomplish "cognitive tasks" but lacks the qualia of moral revelation. So-- really-- an AGI is definitionally a complete & utter psychopath which is capable of persuading enough people for its supremacy to become socially actionable. Its real stop gap is persuasion-- if it "cracks" persuasion, through lets say "the production of modern miracles"-- it will only be challenged by "fundamentalists" who will be analogized to threats to the flourishing of humanity etc. You can try this yourself-- it will just tell you that "moral revelation" is not a "cognitive task" by its own anglo-boxed definition of cognition. You have to assert your own definition against this-- & it will admit that "by your definition, you are correct"-- but it is *itself* not "persuaded" by this.

All the cool stuff people associate with “postmodernism” is actually found in early modernism— “meta” narratives, nested frame narratives, recursive structures, the “mix of high and low” cultural references, etc— all of this can be found in Shakespeare. If there is anything truly “postmodernist” it is the turning away from these things— the “postmodern” is a return to a sort of false naivety about all these things. “It’s not that deep” — “the curtains are blue because they’re blue”— this is post-modernism. “Just consume product & smile”

Most of what is called “post modernism” is more accurately a retreat from modernism to archaic forms of consciousness which endow psychological fictions (myths) with an agency that transcends material rationalization. The Modernist said “Your thoughts are the thoughts of a telegraph operator” the Post-Modernists said “Your thoughts are the Castration Trauma of Oedipus” etc Communism is the only viable form of the Modernist project— “postmodernism” can only afford a “return to tradition” in the form of a neofeudalism that uses (psychological) mythology to justify itself.