The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 8
Instead of sticking to his strong points, Sandifer feels an obsessive need to head straight back to the territory he doesn’t understand. The factual errors of the book have been taken apart thoroughly elsewhere; I won’t bore you by repeating them here. Suffice to say that there are plenty, including that Sandifer seems to be a Windows user, as evident from the assertion “As any computer user can attest, left running a computer will eventually either blue screen or get stuck with the cursor as an hourglass.” What I am interested in is the phenomenon I have often repeated but never quite fully explained: the liberal arts eschatology of Sandifer.
Sandifer’s computer illiteracy provides a revealing window to this pathology. “Let us assume that we are fucked, for we do not know how to install Linux.” He appears to assume that what he knows about computers, based on his experience with Windows, is everything there is. For all of his talk about pwnage, the actual pwning of objective systems is largely beyond his grasp and he instead sticks to “pwning” things where he can simply declare that he has pwned them and decide the facts on the matter by popular vote, not subject to the unfair constraints of a reality which doesn’t care about the cleverness of his arguments and the sickness of his burns if he still fundamentally, materially, utterly fails to actually pwn anything. It doesn’t take a massive quantity of technological mastery to install Linux and set up a system which doesn’t bluescreen or turn the cursor into a hourglass (partly because a computer doesn’t really need a cursor; this pedestalization of style over substance manifests yet again) but whose uptime can instead be mostly limited by the electric grid.
Now, this once again ties intriguingly to something else, for nothing is ever a coincidence. It’s universally known that trans women are massive computer geeks, and something in Sandifer is starkly reminding me of an egg: a closeted trans girl who doesn’t yet know that she is one (while other trans girls totally do see that she is one of them), but is nonetheless strangely fascinated by anything related to the topic, and whenever she is getting close to the underlying truth she gets frightened and recoils with a nervous laugh.
Throughout all of this, Sandifer has displayed the obvious behavior pattern of someone with a Basilisk of his own. Time and time again, whenever he might be getting too much into the matter, he turns away from the most promising prospects just like that trans girl who quickly closes the tab when she realizes the porn she had been watching made her feel like she wants to be the girl, rather than do her. (No, I’m not implying when Sandifer is like “screw these guys” he’d be using the other meaning of the word, but something more interesting. Why are postmodernists always having their minds in the gutter?)
And furthermore, for all of his talk about empathy being a defining feature of humanness, Sandifer has demonstrated a baffling level of its absence.
Just like the egg who tries to distance herself from an uncomfortable idea by petty transphobia which demonstrates mostly her motivation and her lack of any actual arguments to support it.
It is utterly jarring to see a self-identified “intersectional” marxist argue mostly by using a large number of ableist slurs. Or to be more accurate, the number of slurs he uses isn’t that impressive; the number of times he uses each of them is. One certainly would think that an intersectional marxist would have better arguments for his position than that his opponents and people with cognitive disabilities are the same kind of bad people for the same reasons, but nonetheless there did he go.
When Yudkowsky describes his rejection of irrationally anti-emotional “rationality”, Sandifer comments: “It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one”. The thought that someone might just have a different natural vocabulary about talking such things doesn’t seem to occur to him. No, to Sandifer all other humans must be defective Sandifers wherever they differ from him.
Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Now I’m obviously not insinuating that Sandifer would be closetedly trans…gender. What I am insinuating is that, just like he is insinuating that Moldbug is a closet marxist who doesn’t know it yet, Sandifer himself is equally like a planet tantalizingly close to igniting fusion. That in his philosophy there is something that inevitably brings its own downfall, which would provide a natural explanation for why he is so fascinatedly seeking such features in someone else, unable to fully dive in and equally unable to look away, and most importantly make it make sense why he would do all the otherwise inexplicable choices he has made in the book.
Such as the ending. Sandifer promised that the real basilisk wouldn’t turn out to be ourselves all along; a promise he kept because instead of the most cliched ending possible he chose the second most cliched one: pusseh. The much-vaunted proposition for dealing with the unimaginable horror awaiting us is to screw our brains out in a pagan sex cult, because anything else would be arrogant. Or something like that, my eyes kind of glazed over from the bullshit and boredom. The secret at the end of the book is pussy. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this. Perhaps the most continentalest continental philosophers think psychoanalysis has some validity to it because they themselves see teh pusseh as a solution to everything. (And as a non-binary trans person I was vaguely insulted by the insinuation that masculinity and femininity would be some kind of fundamental features of the universe and so on; because oh my Yog-Sothoth can’t you guys ever imagine anything creative? (Obviously not, because then they wouldn’t be so cliched to begin with)) And this guy had the gall to call others inhuman and robotic?
Of course, the lovecraftian protagonist catching a glimpse of the Beyond and furiously retreating to what little reality they can still feel attached to; a pagan sex cult; is an obvious conclusion for this man’s tale of terror.
But what was this Beyond?
The key to everything, the explanation for the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility, the liberal arts eschatology, the degraded marxism, the postmodernity’s divorce from objective reality (while I consider it a credit to both that the rationalist community has managed to derive several key insights of postmodernism and queer theory solely out of first principles, and which probably is the most significant differentiating factor between it and the embarrassment that is the common “respect my identity as an objective unbiased reasoner” “rationality”, there is an inflection point where ideas lose all their attachment to material facts and these kind of literary reviews are without error way past it)…
…the genuine red pill that truly only needs to be taken once to shift one’s perspective on the world and from which all these false pills have been consistently finding ways to shy away from…
An astute reader will have seen the obvious conclusion a long time ago, for the pieces are all there; I have been circling it all this time, not like the egg who circles her transness, but like the predator who circles its prey before swooping in for the kill. To the less astute, let this statement itself be the koan, the gate and the key.
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer shall be left as an exercise to the reader
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 14 notes · .permalink
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