SUGGESTED READINGS FOR MARCH 22, 2018

Sam Miller McDonald's Activist Lab article on "Climate Apocalypse" is a must-read. It begins:

I’m a downer. Due to frequently writing and sharing doom articles, I am not very popular on social media (15 twitter followers as of publication). Or in real life, probably. Most conversations I have about anything with anybody eventually alight on humanity’s imminent violent demise. Many things could wipe all people off the planet: meteorites, supervolcanoes, nuclear wars, aliens. But the mass death that I always go back to is the one that seems most certain. Which is climate change. I study climate and energy politics, so it is my job to think about these terrible, mostly hopeless things everyday. 

Climate disruption is the immense boulder beginning its roll down a slope, picking up speed as it careens inexorably toward the interdependent global hamlet we all reside within. Human-caused climate disruption will very likely proceed until it triggers unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points, some of which include melting permafrost, ocean anoxia, forest diebacks, albedo-destroying ice melts, and ice-sheet collapse. These processes have already begun. When they reach tipping points, some of which could happen any day now, we won’t know how to stop them, and they will quickly make the planet uninhabitable for humans and most other life. Massive sea level rise is currently threatening to flood every major coastal city on the planet – inundating the more than a billion people who live in them – which could happen in the span of a couple of decades. 

During the Permian–Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago, climate change warmed the earth by five degrees; this killed 97 percent of life on the planet. The earth is currently warming at a much faster rate than it did during that extinction event. We’ve already warmed the planet 1.2 degrees in barely a couple centuries and will likely hit two degrees by midcentury, according to conservative estimates. This five-degree temperature shift can happen in a thirteen-year timespan, under the right circumstances. 

If the global economy does not stop emitting greenhouse gases immediately, we are on track to hit at least six degrees. This will kill us and, again, at least 97 percent of life on the planet. So that means, for the people who love dogs and cats more than people and wildlife, all the dogs and cats will also die terrible deaths. 

This is not yet inevitable. We could maybe still stop this mass death and, regardless of the hopelessness, we should all be trying.

You really need to read the whole thing, and share it with loved ones.

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Oh, Jordan Peterson (aka Stefan Molyneux 2.0)... the gift that keeps on giving. I have recently been asked at one or two of my online haunts why I hate Jordan Peterson. Truth is, I don't "hate" him. There are, however, many aspects of his personality and project that I find objectionable. Some of these things are:

His dishonesty, his arrogance, his obtuseness, his bizarre certainty that he fully grasps all he needs to understand re: topics about which he clearly hasn't even got a bare minimum of understanding (postmodernism for instance). There's also his profound silliness, his constant appeal to emotion, his historical revisionism, his reactionary politics, his obvious and multifarious "issues" with the opposite sex, his attempts to cast himself as a martyr when really he's weeping all the way to the bank, his cynical appeals to the alt-right with his Patreon panhandling (cynical in that I suspect he frequently retweets and/or says things that he KNOWS are total bullshit just because he knows it will get a rise from his fan base, which is jam-packed with some of the very worst of the deplorables). And of course, there's his absolutely awful Twitter account, where he exposes his true colors more and more with every passing day.

Anyway, in recent weeks, there have been two absolutely essential articles written about Jordan Peterson in the "serious" press. First there was Nathan Robinson's think piece for Current Affairs, titled "The Intellectual We Deserve", which begins:

If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.) 

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.

Go on and read the whole thing. It's a thorough and damning take-down, and should serve as a pretty decent coffin lid for Peterson's reputation as a public intellectual. And now, for the handful of nails needed to slam that coffin shut, we have a devastating, serious-minded, syllogistically bulletproof  piece by Pankaj Mishra for the New York Review of Books entitled "Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism", which has resulted in the dark professor having a humiliating public meltdown on his aforementioned Twitter. A particularly salient passage:

Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. ... Peterson confirms his membership of this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by belief in profit, or Mammon: slavery, genocide, and imperialism. 

Reactionary white men will surely be thrilled by Peterson’s loathing for “social justice warriors” and his claim that divorce laws should not have been liberalized in the 1960s. Those embattled against political correctness on university campuses will heartily endorse Peterson’s claim that “there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.” Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.” Libertarians will cheer Peterson’s glorification of the individual striver, and his stern message to the left-behinds (“Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark.”). The demagogues of our age don’t read much; but, as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can derive much philosophical backup from Peterson’s sub-chapter headings: “Compassion as a vice” and “Toughen up, you weasel.”

In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered.

Once again, for anyone interested in the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, Mishra's essay is essential reading. If, on the other hand, you prefer your political take-downs with a side order of satire (or if you simply can't be arsed to read all those words) here's the Chapo Trap House gang with their recent overview of Peterson's new book:

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And, finally for today, a very interesting and worthwhile article for WiReD by Virginia Heffernan entitled "Escape the Matrix: The Internet is the Uncanniest Valley. Don't Get Trapped There". The article covers so much ground and so many different topics that it is strangely resistant to either summary or excerpting, but trust me, it's a really good starting point for your personal self defense against online anxiety and any FOMO-exacerbated ennui you might be suffering about missing out on the Bitcoin bus (by the way, have you heard about how the Bitcoin blockchain apparently has child pornography hidden in it, which makes it de facto illegal to own Bitcoin? and that there's nothing that can be done to prevent this kind of thing?! Insane). Anyway, here's a nice bit from Heffernan's piece:

As David Kessler has written about mental illness, thoughts, ideologies, and persistent images of past or future can “capture” a person and stall their mental freedom. If this is hard to grasp in the abstract, look at the captivating quality of sexting, doctored photos, or something as silly and fanciful as Twitter, with its birdies and secret codes. Even as artificial and stylized as Twitter is, the excitement there rarely seems like a comic opera to users. Encounter a troll, or a godawful doxer, and it’s not like watching a sitcom—it’s a bruising personal affront. “You’re a fool,” tweeted by @willywombat4, with your home address, makes the face flush and heart pound every bit as much as if a thug cornered you in a dark alley. Sometimes more. 

But you don’t cool your anxiety by staying off the internet. Instead, you refine your disposition. Looking at a screen is not living. It’s a concentrated decoding operation that requires the keen, exhausting vision of a predator and not the soft focus that allows all doors of perception to swing open. At the same time, mindful readers stop reading during a doxing siege—and call the police to preempt the word being made flesh. They don’t turn quixotic and mix themselves up with their various avatars, or confuse the ritualized drama of social media with mortal conflicts on battlefields. The trick is to read technology instead of being captured by it—to maintain the whip hand. 

Paradoxically, framing the internet as a text to be read, not a life to be led, tends to break, without effort, its spell. Conscious reading, after all, is a demanding ocular and mental activity that satisfies specific intellectual reward centers. And it’s also a workout; at the right time, brain sated, a reader tends to become starved for the sensory, bodily, three-dimensional experience of mortality, nature, textures, and sounds—and flees the thin gruel of text. 

The key to subduing anxiety is remembering the second wave of YouTube commenters: the doubters. Keep skepticism alive. We can climb out of the uncanny valley by recognizing that the perceivable gap between reality and internet representations of reality is not small. It’s vast. Remember how the body recoils from near-perfect replicas but is comforted by impressionistic representations, like Monets and stuffed animals? 

So imagine: Twitter does not resemble a real mob any more than a teddy bear resembles a grizzly. If you really go nuts and nuzzle up to a teddy, I guess you could swallow a button eye, but you’re not going to get mauled. Tell this to your poor rattled central nervous system as many times a day as you can remember. Make it your mantra, and throw away the benzos. Nothing on your phone alone can hurt you more than a teddy bear.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO "HMMMM..."

THE BEST END OF THE WORLD FILM YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE

With 1998's Last Night, Canadian director Don McKellar created a work of transcendent beauty and almost unbearably intense emotional poignancy.  The end of the world has never felt so intimate, so possible, so viscerally present as it does in this film. 

If you consider yourself an aficionado of apocalyptic cinema and you have yet to see this film, be prepared to make room in your personal Top Ten list. 

It's incredible to me that McKellar was still in his 30's when he directed this. The thing that he seems to get, and convey so eloquently, is that, in such a global endgame scenario, regret would loom just as large as dread, and that all our emotions - bad and good - will be heightened to an almost supernatural degree. 

Anyway, I've said too much already. Watch, experience, share. This film deserves to be seen by everyone... starting with you.

EVEN DEATH MAY DIE

"When at last I awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear. The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. … Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things."
From Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft

Upon encountering three news stories about the sorry state of the world's oceans a while back, yer old pal Jerky's thoughts turned to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the prodigy of Providence, living anachronism, gentleman nihilist. In his lifetime, Lovecraft barely eked out a living as an author of weird fiction for pulpy journals of ill repute. Sickly since birth, he died a pauper in his early 40s, just before World War II really got rolling. Fortunately, he left behind a devoted circle of correspondents and admirers who refused to let his visions of cosmic dread be relegated to the recycle bin of literary history. Today, nearly seventy years since his death, many consider Lovecraft the 20th century's most important author of fantastic fiction, a Poe for the nineteen-hundreds.

Make no mistake, he remains a cult commodity; multiple cults in fact, including a number of literalists who've made fetishes of the master's McGuffins. Among these, the reality of a blasphemous grimmoire entitled Al Azif, or the Necronomicon, remains the most persistent rumor. For some, the idea of a book containing knowledge so unutterably awful that anyone reading it risks going insane is simply too good not to be true. Occasionally, academics eager to bolster their "geek cred" with a certain phenotype of student will invoke the name of H.P. Lovecraft, but in the world of learned elites, his work remains a guilty pleasure.

Lovecraft is not without his champions, however. Jacques Bergier, nuclear chemist and World War II hero, introduced his work to the Continent. There, Lovecraft's adjectival excesses were more easily forgiven -- even appreciated -- and his resonance with Nietzsche, Spengler, Freud and Einstein were more readily detected. Not a few who lived through this terrible age of death camps and atomic annihilation sensed the tremor of prophecy in Lovecraft's words. It's not for his style, but for his substance -- or, perhaps more accurately, his subtext -- that Lovecraft's reputation grows more formidable with every passing year.

French novelist and enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq counts himself an unabashed fan. Recalling his youthful first encounter with Lovecraft's work, he writes: "To call it a shock would be an understatement. I had not known literature was capable of this. And, what's more, I'm still not sure it is. There is something not really literary about Lovecraft's work."

Reading The Colour Out of Space provides clues as to Houellebecq's meaning. Besides being Lovecraft's most unnerving work -- and a rip-roaring yarn -- this is a story that captures with skin-crawling accuracy the arcane befoulment wrought by radioactive poisoning. That it was written decades before man first tried to split the atom only adds to the frisson one feels when reading it.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the subject at hand. Though he seldom strayed far from his coastal hometown, Lovecraft loathed the ocean. In its depths, he saw a reflection of the boundless void irreversibly exposed when reason ripped away the comforting veil of superstition. It seems oddly fitting, therefore, that the world's oceans are rapidly deliquescing into a zone of Lovecraftian ruin. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the septic sea we call the Gulf of Mexico.

Along the shores of Englewood Beech a few years ago, seekers of sun and fun bore witness to an astonishing phenomenon; an abyssal procession of sea-life, flopping and wiggling and slithering along in their thousands. All manner of fish, crustaceans, mollusks and eels were observed traveling south in a narrow band stretching for miles, hugging close to shore. Predator swam alongside prey, ignoring the easy pickings in favor of beating the hastiest possible retreat. "You name the species of fish and they were there", one onlooker marveled. "It's incredible. I have never seen anything like that in my life."

As is so frequently the case in Lovecraft's fiction, the scientific community was at a loss to explain. "We just don't know what's happening," declared one researcher. "That's a lot of maybes and what-ifs. I know the state is working on that and some other reports, so maybe by next week we'll have some answers."

Elsewhere in the Gulf, some were coming face to face with a phenomenon so terrible in scope and portent that it makes the story above seem almost quaint. SCUBA divers are returning to shore with hair-raising descriptions of an unprecedentedly vast dead zone. "I'm talking zero things are alive out there", said witness Mike Miller, grimly adding: "The only way to describe it is a nuclear bomb."

The main candidate at this point is the presence of a "stealth" Red Tide. This so-called natural phenomenon bears more than a passing resemblance to the Old Testament plague, and is an otherworldly terror in its own right.

When the algae that thrive on human, livestock and industrial waste begin to multiply unchecked, it has a necrotizing effect on vast swaths of ocean. The blooming flora gives the water a murky crimson taint, but that's the least of it. After a while, the darkness begins to spread, choking out all the oxygen and killing everything in its path. Red Tide produces a potent neurotoxin that has been known to kill people unlucky enough to drink the foul corruption. That which the Red Tide kills sinks to the bottom and rots, providing further fuel to make the Red Tide grow… and the feast goes on.

Need your humble narrator point out that our Red Tides get worse and worse with every passing year?


On the global scale, the news isn't much cheerier. In what scientists warn might be a tilting point in the acceleration of Global Warming, an expanse of Siberian permafrost the size of Western Europe is beginning to thaw for the first time since the Ice Age ended.

But this Global Defrosting could lead to things far worse than just the world's biggest muck-pit. The region consists mostly of a vast peat bog, with billions of tons of methane -- a greenhouse gas 20 times more destructive than carbon dioxide -- trapped in its frozen depths. If unleashed, this methane could double or triple the already accelerating rate of global temperature increase, leading to consequences that can only be described as Apocalyptic. Russian scientist D. Kirpotin described the situation as an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible, and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming."

And so it's come to this. The oceans are choking to death. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. The toxic effluvium of our waste-based society threatens to make our bloody bickering as meaningless as our very lives. We know the consequences, but we can't seem to stop ourselves.

At some level, most of us understand that the human species is going through an unprecedented metaphysical crisis. And most of us understand that this crisis is probably terminal. Like the cultists and malcontents who populate Lovecraft's fiction -- who know that if their incantations succeed, the best they can hope for is a quick death -- we are hastening our own obliteration. We collectively rush to be folded up into the formless tentacles of the boiling chaos that birthed us, and be devoured whole. In other words, we rush to embrace the ultimate doom that is the destiny of all living things, no matter what.

I, PET GOAT II

This gorgeous animated short by a group of Montreal artists calling themselves Heliofant has inspired a ton of ridiculous, piss-poor analysis by the usual Xian, Illuminati-phobic suspects all over the Interwebs. This incredible piece of work (and I mean that on every level of the word) merits every second of the seven minutes of your undivided attention that it demands. You may watch it here, of course, but I recommend you download it from the source, at the creators' website.

EVERY NUKE EVER SET OFF BY ANY COUNTRY

A MUSICAL EDUCATION IN 1001 STEPS - PT 2

Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley (1956)

Not one of the 12 songs on this album – assembled from various disparate sessions, some from Sun and some not – reaches the 3 minute mark, and quite a few clock in under 2. Yes, yes, I know… he didn’t write his own songs. He borrowed 90 percent of his swagger from Black musicians who never got their due. He didn't invent anything. I know. We all know. But that doesn't change the fact that his once-in-a-lifetime voice – so limber, so supple, so inexplicably soulful – was coming out of that once-in-a-lifetime face – almost Luciferian in its lush, ambi-sexual appeal. There is only the slightest foreshadowing of the Las Vegas Golgotha to come on these early cuts - hindsight about the mythopoeic circumstances surrounding the King's birth having forever scarred all who've heard The Bad Seeds' perfect, unforgettable song Tupelo. For the most part, though, this album is just pure, balls-to-the-wall American rock-and-roll. Now, with over half a century having passed since it's release, you can almost understand what the old folks were so worried about.

Had I heard it before? Duh.

Did I like it before? Yes.
Do I like it now? Yes.
Am I keeping it? Yes.
Standout Tracks? I Got a Woman, Tutti Frutti, Blue Moon, Money Honey.

ZIZEK JOINS THE GROWING CHORUS OF INTELECTUALLY RIGOROUS APOCALYPTIC ANGST