Brett Stevens's Blog: Brett Stevens
December 19, 2023
GoodReads Faces The Culture Wars
The usual neurotics find themselves attacking GoodReads:
It makes no sense to comment on GoodReads policy here; they know what they are doing. However, we should acknowledge that this outrage is merely the culture wars coming to GoodReads.
For a long time, a small "elite" of educated east coast intellectuals have determined what gets published, and they tend to favor politically correct MFAs who write navel-gazing novels.
As it turns out, the people buying books have less interest in that than real life experience, but to write about anything real is to bring conflict, which the publishers fear.
Publishing as an industry is in deep trouble. It keeps churning out highly-praised books that no one reads, and everything it has tried lately has had a short shelf life.
Literature -- and humanity -- requires that we confront the controversial, terrifying, ugly, scary, miserable, inequal, Darwinian, and "absent gods" nature of life.
You are not going to do that without setting some fires. We should praise GoodReads for being a fire pit of this battle, not try to neuter it, IMHO.
Its members had produced 26m book reviews and 300m ratings over the past year, the site reported in October. But for some authors, it has become a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published.
“It has a lot of influence because there are so many people now who are not in the New York ecosystem of publishing,” says Bethanne Patrick, a critic, author and podcaster. “Publishers and agents and authors and readers go to Goodreads to see what is everybody else looking at, what’s everyone else interested in? It has a tremendous amount of influence in the United States book world and reading world and probably more than some people wish it had.”
Goodreads allows users to review unpublished titles. Publishers frequently send advance copies to readers in exchange for online reviews that they hope will generate buzz. But in October, Goodreads acknowledged a need to protect the “authenticity” of ratings and reviews, encouraging users to report content or behaviour that breaches its guidelines.
It makes no sense to comment on GoodReads policy here; they know what they are doing. However, we should acknowledge that this outrage is merely the culture wars coming to GoodReads.
For a long time, a small "elite" of educated east coast intellectuals have determined what gets published, and they tend to favor politically correct MFAs who write navel-gazing novels.
As it turns out, the people buying books have less interest in that than real life experience, but to write about anything real is to bring conflict, which the publishers fear.
Publishing as an industry is in deep trouble. It keeps churning out highly-praised books that no one reads, and everything it has tried lately has had a short shelf life.
Literature -- and humanity -- requires that we confront the controversial, terrifying, ugly, scary, miserable, inequal, Darwinian, and "absent gods" nature of life.
You are not going to do that without setting some fires. We should praise GoodReads for being a fire pit of this battle, not try to neuter it, IMHO.
December 18, 2022
Total Nihilism
Most people find it odd that I am a nihilist. I am fond of religion, believe strongly in a personal morality, enjoy caring for things and people, am bonded to culture, and am deeply conservative in that anarcho-monarchist way that focuses on the big stuff and leaves everyone alone in their personal lives. None of what I do fits into the normal silos that people use to categorize people like hashtags -- #vegan, #evangelical, #neocon, #hipster, #farright -- and so half of them ignore me. The other half recognize an actual threat from someone who can diagnose the pathology behind their purported ideologies and faiths, and therefore show them their emptiness. Whether you wield it or not, emptiness is the primal weapon.
As a nihilist, I am a priest of emptiness. That is, I want to clear away all false somethings and replace them with emptiness so that I can fill it, much like how forest fires destroy the accumulated leaf, wood, and animal detritus, leaving behind cleansing ash that imbues the soil with lots of carbon for future organisms to use. Death and destruction of the irrelevant (has no use to anything but itself) and unintelligent (cannot adapt to anything but its own desires) is part of nature, both natural selection and periodic cleansings like plagues, storms, fires, and outbreaks of ice weasels that seek to bite our carotids and then eat our delicious, rare, soft, and flavorful eyes.
Most people are fake and unstable because they suppress the knowledge of how fake they are. They want to ingratiate themselves to you and make you feel good, so they only show you the safe/good sides of life. I am like nature; I am both storm and balmy day, both predator and cute furry bunny, both life and death. These are not "of" me, but "in" me as they are in you, because we are parts of nature. I created nothing, merely discover it, and to my credit, am honest about what I see and have learned. Most of humanity falls down on that latter point but let us face it, honesty is the ultimate luxury, something you can only do if you have a healthy self-esteem, willingness to steal time from the karmic drama of society and commerce, and enough extra cycles on your forebrain AI to spend turning over ideas like a Lament Configuration in your hands.
Some might say this is duality but the key to my mind (and to me) is that it is a singularity: time exists, so things run in cycles, which requires one cycle going forward and one going backward. In life, the forward cycle is creativity, conservatism, continuity, productivity, procreation, and civilization; the backward cycle is commerce, socialism, novelty, salesmanship, egotism, and parasitism. If someone were aiming to live in a balanced way, therefore in equilibrium with themselves, they would march on the forward cycle but limit its excesses to avoid sliding into the death cycle. Basically stopping time by avoiding the decay, even though one cannot stop time and therefore it will manifest in small (and more interesting, more local) ways.
You cannot worship God without also giving praise to the Magister; you cannot praise Satan without acknowledging the role of God (and you cannot believe in God, properly "godhead," without believing in The Gods like a good pagan, since all three -- unconscious universe, conscious but amoral gods, and guiding spirit of forward motion in love and death -- must be there for the universe to function on a metaphysical level). You cannot praise art without praising those who fund art, and you cannot end poverty without ending the cause of poverty, probably with natural selection, including wolves soaked in blood howling at the moon as they feast on the corpses of the weak, stupid, criminal, insane, and perverse. This may be a scary universe, but it is a logical one.
Nihilism accepts both relativity and the whole of reality, which we only know through a heuristic, and know unequally and unevenly because we are not all one, we are not all the same person, and narcissism is a lie. That is, some of us may know it and write it down. The rest will see a YouTube video about it and pretend they know, but really every single person has their own degree of knowledge of reality (objective), their own ability to perceive it (Bell Curve), their own experience (destiny), and their own degree of gumption and honesty that makes them seem out more of the heuristic of knowledge (subjective). Nihilism says that there are no absolute truths, values, or communications, and this is realistic although blasphemous and heretical toward our Enlightenment-era (i.e. ancient and calcified) notion of "equality."
It is important to note the basic definition of nihilism is itself cryptic; we can grasp the basics, but it requires more interpretation, and like all elephant in the room style Big Issues, almost everyone gets it wrong:
I rephrase it this way:
We do not negate; we simply refuse to participate in the herd drama. As I recently wrote in a pipe-smoking analysis:
In other words, you can compile knowledge, but it is esoteric, meaning that per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, only those who have the ability to recognize it, are ready psychologically to recognize it, and know enough about its precursors and prior causes to recognize it, are going to even know what it is if they stumble across it. Imagine a primitive hominid discovering a lump of refined uranium on the jungle path on his way back to the cave; he will not make an atomic reactor out of it. He might use it to bash nuts. It will probably kill him because he does not know what it is, but the smartest hominids will look at something they do not understand and have no way to recognize and nope the heck out of there.
A nihilist is a heretic. By nature he will blaspheme all acknowledged truths as a means of testing the strong ones and identifying the weak, which he will destroy. A nihilist understands emptiness; he is the only one in human societies based on pretense and egotism who can recognize emptiness. To everyone else, emptiness is fullness because it allows them to project their egos all over it, which because they do not know what they are flirting with, will probably destroy them in one way or another. A nihilist recognizes emptiness for what it is and treats it seriously. No wonder we are arch-conservative, devoutly religious, unwilling to judge individuals, accepting of eccentricity and variation, skeptical of commerce, distrustful of altruism and compassion, and otherwise the type of logical commonsense realist that humanity needs and therefore will never recognize.
As a nihilist, I am a priest of emptiness. That is, I want to clear away all false somethings and replace them with emptiness so that I can fill it, much like how forest fires destroy the accumulated leaf, wood, and animal detritus, leaving behind cleansing ash that imbues the soil with lots of carbon for future organisms to use. Death and destruction of the irrelevant (has no use to anything but itself) and unintelligent (cannot adapt to anything but its own desires) is part of nature, both natural selection and periodic cleansings like plagues, storms, fires, and outbreaks of ice weasels that seek to bite our carotids and then eat our delicious, rare, soft, and flavorful eyes.
Most people are fake and unstable because they suppress the knowledge of how fake they are. They want to ingratiate themselves to you and make you feel good, so they only show you the safe/good sides of life. I am like nature; I am both storm and balmy day, both predator and cute furry bunny, both life and death. These are not "of" me, but "in" me as they are in you, because we are parts of nature. I created nothing, merely discover it, and to my credit, am honest about what I see and have learned. Most of humanity falls down on that latter point but let us face it, honesty is the ultimate luxury, something you can only do if you have a healthy self-esteem, willingness to steal time from the karmic drama of society and commerce, and enough extra cycles on your forebrain AI to spend turning over ideas like a Lament Configuration in your hands.
Some might say this is duality but the key to my mind (and to me) is that it is a singularity: time exists, so things run in cycles, which requires one cycle going forward and one going backward. In life, the forward cycle is creativity, conservatism, continuity, productivity, procreation, and civilization; the backward cycle is commerce, socialism, novelty, salesmanship, egotism, and parasitism. If someone were aiming to live in a balanced way, therefore in equilibrium with themselves, they would march on the forward cycle but limit its excesses to avoid sliding into the death cycle. Basically stopping time by avoiding the decay, even though one cannot stop time and therefore it will manifest in small (and more interesting, more local) ways.
You cannot worship God without also giving praise to the Magister; you cannot praise Satan without acknowledging the role of God (and you cannot believe in God, properly "godhead," without believing in The Gods like a good pagan, since all three -- unconscious universe, conscious but amoral gods, and guiding spirit of forward motion in love and death -- must be there for the universe to function on a metaphysical level). You cannot praise art without praising those who fund art, and you cannot end poverty without ending the cause of poverty, probably with natural selection, including wolves soaked in blood howling at the moon as they feast on the corpses of the weak, stupid, criminal, insane, and perverse. This may be a scary universe, but it is a logical one.
Nihilism accepts both relativity and the whole of reality, which we only know through a heuristic, and know unequally and unevenly because we are not all one, we are not all the same person, and narcissism is a lie. That is, some of us may know it and write it down. The rest will see a YouTube video about it and pretend they know, but really every single person has their own degree of knowledge of reality (objective), their own ability to perceive it (Bell Curve), their own experience (destiny), and their own degree of gumption and honesty that makes them seem out more of the heuristic of knowledge (subjective). Nihilism says that there are no absolute truths, values, or communications, and this is realistic although blasphemous and heretical toward our Enlightenment-era (i.e. ancient and calcified) notion of "equality."
It is important to note the basic definition of nihilism is itself cryptic; we can grasp the basics, but it requires more interpretation, and like all elephant in the room style Big Issues, almost everyone gets it wrong:
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
I rephrase it this way:
Nihilism is the declination to accept the social belief that universal values, universal truths/knowing, and universal communications exist.
We do not negate; we simply refuse to participate in the herd drama. As I recently wrote in a pipe-smoking analysis:
All philosophies are conjectural except commonsense realism, and therefore, are threatened by other conjectures.
Somewhere in between the human categories we can find a truth: people are not the same, nor do they have the same wisdom or needs, therefore there cannot be one standard of tobacco, truth, values, or communications. All we can do is pass on what we know, unlocking our word hoard to communicate as well as we can, hoping that our suffering leads to conclusions which can save others the same suffering so that they can move on to new suffering, therefore increasing the sum total of human knowledge.
Our minds settle on the tangible whenever they can. We like broad categories, square grids, equal divisions, and integers. Nature works in clines, curves, individuals, and ratios; these do not break down into “easy” for humans most of the time.
In other words, you can compile knowledge, but it is esoteric, meaning that per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, only those who have the ability to recognize it, are ready psychologically to recognize it, and know enough about its precursors and prior causes to recognize it, are going to even know what it is if they stumble across it. Imagine a primitive hominid discovering a lump of refined uranium on the jungle path on his way back to the cave; he will not make an atomic reactor out of it. He might use it to bash nuts. It will probably kill him because he does not know what it is, but the smartest hominids will look at something they do not understand and have no way to recognize and nope the heck out of there.
A nihilist is a heretic. By nature he will blaspheme all acknowledged truths as a means of testing the strong ones and identifying the weak, which he will destroy. A nihilist understands emptiness; he is the only one in human societies based on pretense and egotism who can recognize emptiness. To everyone else, emptiness is fullness because it allows them to project their egos all over it, which because they do not know what they are flirting with, will probably destroy them in one way or another. A nihilist recognizes emptiness for what it is and treats it seriously. No wonder we are arch-conservative, devoutly religious, unwilling to judge individuals, accepting of eccentricity and variation, skeptical of commerce, distrustful of altruism and compassion, and otherwise the type of logical commonsense realist that humanity needs and therefore will never recognize.
December 16, 2022
Books About: WW1
Since Europe has again begun flirting with what George Washington called "entangling alliances," setting up allegiances and proxies that will bring a string of nations into a war if one is attacked, it is time to revisit our last experience with such things, "The War to End All Wars," WW1. Like most pro-democracy wars it was widely praised, but ended in heaps of bodies in ditches.
1. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear: you must know what a White Feather was to understand how pathological modernity is.
2. Sturm by Ernst Junger: a cynical eye toward how under the guise of morality power moves to establish its permanence.
3. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: on the periphery, in the details, a great deal is told in the aftermath.
4. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: the past retold through what cannot be mentioned in the present.
5. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline: dark psychological hallways emerge from the clouded consciousness of our war for imperial democracy.
6. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: looking into the sea change that brought about war on multiple continents.
These should keep you looking forward to the crisis ahead as once again imperial democracy runs out of options and turns to war.
1. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear: you must know what a White Feather was to understand how pathological modernity is.
2. Sturm by Ernst Junger: a cynical eye toward how under the guise of morality power moves to establish its permanence.
3. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: on the periphery, in the details, a great deal is told in the aftermath.
4. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: the past retold through what cannot be mentioned in the present.
5. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline: dark psychological hallways emerge from the clouded consciousness of our war for imperial democracy.
6. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: looking into the sea change that brought about war on multiple continents.
These should keep you looking forward to the crisis ahead as once again imperial democracy runs out of options and turns to war.
November 19, 2022
Brett Stevens the Blog
I have come to appreciate GoodReads for its fusion between old school internet and nu-school social networking. A lot of things here are minimal, like you might find on Slashdot or the old del.icio.us, and this makes the site more usable than these pop-up heavy horrors which are more interface than content. This is a site for readers, and so it might be time to start a blog here.
My journey began with old school Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and an exploration of, uh, computer security, telecommunications, and networking, which were related fields at the time. During the 1980s I ran a number of locally-successful bulletin boards, then moved to the internet with USENET, an FTP archive, and later a web site which became a series of pre-blog-era websites which featured very similar content, namely essays about nihilism and heavy metal reviews. Along the way, I was an early podcast pioneer making radio shows for download in the 1990s.
Since that time, I have produced Brett Stevens essays and books, mostly on nihilism, environmentalism, and avoiding civilization collapse, with more to come. I also work as an editor in my spare time and write nihilist screes and political commentary when I can. This provokes some criticism but you can see how it all links up with a little elbow grease and reading time.
On top of that, sometimes I write about The Tao of Pipe Smoking. Someday I will be mentioned in the annals of the decline and fall of Western Civilization and you will be glad you read this page.
My journey began with old school Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and an exploration of, uh, computer security, telecommunications, and networking, which were related fields at the time. During the 1980s I ran a number of locally-successful bulletin boards, then moved to the internet with USENET, an FTP archive, and later a web site which became a series of pre-blog-era websites which featured very similar content, namely essays about nihilism and heavy metal reviews. Along the way, I was an early podcast pioneer making radio shows for download in the 1990s.
Since that time, I have produced Brett Stevens essays and books, mostly on nihilism, environmentalism, and avoiding civilization collapse, with more to come. I also work as an editor in my spare time and write nihilist screes and political commentary when I can. This provokes some criticism but you can see how it all links up with a little elbow grease and reading time.
On top of that, sometimes I write about The Tao of Pipe Smoking. Someday I will be mentioned in the annals of the decline and fall of Western Civilization and you will be glad you read this page.
Brett Stevens
Dedicated to the writings of Brett Stevens, a nihilist hacker who explores environmental topics and the elephant in the room, avoiding civilization collapse.
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