From the Economist:

A denim revolution in Europe?

The affairs in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia are all too easily ignored by the West. Russia under its tough president, Vladimir Putin, considers the post-Soviet countries on its borders to be within its sphere of influence. Where outsiders have tried to exert some influence, Russia is asserting itself all the more. America had a military base in Uzbekistan until last year, for the sake of fighting Islamic extremists in the region, but its troops have since been turfed out and replaced, apparently, by Russians. Russia’s growing control of gas infrastructure in many nearby territories, and its willingness to use energy supplies as a lever of foreign policy, gives it a powerful economic grip on the region. Mr Putin’s steady support for autocratic incumbents earns him their allegiance. As ever, Russia wishes to preside over a set of buffer states at its borders.

But one repressive post-Soviet country does attract western interest. Belarus under Alexander Lukashenka is widely—if somewhat simplistically—known as “Europe’s last dictatorship”. It is undeniably a bleak place, if not as violent and authoritarian as Uzbekistan. The lives of ordinary people are tightly controlled by Mr Lukashenka’s thuggish government, most importantly through economic means. Most workers for state companies (and much of the economy is state-run) are now employed on one-year contracts and may be sacked for showing open support for the opposition. Aid groups, journalists, opposition parties and others who try to promote democracy are routinely picked on. Mr Lukashenka has put tight controls on the media, rigged elections and torn up the constitution. Opposition activists have been jailed, exiled or—in at least four cases—have disappeared in unexplained circumstances. A new law on public security will make it a criminal offence to “discredit Belarus’s standing abroad”.

In theory, the people of Belarus have an opportunity on March 19th to be rid of Mr Lukashenka, another ally of Mr Putin, when general elections are held. In fact, the opposition has no chance of winning. Anti-government rallies are frequently blocked or dispersed by police. The media pumps out endless support for the president. Those who signed petitions supporting opposition candidates now fear they are being targeted for reprisals. The playing field is far from even, and results are anyway unlikely to reflect the votes cast.

Whereas members of the European Union, the United States and other democratic countries will be quicker at condemning misrule in Belarus than they were at responding to autocracy in Central Asia, few expect such pontificating to make much difference. More important would be upheaval from within. Peaceful revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and in Kirgizstan last year were caused by ordinary protesters. In Ukraine, democrats adopted orange as their colour and took to the streets until the government fell; in Kirgizstan, protesters chose the tulip as a symbol of change and brought down the old regime in a matter of days. And Belarus? Supporters of democracy have tried putting lit candles in their windows each week as a form of protest, and some have promoted the idea that wearing denim is a way to call for reform. But the promise of tragedy and puppet theatre remains stronger than the prospect of political change.

[needs a subscription: www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVJRJDP]

+ some great pictures here:
www.zubr-belarus.com/index.php?id=1262&lang=2

another taste of lunacy:

Coup prevented in Belarus - KGB
en.rian.ru/world/20060301/43855182.html

Guessing the real question is about Putin and Russia - are they really going to put their geostrategic muscle behind a ring of autocratic loser regimes and (for instance) work to keep Eastern Europe divided between rapidly emerging post-soviet societies on the one hand and these pitiful fossils on the other? It's truly depressing how neo-tsarist reaction still seems to have a vice-like grip on the eastern slavic imagination.
Best thing the Poles, Balts etc. can probably do is push on with their own reform and consolidate the alternative model. The Internet will make it increasingly infectious.
Also disappointing how the Ukrainian 'colour revolution' seems to have fizzled out into corrupt inertia. The Poles (who were so essential to the fall of the Yanukovich junta) must be especially pissed about that.

vice-like?

I'd like to raise a more general question about the relationship between hyperstition and politicsl, though not sure where the best place would be. I think it is worth putting a spotlight on the possible politics that derive from hyperstitional theory or practice: does hyperstition essentially lend itself to a certain kind of politics, and if so to what extent can this be determined? How much scope is there for difference and divergence amongst hyperstitional politics: on a conscious, theoretical, level, what kind of politics can hyperstition afford, concede? And on an unconscious, purely pragmatic level, can it be said that certain kinds of politics are inextricable from real hyperstitional processes?

tachi - I suspect sd would be happy to treat such a wider discussion as 'on topic' here, given that the amount of tightly focused Belarus commentary is not likely to be huge at the moment. There's room here for the whole spectrum from minute attention to the ghastly Lukashenka, through wider regional q.s to the panoramic topic you float IMHO.

In provisional response to you, then:
Seems to me that 'hyperstitional politics' has two aspects worth teasing apart.
1) Hyperstitional-political analysis, which would be a maximally 'nonpartisan' investigation of how Autogenesis feeds into political issues and helps to explain them.
2) A taxonomy of intensely hyperstitional programmes, which would cover a wide spectrum since it embraces at least (overlapping):
a) Islamist efforts to instantiate a modern Caliphate.
b) Vestigial soci*list attachments to a virtual planetary communism.
c) Variants of (neo)liberalism fed by the powerful hyperstitional dynamics immanent to - constitutive of? - capitalism.
d) Singularitarian-transhumanist accelerationists devoted to steepening the technocommercial intelligenesis curve.
And in each case the opponents, spin-offs and mutants attending these hyperstitional autoproduction scenarios.

Nick - is this worth a dedicated post? Do you think this is a worthy topic? This is something I am particularly intersted in pursuing. I wonder how divergent hyperstitionists' politics can be, for a start.

does Chernobyl's 60% fallout landing in Belarus a good "insanity" topic fit? what about the combating normanist vs. antinormanist Rus theories? pretty sure Mir Taqi Mir pederastic poetry completely off-topic — even if there's a link to Mir, Belarus, Mir station, Clarke's "Time Odyssey" series with its mysterious hanging giant metallic orbs & a highly popular asian MMORPG. gotta hyperstitionally rich main vein topic here. lots of asteroids too!

hey hey ... neato:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution

nick. questions related to Tachi's stuff. how is the practice of hyperstition (POLYTICS: numogram, mythos & unbelief) related to POLITICS? think you mentioned earlier numogram trashed? if yes, have these "three irreducible ingredients" been upgraded?

tachi - a dedicated post makes sense, but why not get the discussion started here, then if a suitable 'trigger' link crops up we can uplift to a new post.
(of course, feel free to start a new thread on the topic yourself if the spirit grabs you)

northanger - OK (I'll bite), starting with the Chernobyl topic, what do you think the impact on contemporary Belarus politics might be?

northanger - 'polytics' as a micro-enterprise tightly linked to practical production problems would definitely stand at a 'higher' (tighter, more immanent) level IMHO - less room for random bloviation when something is actually under construction.
But to respond more directly to your question: politics/polytics relation is probably quite complicated. If (questionable?) all the different hyperstitional programmes outlined above were able to share polytical principles (in the same way different ideologies can share technical principles) then the relation would probably look intriguingly various, dependent on line of approach.
Actually think your question here really fascinating and consequential, so I'm going to shock you by thinking a bit about it (before further babbling) ...

"think you mentioned earlier numogram trashed?" - ??? (don't think so)

>>starting with the Chernobyl topic, what do you think the impact on contemporary Belarus politics might be?

my pleasure:
english.pravda.ru/world/20/92/370/15609_Belarus.html

nick. [zwei] fits the "A Blast From The Past" thingy.

>>"think you mentioned earlier numogram trashed?" - ??? (don't think so)

nick. not trashed, exactly. something about about a hyperstitional lineage w/o the numogram.

>>actually think your question here really fascinating and consequential, so I'm going to shock you by thinking a bit about it (before further babbling) ...

The Black Hole
number three-thousand, forty-four.
[politics/polytics relationship]
Nick at March 8, 2006 05:03 AM

archived!

Nick - the situation in Russia does not bode well:

1.The country is heading for a demographic disaster, a huge drop 30 million drop in population by 2030. (Also very high inflation.)

2.It is particularly disturbing how Putin and Karimov exploit WoT/WWIV to tighten up their autocracies. The concept of civil liberties, never very strong in the region, is trampled over with a brutality and crudity unparalled in the west. Russia also conducts war in a very old-school fashion: Putin has done nothing whatsoever to discourage the use of rape as a weapon in Chechnya.

3.The media in Russia and Belarus is an extreme empirical example of simultaneous reality distortion/production. In Belarus, as in Ukraine, the further west you go, the more influence the Internet and Polish radio has, but in the east the media has a very tight grip on reality. Putin's clampdown of the Russian media was very instrumental here, setting the precedent etc. So it it very difficult to imagine how just how far some Belarussians' worldview is from 'ours', or even that pumped out by moonbat media.

4. The Poles have been very active in Belarus (there's a considerable Polish community there), particularly over the airwaves, but they won't have a big affect because, as the Economist points out, the elections will be rigged and backed up by brutal security forces.

tachi - I think that hyperstition's politics are fairly divergent (just look at new york mullins contributions). I don't think there's a party line or a consensus, unless it is that in it's current form H. is definitely pro-capitalist (anti-capitalism being analagous to being anti-stone during the stone age), and being pro-capitalist is nothing special. H is also pro-war, most of the time, but there is acute awareness of how bewilderingly complex that war is, in terms of how, where and why its is being fought...

Personally, I'm more understanding how politics evolves and works than defining and clinging to a specific political position.

>>H is also pro-war

sd. in what sense?

sd -
Russia: Agree with your gloomy scenario, things are going to get a lot worse there for all the reasons you mention (others might include very obstructive cultural legacy (Orthodox Christians aren't good at liberalism as a rule)).

H. Politics: There's a distinction worth making between the 'empirical' stance of the blog (what people who post and comment here think) and its 'transcendental' commitments (what must any consistent 'hyperstitional politics/political theory' be like?).
Seems to me, as far as the second is concerned, there's room for a Marxoid hyperstition (since the Revolution can be construed as an autoproductive irrruption), however absurd that might seem at the empirical level. At least, if anybody was still to promote it (a carrier of some kind?) it would be nice to see a degree of cold intelligence replacing the hysterical spluttering gesticulation that marked this sort of position on the blog before.
Furthermore, although radical Islamism is rather mute here these days, it too can clearly be articulated in fairly pure hyperstitional terms (as the cultural-political 'fetching' of a virtual megasyndrome). I'd also make my usual point -- 'tackling' Abrahamic Monotheism as an historical factor is essential to any comprehensive hyperstition, with Islamic Apocalypticism an absolutely critical topic in this respect.
Since Abrahamic historicity, Marxism and the apocalyptic analysis of Capitalism share an occulted nexus, it might also be somewhat misleading of me to treat them all as simply diverse ...

nick. parallactic gaps?

www.mediamonitors.net/sullivan1.html
Unfortunately, the hard reality now is that in both the West and the Muslim world religions and civilizations have become increasingly reified. Little effort is being given anywhere to acquiring understanding of supposedly homogeneous and inimical "Others." [4] I submit that unless Christians and Muslims begin to hear each other when they whisper prayers to their common God, they indeed are likely to meet on obscure battlefields around the world.[5] Surely, any war of civilizations or religions is not one that either side will win. As a new century impends, I suggest that Christians and Muslims alike need to attempt a new beginning.[6]

from above link:

I would suggest that the civilization of the contemporary West might more accurately be designated as "Abrahamic" than as "Judeo-Christian."

E.U. Constitution Should Cite Abrahamic Monotheism: Imam
www.islamonline.net/English/News/2003-11/01/article02.shtml

Long Sunday's, "What's Missing?" (ironic, innit?)
www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/03/whats_missing.html

having never read Zizek, found this helpful & interesting: he focuses on three main modes of parallax — [1] the ultimate parallax (the ontological difference), [2] the scientific parallax & [3] the political parallax.

"having never read Zizek" - thank Allah for small mercies :)

My theological sympathies are more with Abu-86 and Darkside Islam than with the happy-clappy ecumenists like Sullivan. Start with a jealous God and prophetic historicity and the conveyor belt culminates inevitably in eschatological war and universal insanity - at least the mechanism is now eating itself rather than just chewing up pagan civilizations. It's way too late for Kumbayah ...

nick. let me clarify, not talking Kumbayah but attempting to unpack your "usual point":

'tackling' Abrahamic Monotheism as an historical factor is essential to any comprehensive hyperstition, with Islamic Apocalypticism an absolutely critical topic in this respect.

for me, clarifies McCarthy-Ijaz debate; illustrates WoT's focus on Islam's differences (McCarthy) vs. similarities (Sullivan) & lets me understand the point you're making.

nick. Sullivan presents "historical factors" you say "essential to any comprehensive hyperstition" (why, i don't know). particularly interesting:

"It is worthy of note that both China and India consider the West to constitute one civilizational block derived from three constituent parts: Byzantium, Europe and the world of Mediterranean Islam. For the very different civilizations located to its east, Western civilization is most emphatically not made up only of Europe and North America but consists also of both Arab Christianity and the Arab Muslim world."

contrast this with the current civilizational block (& divisor) of the "anglosphere" (vee speak english). if i understand you correctly, yes, "the mechanism is now eating itself".

northanger - wasn't accusing you of the Kumbayahing (perish the thought!!), just side-swiping at Sully (who used to be one of my favourite people in the world and nowadays has me scratching my own eyes out in infuriation). Grateful for the opportunity to dig around in this area (don't mean eye-sockets) because the whole Judaeo-Christian West vs Islam thing is getting quite trying, as if a choice between two flavours of Skygod makes a menu worth salivating over ...

and they're doing it with language.

oops, think we bumped into each there.

northanger II - OK, that (one Abrahamic civ block) really interesting - now I guess I have to go and read the damn thing.

Anglosphere MUCH more interesting, since its diagonally trans-civilizational (in Huntington terms) and aligned extremely closely with escalating capitalism

...and given it's not even the same Sullivan I've been floundering about in a vast ocean of irrelevance ... but what the hell

nick. "trans-civilizational"? nope. it's rule of law & english.

Greek
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

[sigh] "not even the same Sullivan"

nick. it is definitely NOT a "choice between two flavours of Skygod". it is ONE god. just can't figure out why you seem to think this is hyperstitionally important.

"Liggio's fundamental point is that the Abrahamic faiths have each been shaped by and may be considered the successors to HELLENISTIC CIVILIZATION, and that the cultures shaped by Judaism, Christianity and Arab Islam must each be regarded as part of that LARGER CIVILIZATION that I have metaphorically suggested has its frontier on the Indus rather than on the Bosporous. At the same time, note should be taken of the fact that less than one in five of the world's more than one billion Muslims are Arabs. THE VAST MAJORITY OF MUSLIMS ARE CONCENTRATED IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA. There are more Muslims in Malaysia (185 million) than in all of the Arab world. Certainly, Muslims in India, China, Malaysia and Indonesia have participated historically in cultures radically different from those that ring the Mediterranean and extend into northern Europe and North America."

here we have some distinctions (& maybe other reasons why India added (as it should be) to "anglosphere"?):

www.arches.uga.edu/~godlas/tibi.html
The Mediterranean Islam can learn a lot from the Southeast Asian Islam. Can the periphery become thereby the center?

northanger - OK, finished the Sullivan piece - the guy's a quite loathesome Dhimmi obviously (Robert Spencer rips most of his apologetics apart repeatedly, i.e. representing abrogated Suras as authoritative ('no compulsion in religion') and promoting a ludicrously ahistorical (and also abrogated) spin on Jihad), but it's still interesting to see the Abrahamic megamachine integrated geo-civilizationally. Now the important question: how to kill it?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean
Modern states (22 states) bordering the Mediterranean Sea are:

• Europe (from west to east): Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, the island state of Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and the island of Cyprus, divided between the Republic of Cyprus, and the northern break-away region of 'Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus'.

• Asia (from north to south): Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip.

• Africa (from east to west): Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco

nick. kill what? the Abrahamic megamachine? didn't Nietzsche do that? oh, god's dead but he's still on life-support. pull the plug?

all 'good' questions

nick. "the guy's a quite loathesome Dhimmi obviously (Robert Spencer rips most of his apologetics apart repeatedly" — i'm sure spence did do the very thing & it's also quite worthless because of potential conflict of interest & bias. dear spence, we fear, is in the megamachine.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spencer
Robert Spencer holds a Master's degree in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1986, and is an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Congress_Foundation
The Free Congress Foundation (more formally the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, and Free Congress or FCF for short), is a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. founded and led by Paul Weyrich. In the 1960s and 1970s the labor union-backed National Committee for an Effective Congress was highly influential. In 1974, in part to counteract its influence, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), whose name implied that the United States Congress was dominated by labor and other liberal-leaning interest groups, and that this situation needed to change.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Committee_for_an_Effective_Congress
Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, the National Committee for an Effective Congress (or NCEC for short) is a political committee that provides voter-research resources to progressive political campaigns throughout the United States. The NCEC is vital to campaigns of all sizes due to its role in providing a "voter file" for campaign activities that require identification of voters in target demographics.

nick. "all 'good' questions" - we demand 'impossible' answers.

northanger - not sure where this is going now, but IMHO the 'islamophobes' are much more rigorous when it comes to Koranic interpretation than the (taqqiya or dhimmitude driven) apologists. If I hear the 'no compulsion in religion' diversion one more time I'm going to scream (at least). IT'S ABROGATED!!!

On the wider question: Think Shoggothic Insurgency.

""Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?" —Ms. Eleanor Roosevelt

"Prepare your representatives…In a democracy not only government is responsible but people are responsible for what happens in their own land and through their leadership in the world." —Ms. Eleanor Roosevelt

[hit the lights boys ... Ms. Barbra Streisand]

"I am also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberators—they fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five day work week! What's to be ashamed of?"

E. Roosevelt's legacy gang-raped in UN:
www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200603070816.asp

I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough. —Clarie Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." —Virginia Woolf

"What's to be ashamed of?" - depraving liberalism into fidelista narcissism?

nick. "E. Roosevelt's legacy gang-raped in UN". yeah, think you mentioned UN sex crimes earlier. checked that out. reform? hahaha hahaha. i certainly would not pick Islam first. i'd remove the massive log in the anglosphere's eye first. megamachine indeed.

>>"What's to be ashamed of?" - depraving liberalism into fidelista narcissism?

scroll up. blast from the past, remembering the good name & achievements of Liberalism. is there such a thing as conservative liberalism?

Barbara Streisand!!!??? You were doing fine until that point ...

"is there such a thing as conservative liberalism?" - Hong Kong neo-Manchester Liberalism, think it's called 'neoliberalism' these days and all the world's moonbats seem to hate it, so it's got be basically on the right track.

Robert Spencer (et nauseum)!!!???

"IMHO the 'islamophobes' are much more rigorous when it comes to Koranic interpretation than the (taqqiya or dhimmitude driven) apologists. If I hear the 'no compulsion in religion' diversion one more time I'm going to scream (at least). IT'S ABROGATED!!!"

nick. um, think you need to get OUT of the megamachine box here. what has this argument to do with anything relevant when trying to pin down "essential historical factors" re "tackling Abrahamic Monotheism"? doesn't YOUR objection cloud the issue of what's really at stake here?

"On the wider question: Think Shoggothic Insurgency."

what about it? you want a status report?

denimosphere

northanger - pro-war 'in what sense?'- In the 'well, if you insist on causing trouble...' sense.

Nick - re: Marxoid hyperstition - I think a ruthless reading of The Communist Manifesto and Lenin's 1917 texts is on the cards, quite a way up the pipeline though. Until Marxist-Leninists can come up with a rigorous response to 'The Black Book of Communism', Figes' 'A People's Tragedy', the works of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes' 'Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime' then I think it would be very difficult to take them seriously.

If this is the best the left can do then they have simply lost:

www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1999/x01/x01.htm
www.wsws.org/polemics/1998/jul1998/blck-j15.shtml
www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

So what is the range of political options for hyperstitionists right now? Accept that politics change, and positions are fluid, and accept that contributors politics are divergent, but then is every contributor a hyperstitionist, whatever that might be? The q. isnt the divergence of contributors' views but what divergence hypersition actually allows - Allah forbid - am I insinuating that hyperstition might be tied down, might be restrictive, have a dynamic but neverless finite set of options for politics? Can one disagree with the WoT for example and be a hypersitonist?

"Can one disagree with the WoT for example and be a hypersitonist?" - I'd be amazed if that proved either:
a) empirically non-instantiated, or
b) transcendentally inconsistent
[to use distinction above]

A hyperstitionist practices memetic autocondensation, or something of the kind - that seems to give a lot of ideological leeway ...

tachi - not very keen on the term 'hyperstitionist' - it sounds like an occupation or a practitioner swallowed whole by an 'ism'; it might be more productive to look for consistency in the codes, strands, themes, refrains and processes rather than a set of principles upheld and followed by card-carrying members.

also it is also useful to constantly bear in mind the distinction between hyperstition as a phenomena/process and what goes on on this blog. the blog mutates and so do its definitions of hyperstition, and hyperstition as a process unfolds within the blog in accordance to how it is triggered and the parameters it is given. hyperstition would unfold entirely differently elsewhere, given other parameters.

if a contributor were to input convincing/challenging anti-WoT code into the blog then the blog would have to process it and adapt. i suppose your question ultimately would cash out as 'How many directions can H. move in at once?/ How many conflicting processes can be up and running at the same time?' - these questions could only be answered if it happened.

[p.s.does any other blog spend so much time trying to define itself? i know it's useful, in small doses, but ...]

sd - v. helpful formulation

Good points sd, agree with you its not like a party, but I do think its worth thinking about which political pathways open up from the theoretical position of hyperstition. I too have often distinguished between the theory and the phenomena, though if we cannot be clear about what the theory affords, then we cannot be sure what processes are hyperstitional, and what politics are made possible.

Taking Nick's initial response: "'hyperstitional politics' has two aspects worth teasing apart.

1) Hyperstitional-political analysis, which would be a maximally 'nonpartisan' investigation of how Autogenesis feeds into political issues and helps to explain them.
2) A taxonomy of intensely hyperstitional programmes, which would cover a wide spectrum since it embraces at least (overlapping):
a) Islamist efforts to instantiate a modern Caliphate.
b) Vestigial soci*list attachments to a virtual planetary communism.
c) Variants of (neo)liberalism fed by the powerful hyperstitional dynamics immanent to - constitutive of? - capitalism.
d) Singularitarian-transhumanist accelerationists devoted to steepening the technocommercial intelligenesis curve.
And in each case the opponents, spin-offs and mutants attending these hyperstitional autoproduction scenarios."

This sounds good, though isn't the key 'autogenesis'?

The various interesting developments we are witnessing in the world right now are clearly distinguished, but what makes them anything more than a list of interesting current affairs developments, unless autogenesis can be shown to be integral to them.

I think there is a difference between people who participate in hyperstitionally driven movements and people who might participate in movements which are consciously aware of their hyperstitional nature. Though I am not quite sure of how to describe the former kind of movements as hyperstitional. The latter might be singulararians who wish to accelerate the coming singularity.

I am also not sure that any ideological position is open to anyone that has a theoretical grasp of hyperstition as a real phenomenon. If you appreciate the hyperstitional character of globalization, for example, it seems ludicrous to bang on about a world in which the USA is dominating the world.

I can see how one might not want to further the singularity, and be against it, but that would be a different thing from denying its actuality or engaging in politics which do not appreciate the fundamentals of the processes the singularity involves.

tachi - strongly agree with your points here, but I also think they leave open a range of hyperstitionally informed options because recognizing that a phenomenon is significantly 'autogenetic' of hyperstitionally sensitive does not necessarily imply affirmation, at least on the empirical-psychological level.
It seems to me 'darkside' Marxists (as opposed to utopian soci*lists) are in that position - Mark Downham is the most interesting example I have ever encountered - recognizing that capitalism is an autonomizing inhuman and intelligenic singularity, while maintaining a politically hostile posture in relation to it (at least nominally).
My own posture in relation to Global Jihad is in certain ways strongly analogous - I see the Caliphate as an extremely powerful hyperstitional object, pre-programmed in a very fundamental way at the origins of the Abrahamic tradition, yet my empirical politics in relation to it are radically negative.
Where I see your remarks being especially important is exactly here: calling into question this disconnect, which (I am inferring) you are quite reasonably dissatisfied with. Surely there must be some integral crossing from analytical recognition to affective and political posture? But the nature of this passage escapes me.
I'm assuming rigorous hyperstitional practice would largely cancel empirical psychology and its loyalties, delegating everything to carriers which would be proliferated to explore the hyperstitional object from the widest practical range of approaches - again, not sure how this impacts on the question right now.

"largely cancel empirical psychology and its loyalties, delegating everything to carriers"

but surely an effective carrier would have both perceptrons which would facilitate that gathering of empirical data and a faculty for forming judgements based on that data (i.e. an empirical psychology). only a carrier capabable of ignoring large amounts of data (particularly connected to 'failed' hyperstition) would be able to articulate a positive posture towards Marxist-Leninism. carriers are de-personalized, but not stripped of equipment.

of course there might be room for satire - surely this is THE carrier exploration mode?

"sd - v. helpful formulation"

sd - very good point: "not very keen on the term 'hyperstitionist' - it sounds like an occupation or a practitioner swallowed whole by an 'ism'; it might be more productive to look for consistency in the codes, strands, themes, refrains and processes rather than a set of principles upheld and followed by card-carrying members."

imho, humans are hyperstitional by nature. your point got me thinking about christmas, currently viewed as crass commercial*sm being the driver. children are highly hyprestitional. what if we remove parents & children from the xmas equation. certainly, the yearly yule play is a collection of codes, strands, themes, refrains, etc., generating a family's mythology, memories, expectations, anticipation, etc. therefore, the parental-child bond seems like a viral seasonal driver. does capitalism generate this (it certainly sustains it)? or is it generated elsewhere? then we're looking at autogenetic triggers (another good point).

sd - 'yes' to all that. I should have said, cancel non-constructed empirical psychology, or artiificalize and multiply psychologies, or something similar. Satire - absolutely.

northanger - "children are highly hyperstitional" - also a key point. (Stephen King is obsessed with this, although usually rather crassly)

Nick, sd, interesting comments; "recognizing that a phenomenon is significantly 'autogenetic' of [sic] hyperstitionally sensitive does not necessarily imply affirmation" - exactly, though surely it cannot tolerate politics of denial that may be witnessed in some contemporary movements (anti-globalization, islamism, the 'soci*l' dimension of Chinese soci*lism ..) - "Surely there must be some integral crossing from analytical recognition to affective and political posture?" - right; though the scope of possible affective and political posture cannot include a denial of "ignoring large amounts of data" or of what is actually going on. So we arrive to a point where we are dedicated to a conceptual framework, at least, in which we are understanding reality, and drawing lines through what is and what is not empirically possible for a given political program of action. What I am trying to say is that sketching out this line, however fluid, might be something that Hyperstition, as a blog, could focus on, since it would be a concrete yet ongoing result with pragmatic ramifications. If you agree, how might we continue? I don't think its a simple case of worrying unecessarily about definitions, but of sharpening the remit of the activity of this blog, and enabling it to do something constructive and relevant.

That sounded clumsy - "we are dedicated to a conceptual framework, at least, in which we are understanding reality, and drawing lines through what is and what is not empirically possible for a given political program of action" - I don't mean what is and is not possible to do, since it would be possible to do many things that ignore the hyperstitional dimension of reality production. But perhaps even before the question of possibility of action (and of the kind of possibility, empirical, logical etc) is surely the possibility of tuning in to, acknowledging, hyperstitional processes: without proper tools, how can we be sure that a process is hyperstitional, autogenetic? This would have to be clarified before the question of action can arise, surely?

>>though the scope of possible affective and political posture cannot include a denial of "ignoring large amounts of data" or of what is actually going on

tachi. like your focus. but what makes data data? doesn't your statement assume the validity of data & therefore "what is actually going on"? how do we know what's actually going on? data can be ignored not only by "denial" but by selected parameters, existing frameworks, high noise-to-signal ratios, and (if the span is great enough) too much data.

nh - borrowed sd's phrase re.'data' - my point being that whilst I raised the issue of political action and its connect with hyperstitional theory, the theory has to be tight first. To explore the political possibilities that emanate from an awareness of hyperstitional reality, first indeed we need to have a firm if fluid handle on what hyperstitional reality is, and this involves a set of analytical tools which are sharp and constantly being sharpened.

tachi. "political action and its connect with hyperstitional theory" — generally agree. hesitation, before jumping down this rabbit hole, concerns inadvertently pre-mining conceptual veins avoiding the sharp analytical. needle in haystack kinda thing. would you agree that the act of getting a "fluid handle" involves a hyperstitional process? kinda dicey.

sd. read your Marxoid hyperstition links about 'The Black Book of Communism'. being an american, stalin = evil; so info extremely illuminating. we discussed the communist death tally months ago. why do you think it a "weak" response? what are they failing to do here?

tachi - I appreciate your enthusiasm for tightening up H. theory, but I also think sd's evolutionary approach to this has the great virtue of practical realism. When certain 'meme-clusters' have been chewed over for a while there may well be opportunities to precipitate them into conceptually-clarified forms and perhaps lodge hthem somewhere meta-ish on the site. However, the idea of pushing for a generalized and preliminary rigorization of the hyperstitional enterprise might simply not be feasible. That's not to say I have any problems with this kind of reflexive discussion, it seems definitely productive as long as we don't entirely black-hole into it, and it probably does help 'sharpen' anylytical tools.
[PS. It's going to be June before I can get anything remotely ambitious done here, so I'll be mostly spectating the more symphonic unfoldings until then]

nick. why does sd's approach have "practical realism" & why is that a virtue? you said it yourself: tightening up H. theory. doesn't that have practical value?

Just suggesting that incrementalism probably inevitable, so we should embrace it. Not saying that tachi disagrees with this BtW.

some of this the points in this thread could be put into the Polytics, no?

I agree with incrementalism totally, and do not think that a generalized theory is really what we are aiming for nor possible. But I think incremental, practical, realism should be bold. Can we trawl through the blog and drag up something to put on the table? That would be really opening up and push things forward fast.

The Hyperstition of Porphyrin: No blood for oil!
hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004510.html
[check tangents for drag process]

'carriers are de-personalized, but not stripped of equipment.'

Explain please. The rest sounded intelligent and flexible enough, despite the 'inevitable increments', but this sounds like too much stricture. If so, I'll at least know where the oppression can be found.

Just how much 'de-personalized equipment' is anyone going to want? I mean after a certain point, 'depersonalized equipment' sounds like something you'd get in a successful Communist Party? this does not mean I had hoped to tell you of every trip I make to the New York State Theater.

NYM - have a look at this:
hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004648.html

SD--thanks. That ought to keep you with few enough carriers. Who needs such shit? If that's the answer to my question, then I go the way of reza and undercurrent. I don't know why northanger and piet would care to bother once such repulsive dogma has been known, but definitely saved me a lot of time. There wasn't a thing of interest in nick's manifesto, just evidence of the usual attempt to find novel corruption.

interesting that these 'carriers' sound like the ones in the WoW game. Those games are enormously addictive, and people who play them suffer huge financial and physical losses--but they then play them even more. I suppose a kind of game like that is being proposed as a hyperstitional project. The carriers would be useful for 'infecting' as in the WoW game, but they would needed to have wanted such a religion first. These things can be turned around very easily. For example, like not identifying which players are the most dessicated at this time, but knowing who they are anyway. In that way, they can do their own suffering. And little more do they deserve--it's inevitable that insistence on political allegiances of a gross lack of subtlety would spawn players of newish but coarse appetites. These attempt to get the most delicious morsels until they feel threatened, then they spill the beans just like leftist millionaires who do it out of guilt. This is all right, but somehow not convincing as the only slot in town even after outsourcing is figured in. Too bad. Anyway, how you gonna get satire when you've got people with no sense of humour at the controls? And 2 out of 3 don't, the third may have no spine.

Nothing to base anything on when all you agree on is Islamic threat. There are plenty of active environments offline that do that, and without the humiliation of online addictions. Be your guest.

new york mullins - I think the whole concept of carrier is worth giving some thought to. Your instinctive, disgusted dismissal is intriguing. I would like to have answered your question more thoroughly, but at the moment I don't have the time or strength. A bit of patience maybe...?

NYM - online game ref. ++ interesting - that kind of format is probably exactly where carriers will take off (games that would actually do useful cognitive work, an undeveloped area IMHO).
More widely, don't think you need to react so strongly to the issue - doubt whether many people here are getting enough sleep to put together even quasicoherent carriers at the moment (I'd like to be proved wrong, however, which is probably (among the places) where we differ).

nick [new york]. puff adders effective bullshit detectors, blowing holes through cellular fluff (IOW, cytotoxic spam chopping; maybe a bit Lacanian for some tastes — however, check Martin Crane for details). bit of apoptosic levity might prove useful.

Well, I've already done a lot of 'carrier' work, cutting out necrotic tissue on vile leftist blogs like with a machete--especially that idiot Arpege Chabert. So I automatically do carrier work and use all equipment at my disposal, but WILL NOT BE DEPERSONALIZED just so Kurzweil and Bill Gates can keep their subjectivities at the exclusion of only a few others. Neither one is beautiful enough in any way to deserve extensive accolades from me no matter how much they tell us that the bio-brain is getting outmoded. That’s just filibuster till they can really put it into effect. And they have offered my nothing!

www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/punishment.htm

In 1743, Mary McNamara was removed from the town as "a lewd, loose and idle woman".

In short, I did this to Arpege Chabert for a full 4 days of concentration. She ‘outed’ herself as being a super-Commie who also does currency trading on her rear end all day. Said television (she calls it TeeVee) 'buys your eyeballs as commodities' and then it comes out that she made her fortune as a TeeVee producer and now can just eat chocolates in Paris. She wanted sympathy from the poorer dumb commies for exploiting them, the idiot bitch. I led the campaign, even with my terrible reputation among Commies and a surprising number decided to keep her in stocks for several days. She responded by trying to get even haughtier and more Parisian-vicomtesse, saying, more or less, I hate myself for being a capitalist exploiter, but I don't have the time to waste on your dumb questions because I have to watch the TeeVee for currency figures.' There is very little she can now do in terms of more posts of dead Haitians, Iraqis and genocide in New Orleans because I set it up so that Anthony Smith of the Weblog would make her prove that she was at least worth being a cash cow. I said ask for $30,000, rich people get suspicious if you ask for small sums (consult Wm. Burroughs), and she told him to email her his 'pitch', but that she had limited resources and probably just thought he was a self-pitying schmuck. I got most of my messages through that were necessary at that toilet blog 'Long Sunday,' run by Matt, the little Derrida person who comes over here--they were often scrambled and put in Russian, Greek, black ghetto talk, white trash talk, French, Spanish, and German, but Mrs. Chabert got the message. She does not understand that being a rich Jewish American Princess from Riverside Drive does not automatically entitle you to behave like Sarah Bernhardt (in her book about Bernhardt, that wild Francoise Sagan actually had SB use the phrase 'to fulfill all of those who dream of being French' and had SB tell her from Pere Lachaise Cemetery that she wouldn't have told just some bluestocking her story, that it had to be Ms. Sagan, later caught for tax evasion, but she wrote 3 or 4 good novels) or Catherine Deneuve, just because you have got an apartment across from the Pompidou Center. In short, she accused EVERYBODY of being owned by corporations because they watched TeeVee and she didn't--except she didn't count on that I really DON'T watch TeeVee, so I could just concentrate on her. She said the only alternative she had to 'my capitalism in which I exploit you is suicide,' so I told her to follow my favourite stage directions, i.e.,

Cleopatra (applies an asp)

I said that will be fine, as somebody has got to put you out of your misery.

Anyway, I am getting interested in stocks and pillories myself as a result of this. The worst part was that she was the most interesting character among these poor leftists, and didn't even have the guts to keep up her haughty performance, just got nasty and then said 'Of course I exploit you. Save poor me from doing this.' And of course, many of the idiots said 'Okay, anything for the Party,' etc.

Mostly I went into Long Sunday as 'new york pervert' but when I finally ate all my spinach I was able to go in and be 'Jehu' like in Kings when he gets the eunuchs to throw Jezebel out of her palace. It went like this, quoted remarks are by Arpege Chabert, followed by my replies which finally got the stocks around her precious wrists and ankles:

'Me, my profits, were your donated eyeballs watching my television programmes, or stock options in compensation for helping eeeevil colonize media markets. And I can say that was truly depraved but no one here seems to agree.'

au contraire, since I am the one who never watched your television programs, it is clear that whatever language my script girl puts it in, that I consider what you did and what you do to be depravity incarnate. You are easily the most hypocritical person in this entire group of communists, and you exemplify the ultimate in violent Stalinism.

'so thanks *everybody* for lunch!'

Not so fast baby. I think the dogs are going to have you for lunch. The way I remember it for your new movie is that you were making up round the eyeballs, painting them, till your tinymeat eunuchs threw you down from your palace and your polluted blood discoloured your palace walls.

She's got one or two eunuchs left, and I've been reprimanded by little Mattie for being 'vindictive and petty,'. I'm just quaking with fear, Mattie is truly the swashbuckler, as we all know.

She said only ONE thing of interest, which was that there were many capitalists that were much richer than she was, so that we should join with her since they blow up people and exterminate them. (nevermind that she had just said she was one of them, so she got nowhere. Actually, I think it's down to one eunuch, and 2 comrades at Lenin's Tomb, where she has to go since nobody comments on her own garish over-produced blog anymore. Crime and goddam punishment. yes, yes.)

puff adder - come over to the dark side and you can leave those Kerryite plutocrat leftists behind :)
(over here in the Market Leninist Far East we just shoot the bourgeoisie and then get on with uninterrupted turbocapitalism)