April Fool’s Update
by rsbakker
Jorge linked this, and for transparent reasons I thought it worth linking again. I can almost see the idol of Ajokli, laughing.
Life was so much simpler back when children could just pull the legs off insects.
I’m doing a Q&A on Reddit Fantasy beginning next Monday morning, April 3rd. With The Unholy Consult completed I’m looking forward to talking more freely about the World (trying to be mindful, of course, of any potential spoilers). Spread the word. The organizers recommended I keep the intro jaunty and light, so I decided to begin with, “If God is dead, then fantasy is His grave.”
I’m also scheduled to do a couple podcast interviews, one for Everything is Pointless, and another for Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My hope is to keep doing as many interviews, media pieces, as I can running up to the release of The Unholy Consult. Ideas are always appreciated.
I’ve also accumulated a fair number of book related links, thanks to emails sent and comments posted. Barnes and Nobles had a readout of Book Three, The Great Ordeal, which The Fantasy Faction selected for their Best of 2016 list (weird, isn’t it, the way everything ‘pre-Trump’ seems ancient and naive). The Great Ordeal was also given a rave review for SFF Den by silentroamer, who can see the narrative lens drawing into tighter focus. JP Gowdner offers an excellent aesthetic assessment of the series so far, though he finds himself morally troubled by many of my apparent decisions. For those hemming and hawing about starting The Aspect-Emperor, I heartily recommend Leona Henry’s eloquent review of The Judging Eye. I’ve noticed, lately, that almost all reviews of my books concede that they may inaccessible to the tastes of some readers, and even though this is undoubtedly true, the whole point of writing fantasy, for me, is to challenge actual readers as opposed to ‘ideal philistines,’ to confront folks with an unfamiliar (and probably uncomfortable) story-telling sensibility. If the election has taught us anything, I think, it’s that we desperately need to create a culture dedicated to spanning ingroup boundaries. We need to be urging one another to take risks, to drink from strangers’ glasses instead of hogging the same old straw for the entirety of our lives. We need to shame our most talented communicators back into honest dialogue with the communities that make their ingroup luxury possible.
Next up for TPB, someone not only stumbles across the semantic apocalypse in complete independence from my work, they even end up calling it the ‘semantic apocalypse.’
Three Pound Brain 
Many accolades and congratulations, buddy :)!
You know I got lots of outreach suggestions. Looking forward to Monday right now though!
Also, Jorge’s link has to be the cutest and yet scariest seemingly innocuous note regarding the advent of the semantic apocalypse.
Also, also, congrats to SR and Leona for getting linked!
I kind of want someone to edit an image of the roach with a speech bubble saying “If God is dead, then fantasy is His grave. – Sent from my Android using Tapatalk”
What’s the role of shame in a future where our most talented communicators are [robots](https://scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine)?
links are hard
Ohhh I get it. Took me a couple days. April Fools, you got me. Doing extra outreach was the joke right?
Nah but congratulations are in order, again, if any of the above turns out to not be a joke. I’d love to see your monofocus mind bent towards promotion of TSA. 😀
Dear Mr bakker, having been an avid fan of yours for over 8 years now I’ve come to the conclusion that simply being your harmless stalker is not enough. Thinking back on it, I guess I always knew it would never be enough to simply rifle through your trash, collecting the small gems you and your wife throw away. I’ve come to the sad realisation that the shrine I’ve been building in your honour will always be an empty shell, devoid of the true essence of my toils to create a dread mog-manchoo or the No-Bakker as men have come to call it. Of course, 8 years is a long time to think about anything….especially when thats all that is thought about. But I digress, so i’ll just cut to the rub…I would like to crack open your head and eat your brains with a spoon, thus obtaining the Absolute. I believe that once I’ve absorbed your power into my own I will truly be undefeatable on the field of battle. You of course will live forever inside my mind, where you will be granted a portion of control every other full moon, when our sexual electricity is at its absolute peak. I also think that eternity inside a ruler of this current dimension would be a great perspective for the next 18 second apocalypse books you will be compelled to write.
Thoughts on a rough estimate on when we can expect it to hit the shelves?
Is there any chance of this book, or the earlier ones in the series, being available on Kindle in Canada?
“Next up for TPB, someone not only stumbles across the semantic apocalypse in complete independence from my work, they even end up calling it the ‘semantic apocalypse.’”
I’m going to guess J. Andow.
“The possibility of semantic apocalypse is the possibility that all or the vast majority of our current vocabulary resembles the case of ‘phlogiston’. Clearly this is a possibility. Unfortunately, it seems things are worse than that.”
Oh sweet summer child.
No R. Scott Bakker citation. tsk tsk
He means something similar but also quite different. He’s using it as a reductio of dispositionalism, which is itself hopelessly muddled. The semantic apocalypse, the indeterminacy of all our meanings, follows from even complete relevant information disposition, he argues, because there’s no way of determining what counts as relevant. It provides apparent determinacy by taking on background indeterminacy, and so does nothing to save dispositionalism.
Hey, Bakker. Do you know why I was banned from Reddit for asking if you’ve read Culture of Critique and what you thought about the Jew World Order?
Is it as Voltaire said “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise”?
As to your point about the “cognitive shortcoming” of scapegoating outgroup competitors (i.e. normal human behavior). Well, the various Jewish intellectual movements have conditioned people into thinking that ethno-nationalism is a pathology when it was only perceived as a threat by the Jews living in Goyim communities. If you’ve read the book you’d have known that.
Because Jewish conspiracy theories are paradigmatically racist positions and Reddit, as a site dedicated to inclusiveness, bans such views. I personally think such an approach is counterproductive. I think you and everyone enamoured of ethno-nationalism are simply attempting to rationalize the paleolithic intuitions that constitute the greatest threat to the future of humanity. Banning the expression of those view, I think, has the effect of baking them in.
Do you think Jews have magical superpowers? That they comprise some kind of master race? Because this is the only way they could control/fake the mountains of research on group psychology, let alone the ‘world order.’ I for one would be relieved if you were right because then at least someone has some control of what’s going on! The world is noisy, which is why history is littered with failed conspiracies, not one of them a sliver as complicated as any of the ZOG narratives I’ve encountered. What you’re suggesting is magical. Put another way: if the Jewish people are so unbelievably organized and dependable as to pull off something so astronomically improbable, then perhaps you should feel relieved they’re in control! To me, it looks pretty damn clear that no one has a frickn clue what’s going on.
We’re bombarded with claims, circled by people telling us to believe this and that. Since almost everyone believes flattering things about themselves relative others, I take any claim that tells me I’m ‘special’ for this or that reason to be a marketing scam. You think your view is set apart because it inveighs against mainstream pieties, that you’re a ‘contrarian,’ but nothing could be further from the case. Everywhere you go, you see people beating their chest and pointing their fingers elsewhere. Jews. Muslims. Americans. Russians. Blacks. Whites. Don’t you see how ridiculous it all is? How me-me-me? Political correctness repels you because you smell the exceptionalism, which is really only a more inclusive version of your own exceptionalism. It’s pedestrian, Hanalulu, the cheapest, easiest thing to believe, which is why all of history’s tyrants have exploited it in the course of visiting misery on those they govern. You have a choice here. Be one of the billions who genuinely think they have won the Magical Belief Lottery, or embrace the ugly truth.
The truth never tells you what you want to hear. You are nothing special. Same as me. Same as Jews. Same as all of us. And this is why we nobodies need to stick together, no matter what our bullshit cultural baggage we happen to drag around. There’s no guarantees. This whole thing can flicker out… and will if we can’t find our way past our stone-age instincts.
They don’t have magical powers but they are by far smarter than everyone else. As Steven Pinker summarizes,
“Jews are remarkably over-represented in benchmarks of brainpower. Though never exceeding 3 percent of the American population, Jews account for 37 percent of the winners of the U.S. National Medal of Science, 25 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in literature, 40 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, and so on. On the world stage, we find that 54 percent of the world chess champions have had one or two Jewish parents.
Does this mean that Jews are a nation of meinsteins? It does not. Their average IQ has been measured at 108 to 115, one-half to one standard deviation above the mean. But statisticians have long known that a moderate difference in the means of two distributions translates into a large difference at the tails. In the simplest case, if we have two groups of the same size, and the average of Group A exceeds the average of Group B by fifteen IQ points (one standard deviation), then among people with an IQ of 115 or higher the As will outnumber the Bs by a ratio of three to one, but among people with an IQ of 160 or higher the As will outnumber the Bs by a ratio of forty-two to one. Even if Group A was a fraction of the size of Group B to begin with, it would contribute a substantial proportion of the people who had the highest scores.”
Knowing this it’s not so hard to understand how the Jews dominate every industry in the world from finance to entertainment… And the most likely explanation for this is that it’s genetic, the result of ingroup selective breeding over thousands of years. Being the author of the Prince of Nothing series you should know how dangerous this could turn out to be for the rest of humanity.
So, yeah, I’m not so special, but the Jews are. Everyone in the alt-right knows this. The most imminent danger facing the west today is the fact that a tribe that’s been historically oppressed in Europe has taken over the western world, and they’re trying to destroy it through mass immigration.
“Being the author of the Prince of Nothing series you should know how dangerous this could turn out to be for the rest of humanity.”
Because they are Dunyainish? A standard deviation may seem impressive while doing a LSAT, but in the scheme of possible intelligences, it means nothing. The same can be said of ethno-nationalistic identities: the degree of genetic variation between you and a sub-Saharan African and a Hasidic Jew amounts to nothing. As the author of PoN I understand how lucky we would be if anyone were under control. I hope you’re right! The point of my books is to demonstrate how delusion drives the atrocities we commit. The point of my books is to convince people to step out of all our ancient mindsets, to see all instances of US versus THEM as the suicidal tendencies they in fact are. The world simply cannot survive another round of ethno-nationalist fantasy.
(Besides, the hilarious thing about the Jewish IQ debate is that the leading theory explaining the apparent IQ edge involves group selection: persecution by larger ethno-cultural entities has actually made them smarter! Are you suggesting we make them smarter still?)
What do you think of all the Medieval Christian claims made against Jews? Were they really poisoning wells? Were they in league with the devil? Or were Medieval Christians feeling threatened for reasons they could not articulate, and simply blaming a convenient outgroup scapegoat? And if the Medieval Christians were right about the Jews, were they right about all the other minorities they persecuted as well? At the very least, you have an optics problem, Hanalulu. You and your views are as old as tribal warfare.
That’s because you’re presently in the grips of the signature weakness of homo sapiens: our willingness to rank and slaughter one another on the basis of the squawking noises we make. I hope you find your way past it. You will just be another human hating human, another primate in the mire, until you do. Another bloody ape, just ‘protecting’ the sliver of difference that distinguishes you from all the other apes. Don’t you see how sad that is?
Damnit, Scott, that was eloquent. I love it when the conversation drops down to my level and I can actually understand what you’re writing.
Check out/offer to be interviewed by “You Are Not So Smart,” a podcast about logical fallacies and cognitive biases. And cookie recipes.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/
That’s a good tip, Greg. I think he even reached out to me a couple months back, and – per normal – I entirely forgot to respond…
Ha, great minds think alike! Well, now this HAS to happen.
Thetes a question I wanted to adk but was too late…trying my luck here
Are there any deleted scenes from Kelhus’ training ? Those where really cool, too bad we had so few
Yes, in what amounts to an entirely alternate beginning to TDTCB.
Any chance to share some of these things? A lot of super fans(me included) would love to see those things…
Of course, when you have the time…5 years or so, can’t believe the last* book is finally here! So excited!
Hi Scott, I know you’ve left the Q&A, but we are arguing about something and I was hoping to get Word Of Author to clear it up.
Do Cishaurim turn to salt if they touch Chorae? They clearly die, but we are fighting about whether or not they turn to salt like Anagogic/Gnostic sorcerers.
Hi Scott,
Very pleased to be working my way (finally!) through The Unholy Consult.
Only about a third through (and trying to savour and not rush the experience) and an odd thought occurred to me:
Have you ever read The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass? In many ways Kelmomas reminds me of Oscar…
Hi Scott, I have no idea if you’re checking this any time soon, but I just finished reading TUC.
I couldn’t put it down! The ending was pretty ballsy too.
I wish you continued success and a restful internet sabbatical. Cheers!