#elizabeth sandifer

[immortalclarareborn]

"But in doing so, another aspect of the era’s core flaws becomes clear. We’ve already talked a lot about the notion of a female Doctor, and about Chibnall’s Davison revivalism of a more passive Doctor. Another key aspect, however, is that Whittaker is tasked with playing a much more childlike Doctor than we’ve had. Even Matt Smith, the previous record holder in this direction, cut his Doctor’s manic glee with a sense of weight and age. Whereas Whittaker is just playing a relatively infantilized Doctor. And Dawson picks up on this. That’s not especially surprising, because it’s one of the things about Whittaker’s Doctor that you could get off of little more than the publicity photo of her costume that dropped in November of 2017—a costume that always looked like a child slightly ineptly playing dressup.

There’s a case to be made that Doctor-as-child was always a mistake—the rotten spawn of how charming Tom Baker is when he delivers that “there’s no point in growing up if you can’t be childish sometimes” or of Patrick Troughton playing with the Daleks in Evil of the Daleks in much the same way that Kerblam! is the poison fruit of  the successful in its time Moffattian liberalism. Certainly childishness is the axis upon which the Matt Smith era began to go a bit wrong. There’s something to be said for the idea that part of the engine that makes Doctor Who work is the fact that the Doctor is sympathetic to children even as they’re not actually like a child—that this is why the show can function simultaneously as a children’s show and as an adult drama peer of Star Trek: Discovery that’s made by the same people who made Broadchurch, It’s a Sin, or Inside Man. Disrupt the balance, whether in the direction of making the Doctor too grimfaced or too childish, and the show falters.

But there’s a particular flavor of the error that comes in falling into this specific trap alongside the idea of the first female Doctor. It’s not that childish Doctors are unpopular—although ultimately Smith’s three years, for all that I’m quite partial to them, feel like the cracking of the new series’ imperial phase. But it is that childish Doctors are in a real sense lesser. If you put Whittaker next to Capaldi she is diminished, in the same way that Capaldi was enhanced in key ways by coming off the at times facile mania of Smith. At the end of the day, equating someone who was at the time the only female Doctor with being a literally more infantilized version of the character was an egregious and fundamental mistake."

You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Good Doctor by Elizabeth Sandifer

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[femmchantress]

Elizabeth Sandifer’s prose is always such a delight (source)

[1000rh]

We all know what’s to be done. Nazis have been the go-to example for people arguing why sometimes violent resistance is necessary for decades. But in the absence of a credible resistance […] the knowledge of what we should do is fairly useless. We’re not doing it, and I am to say the least skeptical that screaming “for fuck’s sake, just bash the fucking nazis’ skulls in already” for the next 350 pages would magically kickstart a mass uprising.

– Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (2017)

[mimeparadox]

If there was ever a classic Doctor Who story Elizabeth Sandifer made me feel keen about watching, it was "Paradise Towers"; now that I'm halfway through it--has Tubi always had classic Who?--I have to say, this is really quite fantastic.

[spokenitalics]

i've been thinking a lot about this paragraph from elizabeth sandifer's 'neoreaction a basilisk' in relation to the core theme of glass onion:

To be clear, my contention is not merely that the alt-right is stupid, nor even that its individual adherents are. It is and they are, but the problem is more fundamental: the alt-right is stupidity. It’s the elemental particle of which every part is comprised. To engage in alt-right thinking is to turn one’s self into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. [...] Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell-bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

[areadersquoteslibrary]

A BACKWARDS WAY OF WORKING OUT THE VALUE A 'SOCIAL CONSTRUCT' HAS IN ARGUMENT, this quote following a subjective account of Marx's theory of labor-worth: "The reader needn’t accept this account. The point is that it is neither a vulgarly objective account nor a vague and subjective one. It admits that value is a mental construct, but one that is ‘real’ because it has a real social basis and real social effects. Value, for Marx, is neither a thing nor an essence, neither quality nor spirit. It is a social reality because of what humans actually do. (This argument applies to most things leftists call social constructs—a phrase that does not mean “nebulous and unreal,” but rather “best understood in terms of lived experience than in woolly metaphysics.”)

- Elizabeth Sandifer, with Jack Graham,

'No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School',

From the Book 'Neo-Reaction: A Basilisk'

[txttletale]

Could you say a bit more about your thoughts on zygon inversion?

the whole two-parter is about how refugees (the zygons) who are being settled by the british government, and how some of them are Good Refugees who just want to assimilate and be Normal Human (read: British) People and some of them are Bad Refugees who join a scary terrorist group that use this fucking banner:

it is, i think, completely impossible for anyone with even the slightest understanding of european political discourse to not immediately scan this as being, if not a 1-1 to metaphor exactly, about as damn close to being About Muslim Immigration as it gets, playing on the everpresent fear of the european white supremacist right that asylum seekers and refugees from west asia are all secretly suicide-bombers in waiting. and this episode takes the liberal stance on this, which is that yes, obviously some of them are insane violent evil militants who just want to kill people, but some of them are The Good Ones, and we should figure out a way to find and punish The Bad Ones without impactiung the Good Ones Too--this is, broadly, the liberal stance on immigration in the UK, and it is obviously also prima facie accepting of islamophobic ideas! jack graham did a great piece on it.

the doctor's little speech at the end of the zygon inversion essentially boils down to 'war is bad, you just want war because you're an arrogant idiot who won't be affected by it'. which would be all very well and good in an episode like the frontier in space, where the confrontation is between two competing imperialist powers full of bluster and bravado and jingoism--but in talking to UNIT and the zygons, he's textually equivocating between refugees who are unhappy with their mistreatment at the hands of the British government and the British government agency mistreating them (yes, i know UNIT is nominally plurinational but that is not the portrayal of them we are getting here.) the fundamental problem with the scene is that bonnie (as elizabeth sandifer has pointed out) is only there to say vacuous nonsense that basically amounts to "i love war and violecen and i think its good" so that the doctor can heroically say, "actually, itsNot good." she's written as such an embarrasing caricature for the doctor to knock over that it imo makes the whole speech profoundly unearned.

of course, peter capaldi sells it, like he often sells garbage he's given to say! it's even a moving speech against war, when taken out of context--but taken in context, it's just equivocating between the oppressed and their oppressors and treating them both as equally responsible for making peace, and i think that's morally repulsive.

[minimoonstar]

Someone showed Matt Levine the tag bc he was subtweeting Ellison as part of his FTX writings, which... instinctively struck me as not cool? Somehow analogous to showing an actor fanfiction of themselves? Like I get tumblrina here committed financial fraud on a massive scale but just bc someone else is Bad doesn't mean one ought to cross the streams. Standards!

CEO of Alameda Research and the erstwhile girlfriend of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison has been labeled a “Harry Potter fangirl” because of comments made on an alleged Tumblr and elsewhere, though that's not quite right. She loved Harry Potter, but the blog has a lot of posts specifically about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Yudkowsky’s infamous plodding rewrite of the series which launched the entire genre of rationalfic. The central hyper-competence fantasy of rationalfic is central to understanding Ellison’s apparent fannishness, which is in turn central to understanding her as a person. She actively oriented her life around becoming the type of protagonist who exists in these stories. There is, or was, a sort of LARP going on, which this Tumblr narrates.

The blog also includes lots of Taylor Swift, including an assertion that “if I were the sort of person who wrote such things I would definitely write Heloise and Abelard fanfic based on Cruel Summer.” Ellison also wrote wordy Goodreads reviews, including of books by Naomi Novik, a co-founder of Archive Of Our Own. There were also multiple posts on the Tumblr tagged with “#matt levine is my internet boyfriend” and, in the grand tradition of being on Tumblr to post about Tumblr, tagged long posts about internecine rationalist drama with “#this blue website.” 

[Read more at Garbage Day]

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I would love to hear more of your opinions on Francis Dolarhyde

Anon, I am so sorry this took me two weeks to answer. I had the whole thing formulated, but it took awhile to track down the scenes/quotes that supported this argument, so here we are.

My initial response to this was “I don’t have many thoughts on him,” but that’s not actually true. I don’t have many thoughts on him as a character - I’m pretty okay with what he’s doing in the story and how he slots into Will and Hannibal’s dynamic, but he’s not one of the cast members who compels me the most.

But what I do find compelling about him is how his character is stylistically handled.

One of the most striking things about him, to me, is what Bryan Fuller said on one of the DVD commentaries for season 3, about the sequences at Dolarhyde’s house demonstrating the horror of cinema. And it’s really true - the horror of the scenes at his house, when he rehearses and relives his murders, is communicated visually through the close-ups on his film projector. For example, in episode 11, when Reba is at his house and he watches - unbeknown to her - footage of Molly and Walter, there are close-ups of the film spinning in its reel:

And this kind of visual focus on the projector and film is pretty frequent in the scenes at his house. It’s all about the film! Hannibal frequently features this kind of close-up object focus in its cinematography, but it’s telling that with Dolarhyde, the main other kind of technology we see it with is the tattoo needle shown upon his introduction.

The film, and the voyeurism it represents, is part of the technology of his becoming, just as his Red Dragon tattoos are. And his long introductory sequence also features the artsy sequence wherein he seemingly gets bound by the film and transforms into the projector.

His bestial nature is linked to his voyeurism and its monstrous appetites.

I also think about Dolarhyde in the context what Elizabeth Sandifer has to say about him, in her episode-by-episode commentary on Hannibal: that NBC!Dolarhyde “exists in constant tension with modernity.” Commenting on the effect of Dolarhyde retaining the job at the film processing plant that he has in the original Red Dragon novel, she says:

Inasmuch as it’s an object worthy of scrutiny, it speaks to Harris’s consistent fascination with turning modernity into monstrosity. But in 2015, nearly thirty-five years later, his connection to film is dated—a connection less to modernity than to early 20th century modernism. (Hannibal himself, of course, presents similar issues.) He is a technological monster, yes, but he is rooted in the hauntological qualities of technology as opposed to any futuristic ones.

And I just love that. Like, it’s fascinating to me that even though the film processing plant is no longer the means through which Dolarhyde is discovered, as in the novel, there’s something about it that just felt intrinsic to his character to Fuller&co. As an adaptational move, it turns the mundanity of his profession into a sort of retro technophilia, kind of reminiscent of that quote that goes around sometimes about how out-of-date technology acquires a new aesthetic resonance when it’s removed from its zeitgeist.

Hannibal is very deliberately out-of-time. Hannibal the character is surrounded by the signifiers of 19th century aestheticism, and Dolarhyde, in turn, becomes representative of the aestheticization of the late ‘70s. And that shift in temporality reflects the narrative turn in the utility of film in this arc - his videos are no longer a plot element, but rather a way of aesthetically and psychologically rendering his character. Rather appropriate to the fact that Will’s 3B arc, in turn, constitutes him shifting focus from the question of how Dolarhyde is choosing his victims to the question of the degree to which he himself shares Dolarhyde’s appetite.

I think the strange, out-of-time quality of Dolarhyde’s use of film - rather than modern digital technology - can also be taken to reflect the level of artistic distance through which we ourselves see the show. Violence on Hannibal is very stylized, very refracted through an aestheticized lens. It’s made beautiful to us. The datedness of this form of technology, the way it renders the projector and film themselves as aesthetic objects, keeps us at a remove from the violence itself. Instead, it reorients us towards point of view, and interpretation. Towards how things are seen, rather than simply the fact of their occurrence.

Geoff Klock, in the oft-cited book If Oscar Wilde Ate People, notes the significance of “seeing” in the show (113). The question “see?”, as Klock notes, bookends the first and last episodes of the show, posed first by Garett Jacob Hobbs and then, on the cliff, by Hannibal. And of course, Dolarhyde himself poses this question, when confronting Chilton with pictures of his crimes: “Do you see?”

Being able to see the aesthetic and artistic qualities in murder, and to see beyond its immorality, is thematically central to the show, in Klock’s argument. And to me, Dolarhyde embodies that concept perhaps more so than any of the show’s other villains (save, perhaps, Hannibal himself). As noted in the film Manhunter, sight is the main sense through which Dolarhyde perceives the world. The two pieces of iconography associated with him on the show are the broken mirror in his house (and of course, his habit of arranging the mirror shards on his victims’ eyes) and the film projector - demonstrating his fractured view of himself, and the consequential control he asserts over the images of his victims, and the way he uses them to transform his view of himself.

Essentially, the show links the potential for violence to a sort of interpretive capacity that is metaphorically associated with sight, and Dolarhyde is a character very associated with sight. And the cinematic and stylistic framing of his psyche has a lot of fascinating implications as to the show’s aesthetic rendering of violence.

[immortalclarareborn]

"Because the ugly thing that, perhaps, it’s finally time to admit is that parts don’t matter. Even if this were largely the good parts, and it isn’t… For all the pleasant and much quoted idealism about Doctor Who in the preface to this blog, it’s not valuable because of the beautiful flexibilities of its structure. It’s not valuable because of the amazing things it can do. It’s not valuable because of some magical breath of mercury at its foundation. It’s not, in fact, valuable at all, at least in and of itself. It’s a flexible container that was lucky enough to be written by people like David Whittaker, Robert Holmes, Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat—to have had actors like Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Christopher Eccleston, and Peter Capaldi, to say nothing of Jacqueline Hill, Katy Manning, Lis Sladen, Sophie Aldred, Billie Piper, Catherine Tate, and Jenna Coleman—and to have intersected the careers of people like Delia Derbyshire, Verity Lambert, Douglas Adams, Bonnie Langford, and Ben Wheatley.

But even that’s just a list of names. What really matters is simply that things like The Rescue, The Mind Robber, Carnival of Monsters, City of Death, Enlightenment, Remembrance of the Daleks, Damaged Goods, and Hell Bent were made—that its theme music was a pioneering piece of electronic music, that it’s a who’s who of British television talent across the ages. It never mattered because it was Doctor Who; it mattered because it was often good, and when it wasn’t good it was often at least interesting. When that quality builds up over decades you get a fascinating and vital lens into British culture. But when that quality is absent, frankly, so does the importance. This, at the end of the day, is the crux of my longrunning beef with much of the spinoff material—they’re simply far too indifferent towards quality."

TARDIS Eruditorum: Not a Trace of the Original (Nikola Telsa's Night of Terror) by Elizabeth Sandifer

[annihilate-this-week]

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is far more frightening: nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

—Alan Moore, quoted in The Last War In Albion by Elizabeth Sandifer

[albiandreams]

I've been somewhat obsessed with Paul Schrader's The Card Counter lately, so I got some of my thoughts on that film, the photos that inspired it, and the violence of white feminism out on my blog:

[1000rh]

The cautionary tale […] is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).

– Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (2017)

[reddragdiva]

when i talk about the LessWrong rationalists, Effective Altruists etc as disaster chucklefucks, i don't enough bring up that race-IQ science is endemic as a belief inside the subculture, and that is 100% sufficient reason to start off from a position of assuming bad faith in them

i did a whole podcast on this with I Don't Speak German - me and Elizabeth Sandifer, author of Neoreaction a Basilisk, talking to our estimable hosts Jack Graham and Daniel Harper

https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/82-scott-alexander-slate-star-codex-with-david-gerard-and-elizabeth-sandifer

the specific impetus was Scott Siskind/Alexander of Slate Star Codex's 2014 email leak revealing he explicitly started SSC to further race science and reactionary ideas, after years of pretending he hadn't:

https://www.tumblr.com/reddragdiva/643400252772302848/topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say-screw-it

the subculture was outraged at this as a breach of privacy, not as a lie. so it seems to be real. bup-pow.

here's el sandifer's essay that does a deep dive analysis of why Scott Siskind is a fucking awful human being behind a polite civilised veneer. https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method

the starting pistol in the LessWrong subculture was these two pieces:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould

the second is interesting. actual biologists answer in the comments that Yudkowsky is talking nonsense, though you'll have to expand the comments to read them because the fans dutifully downvoted them. we go through the post in question in the podcast.

the gould piece reads like someone assembled a list of talking points for yud and he just ran with it.

this was around the time that thiel started funding lesswrong too.

lesswrong is also where the neoreactionaries got their start. it's important in understanding the flow of ideas that this isn't just an online subculture - it's a real-life in-person bay area subculture too.

most people don't get their political opinions from reasoned philosophical discourse. they pick them up from their friends. the rationalists and neoreactionaries are friends. the rationalists adopted the neoreactionaries' race science wholeheartedly.

Caroline Ellison from FTX-Alameda (tumblr now deleted) is a good example of an Effective Altruist who is also a massive fucking race scientist, and literally cares more about wild fish suffering or possible electron suffering than the real suffering caused to existing humans by racism. and she is absolutely a normative example of these people.

so if you find lesswrong or ssc ideas interesting, i suggest you may want to reconsider trying so hard to strain kernels of corn out of sewage flows.

and just to make your life worse, here's the aella thread for your entertainment. CW: aella. https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467

[sporadiceagleheart]

It's Friday Y'all know what that means time for one of my Rachel Joy Scott Friday edits Sarah Elizabeth Armstrong, Sarah Elizabeth “Sadie” Ollis Armstrong, Ruth Eleanor Ollis Yenter, DEATH 27 Dec 1988 (aged 78)Ruth Elizabeth Armstrong Sizer, Dr Sarah Elizabeth Reidhead Armstrong, Sarah Elizabeth Armstrong, Sarah Ann Armstrong, Hachikō “Hachi or Chūken Hachikō” Ueno, Rex the Dog, Girl Dog, Milo, Rando the Dog, Spike, Lassie, Lassie Jr., Max Dog, Greyfriars Bobby, Buster Boy, Toto AkA Terry, Barney “The Cemetery Cat” Sampson, Sneaky Pie Siamese “Sneaky” Cat, Grumpy the Cat, Room Eight, Grumpy Cat, Suzy Cat, Simon The Cat Allen, Tippy The Cat, Slick Cat Chidsey, Morris the Cat, Susan Hayward, Cat, Tom Hanks (Cat), Syrka, Panther Cat, Sylvester Bachman “Syllie” Cat, Edle Lee “♥♥” Hecht Cat, Mr. “Bootsie” Boots-Cat, Nagi cat, Gilbert Cat, Snookum White McStay, Butters “The Bean” Bozwick, Danie Cat, You'll Do Lobelia, Rachel Hannah Morin, Rachel Marie Sobkoweak Jackson, Rachel Marie Johnson Janous, Rachel Lauren Lavalley, Rachel Ann Schrette, Rachel Joy Scott, Rachel Erin Rollings, Rachel Dawn Freeman, Rachel Frances Reid, Rachel Elizabeth Payne, Rachel Karin Hurley, Saffie-Rose Brenda Roussos, Saffiatu “Saffie” Bockarie, Leonard “Len” Saffie, Sarrafino Joseph “Saffie” Flammia, Lillie Estelle Lawson Greene, Effie Frances Sandifer Mayhew, Ewing Roy Mayhew, John Atkinson, Courtney Boyle, Kelly Marie Brewster, Georgina Bethany Callander, Olivia Paige “Ollie” Campbell-Hardy, Megan Joanne Hurley, Nell Jones, Sorrell Jenny Leczkowski, Eilidh MacLeod, Chloe Ann Rutherford, Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, Jacklyn Jaylen “Jackie” Cazares, Makenna Lee “Kenna” Elrod Seiler, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, Layla Marie Salazar, Eliahna “Ellie or Elle” Torres, Rojelio Fernandez Torres, Alejandro "Ale" Vargas Jr., Ava Jordan Wood, Tristyn Tyne Bailey,