Home > Author > Elizabeth Sandifer
1 " The history of the world consists of a lot of wealthy assholes sleeping with each other and killing people "
― Elizabeth Sandifer , Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right
2 " But there’s a second, blunter approach that perhaps more accurately captures the Basilisk’s stony gaze, which is that in a worldview where legitimate power is defined as power that is successfully applied, there’s no legitimate authority quite like the men with guns who kick down your door in the middle of the night. "
3 " But what’s really important is how this sheds light on what exactly Yudkowsky is fleeing from, and in turn on why the Basilisk is the monster lurking at the heart of his intellectual labyrinth. Yudkowsky isn’t just running from error; he’s running from the idea of authority. The real horror of the Basilisk is that the AI at the end of the universe is just another third grade teacher who doesn’t care if you understand the material, just if you apply the rote method being taught. "
4 " My, what an impressively diverse collection of rhetorical moves you employ” is not, of course, a sentiment regularly expressed to anti-Semites "
5 " Objectivity is for things I love less than this. That doesn't mean ignoring the flaws or pretending they don't exist. It just means forgiving them. And, more broadly, it means forgiving our own childhoods, and even to some extent forgiving ourselves. Doctor Who is rarely perfect. But it's frequently good enough to be enthralling, and it enthralled an awful lot of people over the years. It was precious to many of us. "
― Elizabeth Sandifer , TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years
6 " In practice, the US has more of a problem with theocratic lunatics than the UK does, so it's not like fundamental separation of church and state is a panacea or even, for that matter, particularly effective. "
7 " 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. Mencius Moldbug? Stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos? Stupid. Donald Trump? Peter Thiel? Vox Day? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Neoreaction is stupid. Race realism is stupid. Austrian economics is stupid. #MAGA and Pepe and the Daily Stormer are stupid. Even Nick Land is only not stupid to the precise extent to which there is a possibility that what he’s doing is some elaborate game, and frankly, even that sounds pretty stupid once you say it out loud. 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. "
8 " The answer is this: Doctor Who doesn't do epic sci-fi on a BBC budget. It does BBC television theater on an epic sci-fi scale. "
