Eating good food comes with a price: you can’t enjoy McDonalds ever again. Likewise, reading good writers means you will no longer enjoy their imitators and ripoffs (and I hold that it’s possible for a writer to be a second rate clone of someone without even knowing they exist).

I used to read a blogger called Fred Clark/Slacktivist. He is a shitlib (look it up), but I originally assessed him as an entertaining one. He’s most famous for his Left Behind cycle, where he reviews the popular Left Behind novels page by page. (It became a bit of a mess after he changed from Typepad to something else that blows. Maybe WordPress didn’t have enough writers of color or something).

…Then I discovered John Dolan, and was struck by a sense of “wow, this is what Fred Clark was trying to be, all along.” Clark’s a Shirley Temple, Dolan’s 60-proof moonshine pulled straight out of the radiator. Here’s his article about being homeless in Canada. Here’s his article about working for the American University of Iraq. He writes extremely well, and he writes about interesting topics. The shitlibbery is pretty strong at points, but he always lays out a case that’s hard to argue against.

For more Dolan, read the War Nerd (his column under the pen name Gary Brecher), or his all-time most entertaining piece of writing, a review of that James Frey thing: A Million Pieces of Shit.

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the “fat otter” is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

“Hey, Fat Otter. He stares at me. You want what I got? He stares at me. I’ll give you everything. Stares at me….”

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should’ve slapped him with its “flat, armored tail” and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its “Pile with monstrous protrusions.”

After injecting copious amounts of hi-test Dolan into my brain, I re-read Clark and he comes across as a shrill button-pushy retard. Here’s his latest, trying to score some rhetorical points re: shooting sprees. “Hahaha, I’m taking the logic people use on Muslims and applying it to men!”  But that’s actually un-ironically interesting. I am curious to know why males are much more likely to be spree killers. So are lots of people. Go ahead, let’s investigate it. You’re not making a joke here.

Great how he tries to jam every fucking thing from the news into the story (Go Set a Watchman, Sandra Bland). It was a sad day when he slithered from the abortion bucket.

There is a fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which reimagines JK Rowling’s books with Harry as a scientific prodigy and rationalist.

It’s quite long, and many people who start reading it don’t finish it. What’s interesting is that you can detect the exact moment someone bails on HPMOR based on their criticisms.

People who give up after the first few chapters complain that it’s smug and annoying, with Harry (the author stand-in) running circles around irrational wizards because he knows what a Fermi estimate is and they don’t.

But the people who quit 30-40 chapters in seem to have the opposite criticism: that the book isn’t delivering on its promise of a rational Harry Potter universe. JK Rowling’s world spins on nonsense instead of cogs and gears (as a feature, not a bug), and although you can temporarily restore order, entropy eventually reigns. Harry’s vaunted rationality doesn’t actually help him much – even when he wins, its usually by luck (eg, he happens to know a spell or possess a certain artifact.)

I wonder if HPMOR’s rationalism extends very far past the first layer of packaging. Blizzards of scientific buzzwords swarm the page (sometimes to soporific effect) but we’re still stuck in a world designed to be whimsical. The writing vacillates between an optimistic “science will solve our problems!” Neil deGrasse Tyson tone, and dark and angsty ruminations that read like the diary of a bullied schoolchild. It’s easy to suspect Harry is a stand-in for Yudkowsky himself – a guy with a fork in a world full of soup. Harry’s defiant rationalism is mocked and scorned by many of the wizards around him, and there’s a real sense of frustration and obstruction that can’t just be attributed to the feelings of the character.

One large frustration Yudkowsky has with the world is that people die in it. Read this monument to a deceased younger brother.

“I watched Yehuda’s coffin lowered into the ground and cried, and then I sat through the eulogy and heard rabbis tell comforting lies. If I had spoken Yehuda’s eulogy I would not have comforted the mourners in their loss. I would have told the mourners that Yehuda had been absolutely annihilated, that there was nothing left of him. I would have told them they were right to be angry, that they had been robbed, that something precious and irreplaceable was taken from them, for no reason at all, taken from them and shattered, and they are never getting it back.”

An ancillary frustration is with “deathists”, people who (he says) think death is part of the natural order, and indirectly enabled the death of Yehuda by various means (not financing biotech, not making cryonics a public service, etc). In HPMOR, this culminates with Harry reading (deathist) Dumbledore the riot act in ch.39.

“Uh huh,” Harry said. “See, there’s this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there’d be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you’re not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn’t getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they’d say no. And if you didn’t have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you’d have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing?”

I am a deathist. My logic is this: the train has already left the station, it’s moving fast as fuck, and we are all standing a mile from the platform. It makes no difference if you run furiously after the train, screaming and flapping your arms, or sit down and have a picnic. We’re all going to die, I’m 99% sure of this. I don’t worship death, or think death is a good thing. I just understand and accept its inevitability.

I read a few things on transhumanist sites, and my reaction was and remains “This is all dogshit. Nobody can do anything to stop us dying. If this is the state of the art, we’re doomed.” We don’t have ways of vitrifying brains without damaging them. Drexler style repair nanobots probably can’t exist. I’ve read things by Yudkowsky where he invokes a quasi-Pascal’s Wager, saying something like “even if it’s a long shot, isn’t doing something better than doing nothing?”…as if “doing something” is even in the same rhetorical ballpark as cashing in your retirement so Alcor can freeze your brain. There’s something to be said for relaxing and having a picnic instead of exhausting yourself chasing that departed train. As for “scanning” the human brain, here’s PZ Myers on his difficulties scanning tiny zebrafish brains. We don’t have the technology. Maybe we never will have the technology.

I think CS Lewis hits closer to the mark than Yudkowsky in Out of the Silent Planet, where the godlike Martian being Oyarsa explains how he taught the Martians to accept death.

“[…] Bent counsels would soon have risen among them. They were well able to have made sky-ships. By me Maleldil stopped them. Some I cured, some I unbodied——’

‘And see what come!’ interrupted Weston, ‘you now very few—shut up in handramits—soon all die.’

‘Yes,’ said Oyarsa, ‘but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.’

Weston writhed in the exasperation born of his desire to speak and his ignorance of the language.

‘Trash! Defeatist trash!’ he shouted at Oyarsa in English.”

Yudkowsky would no doubt join Weston in his jeers. But as Lewis said elsewhere, you cannot dim the sun by writing “it is dark” in the wall of your prison cell. HPMOR is an entertaining story, or at least the parts of it I’ve read. And I hope Yudkowsky is happy to share in Harry Potter’s quasi-immortality, because he’ll never get his own.

So what might actually work?

I have always thought Ebola could be promising – although not in its classical form. The trouble with Ebola Zaire is that it’s too good at killing – subjects typically end up bedridden and dead before they’ve spread the plague too far. Difficult to get exponential growth (ie, an epidemic), especially in a first world country.

(By the way, I should mention that Ebola Zaire will probably never become airborne, due to complex reasons relating to its structure. The airborne variant, Reston, is not dangerous to humans.)

For a truly weaponised version of Ebola, I refer to the work of Serguei Popov, a Russian molecular biologist who has done more to advance the cause of pathogenic bioweapons than any man alive. His main work (much of which is now public record, thanks to Mr Gorbachev) was genetically engineered pathogens that would use the body’s immune system against it – causing brain damage and paralysis.

“With the myelin toxin, the infection might initially show symptoms like those of typical plague or mild pneumonia,” Dr. Popov writes. The hybrid genes that he and his team engineered would themselves be spliced into some more innocuous bacterium like Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium responsible for Legionnaire’s disease. Thus, Dr. Popov continued, victims would first show pneumonia’s typical symptoms. “So the person would be treated for those and feel healthy. Then the disease’s second wave would come two weeks later, and it would be devastating.”

This is essentially a “glitch in the Matrix” type of plague that exploits the way the body responds to to pathogens. Two things are especially brilliant about Popov’s work.

First, there’s a “cooling off” period of weeks or months, where the person thinks he has a cold or a flu. In fact, he’s a walking ebola bomb, infecting everyone he touches.

Second, this “splicing” can occur with anything, even a lowly rhinovirus. To keep ebola out, you would literally need to screen against things like a mild cough. And that’s if you knew it was coming.

You might even get symptomless infection – and with a long period before the “switch” goes off, things would get very interesting.

Imagine aerosols released in Tokyo, New York, London, et cetera, infecting the world’s busiest travellers, who then go on to spread it far and wide. Nobody knows. It might show up in blood tests, or it might not.

The aerosols should also be distributed among scientists, research teams, missionaries – typhoid Marys who will take it to the deepest recesses of the world. No surface clean is enough. We need to reach into every crack and corner to eradicate the human germ.

A million people charting a million courses across the world with a hidden disease riding their trail, despoiling the ground they walk upon, killing long after they’d departed.

The incubation would be long.

But the end would be short.

Imagine a falling china plate, and that terrible moment of clarity before it shatters on the floor.

Such was the work of Dr. Popov, not long may he live.

On a bleak island in the Aral Sea, one hundred monkeys are tethered to posts set in parallel rows stretching out toward the horizon. A muffled thud breaks the stillness. Far in the distance, a small metal sphere lifts into the sky then hurtles downward, rotating, until it shatters in a second explosion.

Some seventy-five feet above the ground, a cloud the color of dark mustard begins to unfurl, gently dissolving as it glides down toward the monkeys. They pull at their chains and begin to cry. Some bury their heads between their legs. A few cover their mouths or noses, but it is too late: they have already begun to die.

Ken Alibek – Biohazard, 1999