Jim's Blog

Scott Alexander’s predictions for the next year have become ever more cautious, thus ever more boring and ever less likely to be falsified.  And then he came up with a pile of wild assed stuff for the next five years:

AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the spectacular achievements signify anything broader. AI will beat humans at progressively more complicated games, and we will hear how games are totally different from real life and this is just a cool parlor trick.

In other words, he will say it is spectacular, and I will say it is more of the same boring stuff.

AI translation will become flawless,

No it will not. AI translation is as good as it is going to get – gives you a good guess as to what the speaker is actually talking about, while remaining unacceptable as a finished product. You get the gist of things when AI translating between closely related languages like English and Spanish, and near gibberish when AI translating between distantly related languages like Chinese and English – a marginal improvement on what you would get by language dictionary lookup.

1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%

2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
3. At least 5% of truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%

Nah.

4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%

But he will have to sit at the wheel, and will likely die if he falls asleep at the wheel.

The European Union will not collapse.

The EU is a branch of the US empire, and I have long predicted failure or similar crisis for the US empire in 2026. As long as the US stands, its servants in Europe will continue to do as they are damn well told.

Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).

“May have”? What sort of a prediction is that? Might be right, cannot be wrong.

Here is my actual prediction. Russia will have a great decade. South Africa will drift from a shit hole to a hell hole.

Religion will continue to retreat from US public life.

Scott has not noticed that the US has an official religion that daily becomes more extreme, deranged, puritanical, and oppressive

As it becomes less important, mainstream society will treat it as less of an outgroup and more of a fargroup. Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom, much like Buddhists do. Everyone will agree evangelicals or anyone with a real religious opinion is just straight-out misinterpreting the Bible, the same way any Muslim who does something bad is misinterpreting the Koran. Christian mysticism will become more popular among intellectuals. Lots of people will talk about how real Christianity opposes capitalism. There may not literally be a black lesbian Pope, but everyone will agree that there should be, and people will become mildly surprised when you remind them that the Pope is white, male, and sexually inactive.

OK, this prediction will come true, but this, like Europe continuing, is just the official religion of the US empire continuing. The official religion of the US empire will fall, but probably survive for more than five years.

1. Trump wins 2020: 20%

Trump will win in 2020, assuming no coup or violent death. Democracy has already expired. The question is how soon this becomes obvious, and to what extent violence will ensue when people realize it.

On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party.

The misconduct of the Clinton presidential campaign was a manifestation of the fact that the pretense of democracy in the Democratic party was irrelevant to outcomes. It will go right on being irrelevant to outcomes. With the Clinton machine at best falling apart, and at worst being sent to jail, power in the Democratic party will fall into the hands of a Lenin type individual who realizes the irrelevance of electoral politics and proceeds to grab power directly. Primaries will remain irrelevant to the outcome, but the man seizing power will probably be radically left.

Slate Star Codex predicts politics as normal, the usual stuff in the usual ways, that something like what recently happened will happen again. I predict the unexpected – at least as startling as Trump himself, probably a lot more startling. Expect the unexpected. The Republic approaches its end. It will probably not end in five years, but the storms of its coming fall will rage.

The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.

Slate star predicts politics as they are now continuing, but politics as they are now are already extraordinary and remarkable by the standards of two years ago. Again, I predict the unexpected – a significant likelihood of democide or ethnic cleansing, with whites being driven out of large areas, and then blamed for the ensuing ruin that follows when they are no longer holding stuff together. More drama, more surprises, more shock.

The last two years have been very surprising for everyone except me – I predicted Trumps victory shortly after he announced. And I predict the next two years to be even more surprising, and the three years after that to be even more surprising, with a continuing drift towards civil war, democide and genocide, though we probably will not see democide, genocide, and civil war for about six years or so.

First World economies will increasingly be marked by an Officialness Divide. Rich people, the government, and corporations will use formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions. Poor people (and to an increasing degree middle-class people) will use informal gig economies supported by Silicon Valley companies whose main skill is staying a step ahead of regulators. Think business travelers staying at the Hilton and riding taxis, vs. low-prospect twenty-somethings staying at Air BnBs and taking Ubers. As Obamacare collapses, health insurance will start turning into one of the formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions limited to college grads with good job prospects. What the unofficial version of health care will be remains to be seen. If past eras have been Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, etc, the future may be the Ability-To-Circumvent-Regulations Age.

On this, we agree.

Cryptocurrency will neither collapse nor take over everything. It will become integrated into the existing system and regulated to the point of uselessness. No matter how private and untraceable the next generation of cryptocurrencies are, people will buy and exchange them through big corporate websites that do everything they can to stay on the government’s good side.

Nah. Bitcoin may well collapse, and its successor (probably Monero) may also collapse, but one cryptocurrency, maybe Bitcoin, maybe Monero, maybe something not yet on the radar, will eat the world. If it has not eaten the world in five years, the storm of its coming will nonetheless be evident, and will profoundly undermine the government’s ability to control the economy.

Multinationals will occasionally debate using crypto to transfer their profits from one place to another, then decide that would make people angry and decide not to.

Already false.  Crypto transfers are already big – and already cryptic.

Skipping most of his predictions as boring and hard to decide what would constitute fulfillment of the rather vague prediction.

3. Paris Agreement still in effect, most countries generally making good-faith effort to comply: 80%

Already false. No one is making a genuine good faith effort to comply.

4. US still nominally committed to Paris Agreement: 60%

Already false. In 2017 June the US announced it had ceased all implementation of the Paris Accord. That is something a bit less than being “nominally committed”. That will not change, and people are already forgetting that there ever was a Paris agreement. The only real action item on the Paris accord was smashing Americans in flyover country, making them suffer, and providing political cover for smashing Americans in flyover country. If Americans in flyover county are not being smashed, not one gives a tinker’s dam about the rest of it. It is already sliding out of sight and out of mind.

Since our existing state religion has gone rabid in an insane holiness spiral, we are in the business of designing a Gnon compliant state religion.

We need to steal from the best. If all societies had the economic system of twentieth century Hong Kong, all societies would have the economic outcomes of Hong Kong. If all societies had the healthcare system of Singapore, all societies would have the health outcomes and healthcare costs of Singapore. And if all societies had the family law of Timor Leste, all societies would have the fertility of Timor Leste.

Well, then, we need to steal the state religion that Charles the second imposed, which gave us empire, science, and industrialization.

So how did his state religion handle courtship and marriage?

I hope to find a clue in the County microfilm records: Library of Virginia:  Available by interlibrary loan.

Lancaster County:

Reel 102 Marriage Bonds & Consents, 1706 – 1819

Reel 350 Marriage Bonds, 1701, 1715-1736

Northhampton County:

Reel 99 Marriage Bonds & Consents, 1706 – 1780

Reel 62 Marriage Register, 1706 – 1853 c, Unpaged (Stratton Nottingham Compilation)

The consents and bonds are the juicy part, since that is the parent or guardian contracting with the prospective son in law that he damn well will get married.

The bond is a promise to pay damages if the marriage is not carried out – so I assume the couple are having sex at the time of the bond, or immediately after. (Otherwise, there would be no need to pay damages)

Bonds go from 1660, When Charles the Second’s Anglicanism was imposed in England, to 1860, when marriage as it has been understood for the past couple of thousand years was legally abolished in England (though it continued to be socially enforced till about 1972. ) Virginia of course was not subject to English rule in 1860, but its state religion was still effectively the Church of England, much as the State Religion of Israel is not Judaism, but United States State Department progressivism.

I am not at present located where it is easy to get an interlibrary loan, so will someone please look at these, see what is juicy, and if there are any good parts, send me a scan, or a link in the comments to a scan.

Pakistan expels the NGOs. So, soft power looks like it is not doing too well in Syria, Libya, Sudan, the Philippines, Hungary, and Pakistan. (more…)

Chastity should be imposed on women, not men. A key that opens many locks is an awesome key. A lock that can be opened by many keys is a crappy lock.

The problem is that women are hypergamous, while men are polygynous. A man wants to possess many women, while a woman wants to be possessed by the best possible man. Which means that if we let nature take its course, a few men will have most of the women. Notice surveys in which many women report having boyfriends, and considerably fewer men report having girlfriends, even though we would expect the lying to go in the opposite direction.

Of course each of the top male’s many girlfriends will be causing much drama, as each seeks to get a higher position in his booty call list, with the result that they keep shifting from one alpha male to the next. So though they are only sleeping with one male at a time, they have numerous male orbiters, and are continually shifting from one male to the next to get a better deal. The male defects by being a jerk, by never being available, by never providing resources, the female defects by dumping him. So though in this system women do not particularly want to be serially monogamous, defect/defect equilibrium means that in practice they are serially monogamous.

Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. Therefore we should guard eggs, not sperm. What this means is that it only needs a small number of badboys to render a very large number of women unmarriageable. Thus curtailing male badboy behavior is not going to succeed. And if we restrain prosocial well behaved upper class men from being badboys, the girls are going to get their kicks with Jeremy Meeks and Muslim rapeugees. Restraining male behavior results in upper class women fucking men low IQ men who live on towel folding jobs, petty burglary, drug dealing, and sponging off their numerous high IQ high socioeconomic status girlfriend, men whose careers are not going to be adversely affected by a few rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraint orders. The lawyerette does not fuck her fellow lawyers, she does not fuck judges, she fucks Jeremy Meeks. If we let upper class men be badboys, if we stopped afflicting judges with rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders, at least she would be fucking judges.

The problem is that law and society strengthens shit tests against well behaved, respectable, affluent men, but has limited success in strengthening shit tests against Jeremy Meeks. She fucks men against whom rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders have limited effect, because they can pass her shit tests, and you, even if you have a nicer car and a nicer hotel room than Jeremy Meeks, cannot. Plus the police and the courts just don’t seem to be pursuing rape charges against rapeugees, perhaps because of disparate impact.

All these laws have the effect of holding men responsible for female bad behavior. It is a lot more effective to hold women responsible for male bad behavior, because women, not men are the gate keepers to sex, romance, and reproduction. If you stop some men from behaving badly, women will just find men you cannot or dare not deter.

The problem is that we need to guard what is precious, guard eggs, not sperm. We need to restrain female sexual behavior, not male sexual behavior.

First, we need to change the social order so that the lawyerette fucks the judge instead of Jeremy Meeks. Then we can address the much harder problem of preventing her from fucking either one.

First, I endorse this excellent post by Heartiste, Minion of Satan.

If Trumps beats the judges on legal immigration, avoids war with Russia, and builds the wall, he is what we thought he was. Hail Trump, God Emperor. Those three items amount to making war on the deep state and winning. Missiling Syria is deeply worrying, but it is far too soon to count him out on what really matters.

And to that excellent post by Heartiste, Minion of Satan, I will add this. In chess, you can see the moves the master makes. When Trump moves, you frequently cannot see him move. Even when his move is public, a fashion statement or a tweet, it is often at a level that you cannot see what he is up to except in retrospect. He is playing a different game to the game his enemies think he is playing. Therefore, while we should take seriously the likelihood that Trump will double cross his loyalists for the praise and flattery of his enemies, we should take considerably less seriously any theory that supposes he is doing something stupid. Which is more likely? That you are smarter than Trump and know more than he does, or that Trump has an ace up his sleeve and a Smith and Wesson in his pocket?

Making warlike moves on Syria is a strategic retreat under fire, never a good sign. The merely temporary government, Trump is retreating under fire from the permanent government. But is is not over till it is over, and now that Gorsuch is in, Trump is free to move on lowering the status of judges, preparatory to going Jackson on them. That is bigger than Syria, though not so big as war with Russia. If Trump gets legal immigration of Muslims severely slowed, avoids war with Russia and avoids installing the head choppers in charge of Syria, the attack on Syria will not have mattered.

B did in fact win the bet that the Orthodox were holding the line on gay marriage. I failed to notice, because I ignored the evidence he brought up. I will settle the bet shortly.

I have been predicting, and still predict, that the fall of the Cathedral will be long, bloody, and terrible, and that the Cathedral will likely be replaced by something that none of us want, like the Islamic Caliphate.

But lately there have been happier signs, like the Trumpening.

And the defection of Duterte from the blue empire is another encouraging sign.

Duterte won the Philippine election on a hugely popular program of replacing the dysfunctional justice system with right wing death squads.  The Cathedral could not quite believe this, but after a while started murmuring about doing something, presumably another color revolution after the fashion of Syria.

Whereupon Duterte defected from the “International Community” to China, seeking Chinese protection against US military intervention.

Hillary’s program is to restore the blue empire by overtly violent means. Trump’s program is to let it go.

What happened in the Soviet Union is that when they let Afghanistan go, then another state went, and another state went, and a landslide of states, and then Moscow itself fell.

While the International Community, the blue empire of the consulates, has been struggling with Syria, Thailand and the Philippines have wandered off the reservation. Insurrection has a habit of cascading. To restore control, it would not be sufficient to destroy Syria and have the Alawites and Christians genocided, but war with Thailand and the Philippines might well also be necessary, and might well escalate to similar degrees of horror.

War tends to become far more horrible than those starting it expect. The Cathedral is piously indignant about barrel bombs, forgetting that the neighborhoods being bombed were often quite recently ethnically cleansed of their previous inhabitants by the forces supported by the Cathedral.

It seems to me that if a neighborhood was previously occupied by group A, and then group B drives them out, it is perfectly reasonable for group A and their allies to bomb the hell out the neighborhoods new and old occupied by group B. Yeah, there are children living it those neighborhoods. And there children driven out of their homes by violence when those neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. The Cathedral has sponsored a whole lot of violent ethnic cleansing in Syria, which caused, and entirely justifies, the violence that we now see in the reconquest of Aleppo.

And the Cathedral has sponsored a whole lot of violent ethnic cleansing in America, to which everyone piously turns a blind eye.

The empire rests on white males, while sadistically increasing the oppression of whites and males to ever more ridiculous extremes. Contrary to the fantasies of the 1488ers, no backlash ensues, instead whites and males become ever more passive, apathetic, terrorized, and emasculated. But on the periphery of empire, the empire is collapsing.

This collapse does not reflect for the most part backlash against anti white and anti male measures (though Boko Haram is unambiguously backlash against anti male measures) but the fundamental military weakness of a society that is constructed by white males, that is entirely dependent on the work and military capability of white males, and is ever more hostile to white males. The utterly extraordinary and almost incredible British defeats in Basra and Helmand province show what happens when you feminize your military. The empire is falling not because white males will fight their oppressors, but because they will not fight for their oppressors. Will the fall of the Blue Empire go all the way to Washington, as the fall of the Soviet Empire went all the way to Moscow?

The government has defined nitrocellulose, a deflagrating explosive, as a high explosive.

This makes anyone who creates ammunition subject to rules that are impossible to comply with. Fortunately the government has also issued an unprincipled exception, telling people not to worry about it. Just go on handling nitrocellulose as the deflagrating explosive that it actually is, and, wink, nod, we will not prosecute you.

But slowly, over time, unprincipled exceptions always go away. This is a back door criminalization of private ownership of guns. A few years down the line, they will start enforcing this, and say, “Oh, we are just enforcing laws that have been on the books for a long time, but widely ignored.” And private gun owners will find it strangely hard to legally buy ammunition. “Hey, the state has not banned your guns, nor your ammo, just banned anyone who makes ammo for your guns. And this law has been on the books since forever. They are still allowed to make it, but they have to make it safely – except that no one can figure out how to make it safely.”

Of course people who make ammunition for law enforcement and the military will get a continuing unprincipled exception, but people who make ammunition for private customers will not.

Then again, the way they are cutting the balls off our police and military, I would not have a lot of confidence that the military will continue to get ammo either. They banned mines and cluster bombs by a similar back door law: Our government passed laws against our military that could never be complied with, issued an unprincipled exception that allowed mines and cluster bombs, then the unprincipled exception somehow slowly faded away. Meanwhile the Soviets continue to use cluster bombs with devastating effect.

I cannot see any sane reason for banning cluster bombs other than that in the many proxy wars where the Red Empire of the Bases backs one side, and the Blue Empire of the Consulates backs the other side, cluster bombs were blowing the hell out of the State Department’s proxies.