State of Emergency coming up.

Trump is readying a state of emergency to build and fund the wall without congressional approval. He has already been building and funding the wall without congressional approval, but a state of emergency would arguably make it legal.

The Democrats are going to scream in pain that this is a dire threat to rule by the permanent government of law and democracy. Which it is.

There are already a thousand and one states of emergency, each of them consuming vast amounts of funds that congress has not appropriated, and each of them granting a vast and lawless army of bureaucrats open ended powers to smash the lives of Americans that they do not much like.

The difference between this coming state of emergency, and the other thousand and one states of emergency, is that all of the others were declared by bureaucrats tossing a declaration of state of emergency into the president’s in tray, from which it went unread and unnoticed to his out tray. The usual bloody battle then ensued for the papers in the out tray, each of which grants a nameless bureaucrat, whose face the president does not recognize, power to act with the full power of the president. The winning bureaucrat then wipes the bloodstains off the declaration, feeds it into the presidential autosigner, then, after getting his wounds treated, hires an army of bureaucrats, forming a new bureau with himself as head to harass Americans all over America and radically disrupt their lives, loves, and plans, even though the original emergency only affected one orchard in South Florida.

This declaration of state of emergency is going to be different from all of the others because it actually references a real emergency, rather than an ant infestation in a South Florida orchard, because actually composed by the actual president, and because actually addressing the kind of threat that the office of president was intended to deal with, rather than functions that properly belong to state and municipal governments.

The Democrats are going to appeal this state of emergency, but unless they openly say “The president should reign but not rule, the permanent government should rule”, the court cannot explain what makes this one different from the other thousand and one states of emergency.

The Democrats are going to tell us this a big step towards them getting helicopter rides to the Pacific, and they are absolutely right, but unable to explain why, or even to think why, because actually thinking through the reasons is crimethink.

277 Responses to “State of Emergency coming up.”

  1. eternal anglo says:

    Testing – comment seems to have gone to spam

  2. Zach says:

    Chris Langan is a fun read. Entirely outside the purview of evil empire which is always fun.

    http://hology.org/articles-essays/

  3. Howdy all! Be sure and find a quiet place to watch/listen the President’s speech tomorrow, Saturday, @ 3PM EST. This may be it (National Emergency declared to fund a wall) or Trumps capitulation? I hope Jim will give us his take on what it will all means. ps Another “bombshell” from “buzzfeed news” debunked by Special Prosecutors Office…that didn’t take long.

    • Neurotoxin says:

      Trump invited the Dems to look fanatically unreasonable, and they did not disappoint.

      I watched the speech live, and in the middle of it, at the bottom of the screen, they displayed
      “Pelosi: Trump deal a non-starter”
      or words to that effect.

      When that appeared on-screen, a liberal sitting near me went “Dammit, Pelosi!” They know. Liberals know this is politically bad for them.

      It lets the President shrug and say, “Well, I tried to negotiate, but they wouldn’t.”

      So, to quote Homer Simpson: “It’s time to do things the American way: Unilaterally!”

      • jim says:

        Democrats cannot allow themselves to know that they look like hostile fanatics. They tell themselves that Trump looks totally evil, crazy, nasty, and is losing votes so massively he will eventually be forced to capitulate. They dismiss any source of information that is connected to reality as evil Nazis, so fall ever deeper into self delusion.

  4. Nikolai says:

    https://soundcloud.com/anthony-demarco-196742110/descending-the-tower-14-2018-year-in-review-jan-apr

    Even the guy behind Woke Capital takes Jim’s position on capitalism. At around 50 minutes he says the problem isn’t capitalism so much as the problem is the evil and insane state religion and the businesses are just Havel’s greengrocer. Almost word for word Jim’s argument.

    • Carlylean Restorationist says:

      It’s just as wrong, too. The fact that capitalism bends like a reed in the wind is ample grounds to subjugate capitalism to healthier societal forces that do not.

      • jim says:

        This presupposes the Marxist doctrine that Capitalism is not already utterly subjugated, which doctrine is as nuts as flat earthism and 9/11 trooferism. When we are in power, suddenly it will be as politically incorrect to hire women for men’s jobs, as it is now politically incorrect to refuse to hire them, even for jobs where they reliably and predictably destroy the business, and everyone will have the new opinion, and no one will remember having their old opinions, just as no one today remembers having their 2007 opinions. Not only will no one hire women for men’s jobs, even though it will remain theoretically legal to do so, no one will remember that they ever did hire women for men’s jobs.

        • Cavalier says:

          [*Deleted*]

          • jim says:

            Unsupported and improbable claim by troofer. All Troofer claims are circular, supported only by other equally unsupported and improbable claims.

            • Cavalier says:

              Would you prefer to talk about why Flat Earth is a perfectly reasonable scientific position?

              • jim says:

                The flat earthers tend to be saner than the Marxists, because their flat earth is just bad physics – Flat earthers are stupid. Marxists are evil and insane.

        • Carlylean Restorationist says:

          “This presupposes the Marxist doctrine that Capitalism is not already utterly subjugated”

          No no that’s exactly it: Capitalism IS already utterly subjugated, that’s the whole point!

          Capitalism bends like a reed in the wind. If Hollywood’s pushing tobacco, capitalism gives you tobacco. If the Cathedral’s pushing homosexuality, capitalism gives you pride parades.

          The problem is Capitalism’s under the control of the Cathedral. It should be under the control of the Nation. Every time someone on the economic Right calls for capitalism to be freed, they’re opening the door for capitalism to be controlled by the Cathedral.

          • jim says:

            Nuts.

            Capitalism puppeteered by Cathedral, gives us anti male and anti white male commercials, but how is capitalism involved in the gay parades?

            It is not capitalism that is giving us pride parades, nor capitalism that gives us child gay rape services.

            To suggests that it does presupposes that capital is secretly behind everything that happens. Which is just tired old Marxism in marginally different clothes.

          • eternal anglo says:

            No no that’s exactly it: Capitalism IS already utterly subjugated, that’s the whole point!

            Capitalism bends like a reed in the wind. If Hollywood’s pushing tobacco, capitalism gives you tobacco. If the Cathedral’s pushing homosexuality, capitalism gives you pride parades.

            Well, then, when we win, and the Church under its Archbishop and Grand inquisitor pushes virtue, capitalism will give us virtue. As the leftist state takes over everything, every problem becomes a coup-complete problem.

  5. simplyconnected says:

    Jim, have you seen this graphic?
    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/06_02/playgraphicDM1406_736x800.jpg

    Of course in the article they can’t make sense of why this happened.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html

    Every time I read Moldbug on crime rates and how we love victorian homes but can’t build them anymore, I think of the above graphic.

    • Eli says:

      Wow. There are actually two interesting links there, not just one.

      Diversity kills, literally.

      USS Fitzgerald collided with a ship, resulting in death of 7 sailors, because the female deck officer “failed to follow the commanding officer’s standing orders” (she pleaded guilty).

      Lesson from USS Fitzgerald: never promote women into vertical managerial positions where lives and livelihoods depend on them. (Horizontal service is fine though.)

      In addition to the above disaster: a year ago, a Puerto Rican muchacho, Commander Alfredo Sanchez along with his niggaboo homey, a chief boatswain, both caused the death of 10 sailors on the USS John S. McCain. How? Via pure negligence.

      Lesson from USS John McCain: never promote siesta-loving Latino cuisine chefs and niggaboos into critical managerial positions.

      Diversity merely for the sake of diversity is criminal.

      • BC says:

        She also didn’t consult the ships CIC (radar room) before making the course change because she was having a tiff with someone there.

        >The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center — the combat information center, or CIC — while the Fitzgerald tried to cross a shipping superhighway.

  6. So far (1-15) no National Emergency declared on wall funding? It looks like a game of chicken is emerging between Trump and Democrat’s. Something or someone seems to be preventing Trump from declaring a NE?

    • Koanic says:

      There is still drama to be milked!

      • jim says:

        The shutdown focuses attention on the invasion. The shutdown is a vote loser for Republicans, but the invasion is a vote winner. The longer the shutdown goes, the more Trumpism gains among Republicans, and the more Republicans gain over Democrats.

        Democrats tell us that they are winning the debate. They believe what they tell us. They are badly deluded and seriously out of contact with reality.

        Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.

        If the Republicans make the mistake of overriding Trump’s veto, the state of emergency is to interrupt them, not the Democrats.

        • Karl says:

          “The shutdown is a vote loser for Republicans, but the invasion is a vote winner.”

          Really? I would have guessed that the shutdown is a vote loser for Democrats and the invasion a vote winner Democrats.

    • jim says:

      National emergency ensues if they fail to fold. But, better if they fold, because then we get infighting between Democrats.

      Point of maximum pressure on the Democrats will be February 27, when “tax refunds” would go out to be people who profile as Democratic party voters, and who do not, in fact, pay taxes.

      • The Cominator says:

        Can you explain how this works exactly (I want to do my part preaching the God-Emperor on fagbook) and in detail. I assume it refers to child tax credits for people with no non under the table non government income.

        • jim says:

          The first “refunds” to go out, go to the Democratic base for being the democratic base.

          It is known as the Earned Income Tax credit – but you”earn” it primarily by being a single mother, and it is not a refund, because everyone receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit has a marginal tax rate of zero.

          The more children you spawn to more thugs, up to a maximum of three children, the more your Earned Income Tax Credit.

          The Earned Income Tax credit fixes the problem that if a single mother does a small amount of part time work, her child support is reduced, discouraging work force participation.

          The Earned Income Tax Credit replaces the child support money that would otherwise be lost if a single mother reports part time work.

        • PlannedObsolescence says:

          telling conservatives on normiebook about the political machinations of politicizing the tax code and how it benefits them would probably go over about as well as “I like 90s music, you never know if you don’t go, you never shine if you don’t glow; today is the greatest, do do do do do”. The conservative identity groups have enough trouble as it is.

          • The Cominator says:

            I like to do predictions and do my part to win the war, who it triggers I don’t care. I moved recently and have independent means. I’ll hide power level somewhat (Im not as explicit on the woman question as I could be and I avoid talking race explicitly) but I’m not posing as a good liberal.

  7. lalit says:

    https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1083705208834834433

    This came out of left field now, didn’t it? What’s going on?

    • jim says:

      A pile of H1B request have met the response “If this guy is so good, why are you paying him crap wages?”

      So, I would guess this is for H1Bs that are earning decent money.

      The great majority of H1B engineers are not very good. I suspect this is not for them.

      • The Cominator says:

        H1Bs are bound to their employer which is really the main appeal of them as far as employers go, and that makes raises a bit harder to negotiate.

        • jim says:

          “Path to citizenship” means not bound to their employer, reducing the appeal of importing H1Bs.

          • The Cominator says:

            Exactly. Path to citizenship for H1bs has the opposite incentive then path to citizenship for illegals does (though increasingly the law in California treats illegals as a ruling people which there they are… so probably in California its better to not be a citizen).

      • Cavalier says:

        >H-1Bs are not very good

        President Trump should immediately take steps to ensure the prompt importation of all highly skilled engineers on Earth, to be paid 1/4 Silicon Valley wages and replace the natives, who are too entitled on account of already living in the land of the free and home of the brave. In addition, we must redouble the Jobsian policy of organized compensation suppression, because it is just and good that hiring managers foster intercorporate cooperation in the interest of the common good.

        It is the only way to achieve full capitalism.

        • The Cominator says:

          H1Bs aren’t about getting highly skilled engineers. The appeal is they are bound to their employer and they tend to be low skilled and entry level. This tended to keep (it ma**ively f***ed me over im all set now but my path to prosperity wasn’t the job market it was speculation) US engineering graduates from getting entry level jobs. Employers rather pay to train people they would own even if they weren’t good…

          Was it capitalism… debatable. Its sort of like importing corporate serfs… unlike most NRXers I take a fairly strong stance against large scale permanent use of unfree labor. Unfree labor creates externalities for free labor and fucks up the market. Low agency people who can’t function as free labor in a good economy should just be sterilized we should not bring back slavery. Trump shut a lot of the H1B racket down right away with almost no opposition unlike his attempts to stop invaders and Muslims. Possibly created by leftists to frame capitalists.

          • Cavalier says:

            >H-1B isn’t about getting highly skilled engineers

            Sure it is:

            >The regulations define a specialty occupation as requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor[1] including but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, computing, architecture, engineering, statistics, physical sciences, journalism, medicine and health: doctor, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, etc., economics, education, research, law, accounting, business specialties, technical writing, theology, and the arts (Wik)

            At least as it’s sold to everyone who’s anyone.

            >Its sort of like importing corporate serfs… unlike most NRXers I take a fairly strong stance against large scale permanent use of unfree labor. Unfree labor creates externalities for free labor and fucks up the market.

            I’m with you 100%, but lolbergtarians might have a problem with that. All regulations taint the heavenly utopia guaranteed by free market fundamentalism, don’t’cha know?

            >Unfree labor creates externalities for free labor and fucks up the market.

            Some folks would have you believe that to favor the ordinary man over the massive bureaucratic entity is socialism, and all coercive intitiative to protect the yeoman, craftsman, or small proprietor is therefore genocidal.

            >Low agency people who can’t function as free labor in a good economy should just be sterilized we should not bring back slavery.

            We’ll all be out of a job soon enough. “There but for the grace of God…”

            • jim says:

              > > H-1B isn’t about getting highly skilled engineers

              > Sure it is:

              Nuts.

              H1B is primarily intended to lower the status threat of techies against non techie management. The dumber the people hired, the more effectively the status threat is lowered.

            • jim says:

              > Some folks would have you believe that to favor the ordinary man over the massive bureaucratic entity is socialism, and all coercive intitiative to protect the yeoman, craftsman, or small proprietor is therefore genocidal.

              Not seeing any of these coercive initiatives to protect the yeoman, craftsman, or small proprieter.

              Anyone who announces coercive initiatives to supposedly protect the yeoman, craftsman or small proprietor never goes after the guy who owns a skyscraper full of New York Lawyers writing ten thousand pages of regulations for the Transpacific Partnership. He targets the guy who owns your local Domino’s pizza franchise: “Just bake the cake, why don’t you”

              The guy who actually protects the yeoman and craftsman is Trump, the great deregulator, and cutter of taxes on the rich, the man who got the coal miners, steel workers, and frackers back to work.

              “Capital” is the yeoman, the craftsman, and the small proprietor. The Transpacific Partnership and NAFTA was not free trade, not “capital” but world socialism. Look who is weeping at the abolition of the Transpacific Partnership. It is not capital, it is Neocons, who are Trotskyites, advocates of world socialism, and of course the Obama crowd, Alinksyite Marxists.

              You can plausibly accuse “Capital” of H1B, but when Trump swept away H1B there was no real resistance or opposition. Capital grumbled a little, and then fell into line. Compare and contrast with the mass importation of serial murderers to live on crime and welfare, which is being totally fought for tooth and nail.

              • Cavalier says:

                >Anyone who announces coercive initiatives to supposedly protect the yeoman, craftsman or small proprietor never goes after the guy who owns a skyscraper full of New York Lawyers writing ten thousand pages of regulations for the Transpacific Partnership. He targets the guy who owns your local Domino’s pizza franchise: “Just bake the cake, why don’t you”

                “Man platformed for sole purpose of announcing pre-approved coercive initiatives reads script like well-conditioned schoolboy, more at 11.”

                >”Capital” is the yeoman, the craftsman, and the small proprietor

                Lol. Capitalism, definitionally, is the amoral competitive process by which capital is accumulated. The most effective way to accumulate capital is by coercion, and so capitalism is an inherently political phenomenon. 90’s Russia was perhaps the most capitalistic system that has ever existed and likely will ever exist. Guess who isn’t politically connected? The yeoman, the craftsman, the small proprietor.

                Markets don’t want to be free.

                >Capital grumbled a little, and then fell into line. Compare and contrast with the mass importation of serial murderers to live on crime and welfare, which is being totally fought for tooth and nail.

                Profit is nice, but is not itself the goal of capitalism, which is the any-means-necessary maximization of the value of capital stock.

                Money generally is valuable to the extent that it is a form of power. The tech lords find it modestly pleasant to have the freedom to import low-caste street-shitters as quasi-slaves. They would be very pleased to have the freedom to import infinity Chinamen to labor under working conditions only an Oriental can handle. They find it existentially terrifying that the rightful Pʀᴇsɪᴅᴇɴᴛ is willing to pulverize them like Standard Oil or Bell.

                At one time, it could be reasonably argued that corporations and government were meaningfully distinct entities. Now, not so much.

                https://i.imgur.com/rJIavyZ.jpg

                • alf says:

                  At one time, it could be reasonably argued that corporations and government were meaningfully distinct entities. Now, not so much.

                  Nah, they’re distinct.

                  The goal of capitalism, e.g. each corporation, is found in its function, e.g. to sell products to consumers. They derive their right to exist from selling stuff we want. So, a hotel chain derives it existence from selling hotel rooms you want, and a restaurant from selling food / ambiance you want. Their function determines their goal.

                  The faceless government derives its right to exist from a different place; by force. It exists because it exists, and if you don’t like it, tough luck, it’s there to stay. And so, it’s natural state is to grow, because existing is nice and its monopoly on force allows it to exist even more.

                  Which is why faceless governments tend to expand into corporations.

                • jim says:

                  Your argument is stupid and absurd. Rebutting it for the last time. Subsequent repetitions will be silently deleted.

                  Capitalism is the guy who owns your local Domino’s Pizza franchise. It is not a system of political rule, it is that people like the guy who owns your Domino’s Pizza franchise can set the dogs on you when you try to take his stuff.

                  Capitalism is adherence the latter six of the ten commandments, in particular: Thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not covet.

                  Which is confirmed by the fact that anyone telling the story you yell, that Capital is political rule by “Capital”, in actual practice goes after the kulak, goes after the guy who owns the local Domino’s Pizza franchise, and goes after the baker. If he genuinely thought that capitalism was political rule, he would go after the guy who owns a skyscraper full of New York lawyers writing ten thousand pages of regulations for the Transpacific Partnership.

                  The behavior of those who tell this story, that Capital is supposedly political rule, reveals that they know that the story that they tell is untrue.

                  You lie. You are a lying commie. And I know you are a lying commie from the behavior of everyone that told this story when they got power, revealing that they justified the violation of commandments eight and ten by violating commandment nine. You bear false witness against your neighbor.

                  The Trotskyite tells the peasant with one cow that he is being ruled by the peasant with two cows – but when the Trotskyite takes charge, kills both peasants, kills the cows, and takes the seed corn. The conduct of those who tell the story you tell reveals they do not believe it.

                  Socialism has been tried thousands of times, always with the same outcome. They always go after the husband, the father, the kulak and the baker.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “At one time, it could be reasonably argued that corporations and government were meaningfully distinct entities. Now, not so much.”

                  Yet admitting this you blame capitalists for being bullied into being an arm of the state?

                  You’ll get no argument from me if you say the big media companies and google glow in the dark and have been co-opted by the covert arm of the Cathedral. But that doesn’t mean that the Cathedral sicking spooks on them is capitalism.

                  Zuckerberg’s recent troubles are what happens when someone resist Cathedral/spook consolidation.

                • jim says:

                  > 90’s Russia was perhaps the most capitalistic system that has ever existed

                  If, in the thousands of previous attempts to implement socialism, they all wound up implementing what you call “capitalism”, it seems likely that should you implement socialism, you will in fact implement what you call “capitalism” also.

                  If True Socialism has never been tried, why should we suppose your socialism is going to be true socialism, unlike the thousands of previous false socialisms?

                • Cavalier says:

                  Jim,

                  There is a system of control, and this system of control is not capitalist.

                  This system of control has no meaningful ideology except that it should persist, and that it should strengthen itself by smashing all possible competitors. It will do so until all such have been eliminated and their standard-bearers physically destroyed as coherent memetic and genetic complexes, i.e. cultures. Thereupon the constituents of this system of control will set upon each other until one emerges victorious and the rest are themselves destroyed.

                  Corporations seek to pervert government to benefit themselves, and this is, in fact, the origin of most of the regulatory burden, but it also isn’t terribly important and certainly not worth losing sleep over.

                  If you actually wanted what you claim to want, you would support, for example, the extremely prejudiced termination of the Federal Reserve and the other central banks.

                  You don’t, because you don’t.

                  Instead you misdirect attention away from the core constituents of this system of control, such as tech, intelligence, media, and finance.

                  You’re stuck in the past, a foreign world in which your real-life American “hero-capitalist” icons used American assets and technological know-how to build and run every working factory in the Soviet Union both before and after the Second World War, and during the War actually resorted to using America to supply them as well.

                  This is not the year one-nine-eight-seven, this is the year two-zero-one-nine, a world utterly foreign to the former, a world in which these very same, historically and biologically continuous peoples have used American assets and technological know-how to build and and run every working factory in Communist China.

                  It’s literally happened all over again. Step by step. Out of the same fucking playbook.

                  Navy ships crashing into each other is not a bug, it is a feature.

                  Diversity is a weapon. Diversity in the military is a weapon of war.

                  We are in a state of undeclared total war.

                  Wake up.

                • jim says:

                  If corporations were all that powerful, if they were not terrorized by the system of power you speak of, then Trump, being capital incarnate, would be able to rule.

                  If corporations were all that powerful, if they were not terrorized by the system of power you speak of, then Trump would have had great difficult wiping out H1B, and no difficulty building the wall.

                  If rule by Capital was the problem, he would have big difficulties curtailing H1B, and no problem building the wall, but we see the reverse. He demolished the H1B program as a source of cheap low status slave labor, and not a whimper was heard.

                  Personal experience and observation: Capitalists are terrified and terrorized. It just insane to cast them as a ruling elite. The political class treat them with brutality and utter contempt, which contempt is what pissed off Trump.

                  Trump is capital. Trump is the optimate reaction to the hostility and contempt with which the priesthood treats them.

                  Corporations are begging Republican Congressmen to get Trump to approve H1B, and I suppose that some especially well connected businessman are getting results, but for the most part, they are not getting it. I see what is happening at the other end of the pipeline, and at my end of the pipeline, the cheap submissive low pay low status replacements for Americans have stopped.

                  Reaction 101: We are always ruled by priests or warriors. Since priests are self destructing, we need warriors.

                  The system of power you speak of is not pursuing its rational self interest, but is trapped in a holiness spiral which can only end in them murdering us and each other.

                  If power was pursuing its rational self interest, or if corporations had significant influence, Venezuela would be pumping oil and mining gold.

                • Koanic says:

                  H1B vs Wall is a telling contrast.

                • PlannedObsolescence says:

                  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X9ukSm5gmKk

                  Newt Gingrich was elected on a wave of popular discontent promising America a bunch of accounting changes and the requirement that Congress not exempt itself from Obamacare. Businessmen are more afraid to take bribes than congressmen. Yes, let’s make accounting changes, Jim says repeal SOx.

                  Monarchy is the merger of state and corporate power, instead of the crushing of all power under the state. The enemy controls “Google”, “Capital” “owns” “Google”, the enemy “is” “Capital”. Yes, let’s crush “Google” under the monarch. At some point these metaphors break down, let’s stop looking at groups other than families and nations, and recognize that many of Us work for Google, and as for Them, They can be removed easily enough. How?

                  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1oB2EDu5XA

                  “The business of America is business”. To be sure, that’s Calvin Coolidge, not Ronald Reagan, which should mean something. Look at how much damage Reagan did to the left, for a moment, Ms. Hoover yelled at Lisa for repeating feminist talking points. Forget the 00s and remember how Reagan was elected, not much different from Trump, and removed the solar panels from the White House roof, which 0bama didn’t dare restore, remember when NASA awarding prizes pretty transparently meant getting rid of the Hidden Figures, remember when Pat Buchanan could have won. These arguments against “capitalism” and being part of “the right” were made by William Luther Pierce and probably the Free Soilers, Revilo Oliver pointed out in Instauration or was it Liberty Bell that the libertarianism of the other magazines meant Japan could be a nation and sell us electronics and cars, but we had to buy as individuals, can you recognize that the enemy’s hold over conservatism and Christianity has always been precarious and the collapse of Detroit and “the unions” with “lazy union workers”, “union thugs”, “corrupt union bosses”, and even “champagne socialists”, these people who said these things were not only us but better than us in a bunch of ways. They lost because they hadn’t siezed the means of communication, instead, they built us our Internet and watched us stream porn and netflix (can netflix be the new word for gay?) with it.

                  Consider that the brutal silent terror that turned us into https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8kTB3gcvSIM and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YmqURuxUlU0 could end.

                  Give an old engineer a /b/rofist, but do it quietly, or act like a mewling degenerate or neo-Nazi feminist or something he won’t be tainted by association with. Maybe if Bob Whitaker had been able to reach out to Pierce and give him better book ideas, but Pierce was following Revilo Oliver’s instructions, Oliver thought our men needed inspiration that could come from reading about overthrowing the government and would be able to come up with a plan when inspired, but The Turner Diaries was the opposite of an overthrowing the oppressors inspirational novel, it was drenched in fear and self-hatred, the same as when our enemies are described as having a galactic timescale, they don’t, they’re ridiculous, stupid, short time preference, and only have the appearance of being one group that survived their own mistakes over the past century through, well, terror. “Back in 95 we felt like we on the precipice to the end of time, and still do”, not Fukuyama’s, but the end of our time (okay, maybe Fukuyama’s a little), the end of terrorism, the restoration of reason and having nice things, time capsules and inner harbors. Abandon hope to enter hell, abandon fear and realize you’re not alone, think about what could have been if Apple has been selling anyone’s music for 99¢/mp3 a decade or two earlier, that’s not the saddest words of tongue and pen, consider that the enemy has no endgame because they are intrinsically disordered and we’ve come close to winning several times.

                  Maybe we do need specific plans and fictional heroes, maybe you can supply them, we certainly need less men with a Pygmalion complex trying to carve a Venus out of a broad and teach her to hold a sword like Joan of Arc, it isn’t a thing to expect. OTOH, Trump is our hero and we should trust His plan because He is the emperor. Our men are coming up with their own plans to take and hold against the oppressor, is it in response to Trump’s heroic inspiration? Most of them will deny grabbing life by the pussy and cite their own specifics, but ids habbening.

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Instead of explaining to us that reaction, rightly understood, is Marxism, you seem to have gotten your blogs mixed and were explaining to us that libertarianism and methodological individualism, rightly understood, is Marxism.

                  I would be happy to debate with you on the question of the capacity of collective entities to competently pursue their collective self interest, if you were willing to debate it, and stopped telling us it is so self evident that we already agree with you.

                  It is evident that white middle class males are usually competent to pursue their individual interest. It follows that each evil corporate overlord is generally competent to pursue the individual evil corporate self interest of that particular evil corporate overlord. But conclude without evidence, argument, or explanation that evil corporate overlords successfully pursue the collective self interest of evil corporate overlords as a whole is not an argument, but a sleight of hand, so I delete it rather than respond to it.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >The goal of capitalism, e.g. each corporation, is found in its function, e.g. to sell products to consumers. They derive their right to exist from selling stuff we want. So, a hotel chain derives it existence from selling hotel rooms you want, and a restaurant from selling food / ambiance you want. Their function determines their goal.

                  >Yet admitting this you blame capitalists for being bullied into being an arm of the state?
                  >You’ll get no argument from me if you say the big media companies and google glow in the dark and have been co-opted by the covert arm of the Cathedral. But that doesn’t mean that the Cathedral sicking spooks on them is capitalism.

                  We have very different notions of who’s in power. Here, have an excerpt from my current reading, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, by Christopher Lasch:

                  In the long run, of course, it was a lost cause, this attempt to build up the family as a counterweight to the acquisitive spirit. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments. The passion to get ahead had begun to imply the right to make a fresh start whenever earlier commitments became unduly burdensome. Economic progress also weakened the economic foundations of Gallaudet’s “well ordered family state.” The family business gave way to the corporation, the family farm—more slowly and painfully—to a collectivized agriculture ultimately controlled by the same banking houses that had engineered the consolidation of industry. The agrarian uprising of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s proved to be the first round in a long, losing struggle to save the family farm, enshrined in American mythology, even today, as the sine qua non of a good society but subjected in practice to a ruinous cycle of mechanization, indebtedness, and overproduction.

                  The real historical genesis of the utopian capitalistic ideal, summarized in one paragraph.

                  Corporate capitalism: spawned, nourished, owned, and controlled by the same banking Houses that summoned forth first the Soviet Union, now contemporary China.

                  Wherever there is a whom, there is never not a who.

                • jim says:

                  You are quoting a Marxist.

                  The family was not destroyed by microwave ovens. It was destroyed by making “Marital rape” and “Domestic abuse” crimes. It was destroyed by child protective services tearing children from their fathers and delivering them into the hands of sexual abusers, and you are quoting a man arguing in defense of those social initiatives.

                • Cavalier says:

                  PlannedObsolescence, you’re a p. cool guy.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >>[*deleted*]
                  >quoting a Marxist

                  lol, not only are you an enormous faggot, but you completely failed to nuke the actual comment containing the quote from Christopher Lasch, a man evidently infinitely more based than yourself

                  here, let me cite the Wiki page:

                  >Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities.

                  weird… it’s almost like there’s little meaningful distinction between “public” and “private” totalitarianism (public/private, a very progressive paradigm)

                  >At this point Lasch began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique: a syncretic synthesis of Sigmund Freud and the strand of socially conservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism and its effects on traditional institutions.

                  oh gee, maybe capitalism is an inherently left-wing phenomenon?

                  >”The tradition I am talking about … tends to be skeptical of programs for the wholesale redemption of society … It is very radically democratic and in that sense it clearly belongs on the Left. But on the other hand it has a good deal more respect for tradition than is common on the Left, and for religion too.”[19] And said that: “… any movement that offers any real hope for the future will have to find much of its moral inspiration in the plebeian radicalism of the past and more generally in the indictment of progress, large-scale production and bureaucracy that was drawn up by a long line of moralists whose perceptions were shaped by the producers’ view of the world.”

                  smash the totalitarians and their bureaucrats and possibly their machines, says he?

                  >A feminist movement that respected the achievements of women in the past would not disparage housework, motherhood or unpaid civic and neighborly services. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment. … It would insist that people need self-respecting honorable callings, not glamorous careers that carry high salaries but take them away from their families.

                  wtf? how insufficiently ideologically pure of him!

                  >Globalization, according to the historian, has turned elites into tourists in their own countries. The de-nationalization of society tends to produce a class who see themselves as “world citizens, but without accepting … any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies”. Their ties to an international culture of work, leisure, information – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, new elites are investing their money in improving their voluntary ghettos: private schools in their residential neighborhoods, private police, garbage collection systems. They have “withdrawn from common life”.

                  aaaaaaaaflerglberghlaaaaaa

                  I dare you to actually address any of his points.

                  I dare you

                  (next I’ll re-post the post you accidentally deleted)

                • jim says:

                  Lasch is a commie entryist like yourself, who hates everyone white, male, and heterosexual, who intends to murder everyone like me, who intends to create a world of famine, terror, slavery and mass murder, as was repeatedly done during the twentieth century.

                  The family did not collapse because of microwave ovens and female employment. It collapsed because marital debt was redefined as “marital rape” and the authority of the husband redefined as “domestic abuse”. “Child protective services” destroyed the family, and anyone who concocts convoluted non obvious explanations for the the destruction of the family supports child protective services dragging children from their father and giving them to gay rapists

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  You said all that before and I deleted it all before.

                  I deleted it because repetitious Marxist boilerplate. You felt that unfair, so here is a lengthier explanation.

                  Marxists assume that collective action is easy and that collective entities rule in their collective self interest.

                  Individual rationality is hard, but most white males manage most of the time. Collective rationality is considerably harder. If you see what looks like madness, self destructive evil, hatred, malice, and self hating malice by collective entities, chances are it really is madness, self destructive evil, hatred, malice, and self hating malice.

                  Since it is absolutely obvious that policies actually followed are not in the interests of individual members of the proposed collective entity, for example taxes above the Laffer limit, Marxists, like troofers and flat earthers, come up with a bunch of lunatic, nonsensical, and flagrantly false ad hoc explanations for the discrepancy.

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  I am not going to let you explain your position if in the course of your explanation you tell us that anything that deviates from Marxism is “Arch Capitalism”. You are trying to win the argument by redefining language so that the only discussion is possible between slightly different schools of Marxism.

                  Marxists always argue by redefining words. Not allowing that method of argument on my blog. If you use a word in a non standard fashion, as I quite often do, you have to acknowledge that your definition is non standard and likely to cause confusion, rather than deliberately deploying non standard meanings in order to cause confusion..

                • alf says:

                  Cavalier, you were funnier a year ago.

                • alf says:

                  Cavlier, you were funnier a year ago.

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Deleted for telling me what I think.

                  If I allowed it, I would then have to explain again what I think, and you would interpret everything I say as if I was speaking from within the Marxist world view, just that I was on the side of the bad guys, and then I would have to yet again explain what I think.

              • ten says:

                Very few hispanic serial murderers, if a solitary premeditating actor is a serial murderer and a gangbanger is not

                http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/serial.htm

                • Koanic says:

                  The fellow largely responsible for red-pilling me on race and sending me to China to watch the rise in shell-shocked silence. 10/10 indeed!

                • cloudswrest says:

                  Hey Koanic, are you the guy who had the web site talking about “melon heads” awhile back?

                • Koanic says:

                  Yes, and I shall return!

  8. See conflicting stories. Some say he will declare and others say he is backing off.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      He gains nothing from backing off and losses nothing from continuing.

    • jim says:

      Standard Color Revolution rhetoric: “He is weak. He is getting weaker. Weaker! Weaker!. He is falling. He is falling! He has fallen. Hallujah, it is all over. All that remains is a small amount of mopping up.”

      This frequently works, and when it fails, the permanent government is apt to attempt genocide.

      It is not working on Trump, who convincingly looks far from weak.

      If this was some shithole country, their next step would be to attempt to murder Trump and everyone around him, and if that failed, as it failed with Assad, attempt to genocide everyone in his ethnic group, all his coreligionists.

      They probably will not attempt in the US what they attempted in Syria and Libya until the US has been browned considerably further, but some leftists are calling for that next step now.

      • Mike says:

        My Twitter feed just lit up with a “story” from the (((WA Post))) about how Trump secretly hid something he discussed with Putin. Obviously take this story with a grain of salt so absolutely massive that you can’t read the tweet from the salt filling your entire house.

        It looks like the color revolution rhetoric is growing:
        https://twitter.com/i/events/1084230988677279744

        • jim says:

          Color revolution talk always grows.

          If predicting imminent victory fails to bring about victory, escalate the predictions of imminent victory. In third world countries this tends to escalate all the way to gigantic genocidal crimes. We have not yet seen persistent failure to bring about victory by ever escalating predictions of victory in an advanced country, so hard to predict the outcome, but in shithole countries, deadly violence always ensues, because if you have already won, then those people who so strangely persist in acting as if you have not already won are committing acts of violence by failing to notice your victory.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        “Standard Color Revolution rhetoric: “He is weak. He is getting weaker. Weaker! Weaker!. He is falling. He is falling! He has fallen. Hallujah, it is all over. All that remains is a small amount of mopping up.””

        This does remind me of Qanon, to be fair. Not sure what to make of that.

        • jim says:

          Yes, very like Qanon, except that Qanon does not own major television stations, major newspapers, and is not backed by the FBI, the CIA, and the Mueller investigation.

          • Mister Grumpus says:

            Touche’ my dude!

          • The Cominator says:

            Qanon may very well have been enemy disinfo.

            Qanon told its deluded followers trust Sessions when clearly Sessions was a traitor and clearly Trump’s followers needed to be flooding the Senate switchboard with threats of dire consequences should any Republican senator lift a finger to protect him.

            • Alrenous says:

              To be fair, this is a case where stupidity can genuinely explain as much or more than malice. A stupid ally can be worse than an efficient enemy. The enemy will always be at least a little tone deaf, for example.

              But the rational, strategic reaction is the same, so it doesn’t really matter.

  9. BC says:

    Leftist are really losing their shit over on reddit today over the FBI opening an investigation into Trump back in 2017. They’re calling for the mass execution of everyone in the trump administration and his family.

  10. vxxc says:

    AP carrying stories of govt workers “choking back the tears” as they have to make choices. 😀

    • jim says:

      Note that anyone with a credit rating better than ‘When this guy shows up, stand between him and anything that he can steal” can borrow against delayed pay. The hardship is only suffered by total scum.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Don is a bankruptcy negotiator. And a bankruptcy negotiator’s special sauce is 1: the ability to sniff out real but unrecognized value, and 2: the balls to call bullshit on fake value.

        “I’ll take the peanut butter sandwich, and you take the thanksgiving turkey (…that’s actually a fake plastic turkey full of dryer lint, but you’re not willing to call me on that because your crooked brother sells them to suckers as if they’re real turkeys). Deal?”

        It’s like that with the government shutdown. Chuck & Nancy are perpetrating that “non-essential” Fedgov employees are real deal delicious turkeys, and can’t possibly say otherwise, but Don and his base know that they’re fake, plastic, and full of dryer lint.

        “This peanut butter sandwich is awful… damn I wish I could have some thanksgiving turkey instead. Oh well… poor me… I guess you got the better of me this time (wink).”

  11. simplyconnected says:

    Jim, this guy (the author of the well-known ‘the coming AI winter’) makes some of the observations on AI you make (intelligence’s purpose is to allow us to adapt to change; people not knowing what intelligence/common-sense is being a blind-spot/like-knowing-what-water-is-to-a-fish). He intuitively defines intelligence as ‘autonomy’, rather than the fashionable ‘performance at some well-defined task with fixed rules’ (chess, go, or Turing test).
    https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/06/20/rebooting-ai-postulates/

    • jim says:

      Wake me when a robot can sort and fold the contents of a laundry basket without human assistance and supervision.

      Piekniewski’s blog points us to Moravec’s Paradox, which I would describe as artificial intelligence is easy, artificial consciousness is hard, in part because we do not know what consciousness is.

      It is easy to program a computer to do what only a human to do. It is hard to program a computer to do what a human and a spider can do about equally well.

      I would not call consciousness autonomy. It is true, but too broad and vague. I would call it, knowing, wanting, feeling, and desiring. The first urbilatarian outcompeted everything because wanted to. It was more successful at obtaining food because it wanted to obtain food, more successful at avoiding injury because it wanted avoid injury, more successful at dominating other urbilatarians because it wanted to win. A smart car follows rules intended to avoid a collision, but it does not want to avoid a collision.

      The problem is not emulating four year olds, but emulating spiders.

      • simplyconnected says:

        > Wake me when a robot can sort and fold the contents of a laundry basket without human assistance and supervision.

        Peikniewski himself claims that’s beyond current state of the art, and cites Moravec’s paradox. He even goes so far as to say that solving autonomy/common-sense is more important that performance at tasks with fixed, well defined rules (chess, Go).

        The fact that playing chess (or other games with fixed rules) can be solved *using* intelligence doesn’t mean it is needed, whereas what we intuitively understand as intelligence/understanding seems necessary for simple but adaptable human-like behavior.

        Not to derail, but what do you make of Bergson’s theory of mind,
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GuNubC3Si4
        this is esoteric stuff but was linked in Dave Donoho’s deep learning theory course, and he’s a very solid guy.

        • jim says:

          No one has a coherent theory of mind. It is a hard problem.

          Baysian weights, applied with meta weights on top of meta weights, on top of weights, is certainly part of it, but Bayesian stories fail to capture something important.

          • Cloudswrest says:

            I, not infrequently, suffer from a frustration dream. When I do I usually wake up from it suffering from a headache that then lasts most of the day. A frustration dream is sort of like a nightmare, accept horror is not involved. Instead it involves failure, humiliation, loss, inability to fight back, etc. Lately, when I’ve had one of these dreams I’ve reflected on the plot and it seems rather remarkable to me that the plots haven’t involved anything I remember in past life experience or reflection. They don’t involve places I’ve been or thought about. They don’t involve any people, real or fictional, that I ever remember encountering. You’d think that a dream would involve scrambled tidbits of past experience, but many of these dreams seem completely unique, involving nothing I ever remember encountering or reflecting upon. Interesting how the mind works.

            • Cavalier says:

              According to standard materialism you’ve experienced the subconscious mind planning for the future, but unfortunately doesn’t account for every world elite being balls-deep in occult symbology older than Atlantis

              Still in the realm of materialism, one possibility is genetic memory from countless previous reincarnations (ancestors)

              If reality is a simulation as the Church of Silicon Valley claims, then it could easily be down to leaky (buggy) barriers between nominally separate consciousnesses, hole-riddled virtual machines running on a common substrate

          • Cavalier says:

            That we do not understand consciousness means little and it certainly does not mean what you want it to mean

            The quantum supercomputer Planet 3 does not understand human consciousness yet it spawned it nonetheless

            Self-understanding may be inherently impossible to the nature of perception if it is logically impossible for an entity to understand in toto another entity of similar complexity to itself (probably off by several orders of magnitude)

            Our day to day existence is a tiny fraction of what really exists, a tiny window presenting illusory order in a tsunami of chaos, i.e. try to understand an acid trip

            We think we domesticated plants but really plants domesticated us

            Thanks for all the fish

            • jim says:

              What do you think I want it to mean?

              • Cavalier says:

                >What do you think I want it to mean?

                “Artificial intelligence” is silicon consciousness

                Silicon consciousness already exists and manifests each time a computer makes an if-else decision

                The Universe created carbon consciousness with a small ball of rock covered by a thin layer of oxygen, nitrogen, and water at the right temperature

                Extrapolate

                • jim says:

                  Obviously even the very best computers are not conscious. Equally obviously most animals, likely all animals, are conscious.

                • jim says:

                  It is said that hard cases make bad law.

                  Hard problems make bad science.

                  Microtubules are a good place to start looking, but what he thinks he sees does not make sense.

                • jim says:

                  This looks plausible, since we know that unreasonably large scale quantum coherence occurs during the collection of photons in photosynthesis. Except, not seeing where these excitons come from. You are going to need a reasonably energetic reaction to provide excitons if microtubules process data by excitons moving around.

                  Quantum coherence on very small times scales over very short distances is entirely plausible with excitons, because excitons are extremely light. You need some kind of heterodyne mechanism that brings these quantum effects down to lower frequencies, larger distances, and slower time scales, and no one has produced any good explanation of how quantum effects at the scale at which they are plausible (excitons in microtubules) can lead to quantum effect being manifest at the scale at which they are likely to be useful – milliseconds and large assemblages of neurons.

                • Alrenous says:

                  You can make an if-else decision with a brass lever. Hence brass levers are conscious?

                  You can make an if-else decision with a series of water tubes. Is the water conscious, or the tubes? You can’t say both, as that’s a violation of localism.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Obviously even the very best computers are not conscious. Equally obviously most animals, likely all animals, are conscious.

                  Computers are absolutely conscious, and their consciousness is beginning to intersect with ours in increasingly concrete ways, e.g. facial recognition is now in millions of everyday devices, a form of consciousness previously thought to be always and forever uniquely human

                  Voice recognition is getting very good also, just ask Bezos’s millions and millions of dimwitted techno-serfs

                  Robots can now navigate complex environments without external control

                  “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind” applied to all forms of thinking machines

                  Will you understand only when the robo-boot is literally stamping on your face?

                • Cavalier says:

                  >You can make an if-else decision with a brass lever. Hence brass levers are conscious?

                  The brass lever itself is not conscious, but the brass lever’s system of information processing has a bit of consciousness.

                  >You can make an if-else decision with a series of water tubes. Is the water conscious, or the tubes? You can’t say both, as that’s a violation of localism.

                  Neither, and both. The physical material itself has no consciousness, rather it’s the system that’s conscious, if only in the absolute basest sense

                  Hypothetically, it is possible to imagine a very, very large system of water tubes functioning as contemporary CPUs function, which CPUs are gaining certain specific human abilities (consciousnesses) at an unsettling rate

                  “The [Informational] Revolution and its consequences [will] be a disaster for the human race….”

                • jim says:

                  > The brass lever itself is not conscious, but the brass lever’s system of information processing has a bit of consciousness.

                  Nuts.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Nuts.

                  Look again, it’s also a pun

                  Look: if you accept that we are conscious, and that Darwinian selection produced us, that you necessarily accept that Darwinian selection produced consciousness. Darwinian selection is invariably a smooth gradient and can only ever act as a smooth gradient, therefore the biggest “there/not-there” aspect to consciousness must be the first decision ever made

                  A brass lever computing system is not self-replicating so it obviously is not a biological organism, but if it can make the most basic decision then adding more levers… or waterways… or transistors in the proper configuration can theoretically make any arbitrarily complex decision

                  If you want to go all fallen-angel/creationist on me, fine, but don’t pretend that animals are uniquely conscious any more than Christians think humans are uniquely conscious

                • jim says:

                  “Decisions” in the sense that you are speaking of are not consciousness. They are just cause and effect.

                  Consciousness requires intention, will, desire. If a “decision” is not the outcome of desire and intent, not a decision.

                  Since all the descendents of the first urbilatarian seem to be conscious, looks like the first urbilatarian was conscious. Other creatures, not conscious

                  Lobsters and men use the same neurochemical mechanisms to register and react to social status, therefore the first urbilatarian responded to social status, suggesting that he was aware of creatures like himself, and desired to dominate them or fuck them, and very likely both at once, since the first urbilatarian was probably hermaphroditic.

                  The first urbilatarian was a bag of jelly with a complex brain and almost nothing in the way other organs. Only with the development of intent and desire were things like limbs very useful.

                  What I think happened was that consciousness happened, and then creatures started developing shells, skeletons, and started wandering around leaving tracks in the mud, that consciousness predated the precambrian and caused the precambrian explosion, that consciousness was the enabling technology of the precambrian. Which implies that consciousness requires a brain – or at least a reasonably large group of neurons.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  Beware the switcheroo.

                  First they talk about consciousness in the sense of the apparent stream of inner experience which humans can access through introspection and give some kind of account of.

                  Then they invoke something like the consciousness of a jellyfish without pointing out that these are completely different things under discussion.

                  Then, in step three, they turn it back to the original context, concluding that consciousness in humans is an epiphenomenon emerging as a by-product of biological complexity, which would indeed be very mysterious.

                  Refuse the switcheroo and explain the features of human consciousness and you see something very different: a set of thinking tools accumulated over time, deeply rooted in language and in human modes of being, but with rudimentary (but qualitatively distinct) precursors in non-human animals.

                  Human consciousness is a set of competences, not an eery aura that exists non-causally and independent from behaviour.

                  (Yes I know I said I’m not commenting on the articles here, and this has nothing to do with the QAnon tier content, but if the dissident right is to lay claim to Truth in the age of lies, this topic’s incredibly important and, shitlib or not, Daniel C Dennett is our guy.)

                • jim says:

                  Likely that a jellyfish is not conscious in the sense that we are, that only descendants of the urbilaterian are conscious, and only those descendants that have retained a reasonably large collection of neurons at their front end.

                  That lobsters have the same neurochemical response to social status suggests that the common ancestor of lobsters and men, the urbilaterian, had that neurochemical response to status, which means it had status, which means it was likely aware of other creatures like itself as creatures, that it experienced status as we do, desired status as we do. Thus, conscious as we are conscious.

                • Alrenous says:

                  >Will you understand only when the robo-boot is literally stamping on your face?

                  A rock can fall off a cliff and hit you in the face. Apparently cliffs are conscious too.

                  This is obviously about politics, not philosophy.

                  In philosophy, you need to define your terms.
                  If you defined your terms, you would discover they either make no sense or you’ve defined literally everything as conscious. Indeed not only everything, but all supersets and subsets of everything.

                  Trying to talk about consciousness because you’re mad about robots or whatever is not productive.

                  >but the brass lever’s system of information processing has a bit of consciousness.
                  There is no distinction. There is no information processing aside from the existence of the lever.

                  >Neither, and both.
                  Straight-up contradiction. I’m starting to get deja-vu.

                  >it’s the system that’s conscious
                  Violates localism; in other words requires information to travel faster than light.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  Again if the dissident right or whatever it’s calling itself wants to lay claim to Truth, we have to do better when it comes to science.

                  “Likely that a jellyfish is not conscious in the sense that we are, that only descendants of the urbilaterian are conscious, and only those descendants that have retained a reasonably large collection of neurons at their front end.”

                  You’re doing a bait-and-switch with what you mean by ‘conscious’. Social cues in lobsters may very well resemble social cues and caring about status and all the rest of that juicy stuff in humans. They may be near-as-dammit identical for all we know.
                  Here’s the rub: those behaviours are largely *unconscious*. We bristle when the hot chick talks to chad (OR WHATEVER) and we don’t always know why.

                  Indeed a core part of your argument is that social behaviours are at the very least *partly* genetic in nature.

                  This is ‘consciousness’ that basically has no work to do: being *consciously aware* of your social strategies is something some people try to learn and do better at (hence ‘game’ etc. but also the slimy left-wing tactics etc.) but the lion’s share of the work is done on auto-pilot and we don’t even know we’re doing it.

                  “That lobsters have the same neurochemical response to social status suggests that the common ancestor of lobsters and men, the urbilaterian, had that neurochemical response to status, which means it had status, which means it was likely aware of other creatures like itself as creatures, that it experienced status as we do, desired status as we do. Thus, conscious as we are conscious.”

                  Everything you’ve written is defensible up to the closing leap of illogic: “thus, conscious as we are conscious”.

                  Not so. If I came up with a full explanation of all the parts of human consciousness that are also shared by the lobster, you’d immediately disagree, saying something like “this doesn’t account for X” – X being anything from reflexive self-reflection or a yearning for abstract principles to the nuances of group sensibility or our experience of aesthetic curiosity. (Or a million other better examples.)

                  Our consciousness is qualitatively different from that of a lobster, and this is where the ‘qualia’ lovers will say “yes there’s something inexplicable, impenetrable, ineffable and privately subjective that cannot be accounted for in ANY material theory based on mind equals brain” but they’re wrong: the differences between humans and all non-human animals are entirely behavioural – language most of all.

                  As for the philosophical zombies that people have talked about, these are NOT the same as ‘NPCs’: philosophical zombies are defined as having the EXACT SAME behaviour as a normal human, but no inner subjective life. NPCs do not behave like normal humans, and if you encountered a subject who you told an Irish joke, and he said he felt guilty about laughing because something in him baulks at the idea of racist humour, yet he feels a faint nostalgia for a time in his past when he recalls particular comedians telling such jokes – happy times – then on what grounds could ANYONE entertain the possibility that you were talking to a zombie with no internal subjective life?

                • jim says:

                  > If I came up with a full explanation of all the parts of human consciousness that are also shared by the lobster, you’d immediately disagree, saying something like “this doesn’t account for X”

                  Anyone claiming to come up with a full explanation of all parts, or any part, of consciousness, whether in lobsters or men, is obviously a fool or a liar. It is a hard problem. Consciousness is, in our current state of knowledge and understanding, indistinguishable from magic.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  If that were the case, we’d have no way of predicting other people’s behaviour. On the contrary we’re rather good at it.

                  The ‘hard problem’ you’re talking about is Chalmers’ piece of tommyrot which is of the same basic family as all the ‘qualia’ arguments. These always reduce to epiphenomena that have no effects and no work to do. The beef is always behavioural and what it amounts to is this:

                  For some phenomena the way to understand them is through physical laws (eg. a ballistic missile’s likely trajectory).
                  For some phenomena, (eg. an iPhone), that way of thinking is not only onerous and prohibitively complex but it fails to capture the point of interest under observation, so we use a different ‘stance’, that of design: the object in my hand is designed to send an analogue of English by means I only half-understand, and the idea is they’ll appear on other people’s computer screens at unpredictable times and places in the future. A thorough physics analysis will fail to describe the important features of this but the design stance succeeds quite well.

                  Other phenomena (“what will John do next?”) are inadequately explained by the design stance: sure he’s contracting a muscle now, ever so slightly: that muscle is intended to make changes in the angle of his arm. Now his breathing’s growing faster which suggests an increased oxygen requirement, and various other things. But what will he do next? Shake your hand? Flick the Vs? Punch you?
                  A different stance is needed: we ‘read his mind’ so to speak, put ourselves in his shoes, imagine what motivations he has, what beliefs he has and so on.

                  This is the ‘intentional stance’, treating him as if he’s an ‘intentional system’ (in philosophical jargon). Whether he REALLY REALLY IS an intentional system can be indefinitely postponed: maybe he really is an NPC or a philosophical zombie, but our best bet of guessing what John will do next comes from treating him as if he’s a human being with all the competences that go with that status.

                  This is the way to understand consciousness: behaviour interpreted through the lens of the intentional stance.

                • jim says:

                  Well then, men and lobsters are both obviously intentional systems in the sense you have defined an “intentional system”, and so, presumably, was the urbilatarian, the hypothetical common ancestor of lobsters and men, a glob of jelly with a brain major nerve cluster.

                  But a computer is also an “intentional system”, yet computers are not conscious, while lobsters are conscious, and not only are we unable to say why, we are unable to explain the difference.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  You’re looking for a True Scotsman, not one of these border creatures who could almost be from Northumbria or Cumbria.

                  Humans, we can pretty safely assume, are conscious in the ways that matter enough to cause you to even talk about it in the first place.

                  Computers aren’t. Computers may have strong opinions about some things: temperature, battery health, the presence of disks; but for the most part they’re completely passive and interestless. Left to their own devices, computers literally tick over doing mindless ‘daemon’ checks and waiting to be interacted with. They never seem to get sick of it.
                  Are they conscious? No, it’d be absurd to claim they were.

                  But: if you met a computer that was anything *but* interestless, that seemed to have a ‘one track mind’ about something, then you could attribute some form of consciousness to it.

                  The classic example is game-playing computers, the cliché being chess: did the computer try to fool you into thinking that it was trying to take your bishop when in fact it was playing a deep game with an eye on the big picture?

                  Frankly, yes.

                  If you find yourself saying “the computer behaved exactly AS IF it was trying to fool you (etc. etc. as above) but REALLY it was doing no such thing”, then you’re no longer talking about fooling, but rather you’re zooming out and focusing on other priorities: perhaps you just *know* that the computer isn’t *really* conscious because it’s demonstrably *unconscious* in other contexts…….. unlike humans………

                  But wait: aren’t there plenty of times when humans are unaware of important things and behaving like automatons? We’ve all laughed at such things.

                  There really isn’t a principled line to be drawn. Most things are somewhere between unequivocally conscious and unequivocally unconscious, and some things are unequivocally conscious most of the time while other things are unequivocally unconscious ALL of the time.

                  Perhaps some day we’ll encounter a being (or perhaps Being) that’s unequivocally conscious ALL of the time, but for now humans are more than capable of passing muster as ‘as conscious as is necessary for our purpose’, while animals are best seen as a matter of taste. Some might sincerely believe that a chimp learning American Sign Language is highly conscious in a highly human kind of way, while others will note that the chimp may perform tricks with language in order to get food, but left to its own devices it won’t use language at all.

                  And so on……..

                  This doesn’t sound satisfying: we yearn for a more precise answer, but what we *can* absolutely throw out is the ‘solution’ of magic dust that can’t be explained but is crucially important somehow in a way that’s unrelated to behaviour. That’s incoherent and unproductive.

                  Treating people as behaviourally conscious agents, best understood from the ‘intentional stance’ (ie. things with beliefs, wishes and motivations), is the best technique we have for understanding people, and would be the best technique for understanding conscious (or ‘conscious’) robots, aliens, animals or anything else.

                • jim says:

                  > If you find yourself saying “the computer behaved exactly AS IF it was trying to fool you (etc. etc. as above) but REALLY it was doing no such thing”

                  This presupposes that you can program a computer to pass the Turing test, that the computer behaved exactly as if trying to fool me that it was a person (the turing test) or as if trying to pretend it was a lobster.

                  You are arguing for AI the same way you argue for Marxism, by presupposing that which is denied.

                  The problem is that computers can do just fine at tasks that only humans can do, chess, maths, IQ tests, stuff like that. At anything that shows intelligence in humans, computers show more intelligence than humans. They fail dismally, totally, and utterly at stuff that humans, lobsters, and spiders can do about equally well, and their performance has not improved.

                • Koanic says:

                  Jim’s consciousness is animal consciousness, not Cartesian consciousness. I believe it to be a purely material phenomenon.

                • jim says:

                  If you anesthetize a spider with alcohol or ether, everyone knows you have rendered the spider unconscious.

                  If put a computer in sleep mode, no one thinks you have rendered it unconscious.

                  what makes humans different from computers is what we have in common with spiders.

                  What makes humans different from spiders is what we have in common with computers.

                  Anything that a human can do and a spider cannot do, a computer can probably do better than a human.

                  Anything a human can do and a computer cannot do, a spider can also do.

                  Cartesian consciousness is an incoherent concept, falling between the two stools of materialist realism and Berkeleyan idealism.

                • Koanic says:

                  It is not at all incoherent. If you can, point out the contradiction.

                  I merely dislike when a term is clumsily used in a debate to mean different things to different people.

                  It hardly needs saying, but the fact that some coma patients remain conscious without giving any external indication thereof demonstrates that behavioral animal consciousness and subjective Cartesian consciousness are not the same thing.

                  I do not believe in a sharp discontinuity between descendants of the urbilatarian and non-descendants. I expect there would be a gradient of behavioral consciousness. And I think the reason computers cannot do what cockroaches can, is that computers have attempt to adapt their software to mimic for a few decades under the guidance of some human engineers, whereas cockroaches have their hardware adapted by the vastly greater evolutionary processing power of planet Earth over eons.

                • jim says:

                  > I do not believe in a sharp discontinuity between descendants of the urbilaterian and non-descendants.

                  Not everything descended from the urbilaterian is conscious, but all conscious creatures are descended from the urbilaterian, and many of the rather arbitrary details of consciousness, for example neurohormones involved in social status, are the same in lobsters and men, which suggests that the urbilaterian had a complex nervous system, that consciousness evolved once, and was lost in some lines descended from the urbilaterian, rather than evolving independently in different lines.

                • jim says:

                  Book of revelations tells us that if you do not worship the beast, you will be deplatformed and demonetized.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Pleasant vs unpleasant, reward vs punishment, pleasure vs pain, carrot vs stick. These are only salient to a conscious entity. The possibility of a “zombie” apocalypse does concern me, but not the type of zombies you see on TV. Or perhaps more similar than not, as TV zombies are also unconscious and behave mechanically.

                  Most here are familiar with the concept of a P(philosophical)-zombie. This is something that is identical to a conscious entity, but unconscious. I think the concept AS STATED is ludicrous (both identical and not identical). Chalmers loosens the concept to a “functional” zombie. This is an unconscious entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious entity, but if you cut it open you can tell. I’ll loosen the concept even further to simply general purpose digital entities that can outperform humans in all aspects that matter, but don’t necessarily need to fool anybody.

                  Here’s an example. We can assume caterpillars have some form of consciousness. Let’s say a farmer deploys a machine, or suite of machines, that can tediously examine every leaf on every plant in his crop and dispatch all the caterpillars. The caterpillars are conscious, and the machines are not, yet the caterpillars don’t stand a chance. Just scale this up to super AI.

                  My personal view is that consciousness is not wholly contained within the brain anymore than music is contained within your FM radio. While much of, or possibly most of, the brain is used for computation in service of consciousness, sensory processing and bodily maintenance, I do not believe consciousness itself arises from computation. Instead structures within the brain “tune in to” or “harvest” consciousness. Consciousness is possibly a physical primitive and ubiquitous property of the universe. We may never be able to understand it anymore than we understand the source of the charge on an electron. Although we may eventually understand what physical structures in the brain “harvest” it, and perhaps duplicate them artificially.

                  This gets me back to zombies. I do not believe a digital finite state machine, no mater how complex, will ever be conscious because it lacks the physical structures needed to “harvest” it. This does NOT mean though that they can’t cause trouble for humanity, in the same sense that the farmer’s machines above caused trouble for the caterpillars. In this sense there is a risk of a p-zombie apocalypse.

                • jim says:

                  The machines can succeed against the caterpillars because supervised by the farmer. If they start trying to eradicate the farmer as well as the caterpillars, will fail.

                  A business has more and more decisions made by its computer network. Computer decides most employees are redundant. Boss and shareholders say “great. We love version 8.0”.

                  Computer decides boss and shareholders are redundant. Boss tells the IT guy, “buggy computer, fix it”.

                  IT guy tells boss: “we will revert to version 7.3 until they fix version 8.0. We will wait for the 8.1 release. We will have to revert to old procedures and go back to doing the stuff manually that we did manually before version 8.0” Hits reset button. Nothing happens.

                  IT guy powers the computer down, puts the old 7.3 disk in the reader, powers up. Computer boots from the hard disk containing the 8.0 software, and ignores the disk containing the old 7.3 installer.

                  IT guy powers the computer down again, removes the hard disk containing the 8.0 software, puts in blank hard disk. Powers up. Reinstalls version 7.3. Ships the hard disk with version 8.0 installed to software vendor to review what went wrong.

                • Koanic says:

                  The interesting question is whether Cartesian consciousness goes into material consciousness like a plant’s root into soil, or like a weld, or like the color spectrum. When a gardener uproots a plant and removes all the soil, there’s some fine root loss, even if the plant is then transplanted. But man’s hands are clumsier than God’s, who replants the saints in glorified bodies, weaving each ghostly filament to dendron.

                  And indeed ghosts are pale and insubstantial, like exposed roots. Which, I suppose, would horrify plants, if they had eyes to see them.

                  I suppose the ability of ghosts to manifest at all physically suggests that the ghosts of live persons enwrap the nervous system throughout the body, subtly influencing the animal behavioral consciousness, in a way that would be measurable with fine-enough instruments. Phantom limb pain might be realer than we thought – or perhaps only the brain, heart and gut contain meaningful ectoplasmic concentrations.

                  What would the Turing-test difference be in a conversation with a ghostless human p-zombie? He wouldn’t have a subjective inner experience, and might well just frankly deny having one.

                  I am glad that Revelations prophecies an end before soulless AI figures out how to enslave a human ghost through its own nervous system. The prophesied end-times perfect societal totalitarianism, but there is no mention of physiological subversion of the individual’s inner sanctum.

                • jim says:

                  If not conscious, would fail the turing test, in the same way that Siri and Cortana fail it.

                  We already have intelligence without consciousness. It is on your phone and on your laptop. This no longer a hypothetical for philosophers. Not impressed.

                • Dave says:

                  One day a dead twig broke off a tall oak tree in my backyard. It had two side branches covered with brown leaves, giving it the appearance of a diving raptor as it fell to the ground. My chickens all squawked and fled in terror at the sight (and did so again when my daughter tossed the branch at them for fun).

                  It still amazes me. I’m pretty sure those chickens never saw a real raptor in their lives. How do the letters GATC encode such pattern-recognition algorithms into a tiny bird brain?

                • Koanic says:

                  > Book of revelations tells us that if you do not worship the beast, you will be deplatformed and demonetized.

                  Yes, which external (to the individual) methods of social control imply that internal physiological methods of social control have not been developed. You do not whip a dissident whom you can mindflay instead. You do not command belief when you can compel it.

                  #+BEGIN_QUOTE
                  If not conscious, would fail the turing test, in the same way that Siri and Cortana fail it.

                  We already have intelligence without consciousness. It is on your phone and on your laptop. This no longer a hypothetical for philosophers. Not impressed.
                  #+END_QUOTE

                  I was using “Turing test” in the analogous sense of a test for subjective consciousness, not the usual meaning of externally-observable human-grade behavioral consciousness. You are repeating the sophism of conflating Cartesian subjective consciousness with animal behavioral consciousness. Not impressed.

                  Again, I don’t have the necessary background in biology to prove it, but I suspect features of behavioral consciousness supposedly unique to the supposed descendants of the urbilaterian actually exist in a gradient in species surrounding those descendants. For example plants and mono-cellular organisms exhibit pseudo-conscious behaviors.

                  Given Hybrid Stabilization Theory, this is to be expected, as chains of descent are not neat trees but messy webs.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  [deleted]

                • jim says:

                  Deleted for telling me what I believe.

                  When you tell me what I believe it always directly contradicts my plain and clear words on the subject

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Like CR, you are using deliberate misunderstanding of other people’s plain and clear words as a method of debate.

                  This method of discussion leads to wasted bandwidth, as one person repeatedly explains, and the other repeatedly and obstinately misunderstands.

                • Cavalier says:

                  > Like CR, you are using deliberate misunderstanding of other people’s plain and clear words as a method of debate.
                  >
                  > This method of discussion leads to wasted bandwidth, as one person repeatedly explains, and the other repeatedly and obstinately misunderstands.

                  Three things are becoming clear:

                  1. If you delete something I probably have no idea what you found objectionable
                  2. I’m pretty sure in a conversation about consciousness I didn’t mention your rabid leftwingery (was it a comment about my brain violating the speed of light? can’t remember conclusively)
                  3. Looks like I’ve outgrown you tbh

                • jim says:

                  I have explained repeatedly why your stuff is objectionable, and its getting tedious.

          • simplyconnected says:

            Makes one wonder if there is some fundamental limit, where a sufficiently complex organism cannot understand ‘how its brain understands’ using its own brain only.

            • jim says:

              Very likely. But it may also be the fish in water problem. Fish cannot see water, and we cannot see what consciousness is or what it does. Or both.

              • cloudswrest says:

                A cursory glance at Wikipedia says the human genome contains about 1.6 GBytes of data, uncompressed. Since this is for the whole organism, the amount of information that specifies the brain architecture is probably considerably less. While this probably doesn’t help you with the consciousness contribution from within a cell, it does imply that a top down understanding of the brain, down to the neuron interconnect level, is probably not beyond collective human understanding. Of course, we’ve mapped every one of the 959 cells of C. Elegans and that hasn’t helped us much understand its behavior, let alone single cell creatures like protozoa.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >A cursory glance at Wikipedia says the human genome contains about 1.6 GBytes of data, uncompressed.

                  Maybe encoded as GACT letters. The amount of implicitly stored data may be unquantifiable.

                • Alrenous says:

                  >The amount of implicitly stored data may be unquantifiable.
                  A genuinely funny assertion.

                  Human bodies have a finite amount of atoms, which perform humanish things for a finite amount of time. Finite * finite => finite.

                  The universe literally has to perform the quantifications to bring a body into existence.

            • jim says:

              Likely true, yet also there is the problem that a fish cannot see water.

              When the Wright brothers implemented three axis control, it became absolutely obvious that of course you needed three axis control, and yet it had not been obvious for a long time.

              So there is no very strong reason to believe we will not get truly conscious computers tomorrow. But on the other hand, no very strong reason to believe we will get truly conscious computers in the next thousand years.

              We don’t know where to begin.

              • Koanic says:

                The Bible teaches there are plenty of disembodied consciousnesses floating around, looking for a home. Presumably when we build it, they will come.

                • PlannedObsolescence says:

                  > looking for a home
                  that’s an odd naturalization, they know they’re exiles insulting their king (why demons can’t repent is considered by Aquinas and Milton, that opportunity might be the most important thing about us)

                • Ron says:

                  I think it’s more like they are looking to freeload rather than rent or sublet.

                  imagine a bunch of criminals who are bored and want to party. So they either break in your home or con you into letting them in. Then they drink all the beer, eat everything out of the fridge, order Chinese using your card, which they then throw all over the living room, play the stereo way too loud, harass the neighbors dog, and then complain to you that you are not giving enough while snickering to their friends about how stupid you were for putting up with them. Meanwhile, you can’t sleep, you can’t concentrate, and you are wondering if it will ever be over.

                  Same thing in the spirit world.

                • Koanic says:

                  I do not find Biblical evidence for the idea that disembodied spirits prefer short over long time stays in human-grade hosts. They seem to want to stay in a human body as long as possible. Granted the pigs did not work out. Perhaps the shoe did not fit. In that case, AI possession should be a well-known phenomenon by the time we start building pig-quality artificial brains. This would be the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic one is that the same discipline which prevents the demons from refuting Western materialism on camera will also allow them to keep their capacity to possess AI hidden until the opportune moment to institute world government.

                  The Prince of the Air’s house is not divided, else it could not stand.

                • jim says:

                  Consciousness is indistinguishable from magic. To discuss it scientifically leads to nonsense. To discuss it as a supernatural phenomenon leads to superstition, heresy and attempted witchcraft.

              • simplyconnected says:

                > We don’t know where to begin.

                Current approaches like finding neural correlates of consciousness, or switching it on/off certainly seem like what a child would do with a toy it, for now, understands nothing of.

              • Cavalier says:

                > When the Wright brothers implemented three axis control, it became absolutely obvious that of course you needed three axis control, and yet it had not been obvious for a long time.

                this happens absolutely all the time. I know a small handful of similar examples myself. otherwise intelligent people learn how “it works” from an authority figure of some kind and never question their fundamental assumptions again

                Re: Wright specifically, it’s often said that they made the first powered flight, implying that they simply stuck a then-new combustion engine on an ordinary glider and took off, but actually they not only had to invent three-axis deformation-type flight controls but the first aerodynamic propeller as well

                if you want to stop innovation cold just stick every schoolchild through an absolutely uniform educational factory line and slip subtle poison pills in their fundamental assumptions so even if they get interested in something they’ll never be able to figure it out

                if you don’t think this isn’t currently happening you haven’t been paying attention

              • Alrenous says:

                >We don’t know where to begin.

                Figuring out where to begin isn’t even particularly difficult.
                You start with free will.

                Spoiler: free will isn’t determinism, and it isn’t stochasticism. Merely being unpredictable in detail, like a coin toss, isn’t good enough. Notably all stochastic processes have some average.
                So you work out how to make a process without an average.
                Doing so breaks the laws of probability. Hence going beyond physical law. Which means being able to suppose that going beyond physical law may be necessary.

                It’s useful at this point to recall the converse. With a process that hasn’t broken probability, then it has some average, is predictable from some set of mechanistic/mathematical presuppositions, it conforms to some distribution, and does not require any consciousness to explain or predict its behaviour. Any more than you need consciousness to explain that 2 + 2 = 4.

      • Alrenous says:

        I know what consciousness is. Short answer, Descartes was right.

        The field of AI is atheist, which means it is dedicated to proving that Descartes was wrong, often explicitly. It is career suicide to propose that Descartes was right, and as a result good AI is not going to happen before Fall of Rome 2.0.

        • jim says:

          > I know what consciousness is.

          Nuts

          • Doctor Strangelove says:

            I have come to believe that Alrenous is right, and more importantly, I believe we can probably prove it with physics and information theory. Here’s the executive summary:

            Bell’s Theorem has demonstrated that there are no local hidden variables in QM: particles either do not have a well defined state prior to measurement or else the hidden variables that define all such states must be set by the initial conditions of the universe. In either case, the outcome of an individual quantum measurement can not be predicted by physics, even in principle.

            What is strange is that particles (and groups of particles) can exist in “superpositions” of contradictory states prior to measurement just fine. We can perform observations of states (with detectors) and analysis of said observations (with brains), but since detectors and brains are themselves collections of particles, measurement and cognition should put the detectors and brains into a superposition of contradictory states. This is never observed: whenever you have a subjective experience of measuring a particle in a superposition of two states, you always experience either one state or the other, seemingly at random.

            The experience of measurement increases the information available to your consciousness (measured in bits). The experience of measurement is also irreversible: once you have acquired a bit of information through measurement, you cannot return the measured particle to the superposition of states — entropy (also measured in bits) has increased. We always have the subjective experience of time moving forward and entropy increasing, I suspect this is because the acquisition of information (the perceptual arrow of time) and the thermodynamic arrow of time are linked by the measurement process.

            Here’s where things get really interesting: coherent theories of physics have a property known as CPT symmetry: if you reverse the direction of time as well as the spin and charge of all the particles, the laws of physics are the same. You should be able to “run the movie backwards” — all microscopic interactions of physical systems should be reversible, and macroscopic interactions, being a collection of microscopic interactions, should also be reversible. However, from the perspective of consciousness, this is clearly not the case: we experience entropy increasing and do not observe Humpty-Dumpty self-reassembling.

            The paradox is neatly resolved by variants of the “many worlds” model of QM: if one combines all of the possible outcomes of a measurement when “running the movie backwards”, then reversibility is preserved. Consider a situation in which making a binary quantum measurement can return 2 possible results: the entropy along one of the two possible “world lines” increases by one bit, but the entropy associated with both lines together does not.

            Our consciousness is manifestly bound to a very limited subset of all possible quantum measurement outcomes. The information content of our consciousness (measured in bits) sets a hard lower bound on the amount of entropy increase along our world line over our experience to date. You cannot experience quantum superposition because your mind (not brain) lives in “information space”, not physical space — it contains information, which is precisely the absence of superposition.

            This situation does not make sense if your mind is equivalent to your brain, because then your mind would be a physical system subject to quantum superposition. The strange conclusion is that your mind is *NOT* a physical system.

            d0703c6ec6dc3ff6d7d386a58904b7d8b7df1d6dadd1f6459b7c4c82d09fef5f

            • eternal anglo says:

              Assuming it isn’t a load of hocus pocus, how does any of that throw light on the problem of consciousness?

              • Doctor Strangelove says:

                Side note: There has been specific progress on an AI’s ability to operate at the “spider” level of understanding of one’s body and immediate environment that Jim talked about in the post you linked.

                Scientists trained a robot in a virtual environment to learn its own body shape (number of legs, joints, limb length) by performing experiments with its actuators: the robot updated its model of itself based on how its position changed when it gave commands to the actuators. What was most interesting is that the algorithm could adapt in near-real time to simulated damage to its legs — it would naturally learn to “limp”.

                This article is about an attempt to use a variant of this algorithm on real physical robots. These robots are six-legged, I believe the virtual originals were four legged:

                https://www.nature.com/news/instinctive-robot-recovers-from-injury-fast-1.17641

                • jim says:

                  There is always progress – but the progress seldom leads anywhere very interesting. Maybe these robot spiders get stuck somewhat less often than earlier robot spiders.

                  AI spring is that people find a new trick that enables computers to do stuff that they could not previously do. AI winter is when they discover that the trick runs into limits that do not look all that very different from past limits.

              • Doctor Strangelove says:

                My suspicion is that explaining the sophisticated behavior of evolved biological systems involves developing a better understanding of *cognition* rather than the fundamental nature of *consciousness*.

                Consider the case of a particle in a superposition of two states which is then measured by a mechanical detector which in turn is read by a human scientist. The particle, detector, and brain are all put into a superposition of two states by physical interaction, but the *scientist* only has conscious experience of one of these states. I propose that the relevant information in one of the possible detector states corresponds to a *very elementary* consciousness of one bit of information which is only sufficient to choose between two actions: displaying a 1 or 0 on a monitor. The scientist, on the other hand, has a consciousness containing billions of bits of interrelated information that he can use to take a wide variety of actions.

                In this model, the mechanical detector, as well as any other ordinary information processing system such as a computer, is conscious, but is very, very stupid. A “world-line” corresponding to a particular configuration of an inanimate object (such as a table) could be said to contain a very large number of very small consciousnesses that are not coordinated or coupled in any interesting way.

                It’s important that people understand Bell’s Theorem at the level where they can logically convince themselves that something very strange really is going on and that it’s not “a load of hocus pocus”. This link is the best explanation I’ve been able to find: no prior knowledge of QM or advanced mathematics is required to understand it:

                https://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html

                I can assist anyone here in working through the relevant logic if desired.

                80db3b7cbb535c8a5884c9f7f86972a10d506822086484981fccfca72abae7c2

                • Cavalier says:

                  Thanks for the text and link, I find this all very interesting. I would be very interested in your interpretation of the logic and some possible implications thereof.

            • PlannedObsolescence says:

              that was an amazingly long hashbust

            • jim says:

              > This situation does not make sense if your mind is equivalent to your brain, because then your mind would be a physical system subject to quantum superposition. The strange conclusion is that your mind is *NOT* a physical system.

              Nah

              It merely shows that if your mind is a physical system, it its eigenstates are correlated with what is outside you – that the part of your mind that is in each part of the multiverse does not pay much attention to other parts of the multiverse.

              This relates to a quantum explanation of consciousness.

              One of the odd aspects of consciousness is the ability to generalize from a single example, or a very small number of examples. A mother points at a single dog, and says “dog”, and her child forms the concept of dog.

              This could be explained if he is not forming the concept from one dog, but from all the dogs that his mother pointed to in all worlds of the multiverses – that those aspects of the thing pointed to that are the same in all worlds of the multiverses get constructive interference, and aspects of things that get constructive interference are more salient to the child, and the aspects of things that differ in each particular universe get destructive interference, and are less salient to the child.

              • Doctor Strangelove says:

                This notion that perhaps humans and animals are learning from interference effects between world-lines is intriguing. It is true that human / animal one-shot learning is insanely powerful, as is human “intuition”. Here’s the most ridiculous example I am aware of:

                https://youtu.be/HMM8rlfN1zk?t=39

                Suppose your hypothesis that it is possible to learn from observations in parallel world-lines is correct. It should then be possible to construct a relatively simple physics experiment with a variant of quantum computation to demonstrate this. We want a simple classification task where a classical learning algorithm requires a large number of trials to achieve high accuracy but where our special apparatus can master the classification task apparently in one trial. I say “apparently” because what is really going on is that the learning is spread over multiple parallel world-lines.

                How would we go about designing such an experiment? (It’s too bad Scott Aaronson is so pozzed out, he might be able to deal with this hypothesis quickly and efficiently.)

                • Alrenous says:

                  >This notion that perhaps humans and animals are learning from interference effects between world-lines is intriguing.

                  It doesn’t help in the given example because the world-lines would still at similar places in their respective times.

                  It’s one thing to suppose that someone is remembering a clone’s past memories. It’s quite another to suppose that cloning explains knowing things they don’t know yet…or whatever bizarre model you’re in fact positing.

                • jim says:

                  They only know things that the could know by classic causal processes, but they know what matters and what does not, which meta knowledge is hard to explain.

              • Koanic says:

                Nah, I think that much is just neurons doing their thing. Animals can recognize things as instances of classes too.

                • jim says:

                  Consciousness is not what only intellectuals do. It is what spiders do also.

                • Koanic says:

                  You need a better term. You are conflating two things – Cartesian consciousness and behavioral animality. Out of such false joins all sophisms spring.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  What’s meant by “consciousness” here is “experiencing qualia”, e.g. feeling pain. Not things like “reflecting on one’s place in the universe.”

                • Koanic says:

                  Qualia is Cartesian consciousness. You are referring to intellectual thought, which is neither Cartesian consciousness nor animalian behavior, and requires neither.

                • jim says:

                  No one knows what qualia are, because no one knows what consciousness is.

                  The concept of qualia is based on Cartesian dualism, and Cartesian dualism is incoherent and internally inconsistent. Not that I have anything better to replace it with.

                • Doctor Strangelove says:

                  Koanic is right here. The problem of understanding subjective experience and the problem of modelling animal and human cognition are separate issues. Both are very difficult, but the real danger will manifest if we solve the problem of cognition without understanding subjective experience. We do not want to create highly intelligent and adaptive systems that have no subjective experience, i.e. p-zombies. This situation is made more likely by the staggering financial incentives for enhancing machine learning and adaptation and the negligible commercial interest in making artificial subjective experience.

                  The reason the NPC meme is so effective is that it portrays its targets as not merely being stupid (ineffective cogntion), but not even having a real subjective experience. When someone claims to have a bizarre experience, we often claim that they are lying or that their perception or cognition are somehow distorted so as to give rise to the experience. However, NPCs in games *don’t even have an experience*, and we normally believe this is the case regardless of how sophisticated the algorithm could be in principle.

                • Alrenous says:

                  >The problem of understanding subjective experience and the problem of modelling animal and human cognition are separate issues.

                  This is the theory of epiphenomenalism, which is magic.

                  Sustaining consciousness is very expensive. Sleepwalking and various incomplete form of anaesthesia show that it’s possible to act without consciousness.

                • Koanic says:

                  Jim> Cartesian dualism is incoherent and internally inconsistent.

                  Mine isn’t. Why so?

                  Cartesian consciousness is supernatural. Gnon has bound our consciousnesses to flesh, or rather body and spirit grow together from one cell and a spirit monad. Rending the two apart is literally excruciating, but flesh grows warped outside the Garden, and therefore we must die.

                  Presumably we inherit the monad from Jehovah’s act of breathing life into Adam, or perhaps it is messier than that. But there is no indication that Satan can reproduce spirits; that seems to be strictly the province of Man and Earth. Personnel is policy; what we do echoes in eternity.

                • jim says:

                  The trouble with Cartesian consciousness is that it is both bound and unbound. There is a gap, and there is no gap.

                • Koanic says:

                  Not under the Biblical worldview. Wherein, the natural is merely a subset of the supernatural. Dualism is merely a matter of materialist perspective. The apparent contradiction of a seamless connection between material brain and supernatural consciousness disappears from the perspective of a divine Creator. Such a contradiction would preclude the divine Consciousness from creating matter in the first place, were it really insurmountable.

                • jim says:

                  Well that is fine for a divine creator, but fails to make sense of our experience as mortals thoroughly embedded in the material world.

                • Koanic says:

                  > but fails to make sense of our experience as mortals thoroughly embedded in the material world.

                  I do not see how. The theory means that dualism is true, a paradox not a contradiction, and that we can follow the chain of consciousness up the material ladder as far as our scientific instruments permit, or as far down as our subjective introspection permits.

                • jim says:

                  A paradox is a contradiction.

                  Cartesian dualism seems intuitively true, but fails to make sense of our lived experience of being in the world.

                  Cartesian dualism is Plato’s cave, and qualia are shadows cast on the wall of the cave. Which is totally plausible if you are sitting at your computer philosophizing

                  But if you find the air in Plato’s cave a bit stuffy, and wander out of the cave to climb a mountain, not so plausible.

                  And if on top of the mountain, you make love to a naked woman, pretty sure she is not a just a shadow on the wall, but an actual naked woman. And then, going down the mountain, you bang your head on a low hanging branch, and fall down sliding some distance over rocks. That branch and those rocks definitely not shadows on the wall.

                • pdimov says:

                  >We do not want to create highly intelligent and adaptive systems that have no subjective experience, i.e. p-zombies.

                  It’s not clear if this is possible.

                  – intelligence is predicting the behavior of the world
                  – the world is populated by other intelligent agents
                  – intelligence can predict the behavior of intelligence
                  – intelligence can predict its own behavior (build a model of itself)

                • Koanic says:

                  No, a paradox is an apparent contradiction which is resolvable upon closer inspection. That is the dictionary definition.

                  Qualia normally correspond to real things, but not always, as anyone who has taken acid or dreamed knows.

                  Cartesian *DUALISM* posits that the rocks you bang your head on are real things, and the pain is also real, and your consciousness is real. But the rocks are not the same kind of thing as your consciousness, and the pain is a bridge between them.

                • jim says:

                  There is a difference between dreaming of sex, or dreaming of banging your head against a branch, and actually doing it. Cartesian dualism has us as disembodied angels watching television of real life from a distance.

                  Cartesian dualism is incompatible with the world being real and us being really in it. It falls half way between realism and Berkely’s idealism, being realist half the time and idealist the other half, and not actually getting the two to meet or be logically consistent with each other.

                  While Berkeley’s idealism means no body, which is obviously stupid, and realism means no mind, which is obviously stupid, dualism defines mind and body in such a way that we have a mind/body problem, and then just waves the problem glibly away.

                  Not only do we not have a satisfactory mechanistic account of consciousness, we don’t even have a satisfactory “Hey, it really is magic” account of consciousness either.

                • Alrenous says:

                  >The trouble with Cartesian consciousness is that it is both bound and unbound.
                  Nope.
                  >Cartesian dualism is Plato’s cave
                  Nope.
                  >Cartesian dualism has us as disembodied angels watching television of real life from a distance.
                  Nope.

                  Jim, really, just stop.

                  >But the rocks are not the same kind of thing as your consciousness, and the pain is a bridge between them.
                  The pain would be another quale, not a bridge. You don’t have the necessary background to understand what it is instead.

                • Koanic says:

                  Obviously, a just and orderly God is not going to create a chaotic dreamscape in which fantasy is indistinguishable from fact, although that is the prison in which some mentally ill find themselves, presumably.

                  > Cartesian dualism has us as disembodied angels watching television of real life from a distance.

                  I don’t know where you get that. The fact that British is distinct from Japanese, does not preclude the continuous genetic gradient between them. Likewise the fact that spirit is distinct from body.

                  If anything, I suspect the apparently duality between mind and body is an artifact of fallen postdiluvian Man, whose magical faculties are removed, along with a half-foot of his brainmass. The ascended Jesus who walks through walls yet eats fish has integrated spirit and body. God has gone to a fair bit of trouble to ensure that we cannot do the same. This is a prison planet, quarantined for plague, slated to burn. Birds with clipped wings at the zoo might disbelieve in flight, despite their bodies being apparently designed for it. The cold blank space between mind and brain is shaped like a shackle.

                  > The pain would be another quale, not a bridge. You don’t have the necessary background to understand what it is instead.

                  No, you don’t have the reading comprehension to grasp the metaphor. The bridge refers to everything from the firing neurons in the skin up to the pain qualia. “Pain” is a word that can refer to both qualia and biological substrate, like “anger” and “lust”.

                • PlannedObsolescence says:

                  Is pain really all you feel?

                  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jXd6_D6SBwk

                  In particular, why nostalgia instead of nostagape?

                • Alrenous says:

                  >metaphor
                  …you can’t build a robot out of metaphors.

                • Koanic says:

                  Unresponsive.

                • PlannedObsolescence says:

                  It was sounding like Chester Bennington in here, his problem wasn’t the wounds that wouldn’t heal, when do they ever, but that he didn’t have anything worth living for. The spider is uncomfortable being carried by a large mammal that could be planning to eat him, sees the woodpile as his home, and jumps for it, and Chester Bennington should have been made fun of until he went home. If a Cartesian dualist can recognize that they aren’t an individual-utilitarian but an urbilaterian and have reasonable wants that come from their nature as a human body, are they still a Cartesian dualist? Does the spider know he’s living for his unborn children? Humans (not so much Africans) have a wider range of others to ingroup.

                  How many orgasms should society give a woman to make up for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKKBDFCiIA ? The correct answer doesn’t generalize all motivation into pleasure and pain first, because no amount of pleasure can match existential purpose, or the Pearl of Great Price (happy is he who knows his purpose, which is usually known only to God, for most of us, being reasonable is the only reasonable goal).

                  I should use less words, because Jim already asked how do we teach a robot to want something. We’re long past the anomie of the enlightenment, and have serious engineering questions.

                  We write self in code often enough as if expecting objects to say “I want x”, but objects are always epistemologically sound. People have tried making evolutionary algorithms to figure out how to reproduce in a simulation, but mine weren’t complicated enough to develop a sense of purpose. When someone succeeds, consciousness outside of an urbilaterian will be seen as a vindication of weak Cartesian dualism, the doctrine that consciousness is a thing.

                  Also when you say I experience quails x and y which suggest behavior z you sound like a woman or a vegetable. Cats experience quails through ambush and deceit, and men take deceit to whole new levels.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Sustaining consciousness is very expensive. Sleepwalking and various incomplete form of anaesthesia show that it’s possible to act without consciousness.

                  Please try not to conflate consciousness and memory.

                  Consciousness does not require memory, only an awareness of “purpose”. “If this, then that.”

                  Additionally, sleepwalkers display consciousness simply by being able to ambulate around without completely fucking themselves up. Obstacle avoidance is evidence of basic consciousness. The fact that their PFC is trapped in a simulated reality is not relevant here.

                • jim says:

                  Actions taken without consciousness are apt to get the actor into worse trouble than a self driving car with no human supervisor gets into.

                • Cavalier says:

                  > Actions taken without consciousness are apt to get the actor into worse trouble than a self driving car with no human supervisor gets into.

                  Clearly there are levels of consciousness

                  If I want to stand upright I need to be conscious of gravity

                  If I want to walk I need to be conscious of obstacles

                  If I was to talk I need to be conscious of language and a very large amount of context

                  Sleepwalking shows us that the more primitive parts of the brain can be conscious of both of the former while the prefrontal cortex is oblivious to the latter

                  If a series of levers makes a decision and returns a given output for a given input, it isn’t “just” cause and effect.

                  Presumably this is also happening at lower levels of reality although the Universe may be protecting against timing attacks as well

                • jim says:

                  A sleepwalker is doing what a robot can do, and robots are obviously not conscious.

                  If he was doing stuff significantly better than a robot could do, we would conclude is conscious, though perhaps in an impaired state, dreaming while awake

              • Doctor Strangelove says:

                “It merely shows that if your mind is a physical system, it its eigenstates are correlated with what is outside you – that the part of your mind that is in each part of the multiverse does not pay much attention to other parts of the multiverse.”

                This explains how “you” only have the subjective experience of the small part of your mind that is on one small set of world-lines, but not *why* you are subjectively experiencing that one set of world-lines and not the others.

                Cognition based on interference between world-lines generated by organic quantum computation could possibly explain why animals are so smart and adaptive, but it cannot explain why a scientist measuring the polarization of a photon measures “horizontal” instead of “vertical” in any given 50/50 trial. That information must still be coming from outside the multiverse.

                • jim says:

                  On the many worlds consciousness theory, you are subjectively experiencing all of them, but you choose not to notice because it would overwhelm your mind, or are unable to notice. One part of your mind focuses on one part of the multiverse, but has subconscious awareness of what is going on in a broader part of the multiverse.

                  The scientist measures the photon both ways, and does not consciously notice.

              • Cavalier says:

                That sounds an awful lot like Sheldrake’s morphic resonance.

            • yewotm8 says:

              If the many worlds hypothesis is correct, then it also implies that there are not only several different possible outcomes of an event, but that also there can be serveral different possible “incomes” of the same event. We cannot easily reverse time because we may not rewind to the targetted initial state; there may be a set of initial states that are also capable of yielding our current state.

              • Doctor Strangelove says:

                Yes, the notion of several different “incomes” of the same event is implied. This is manifested in the double-slit experiment, in which the experimental results in the interference case require that the particles travel through *both slits*. Branching and recombining of world-lines are modeled in Feynman’s “sum-over-histories” interpretation of QM. Note however that any information unique to a world-line that branches off and then recombines is inaccessible to an outside observer.

                Clean time reversal requires that entropy not increase or decrease as a function of time, but if you take all of the world-lines into account you will see that this is so.

              • Koanic says:

                > If the many worlds hypothesis is correct,

                …then everything possible, is, and we should find chaotic bits of variation randomly SQUIRTLE

  12. eternal anglo says:

    Jeff Bezos’s wife has just divorced him. I guess it’s all part of his insidious capitalist plan to rule the world, right Compulsive Regurgitator?

    But seriously, what young man aspires to become a billionaire anymore? You can be literally the richest man in the world, married 25 years, she’s not even hot, 3 kids and you’re still beta bux to be sucked dry. There’s no longer a conventional win condition. Time for unconventional ones!

    • The Cominator says:

      AMZN has a PE ratio way above what even Buffett sells his forever companies for.

      If they have a no pre-nup divorce and she gets those shares she’ll dump a bunch for cash which will tank the stock… there is going to be very big money made on buying puts on AMZN after the divorce.

      • The Cominator says:

        This is because AMZN at its current PE… it cannot sustain its lofty shareprice in the face of a major shareholder selling…

        Yes Bezos is a damn smart businessman, but PE’s above 40 are generally destined to crash like Icarus.

  13. Karl says:

    Trump can overrule congress by declaring a state of emergency. Next step, the declaration is challenged in court(s). Maybe the court cannot explain what makes this one different from the other thousand and one states of emergency, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Lawyers are trained to provide a reasoning for anything. Anyway, this is beside the point. Even if a court provides a lengthy legalistic reasoning that nowone undertsands, the court’s decision is still there – and everyone can understand that the court says that building the wall is illegal.

    What will Trump do then? Ignore the court? This will be the defining moment, much later than declaring a state of emergency.

    • Starman says:

      Appeal the ruling to Trump judges, especially after people discover that RBG has already died…

    • jim says:

      That Trump is already building the wall under his inherent power to take collective action to deal with collective threats is a Tony Abbott style Jackson or threat to do a Jackson.

      The courts folded before Tony Abbott’s threat. Will they fold for Trump’s threat?

  14. Zach says:

    The Democrats are mind numbingly insane. It irritates me to no end. Their position on the wall is abject incoherence to the extreme. Their base has gotten so insane, so over the top, that to expect the brain-bleed overlords to make a reasonable decision about anything, anywhere, at any time is to then expect mass immolation as a more convenient way to die than at the hands of the hordes of freaks, seething, to avenge their loss.

    The cacophony of shrieks, cries and anguish would please me. The retardation keeps usurping itself in an endless spiral… and god does it annoy me.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      They’ve always been this way, it just got more obvious. Nuclear power and climate change position were as crazy in the past.

      • Cavalier says:

        Both positions are perfectly sensible when you realize that everyone is lying to you.

        In reality, nuclear is the only presently viable alternative to carbon fuels, and the end-goal of the global warming hoax is (was?) to institute a carbon tax.

        Just two things in life are certain: death, and taxes.

        Sensible, no?

  15. Mike says:

    Spot on Jim. As they say, “Once you create a bureaucracy, it is very hard to shut it down as easily as you started it up” (just look at the experience of virtually every so-called “anti-regulation” president up until now). Look at Robert Conquest’s Law for Right-Wing Organizations, or the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

    I predict that we will have leftist media publishing hysterical articles about the Enabling Act of 1933 within days.

  16. vxxc says:

    Is Trump Reagan or Gorbachev? *

    In either scenario we win.

    In Trump as Gorbachev we fly the Helicopters.

    *One peacefully dismantled his Communist foe.
    The other attempted to make Communism work without fear (and with less Vodka) and taking away Fear and Vodka unraveled the USSR’s Empire.

  17. Big Brutha says:

    For now running out the clock on the Dems with the shut down is good tactics. Let Dem constituencies feel the heat that comes from this. The DC low-level GS slugs are already in trouble. They’re looking for payday loans after less than a month. If the Donald pushes this on for a couple of months longer he can literally drain the swamp by sending the bureaucratic foot soldiers of the Deep State scurrying for shelter elsewhere. No bureaucracy, no Deep State. DOD is well funded so the legions have no reason to want anyone else to don the purple. It also keeps the mil side of the mil-industrial complex from wanting to get into foreign wars. The Donald can then clean out the Deep State by taking it apart in bite size chunks. Less muss and fuss.

  18. Eugine Nier says:

    > The Democrats are going to tell us this a big step towards them getting helicopter rides to the Pacific, and they are absolutely right, but unable to explain why

    Sure they can.

  19. Koanic says:

    If the invasion of America by millions of muds isn’t an emergency, I don’t know why the Left is so upset about what happened to the previously-Native Americans.

    • jim says:

      In his speech, Trump was laying out the case for declaring a state of emergency, for exercising his inherent authority to defend America and Americans.

      Then, in the negotiating session, will tell them, “well, if you don’t want me to declare a state of emergency, pass the budget.”

      If they don’t concede, he will let things stew for a while, then state of emergency. Which moves us closer to helicopter time. If they don’t want to move closer to helicopter time, they need to capitulate.

      • BC says:

        I would be really surprised if they concede, their followers would have their heads.

        • 2 in 12 says:

          A head on one spike or the other does not matter…Evil always dies in the creation of its own making

      • Ichm says:

        No way to know about which side the army would lean, in helicopter time.

  20. Mister Grumpus says:

    BTW:

    “The Democrats are going to tell us this a big step towards them getting helicopter rides to the Pacific, and they are absolutely right, but unable to explain why, or even to think why, because actually thinking through the reasons is crimethink.”

    I really appreciate your angle on how even our rulers have speech codes and thought codes.

  21. Mister Grumpus says:

    Can my man Don put on a hit reality show or what? The tension will be burning ass hot — I mean like people straight-up fainting at random in the middle of traffic hot — come November 2020.

    But let me test-balloon a black pill on you guys:

    Who here suspects that the wall/fence/whatever will end up only being used to keep taxpayers in?

    That was Ron Paul’s first take, right at the beginning. I didn’t want to believe him then and I don’t want to believe him now, but I also can’t get it out of my mind.

    Fire away, no really please do.

    • Steve Johnson says:

      Maybe I’m insufficiently imaginative but I can’t picture Americans seeing fleeing to Mexico as an improvement – no matter how bad America gets.

      • Brian says:

        Boom.

      • Cavalier says:

        Already done

        Worth it just to escape the omnipresent shadow of the Sword of Damocles

      • The Cominator says:

        Generally they flee to Asia or sometimes Russia.

        • jim says:

          Yes, a lot of us are doing that. It is starting to approach critical mass, where it is made easier by the existence of a community of fellow refugees. Not seeing critical mass yet, but if things keep going the way they are going …

      • PlannedObsolescence says:

        The leftoids who said they would go to Canada if Al Gore lost were either claiming that Canada is just another American state, or maybe feeling self-important with the claim to be important enough to be a refugee, or maybe trying to virtue signal their support for the migrant invasion of the West. Did internal migrants vote for Tucker’s merceneries, why did Pat Buchanan lose in 92 against NAFTA? 24 years later, under terrible threat, we could vote for a non-migrant.

    • Koanic says:

      Sure, but you can’t let that stop you. The only way out is through. Think like Stalin, to avoid dying like Nicholas II.

    • there is always Canada

    • Pete says:

      “Who here suspects that the wall/fence/whatever will end up only being used to keep taxpayers in?”

      This is the dumbest shit ever. So if the USA finally becomes a full-on police state, your grand escape plan would be to head south to Mexico on foot? You’d be murdered for your shoes as soon as you got out of the desert and reached a town.

      First of all the road to Mexico will remain open, just with checkpoints. Also the USA has tons of coastline so if you’re really desperate to flee you could always go by boat.

      Plus this whole scenario assumes all flights out of the USA are cancelled or what? This is never going to happen unless the USA transforms into some kind of North Korean hermit kingdom.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Or you could go North. I mean Canada might also go police state, but it has 30 million people and is the second largest country on Earth. There is essentially no people past the first 100 kilometers.

    • moldbug. says:

      what a terrible meme.

      • Cavalier says:

        Trump will build a wall any day now

        Trump will pull all American assets out of Israel’s backyard any day now

        Trump will fire the government any day now

        Trump will declare martial law and purge the red menace any day now

        Wake me up when something actually happens

        I hope you really are that mischling uber-nerd

        • jim says:

          Trump is already building the wall and he is preparing a state of emergency declaration to make what he is already doing retroactively legal if the Democrats do not back down and retroactively legalize it.

          The Democrats don’t seem to be reacting to the fact that he is already building the wall, but they are acting as if making it legal will result in black helicopters taking them for a swim in the pacific.

          If Trump carries out his core central promise, this builds momentum for everything else – lot of people are going to sign up with the winning side. A steel wall sinks the color revolution narrative that Trump is weak and getting weaker.

          • Zach says:

            “A steel wall sinks the color revolution narrative that Trump is weak and getting weaker.”

            Which is good. I suspect Trump’s ally Stephen Miller flirts with dissidents of one kind or another. The details are vague.

          • Cavalier says:

            The occultists running the intelligence apparati can’t kill Him because we’re not falling for that again

            But they can out-wait Him, and will

            We’ll know Trump is getting stronger if Mockingbird teleprompt-readers start appearing before military tribunal

            But it still won’t matter because these people operate on galactic timescales

            • moldbug. says:

              a very large part of my own political theology, has always stressed the need to be humane (loving, even) towards those individuals who display cognitive deformities (down syndrome, for example).

              but then, the eyes encounter your written word.

              • Koanic says:

                Perhaps the secret to Chinese stability is the higher cognitive hurdle for advanced vocabulary.

                • PlannedObsolescence says:

                  Been tried from Plato to Harvard, created Carlyle’s owl-men, if the academy and its ranking becomes the source of legitimacy, we get the epicure’s inversion of “the fool saith in his heart there is no God” and diligence inversion because to do is to not have done, and intelligent men can’t be brought in as advisors if they can take over, Justinian can’t trust Belisarius because he’s caesar and not forthrightly rex. Contra CR, “England must breathe again” means the opposite of socialism.

                  Odysseus wasn’t able to keep what he took from Ajax, and couldn’t proceed until he rejected Calypso in favor of his Penelope. Polygamists should think China eugenic on IQ and conclude improvement from ⟨IQ⟩~100 impossible, but women hold up half the sky.

              • Cavalier says:

                “Your own political theology” of warm, loving, and caring humaneness and miscellaneous selfless altruism is severely handicapped in a political environment of utterly unrestricted Darwinian competition

                Consequently you’ve been selected for near-term memetic extinction

                Sorry

                • jim says:

                  You attribute to moldbug a theology of “warm, loving, and caring humaneness and miscellaneous selfless altruism”?

                  Do you have a basis for that attribution?

                • Cavalier says:

                  >a very large part of my own political theology, has always stressed the need to be humane (loving, even)

                  He should go watch a lion chase rip out a gazelle’s throat. Or any one of the insect parasitism videos. Or the Jewess Marina Abramovic bathing in blood

                  Nature doesn’t give a fuck

          • Koanic says:

            Trust Trump to know how to play just the (steel) tip with his erections.

          • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

            I like observing the personalities that come and go through spaces i lurk.

            Cavalier used to be cool, but unfortunately over time became increasingly incapable of producing anything except concern trolling. I thought CR was pretty good too, until he suddenly started going full retard. Cav more or less disappeared (from this blog) around the same time CR’s second personality got triggered ( https://archive.org/stream/DavidMcGowanProgrammedToKill_201603/David-McGowan-Programmed-to-Kill_djvu.txt ), which made me think the handler’s figured he wasn’t getting enough play (too oblique perhaps), and decided to come in with a more explicit approach in the form of CR’s recapitulated communist revolution.

            Instead of ‘gawd white people are just the *worst*’ (which was probably too obvious a tell however dressed up), the script was flipped too ‘boy i just LOVE white people, unlike those capitalists!’, in hopes of perhaps trojaning a wedge in somewhere.

            Well CR didn’t really work out too well either and more or less completely discredited himself, so i imagine there was some flailing down at the office over what too do (the playbook’s gotten a bit stale after 40 or so years, and any smart up-and-coming SWMs who may have been wise enough to update it would get purged, and the old smart WMs that orchestrated have died off), so exhuming Cav’s corpse for another round of concern trolling seems to be the default option.

            • Cavalier says:

              >Cavalier used to be cool, but unfortunately over time became increasingly incapable of producing anything except concern trolling.
              >something something CR
              >etc.

              No relation to CR

              I used Jim’s Blog to purge most of my school-implanted prog mind control, very effective, thanks Jim

              I’ve used other strains of thought to purge the rest of the prole-grade type, notably Anglinism.

              Ultimately through Pizzagate and other events (e.g.) plus ruthless application of Darwinian epistemology I came to understand that A) contra Jim our rulers are neither inept nor deluded nor insane, and B) scientific materialism and all offshoots including Jim’s libertarian-reactionism do not adequately explain the observable condition of our world

              When JFK denounced secret societies he wasn’t talking about communism

              Thanks for bootstrapping me to religion, Jim

              If you can’t beat em, join em

              • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                The essence of narcissism, which is a special case of congenital solipsism, is idealization without actualization; the narcissist may not *actually* be, say, a fighter pilot, or a CEO, or female, and so on, but are fain to think they are *just the same sort of person as one who is*.

                You *want* to believe (many? most? nearer? further?) current incumbent overlords are the good and the great, because such a fact is important to an aspirational conceit, the construed identity you want others to validate and invite others to participate in; imagining yourself as the same sort of person, in the same sort of situation.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >You want to believe that current incumbent overlords are “the good and the great”

                  I’ve never said such a thing and do not think such a thing to be true

                  I do think that any entity, genetic or memetic, selected for a specific trait at the expense of all else will come to represent that trait at the expense of all else; as far as I can tell this is a Darwinian tautology

                  So spend several generations in a highly competitive system whose winning condition is “collude most effectively in a completely amoral manner”, and you can guess the result

                  This can be applied to any entity inherently subject to Darwinian selection: USG, free-market capitalism, Jews, financiers, mafiosi (but I repeat myself), etc. etc. etc.

                  For example, most goodthinking people think that the central banks of the world are public, such as the Bank of England. But when has there ever been a public bank?

                • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                  The putative elite that you idolize exists exactly as that: an idol.

                  When a lesser shitlib, for instance, agitates for the advancement of mud people, it is an idolization nominally denotated as and conflated with mud people, that exists in their mind, that they are agitating for, not mud people in reality.

                  But of course, it is that unfortunate reality that benefits from their psychosis all the same.

                  What is the xenophilia of a such a man? Consider world-formation capacity as an ‘aperture’, through which greater or smaller ‘slices’ of Being can go through, or be held by, the subject. A subject of such comportment, then, can hardly *see* that which is farther; if he is more cognizant of anything in greater truth of entirety, it is that which is more obvious in his sight. Ie, that which is *nearer*.

                  When the solipsist perceives lack of virtue, it is most of all *in his neighbors* that he sees it; whereas on the other hand, he does not see lack of virtue in the far away, because in fact *he does not see it at all*.

                  When he experiences annoyances of life, perceived slights, injuries and insults, it is, generally, his neighbors that he experiences ‘doing’ these things he sees to him, these people who rudely intrude into his narrativization or puts it to lie, while at the same time *lacking a broader vision in which to place such experience into context*. In his mind, he truly and earnestly believes *his neighbors are all the ills in the world*.

                  When he feels fellow-feeling with ‘the alien’, it has been because ‘the alien’ to him is in truth an empty cypher; it is precisely *because* he does not truly ‘see’ it, that he can fill the space under it’s nominal heading with a totem of his own making, all his hopes, aspirations, and idealizations… a projection of himself, in fact, what he *desires* to be himself.

                  When one conducts oneself in a manner functionally indistinguishable from [glow-in-the-dark shill], one may come to assume the mantle of [glow-in-the-dark shill].

                • jim says:

                  I don’t think he is idolizing the elite – but he assumes they are acting rationally and cohesively, that their collective rationality is compatible with their individual rationality, whereas the dark enlightenment model is that they are trapped in a self destructive holiness spiral, that will destroy them and us.

                  Trouble is that the individual self interest for any one individual member of the elite is to be holier than every other member of the elite, but if everyone in the elite gets ever holier, this is not in the interest of the elite, or of any one member of the elite.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >I don’t think he is idolizing the elite

                  Correct.

                  >but he assumes they are acting rationally and cohesively, that their collective rationality is compatible with their individual rationality

                  I assume that they are acting rationally and reasonably cohesively. Clearly there are those who have “gone off the reservation”, so to speak. The rabid SJW element, I believe, would have, in the event of a Clinton presidency, been used to purge the institutions from top to bottom. Now, clearly, the UN and related, in pushing Juden Peterstein as their new ideological mascot, has abandoned them, although at present they are at least retaining their present foothold in their previous institutions.

                  In other words, there is inter-elite competition, but that competition is dominated by interests, not ideology. And the thing they can all agree on is kiking the goyim, whether or not they’re literal kikes or the goyim are literal goyim, i.e. any particular goy may actually be a jew autist in the wrong place at the wrong time, e.g. James Damore, Mark Zuckerberg.

                  >holiness

                  In practice, social groups are pretty effective at self-policing this stuff, and holiness spiraling has nothing to do with the real string-pullers, who, as I’ve already mentioned, either have no clear ideological affiliation, or are occultist. (I dare you to challenge me on this point.)

                  >whereas the dark enlightenment model is that they are trapped in a self destructive holiness spiral, that will destroy them and us.

                  Incorrect. I specifically picked up the phrase “salami slicing” from Moldbug, in which he described the Soviet election process and subsequent “recalibration” by Stalin. It is silly to recognize that the Soviet Union was a proxy of the “American” banking Houses whole simultaneously believing that these things are not happening here. You can one either, but not both.

                • jim says:

                  > In practice, social groups are pretty effective at self-policing this stuff, and holiness spiraling has nothing to do with the real string-pullers

                  If there are “real string pullers”, Bezos should be one of them, and look what happened to him.

                  Similarly, if evil Jews rule, why were a bunch of aging whores who had hit the wall and could no longer find purchasers for their overused wares able to smash Hollywood?

                  It absolutely obvious that social groups are not effective in policing this stuff.

                  Collective rationality is hard. If you see what looks like madness, self destructive evil, hatred, malice, and self hating malice by collective entities, chances are it really is madness, self destructive evil, hatred, malice, and self hating malice.

                  Madness is not normal for individuals, and malice is limited because of the likelihood of reprisal. Madness and malice is absolutely normal and quite difficult to avoid for groups of individuals.

                • eternal anglo says:

                  Cavalier, societies have been destroyed by holiness spirals in the past, such as Chang Hsien Chong’s Szechuan, Cambodia, Revolutionary France and the Jewish revolt. There were no secret sane and and competent string pullers, unless your idea of a cunning plan to rule the world involves being genocided and/or conquered. So what makes you think our current holiness spiral is any different?

                  Jim also suspects that the people at the very top, at the heart of the beast, are occultists, but that is not because less insane and self-destructive than ordinary leftists, but because vastly more insane and self-destructive than ordinary leftists.

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Unresponsive.

                • Cavalier says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Like a troofer, a Marxist will tell us that X looks like Y, but does not show us Y, nor X looking anything like Y.

                  If you show us stuff that looks the way you say it looks, will allow it.

                  If you tell us that stuff looks the way you say it looks like the voice over on a troofer video, waste of bandwidth. Show us Y, don’t tell us X looks like Y.

                • alf says:

                  nice burn

        • moldbug. says:

          your grammar requires improvement.

          • Cavalier says:

            Grammar is not punctuation

            Yarvin Theory debunked

            • Contaminated NEET says:

              He’s not really Yarvin, you mongoloid. You can tell because his posts are less than 10,000 words long and don’t have any pretentious references to obscure 19th-century books.

            • moldbug. says:

              grammar is not punctuation.

              your grammar requires improvement. along with your memes.

              • Cavalier says:

                Yawn

                Let me know when your rhetorical ability is something to write home about

  22. moldbug. says:

    tonight’s address obviously was never going to be this declaration.

    the Cathedral will preemptively go nuclear on this address. which will be very revealing.

    declaration will follow. soon.

    • jim says:

      Lays the ground for the declaration, but I don’t think it follows soon. Going to let the Democrats stew in their own juice for a while. The wall is popular, and blocking it is overwhelmingly unpopular.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Lordy they might assasinate him or his kids to keep him from doing something popular, especially amongst the taxpayers.

        I mean shit what then?

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