“Why the rage?
asks a member of the audience
Michael Knowles at UMKC tells us
When people have a weak point, they tend to shatter.
When people don’t have confidence in what they are saying, they scream at you.
They are now seeing the fruits of a long simmering gender ideology, that men and women are identical,
Which ideology is resulting in horrific consequences.
Eradicating the differences between men and women. They lose their minds.
Why these people are crazy?
Asks a member of the audience.
Michael Knowles answers:
Despair.
They have driven themselves mad
There is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as reality, we can not have a reasonable discourse about objective reality.
There are just personal interests, there is no reason, there is no logic to the universe. It is all a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. The only way you can get what you want, the only way you can take a bigger piece of the pie for yourself is to take it from someone else.
In contrast, Solomon’s good women gets a bigger piece of the pie by using the market place to apply capital to its highest and best use. Proverbs 31:16: King Solomon tells us:
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard
She “considereth land and purchaseth itâ€. She does not just purchase it, and she certainly does not apply to the King or to Wall Street to get a piece of land assigned to her. That she “considereth†the best application of capital is what makes capitalism work and socialism fail. And then she “planteth a vineyard”, creating capital.
The Marxist believes that the man running your local Domino’s pizza franchise was assigned that franchise by wall street, unaware that he built it, and owns it.
The Marxist (and every tenured academic and every teacher is a Marxist or else he would lose tenure so fast it would make your head spin) refuses to know that the man who runs your local Domino’s pizza franchise built it, owns it, created it, and could at any time take down the Domino’s sign, and put up his own, because the academic, every tenured academic everywhere, intends to murder the man who runs your local Domino’s pizza, and install someone holier, who will demonstrate superior holiness over his mere customers by providing you with bread and coke zero, instead of cheese and meat on your pizzas, much as those who created Captainess Marvel and Hans Soyboy celebrated the tears of their fans, for by giving the fans something they hated, they proved themselves holier than the fans who were paying them money.
You cannot run a restaurant from Wall Street, any more than you can run a restaurant from Moscow. But they are determined to believe the world is run from Wall Street, even though Human Resources will not let Musk or Bezos get laid, because they intend to run the world from Washington.
The end result of attempting do so is of course is that pretty soon you run out of other people’s money. The shops empty, as they did in Revolutionary France and are emptying now in Venezuela, and eventually those holier than you and me burn down the shops, and shop keepers flee, as they are today fleeing Venezuela.
The French Revolution was an anticapitalist revolution. There was a very short lived alliance between the Merchant class seeking the abolition of the controls on price, supply, and distribution of grain, and the Popular Society, the Mountain, seeking a totalitarian society of superior holiness with the enforced state religion of the Enlightenment, the Church of Reason, which alliance, like every Popular Front ever, ended within a few weeks of the alliance taking power, the left devouring its allies immediately after taking power. The controls were lifted, and then soon thereafter reimposed, plus price controls on every thing plus terror against the merchant class, especially the butchers and bakers, terror against their former allies. Price controls led to shortages, shortages to rationing, and then production quotas, which production quotas amounted to enslavement of many members of the merchant class, especially the bakers.
As with Stalin and Pharaoh, former members of the merchant class in Revolutionary France were commanded to meet their output quotas, even when inputs were unavailable, as they frequently were, and punished for failure to meet those output quotas. Which resulted in bricks without straw in Egypt during the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, tomato soup infamously lacking in tomatoes in Soviet Russia, light bulbs with no filaments in Soviet Russia, and bread largely made of dirt in Revolutionary France. As in Venezuela as I write, violence ensued, and the ruling elite, following the example of King Louis XVI, directed the rage against the merchant class.
In Cuba, there was enough bread and sugar, but only bread and sugar, resulting in epidemic of malnutrition related blindness, while the vanguard of the proletariat and visiting fellow traveler leftists from America ate like Kings. When I was in Cuba, the planes did not fly on a regular schedule like buses, but instead flew like taxis, responding to the momentary and immediate needs of members of the vanguard of the proletariat – or their fellow traveler guests, who seemed totally untroubled by the contradiction between their ideology of equality, their splendid lifestyle in Cuba, and the lifestyle of ordinary Cubans.
Similarly, when Haiti was ruled by NGO carryonbaggers from Harvard bringing billions of dollars in foreign aid after the earthquake, Haitians ate dirt. You want to know what Harvard intends for ordinary Americans? Compare Haiti ruled by mulatto thugs, with Haiti ruled by NGO carryonbaggers from Harvard. Under the rule of NGO carryonbaggers from Harvard, medieval plagues raged, the streetlights went out, and Haitians ate dirt. The streets of San Francisco, littered with human feces, foreshadow what Harvard has in store for the suburbia that it hates, as did the feces on the streets of Haiti during NGO rule. When I returned to San Francisco recently, it was noticeable that there had not been much paint, maintenance, or repairs done in my absence, and that there were human feces here and there.
Marxists, Human biodiversity deniers, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warmists, and sexual difference deniers simply lie loudly and repeatedly. When one of their lies is rebutted, they ignore the rebuttal, and instead of responding, issue a dozen new lies, then return to the old lie, assuming not only that it was never rebutted, but that everyone, including the person who rebutted it, agrees that it is the obvious, unquestioned, and unquestionable truth – a style of debate that reveals that they know that they are lying.
If Marxists genuinely believed that capitalism was recent, or that the French Revolution was a capitalist revolution rather than an anti capitalist revolution, if Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warmists believed that global warming was causing a refugee crisis, they would respond to evidence and argument with evidence and argument, rather than telling you “the science is settled.”
That they knowingly lie reveals that they intend harm to their audience. The method of argument used by troofers, Marxists, human biodiversity deniers, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warmists, and sexual difference deniers, reveals that they know the truth, or that they believe their is no truth, only power. Watch the sexual difference deniers method of debating Michael Knowles. And if you find yourself debating with someone who believes there is no truth, only power, he regards all other people merely as obstacles and raw materials, and will wind up using the power he seeks to murder people. He will announce he is seizing the bakery for the people, and burn it down to steal a bottle of Coke Zero. This is why the left always winds up murdering the left. They knock over the apple cart supposedly believing this will result in an abundance of apples, and for a short while it does result in an abundance of apples. And when a mysterious apple shortage ensues, they launch a witch hunt for the evil witches casting the evil spells that are causing the the mysterious apple shortage, and most of the witches that they find are their fellow leftists. Nazis murder their enemies, but commies murder their friends.
Because leftists believe that, as Michael Knowles said, “the only way you can take a bigger piece of the pie for yourself is to take it from someone else” they believe that capitalism must be recent. If capitalists have stuff, they must have taken it from Kings, Aristocrats, and subsaharan Africans.
If someone tells you that capitalism is recent, he intends, personally and individually, to murder you, because he believes that is the way to acquire value. As Michael Knowles said “They rage and rage and create nothing.”
And this is why a software project dies when it adopts a code of conduct. Left wing “software engineers” don’t create software. They don’t actually believe that software is created, just taken, and the code of conduct is a tool to expel the major creators of your software (as Linus, the creator of Linux and Git was expelled) so that they can take it, without the tedious inconvenience of understanding the source code or understanding how it works or why it is the way that it is. They rage at Linus, and create nothing.
They believe contradictory and nonsensical things, they doublethink, they do not care about the contradiction, but when they try to persuade you of contradictory and nonsensical things, they use the methods of debate of people who know that they are lying: They presuppose a fake consensus, and when this consensus is challenged, segue onto new issues, then shortly return to assuming that everyone agrees with the fake consensus.
Rather than asserting X is true, which assertion would instantly arouse the suspicion of the audience that X is not true, and might result in the audience asking for evidence for X, they talk about Y, where Y presupposes and assumes that the audience already knows and agrees that X is true, even though X is as insane as the proposition that men are women, that all men are created equal, that capitalism came into being recently, or that climate change is causing refugees and a reduction in the livable land area.
And, more dangerously, as an organized and collective left wing group: When a mysterious shortage of value mysteriously ensues, that organized group of leftists is apt to engage in large scale terror and mass murder, largely of other leftists, because by the time that they are able to engage in large scale mass murder, it is mostly leftists who have what little stuff remains.
[…] Source: Jim […]
Bravo! Leftists are not people, they are a disease.
This assumes that they are neurologically like you and me, which I do not believe. I do not believe they have the capacity for truth. They speak power only. Power for them is truth.
Unresponsive.
Any comment by you that advocates communism without explicitly mentioning The Maximum will be automatically deleted.
I am not allowing you to change the subject when one of your articles of faith is refuted. You have to concede, or present evidence and argument in support of the Marxist catechism.
You presuppose that everyone agrees that the French Revolution was pro capitalist rather than anticapitalist, and then when someone presents evidence that it was an attack on capitalists and capitalism, you ignore the evidence, change the subject, and shortly thereafter return to presupposing that everyone agrees that the French revolution introduced, rather than attacking, capitalism.
Not letting you move on, and then come back to presupposing that everyone agrees with your lunatic nonsense. You are not allowed to give us the holy faith of Marxism unless you are prepared to acknowledge and discuss facts inconvenient for the holy faith, such as the French Maximum.
I am censoring your posts because you move on whenever confronted with a fact that Marxists find inconvenient. Respond to evidence and argument with evidence and argument, rather than continuing to presuppose that we all agree with every jot and tittle of Marxism, and you will not get censored.
You have to advocate Marxism explicitly, thus acknowledging the existence of people who doubt Marxism, rather than presupposing Marxism, and refusing to acknowledge any evidence that refutes Marxism – such as the French Maximum.
From the wiki page (as a public service for those too lazy to
Look it up)
“ In many ways, the law actually exacerbated the problem, as the new price setting led to many food producers lowering their production or halting altogether, while many of those who continued to produce held onto their inventories, rather than sell at the legal price, which was often below the cost of production. This led to continued food shortages and recurring famines throughout the country. The Committee of Public Safety responded by sending soldiers into the countryside to arrest farmers and seize their crops. This temporarily alleviated the shortages in Paris, however it led to shortages becoming more intense in the rest of the country.â€
The folk refusing to sell below the cost of production were, naturally, denounced as ‘hoarders’. Obviously the only reason their costs were high was because they believed their costs were high. There is no objective reality, only beliefs about reality which become reality. Or perhaps their costs weren’t high, because the mob, which outnumbered them, believed they were zero, thus the costs must be actually zero.
And this is why you never hear a progressive talk clearly about what they believe. It sounds insane even to them. They very carefully don’t think about what they believe. They become triggered if you point it out to them, because getting upset is a good way to shut down any sort of ‘listening’ reflex.
If they listened to themselves think, they would lose all their friends, after all. And we can’t have that, now can we? It really is true: because they believe they would lose all their friends, they would lose all their friends. Otherwise they would all listen to themselves think, and thus have no reason to stop being friends with each other.
The wiki page is sort of truthful, as far as it goes, but it does not go too far in reporting the anticapitalism of the French Revolution. The popular society (equivalent to Roman populars and the American Democrats) responded to people ceasing to produce by setting production quotas.
The Wikipedia version of history is not exactly a lie, but it soft pedals the truth.
It also fails to report the anticapitalist rhetoric, which started with King Louis XVI, unleashing the forces that killed him, escalated from there – and eventually killed the leaders of the Popular society.
Jim,
If I understand you correctly you are saying Louis attacked the free market and set in motion the forces that ultimately decapitated him. Just as king George’s adulterous behavior led to him being cuckolded by his own wife, and the Russian Tsars indulgence of Lenin directly led to his entire family being exterminated. As you have pointed out before.
It would be appreciated if you could recommend any books on the subject of Louis XVI actions prior to the revolt that involved him attacking the free market.
I feel like all of Jim’s best output is being consumed by this clown.
No. He is doing something extremely important. He is showing us exactly how to treat these murderous thieving narcissistic pieces of lying shit.
Watching Jim treat this diseased rabid animal with the full contempt it deserves makes me feel the same way I feel on warm summer day st the beach when a fresh breeze rolls in. Or out. Whatever.
Joking aside, this is not just important, NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT and more importantly THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING.
It’s like watching a 50 year old ripped guy picking up a supermodel, you can’t believe it works and you wonder why no one else is doing the same.
Jim, God bless you.
Jim has got more verbose. On the other hand, the important ideas have been expressed concisely already. All the remains is the epicycles.
Jim destroying the cryptoleftists is useful partly because it defuses their arguments, and mostly because it teaches us what a cryptoleftist looks like.
FWIW I am not sure pdimov is a cryptoleftist, because he was commenting since before the blog became well known.
When pdimov told us that everyone agrees that capitalism is recent, he did so either knowing it was false, or with reckless and dishonest indifference to whether it was true or false.
Which misconduct he can remedy by doing research on the issue – find some genuine normies, ask them, and then report back the results. I expect that the most common answer will be “Huh?” and the rest will say that capitalism is ancient. Even fewer will spontaneously propose a definition of capitalism, but those few of them that do, if any of them do, will have a definition that involves not just property rights, but capitalists creating capital. The peasant with two cows has two cows because he raised one of them from a calf.
If he does that, if he researches his claims and provides evidence, he gets off moderation. If he does not do that, he remains on moderation, because I have a policy of censoring malicious and reckless misinformation and deceptive rhetorical tricks – and appeal to fake or manipulated consensus is the central and much repeated leftist rhetorical trick.
Basically the scientific method exists now and everyone has a responsibility to try to falsify what they believe.
You can tell the difference between an honest reformer and someone out to seize power, because the former don’t attempt their reforms on whole countries at once. King Louis may be forgiven for not knowing about prototyping and phase I trials, because they hadn’t been invented yet. However, they’re now very old.
Similarly you can tell the difference between an honest debater and the dishonest or negligent one because they will have done some research.
I was all set to dispute Jim’s assertion that most are solvent – but I looked up the actual credit card debt numbers. Fewer than 10% have a serious credit card debt problem. To first order approximation, every dollar owed in America is on a mortgage, which means they have net assets, 2008 excepted.
That said, most probably pdimov is using the standard definition of capitalism,
In which case, by definition, it is relatively recent. Jim is using a broader definition, suggesting that medieval guilds didn’t invest in e.g. better iron bloomeries not because it didn’t occur to them, but because they didn’t yet have the opportunity. Which would be consistent with Gregory Clark’s investigations showing that no industrial revolution in fact occurred.
Nah, lying.
Not a definition. Unless you define capitalism by the date, rather than the economic system.
For it to be a definition, have to tell us what is different about the economic system before and after that date that makes it capitalism after, and not capitalism before.
Indeed, the absence of explanation about what the difference is should tell you that they are knowingly lying. Similarly, the fact that you know of Florence Nightingale yet you do not know of the Highlanders marching into Kerch should tell you that camp followers came to be designated soldiers and put in uniform was an attack on the status of warriors by priests, not a rational military reorganization made for military reasons, the fact that you have heard of Madame Curie but have no idea who made the similar, but vastly more important discovery of radon should tell you that women scientists are not scientists.
Poster girl principle. That they do not give a definition of capitalism tells you that there is no definition that gives the desired answer, as the fact that Rolling Stone ran with a girl who failed to make a rape complaint to the authorities when the whole point of the story was that the authorities were ignoring rape complaints tells you that all the complaints actually made were bogus, and that the reason she failed to make a complaint was that her complaint was even more embarrassingly bogus than the thirty odd complaints actually made.
Rolling stone was pissed that the witch hunt at Virginia University failed to find any witches. But if they went after one of the accused witches, they undoubtedly would find what Virginia University found. So they had to go after a witch for whom no inconvenient information was available. (Because he did not, in fact, exist.) And likewise, a no definition definition of capitalism tells you that no definition can give the desired result.
I wasn’t using any particular definition of capitalism. My initial point was strictly about whether the majority of people think capitalism is recent, and whether this can be used as a useful predictor that someone wants to kill you.
Well, sure.
Lets debate that point.
Do you still claim that 99.9% of normies believe Marxism?
Retract or support. Sounds to me like the standard left wing claim of fake consensus.
Yes, 99.9% of normies have been taught Marxism, but they did not necessarily pay much attention.
A LOT of normie millenials believe to some degree in Marxism because the Cathedral pushed the indoctrination heavy onto them.
Certainly, the indoctrination machine controlled by enemies who want our destruction has had some substantial impact in persuading people to cooperate with those that hate them. But 99.9%?
And a lot of normies may believe what they have been told, but they don’t themselves go around telling people.
Not everyone who believes that capitalism is recent, in the sense of not having thought much about it, wants to kill you. But everyone who has capitalism on his mind and wants to tell you about it, and wants to tell you about capitalism being recent (or rather presupposes that you agree that capitalism is recent) wants to kill you.
For capitalism being recent is part of the view that no one can get ahead except he takes it from someone else, therefore if capitalists are ahead, they must have taken it from Africans, aristocrats, and Kings. And the theory that to get ahead means it has to be at someone else’s expense implies there is a someone who now wickedly possesses what the Marxist wants. And when the Marxist tells the you he is your friend, you are that someone. The Trots told the peasants they were the friend of the peasant, and then they killed them.
I don’t think it was malicious. I have a similar impression of “capitalism” being recent. This is no doubt due to my Marxist education. Capitalism is associated with transnational capitalism, or else with the Industrial Revolution at earliest.
Of course, if I think about it consciously, then capitalism dates back to Cain and Abel. So I do not agree with the connotation instilled. But it is still there.
King Hammurbai’s code indicates that capitalism is ancient.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp
I’m pretty sure price controls are not capitalism. Although the pre-modern world had much more stable prices than the modern world, they were stable on average, not necessarily day to day.
Hammurabi wasn’t a completely laissez faire guy but he has commercial laws which clearly seem to heavily imply private individuals (not government employees although clearly the state/temple owns property as well) privately contracting and exchanging goods, not a top down command economy the way Egypt was (at least at times).
Lets contrast King Hammurbai’s code with the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martial of Jamestown.
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/ALH/lawesdivine.pdf
Its clear that Jamestown was a penal colony (though this is not taught in school) from reading the laws. Nobody is supposed to trade anything without clearing it with the company officers on pain of severe punishments and in some cases death.
Now we know that the England under James I wasn’t a communist society so you must conclude that Jamestown was a penal colony.
If Hammurabi’s code was a command economy it speaks of too many things that aren’t relevant to a command economy.
I agree with Koanic.
Capitalism is ancient but there are some features of modern capitalism that are new and game-changing.
The vineyard woman operated in the environment where her partners and customers belonged to her community and she was expected to genuinely care about them. Her business and personal reputation depended on it.
Modern capitalist institutions are anonymous.
On one hand that allows productive cooperation between distant strangers, even the ones who may be inclined to kill each other upon a personal encounter.
On the other hand, transactions facilitated by those institutions are as uncaring as any anonymous transaction, even when sometimes executed face-to-face.
The prevalence of anonymous, cold, and uncaring transactions is characteristic of modern capitalism, and may not be well aligned with our natural intuitions.
For capitalism to exist, capitalists have to exist thus merchants have to have markets at scale enough to get rich. If you are importing stuff from Italy and selling it to people in Israel, plenty anonymous, thus the ship owners, the tribe of Dan, was heavily involved in anonymous large scale transactions, their capital being in their ships, their warehouses, and their warehouse stock.
When the second temple was built, the high priest became upset about wagons carrying dried fish into Jerusalem on the sabbath. Pretty sure the owner of the wagon of dried fish did not personally know everyone eating his dried fish. Wagon owners, or the merchants whose warehouses they were bringing dried fish to, were engaged in large scale anonymous transactions.
That cooperation between distant strangers was likely mediated by a chain of people who did know each other, but I doubt that the housewife buying dried fish in a market in Jerusalem had all that much relationship with the fish lady.
Fair enough.
You are right.
“This assumes that they are neurologically like you and me, which I do not believe.”
Exactly. You hold to an opinion, which personifies cognitive dissonance. When confronted with conflicting evidence that challenges one’s world view, there is self-denial and convoluted arguments. Liberals, conservatives, and the Alt Right live in a constant state of neurotic discomfort and confusionâ€. Be mindful that in a series of studies from 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,†says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire†— is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonanceâ€.
You are the epitome of such a phenomenon.
I’ve often felt as though a cancer-like techno-organic para-sentient System encrusts and penetrates the world. Marx identifies this System with “Capital” but maybe he was mistaken in so identifying it. It makes its presence felt most obviously through all of the application-procedures one has to go through to do anything (earn an income, renew a driver’s license), and perhaps these application-procedures are mainly constraints on free enterprise.
I feel like a mouse in a maze when I need a job because I can’t just walk in through the door of a factory and ask the boss for a job and maybe be taken on after a brief conversation — I have to go through all of the procedures required by the Human Resources Department, which now involve a lot of daunting online-steps. And I can’t just learn from a friend or family-member how to drive a car and then go buy one and start driving it — I have to go through lots of steps and procedures. I think that I might like to do truck-deliveries for income, but the steps required to get to that seem impossibly elaborate.
(I used to comment here as Garr, by the way.)
Procedure bloat arises not because it is serving a praxical benefit, but because it is serving an emotional benefit.
Kafkaesque layering of procedure does not necessarily actually result in better control; indeed, it often results in *worse* control, vis-a-vis the ostensible aim of control (better performance), but it happens anyway because A: the agents concerned here are only dimly aware of how problems could arise from this, in the firs place, and B: it’s not really what they are about anyways; they don’t exactly care the same way a responsible conscientious person might care if the result is worse outcomes, because the idea of a world *without* the kafkaesque layering of impersonal procedure *feels scary too them*.
Simpler explanation: Bureaucrats create work for other bureaucrats, so that bureaucrats naturally tend to multiply like rabbits.
And but not nor.
The late Pournelle’s iron law.
In the military, mandated regulatory procedures are a lot like mandated regulatory procedures elsewhere in the America of our most current of years; it’s impossible to actually comply with them, so people just pretend they do, and officers regularly sign off on false statements to effect the pretense that the impossible regulation is being complied with.
“We pretend to do inventory every day, and they pretend to believe us.”
Pity the poor sucker who actually decides to do an actual fire drill and time it for real, and then a few weeks later gets the post fire marshal stomping into the TOC yelling about how the unit commander’s fire readiness is the lowest in post history.
The lie is expected, and it’s absence is what is detected as an aberration. When everyone is lying about performance, even the slightest dip away from ‘100%’ is interpreted as ‘there must be some really bad shit going on’.
All the readiness certs in the world are basically smoke vapor to make people in the chain of command feel like things are (more) in control; in reality however, the world where an officer has to sign reports certifying that such and such is inspected and in good working order, and the world where he *doesn’t* have to do such reportage, are in fact essentially identical wrt the working order of such and such.
The real difference is that in the former you condition your whole officer corps to be chronic liars, while in the latter it would be possible for an honest man to have a career as an officer while maintaining honor and dignity. But the thought of not having such overseeing reportage fills the insecure micromanaging control freak with a deep sense of nigh existential dread, so they demand the simulacrum of oversight; a totem standing in for the existence of a real desired object (*replacing* the real object). A demand that is ultimately for their own psychological benefit.
I have a different explanation. It is easy to demand ridiculously high standards, impossible to deliver, and looks really nice on your reports when all your subordinates are reporting that everyone is performing to impossibly high standards.
Your boss wants you to lie to him so that he can lie to his boss. Organizational entropy.
And his boss can lie to the press when an actual fire happens.
I have an abiding interest in the motivating animii that nudge people towards doing the things they do, even when, or rather, especially when, there is little to no overweening interest for them to so do.
Only a being completely null in world formation capacity would not be responsive to the contours of Being, to at least some degree in at least some respect. That is to say, incentives.
On the other hand, no being that is within Being can hold all of Being within itself; for then it would always already be something beyond and Outside it.
So contingent beings also have Steering; their instincts, aesthetics, sentiments; that which attracts them towards some forms, and repels them from others.
It’s a killer app, one of them at least. Steering well tuned for it’s circumstances can see an organism successfully through life even with a minimum of world-formation capacity. Contrapositively, the more outside the circumstances with regards to which it’s steering is tuned, the more world-formation a being would require to see itself to success; likewise, *the less well tuned* it’s steering is, the more it would require.
It is very easy to understand why people in a position to profit from expanding bureaucracy would act to expand bureaucracy, why people in a position to profit from fraudulent self-reporting would weight towards a system basis on fraudulent self-reporting.
Less reasonably graspable is why people would ever do these things to *themselves*, even in matters when they, nominally, do not have anyone (else) they need to report too. The instinct to ‘proceduralize’, broadly speaking, can show itself prior to such particular cases. Because the desire for control is a fundamental human impulse (in some more keen than others), and to the congenitally solipsistic, the *appearance* or *feeling* of (greater) control itself is what can satisfy it, is what is desired. Simulation and simulacrum are much easier to deliver than their reific objects.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/04/the_maintenance_of_certificati.html
>If the test is unreliable and 99% pass, why have a test at all? Which reveals the gimmick: the point of the test isn’t to measure competence, but to convey the impression that competence was measured. The point of the test is to say that a test was given– and nothing else.
~
One of the most remarkable things about baizuos is how singularly unconcerned they can seem when informed about how the results of some ostensible do-goodery they publically signaled support for has resulted in catastrophic consequences some years later.
Flat denial of course is the usual order of the day, but even if you ‘hold their nose in it’ so to speak, and force acknowledgement, you might, at most, get a flip ‘oh well, at least they tried’, or ‘oh well, at least our hearts were in the right place’. You might get indignant equivocation: ‘are you saying people should just stop ‘trying’?’ You might simply get annoyance: ‘stop trying to rain on peoples parades.’
It would be very easy to understand why an NGO functionary or other apparatchik, who would stand to profit from big aid or other rackets, would display nigh psychopathic disregard for the fact that, whatever such ventures are serving to achieve, it is at the very least hardly if ever in line with their supposed motivations. More curious is to see the same behavior in the unaffiliated; indeed, people *who are the suckers* of the apparatchiks. Would they not be upset by the fruitless squander of their treasure?
Or perhaps, had they really gotten what they were really paying for after all?
The reactions illuminate what the true object was; the ‘telescopic philanthropy’ and such similar things, was never really about their supposed targets: *it is about the promoters themselves*. Catastrophes can occur and catastrophes will be made to occur in the future too. Because it is not about bringing about good (which is hard), it is about *feeling* good (which has much easier accessibility). Political theater as personal therapy.
(Their hearts are in fact not in the right place.)
~
Not too long ago i happened across on a marginal fluff piece while doing architectural engineering research. Various articles on the matter themselves were forgetably pedestrian, one more bit of grist in the mill of click minery out of many others. But the subjects of the article… as soon as i saw it i was immediately struck.
https://archive.is/Kv4rT
I could think of precious few more emphatic means to illustrate the somewhat tenuous and facile relationship blue-tribe-minded persons have with Being, than the sight of a ‘traditional’ packed mud structure… safely interred within an ultra-modern geodesic climate controlling structure rendering it irrelevant.
Ostensibly, our couple here wished to retire to ‘sustainable living’ in the arctic; and nothing says ‘primal’ like the sleek products of advanced civilization’s heavy industry.
Of course it turns out living in the arctic is hard, and building methods native to temperate climates might not work out so well. Does that mean you adapt your methods so that the original objective can be met in accordance with the constraints of the circumstances? Haha, don’t be silly.
Results don’t matter; not even contradicting yourself matters; participation in the formula is what matters.
To our protagonists, cob walls+wooden beams+earth floor=’sustainable’; as long as the formula is satisfied in their minds, any thing else is incidental. Rather, anything else will be *bent* to satisfy the formula, if necessary. It is not their preconceptions that should change, but the world to match their preconceptions.
Massive expenditure and dedication of power to facilitate ultimately superficial conceits; society in the eternal [current year].
~
Not only is this not incompatible with bad people doing bad things for contingent profit, in fact, one is prerequisite for the other. The nature of the pathology informs the nature of the exploitation. A degree of the pathology prefigures motivation for pursuing and promoting the exploitation.
It’s interesting how people with “poor social skills” who focus on hobbies such as comic book mythologies or heavy metal music (that is, people who might be labeled as “on the spectrum”) seem to be especially in need of personal relationships with trusted bosses/patrons who are able to make non-cruel use of them — relationships that a burgeoning of Procedures renders impossible. So, such people find the feudal idea attractive. (Why would I know anything about this, ha ha?)
AL please change your screen name. That’s a terrible name. It’s psychologically destructive and displays lack of pride in self. When one degrades oneself one degrades everyone. When one stands up for self in honorable respect one picks up everyone.
I apologize if I’m overstepping bounds.
You’ve got a good point.
Tangentially, in traditional societies, aged men are respected more than youth and women. Also, the term “loser” is being thrown way too liberally, often by people who would’ve been flogged publicly 150 years ago.
It is important not to accept a degrading frame imposed upon by evil, stupid people.
He said in another thread that he’s mentally ill, wants to die, and wishes his father had been sterilized. So I don’t think the name is the issue.
No, Eynon, I didn’t say in any other thread that I was mentally ill or that I want to die or that I wish my father had been sterilized. I am not mentally ill (although often gloomy), only want (in some hard-to-define sense of “want”) to die for brief moments several times a day during especially anxious weeks, and am glad that my father has had the satisfaction of raising four children.
Ron, I use the name with a smile. I’m a 53 year old twice-divorced adjunct philosophy-teacher, you see. And I’ve noticed that a lot of people use superhero-type screen-names and seem to be 25 year old geniuses destined to take over the world (and I hope they succeed!) so I’m just kind of being clear that I’m not that.
My point about how poor-social-skills-hobby-focused people especially depend on relationships with patrons (and will therefore find the feudal idea attractive) expresses my own situation but also that of an adjunct-friend of mind who presently feels (brooding bitterly) that his department-chair-patron betrayed (under bureaucratic pressure) the assumed feudal relationship — and is also supported by my experience, over the years, of how spectrum-ish students tend to sit right in front of me in class and need to establish a direct personal relationship with me that will get them through the semester.
The broader application of this point is that since “the spectrum” is of course a spectrum, many people would flourish to a greater degree in an economy of patron-client relationships than they do in/under the present “procedural” regime; perhaps everyone would.
You clearly love your students. You obviously want to influence them. Do you think its better for them to look at you and see
A) a man whose wounds are so deep and the pain so bad, that he metaphorically holds up his hands his hands to the world and say “i give up! Im an aging loser! Please no more!â€
B) a man that absolutely believes in himself and his future. Who has only just begun to take part in all the glory of life.
You have immense experience, youve made all the mistakes, you see through all the silly people, you have taste, damn good taste. You have the mind and means. You know exactly how pathetic and stupid you can be, so failire doesnt frighten you
I dont know your situation, you certainly seem to have done much better than me! but my gut says you are not reaching for your own potential. It could be I am just projecting, but that is my feeling.
Suggestion: Switch the screen name to something that you think your students woild be proud to see their teacher has. Something a demoralized young man would look at and then boast to his friends abiut what kind of great teacher he has.
@AgingLoser- your name appeared around the same time as some guy posting in 3 year old threads with a series of similarly mopey names, my mistake.
Okay, Ron — Thanks! (Formerly Aging Loser, Formerly Garr).
ðŸ‘ðŸ¼
The only reason I don’t advocate feudalism more openly is that I wonder if normies would really not enjoy it or something. For me it is entirely normal for the same reasons, I use my boss as a shield, up-delegating decisions I feel uncomfortable to make or uncomfortable to communicate to the customers.
It’s family written large. 18 is just a number, some need a father for longer. Some need to borrow other people’s father. Mine was borrowed a lot, his two construction technicians literally called him papa.
Beyond what I wrote, there is also the opposite. I remember having a period when I was thinking like a leftist. I was rebelling against parental and teacher authority, at around 16 and not because they were strict, they were actually quite permissive and it was not even easy to find some restriction to rebel against. And I was like “How do you DARE to forbid anything to me, you are not above me, you are not better than me!” So I took personal power as a sign that whoever has it is better or worths more than the other (okay, this is mostly even true) and railed against it. Later on, growing out of it was not hard to find out the reason inside my soul: I was actually feeling I have low worth, and were sort of trying to compensate or prove it wrong.
And I am pretty sure this is behind most leftism. Years ago there was an Australian SJW girl trying to explain privilege and things like that and said it is like when you are unemployed, you not only have financial problems but you also feel worthless. Well, fully mentally healthy people don’t. But people who do have already some of this depression-like i-am-shit thing may indeed. Trying to disprove that feeling by attacking everybody who seems better than you.
So my point: this is a big reason why we have procedural, not personal rule. For the rulers, a procedural system absolves them of responsibility. For the ruled, it absolves them of feeling inferior. People who have this ego problem, this inferiority complex problem, can deal with being told you must do this because this is the rule we all voted on and everybody obeys it. But some dude telling them I order you to do X or else? The feeling of inferiority would be very painful for them.
Healing these egos would help reducing support for leftism. But I don’t know how to do that. I could only halfway heal even mine, through professional success, marriage and exercise. No idea where this comes from or what the cure is.
Maybe religion. I have no experience with it, but if people are told from small childhood that you must kneel before God because he is bigger than you but he is also bigger than everybody else too even that truly scary teacher in the kindergarten, maybe they can get used to this whole thing without it causing them psychological pain.
Solid post. Had no idea about this. But I came from a deeply religious family. My whole life I’ve been wondering where the feudalism is. Turns out, nowhere. Yet.
That was the big shock – transitioning from an honorable nuclear family to a degenerate atomized meaningless abyss.
It seems as though if a morally decent (honest, non-cruel) “patron” were to tell me, “Okay, now I need you to do X for me,” I’d be likely to feel more Real (or whatever) as opposed to being a Nothing flowing along with all of the other Nothings through a maze of pipes — and as that sense of Nothingness is akin to a feeling of inferiority, so this feeling of Reality would sort of be the opposite of a feeling of inferiority. My patron would be expressing his recognition of my ability to do X for him — and that would be satisfying. And of course I might remain aware of probably being better at various specific things (drawing, bench-pressing, whistling, whatever) than my patron is.
Good point. Positive, “do this” authority implies things like trust that you can do it or at least a bit of thankfulness if you do it, entirely different “vibes” than negative, “don’t do this” authority.
There is also this thing I keep saying but don’t know how many people agree. In an egalitarian society that pretends to believe every human is of equal worth, the issue is that people tend to express worth via respect, status and it will never be equal. And thus those who are treated as having lesser worth will feel like they have zero worth, they will feel like not treated, not seen as human beings. In this sense, when they are saying racism etc. is dehumanizing, within an egalitarian social framework it is indeed so. If people say every human deserves equal respect but then exclude some people from that obviously feels extremely badly for those. Effectively “we” are breaking a promise to them, that of egalitarianism, because that promise was impossible to begin with.
And the great advantage of a hierarchical society that openly accepts different people deserving different amounts of respect and thus having different implied worth is that those who have less than others still have some. Not zero. Thus not dehumanized.
I get this vibe from e.g. some gays, that they could accept that deal that a hierarchical society offers, to have less respect, because they are submissive anyway. But of course they cannot expect the deal that society is loudly saying every person deserves equal respect and yet not giving them that, thus questioning their personhood.
Hierarchies work so smoothly in this respect. Privates accept not being treated like generals because they are allowed to have pride as privates, they have their place, they are not nobodies, just lowbodies.
I agree, TheDividualist — if everyone’s to be respected equally or not at all then nobody’s respected at all (not even the most powerful people, because those guys aren’t seen as positioned within a hierarchy that makes sense).
Making happiness your object of life ironically makes you even more unhappy when you aren’t constantly happy.
[…] Alternative title: “Reasons Why You Should Already Have Some Communists In Your Area Marked Fo… […]
The sentiments are true enough, and obvious enough, but from what little of the speech I could stomach it appeared to just be the standard GOP Maji Maji war medicine: allusions to a long-lost society and recommendation of the same strategy that long lost it.
Yes, but the interesting part is not his quite boring cuckservative speech, but his interaction with and comments on the left.
If the left is, as he argues, evil and insane, then the cuckservative strategy that he also argues is not going to work
You can learn a lot about style and banter from him. Leftists, especially lay leftists and shock troop leftists, are indeed driven by fragility and despair.
His philosophy is the same nihilistic anti-life (gnosticism?) that animates the leftists. Only difference being he thinks you go to heaven after, and the leftists think you don’t. It was probably okay to think this way during the early dark ages and during the black death.
I like the part where he appeals to authorities he neither owns nor own him, because Authority Good, I’m Conservative.
Even for people on the far right its hard to steel yourself to the amount of helicopter rides we are going to need to provide… they question whether its right to give so many helicopter rides.
But when you truly understand you realize that we have NO RIGHT NOT TO give them helicopter rides… this would not be true if leftism was curable but in most cases its not.
Cuckservatism is esentially nihilstic at its core… it has no real model society just a weak commitment to losing slow.
Missing a Havel’s greengrocer correction factor.
When society stops rewarding madness, and makes sanity and virtue high status, rather than madness and evil high status, you will see people suddenly change their supposed beliefs, and entirely forget that they had ever believed anything different.
From my point of view, I think the leftist can be a true believer while also just wanting to murder you and take your stuff. Nothing but sincere religious fervor could make the nobility of Carthage chuck their kids into the oven, and our most powerful leftists today treat their own progeny in a way consistent with Carthage.
Sincere religious belief in leftism validates and lends holiness to the omega ape ressentiment of murdering the successful and taking their stuff, just as sincere belief in Christ reinforces all kind of eucivic behaviors. The one who can most credibly signal loyalty is the truly loyal, so true loyalty is adaptive, so we always end up with a priesthood of true believers.
Stalin was a born warrior. We know he was a born warrior because despite being educated and well off, he still chose to shoot cops and rob banks rather than sit around in salons and talk about Marxism. Communism gave him a holy mandate to nobly kill people and steal stuff, and Stalin joined up with the commies because there was no Holy Russian Empire, no one to tell Stalin he was holy and glorious for killing the Czar’s enemies while wearing a uniform and plundering their wealth.
No one wants to believe that they are evil, everybody “searches for meaning”, which means wanting a religion to put a wax seal of holiness on the things they would have done anyway. So the leftist’s chimp desire to murder and steal from you is entirely consistent with their sincere belief in the fact that they’re making the world a better place by doing so.
“No one wants to believe that they are evil, everybody “searches for meaningâ€, which means wanting a religion to put a wax seal of holiness on the things they would have done anyway. So the leftist’s chimp desire to murder and steal from you is entirely consistent with their sincere belief in the fact that they’re making the world a better place by doing so.”
This is true of most maybe even the vast majority but certainly not all. I’m not all that certain how many of leftists “priests” are really true believers either.
In my experience the pattern George Orwell wrote about in 1984 holds true, men if they are leftists tend to be opportunistically so but women tend to be the most bigoted and fanatical believers in the creed.
I am not saying that there are no opportunists on the Left, I’m saying that considering Leftists the cultists of an evil religion is a more accurate heuristic for understanding and predicting their behavior than using the heuristic that they know they are lying and are faking belief for power.
So I argue that their lying and hypocrisy is as consistent with fanatical religious belief as it is consistent with the “naked power” hypothesis. If Robespierre was an opportunist, he could have stopped the Reign of Terror and formalized his power. If Stalin was a mere opportunist, he wouldn’t have perpetrated the Holodomor; nothing but the insane and fanatical belief that the kulaks were hiding grain because they hated communism could have led to the Holodomor, and likewise Pol Pot’s actions could only have been the actions of a fanatical true believer.
They doublethink. They are the cultists of an evil religion and at the same time they know that they are lying and faking their way to power.
That is the inevitable side effect of a religion that makes falsifiable claims about this world.
The sincere cultist would most accurately describe the nine year old schoolgirl who wants to save the earth from the evil coal miners, the cynical con man most accurately describe the entryist and the troofer.
But even the schoolgirl – well here is a devastatingly accurate depiction of even that schoolgirl:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/fnRt_JEoBRU?start=18
Lisa is a sincere believer, and cynical opportunistic con woman, both.
Stalin did not perpetrate the Holodomor, or at least not its worst excesses. He attempted to stop it, or at least slow it down, when it got totally out of hand. Blaming the Holodomor on Stalin is just “real communism has never been tried.”
Stalin sincerely held deluded beliefs about economics, albeit a lot less deluded than most of his colleagues, and less deluded than most of the left of the Democratic party, but these beliefs were shaped by the need to depict terrible deeds as good and right – the intent to commit terrible deeds came first, rationalizations came second.
Yes, Pol Pot was a genuine true believer. But no one who dodges the empirical evidence on global warming and fights freedom of information requests is a true believer in global warming, no troofer who responds to evidence about the fall of the towers by introducing twenty new claims, then shortly returning to assuming that you have already agreed with his old claim, is a believer in Trooferism, and similarly, Lenin in “What is to be done” implicitly concedes that Marxist Economics is a lie, and tells Marxists not to drink their own Koolaide.
I suppose Lenin was a true believer in communism, despite viewing Marxist Economics and Marxist history as useful lies, and I suppose Pol Pot was a true believer in communism – but they also knew that they were lying to people that they intended to murder.
Carlylean Restorationist tells us that we are all agreed on Marxist history and Marxist economics, even me, but if he has read his Lenin, and he probably has, he probably knows that even Lenin is cynical about Marxist history and Marxist economics.
“The sincere cultist would most accurately described the nine year old schoolgirl who wants to save the earth from the evil coal miners, the cynical con man most accurately describe the entryist and the troofer.”
Yes exactly so. As hard as we are on the women a young female new ager or raver girl who wants to save the earth is the most open minded least fanatical most basically decent (they actually tend to be a good sort of women because they also specifically tend to like men and reject feminism) and most curable form of leftists.
Curing them requires establishing a rapport but new ager/raver girl leftists should not be unpleasant for any red blooded right wing male to establish a rapport with. If you like being mean to animals or something (I don’t and think that is kind of despicable) is the only thing you have to hide. I’ve never had a girl who fit this profile actually turn on me for supporting Trump.
I would not consider such types con people… but the other types of more full spectrum true believers yes.
The rest all need helicopter rides.
This post is misattributed to “p” instead of Jim.
Excellent powers of observation koanic, that 150 IQ really shines through.
The genuinely intelligent do not aim to be perceived as intelligent; that is scarcely avoidable. Their goal is to be understood a greater percentage of the time. That is why I reported the error and Jim corrected it, while you merely felt smug for recognizing it.
Truly, how you manage to stay humble under the burden of your enormous intelligence, it is an inspiration to us all.
I make no attempt whatsoever to be humble about IQ. This is to differentiate myself from the false humility of midwits like you, who disgust me. They lord it over the 100-IQs, acting as if their superiority were moral and earned rather than genetic and gifted. Their smug little game of passive aggressive signalling looks pathetic from my point of view, since I know that midwits are neither morally nor intellectually superior, but merely crybullies with overfed egos too stupid to know when they’re beaten and too numerous to exit their echo chamber. I do not ever want to be mistaken for a member of your club. The supremacy of the midwit is the downfall of Western Civilization; they are the Boomers of the Bell Curve.
Truly we are blessed that you grace us with your 160 iq presence. https://imgur.com/gallery/BGGyyzN
Unrelated:
https://i.imgur.com/TiOrH7x.jpg
> Leftists the cultists of an evil religion
This has been my perception for some time but I find extreme difficulty communicating it to people, even nominally non-leftist people. Liberals have successfully created the meme that they are anti-religion, for better or worse, and I cannot convince normies that they are merely putting forth a different, worse religion.
Tell them ideologies are knock off religions. You have your mystics (the kooks trying to come up with a utopian blueprint), your priests (the ones communicating what is currently acceptable beliefs) and the faithful masses (the ones who mindlessly repeat what the former are delivering).
In most times and places children are produced by the desire to have sex, and maintained because being a horrible parent carries a stigma. This is sufficient for Darwin compatibility. A majority don’t much like even their own kids. They don’t resist Moloch. They don’t resist Prussian school. They seem downright pleased, in fact.
I can’t entirely disagree, since infanticide is a common feature of developed nonchristian cultures. That being said, even in cultures where it is acceptable to murder one’s children, fertility tends to outstrip infanticide by a great degree. Even in modern female-liberated societies, births still beat abortions on a considerable ratio.
Having seen parents raise their kids, I have a hard time believing that filial love is merely performative out of fear of stigma. The infanticide instinct and the desire to love and raise one’s kids are two competing elements of human nature. Moloch and Prussian school are both portrayed in their time to be good for the children subjected to their abuses, which shows that filial love is naturally dominant over the infanticide-feeling. (It satisfies Darwinian compatibility to want sex, and to love kids when they come along; independently and consciously desiring to have kids as a non-performative behavior is indeed very rare)
All religions ask the believer to sacrifice a normal human behavior, and in return lends sacral legitimacy to another normal human behavior. Traditional Christianity sacrifices female hypergamy for female submission to her mate, sacrifices male polygyny for male mate guarding. Leftism asks that we sacrifice the good to elevate the bad, while most historical religions are vice versa.
Although if the strong Jimian hypothesis, that women have not been making sexual choices since we looked like apes, at least in successful lineages of higher races, is correct, then female hypergamy is not a normal human behaviour.
Jim, elsewhere you describe how textual pornography for females sometimes contains extreme deviance such as being ravished by tyrannosaurs, but this does not show that we have had patriarchy since the Cretaceous. Also, #WGFD (White Girls Fuck Dogs), though the extent of this is not confirmed. Perhaps women’s attraction criteria are simply inherently broader – sexual power and dominance in general, rather than specific facial and bodily shapes as with men’s criteria. And what about races such as blacks with low paternal certainty, low paternal investment, indicating weak patriarchy? Are these races degenerate? If not degenerate, but primitive, then patriarchy much more recent than looking like apes.
Not seeing your reasoning here. Of course hypergamy is normal female behavior. What is not normal, at least in successful lineages of higher races, is males letting them get away with it and allowing them the opportunity to engage in it.
I take a weak Jimian hypothesis.
I don’t think women generally had any control over who they got married to generally (with some exceptions) in successful societies in the past.
I don’t think they could or did prevent their husbands from screwing them.
I differ from Jim in that I think adultery outside of extreme purdah societies was pretty rampant so probably a higher % of children in the past were born out of women cucking their husbands then Jim thinks so to that limited degree female choice was a reproductive factor. Married women are more likely to be impressed with their husbands boss then a low level thug… so it wasn’t as dysgenic as feral women female choice.
There are numbers on this – that’s not correct.
Read Greg Cochran’s blog – he references this and the backup for it quite often.
Link and how would accurate numbers on this possibly be attained its not something people would generally report since it was a crime.
Matching Y chromosomes to last names is one way.
Sequencing old remains is another. I’m not fully up on the details but if GC says it, it’s factual.
You underestimate the level of extreme purdah.
I recollect (though I cannot give the link) the biography a woman born in early nineteenth century Australia, who mentioned that the servant whispered to her that she should sneak to a certain point in the house, where she would catch a glimpse of her future husband. That she had never met her future husband, did not expect to be allowed to meet him until immediately before the marriage, and was mighty excited by the prospect of marrying him, implies she had little or no contact with males who were not close kin.
Australia was a colonial society of isolated farmsteads. People in Europe and Asian societies tended to live closer together in villages though right. Barring Islamic measures to segregate the sexes that level of isolation was probably not quite feasible and also European literature of the middle ages and renaissance and later era does not seem to suggest extreme isolation was the norm.
The ‘strong’ in strong Jimian hypothesis refers to the origin of patriarchy. How long ago did hominids figure out that that a female should belong to one man and him alone? (Chimps have male dominance over female, but not on a securely exclusive basis, and are apparently horrendous white knights.)
Chimps different from humans their females aren’t picky the alpha male tries to maintain his monopoly by extreme violence.
> (Chimps have male dominance over female, but not on a securely exclusive basis, and are apparently horrendous white knights.)
Genetic studies show that despite the Alpha male getting fewer couplings with a particular female chimp the child ends up being his 70-80% of the time. Females mating with multiple males reduces the likelihood that a given male will kill a child because it might be theirs, where they won’t hesitate to kill a child with a female they haven’t mated with.
>How long ago did hominids figure out that that a female should belong to one man and him alone?
Around the time we invented spears. Even the strongest alpha male can’t stop a spear thrust to the back from a beta male who’s getting shut out of reproduction. And once assigned a mate, that same beta male can still kill the alpha male if he caught him sleeping with his mate.
I was unclear. “Not normal” not in the sense of being uncommon, but in the sense of being contrary to the Darwinian telos of the reproductive unit of the higher races, the patriarchal family, thus pathological.
I suppose it is normal under emancipated social conditions, as obesity is normal under conditions of emasculation and food hyperabundance, but the true faith must teach, and natural morality urges, that it is in general violently unnatural, evil, disgusting and abnormal for women to pursue hypergamy.
Here’s the source of the confusion: to what extent does the true faith teach the truth, that women are hypergamous, and we are suppressing their natural hypergamy by naked force for our good and theirs; and to what extent does the true faith teach that women are angels – while still punishing them if they are less than angelic – in order to gaslight/psyop women (similar to not speaking in church to lower their status) into greater guilt, thus more effective self-policing, and also providing a stronger Christian-moral basis for punishment of sinful females. Do we say she is merely indulging her nature and we are correcting her, like a messy puppy – denying women moral agency – or do we say she deserves it for perversely violating the holy imperative of Gnon – acknowledging women moral agency. The latter would make use of the Archbishop’s very own Principle of Merited Impossibility: women are faithful helpmeets, NOT whores and sluts, and they deserve to be punished for it it good and hard.
The danger of the latter is obviously its potential to mutate into feminism. The former is very pagan-egoist; ‘vae victis’ in the war of the sexes, or rather simply ‘you belong to me’. It would be sexier from the woman’s point of view, and would make the true faith more strictly true, but might not be as effective at inducing self-policing.
Before 1810 or so, the rule was that if a woman was behind closed doors with a man for a few minutes, they must have had sex, and it was time to bring out the shotgun and marry them off. If possible to the man she had sex with, if not possible, to whoever would take used goods, which was usually someone of lower social status.
Victorianism abandoned this rule, that women were naturally lecherous, lustful, and horrifyingly difficult to control, and instead went for gaslighting women and psyops.
This failed miserably and disastrously, resulting in a horde of bastards born in the rain in muddy alleys, which horde of bastards when they grew up caused a horrifying crime wave (though still astonishingly little crime by modern standards)
So they escalated the gaslighting and the psyops to superduper extreme.
This continued to fail miserably and disastrously.
So, welfare state, the replacement of the family with child support, and, around 1900-1910 or so, the normalization of sexual freedom for women.
So, the true religion will not try gaslighting women that they are chaste. Been tried, failed with horrifying consequences.
The doctrines of the true religion will be true or unfalsifiable. And it is not true that women are naturally chaste. No women are like that, except in the sense that if they perceive their husband as dangerously alpha, then they are naturally faithful.
Victorianism failed because it told a lie, and then escalated the lie when the truth was being rubbed in their faces.
So die all state religions that promote lies about this world.
Makes perfect sense. Should have seen the problem: you can’t avoid gaslighting the men and the next generation of priests too. “Not getting the joke.”
Would they really shotgun marriage a woman to a man her father thought poor and unsuitable. I’m skeptical this rule was consistently followed in 18th century England I recall something in Gibbon´s Decline and Fall (and he was a contemporary and yes if asked ill find the part for you but not tonight and since I don’t remember the phrases may take a long time) about how England was odd in not being all that strict in segregating the sexes.
Pretty sure that the wife of Raffles was shotgun married to him, despite him being poor and of substantially lower social class.
Of course his father in law correctly figured that Raffles had talent and ambition, and then helped him improve his position, but at the time of the marriage, definitely unsuitable in terms of class and class origins, from which I conclude his wife had been behind closed doors with someone she should not have been with and therefore needed to married off in a hurry to whomever his father in law could get. And his father in law needed to add a whole lot of sugar to make the deal go through.
Jim I’ve found the passage in Gibbon.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/gibbon-the-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-vol-11?q=daughters#Gibbon_0214-11_17
CHAPTER LXVI
“Britain, in the ocean and opposite to the shores of Flanders, may be considered either as one or as three islands; but the whole is united by a common interest, by the same manners, and by a similar government. The measure of its circumference is five thousand stadia: the land is overspread with towns and villages; though destitute of wine, and not abounding in fruit-trees, it is fertile in wheat and barley, in honey and wool; and much cloth is manufactured by the inhabitants. In populousness and power, in riches and luxury, London,27 the metropolis of the isle, may claim a pre-eminence over all the cities of the West. It is situate on the Thames, a broad and rapid river, which, at the distance of thirty miles, falls into the Gallic Sea; and the daily flow and ebb of the tide affords a safe entrance and departure to the vessels of commerce. The king is the head of a powerful and turbulent aristocracy: his principal vassals hold their estates by a free and unalterable tenure; and the laws define the limits of his authority and their obedience. The kingdom has been often afflicted by foreign conquest and domestic sedition; but the natives are bold and hardy, renowned in arms and victorious in war. The form of their shields or targets is derived from the Italians, that of their swords from [248] the Greeks; the use of the long bow is the peculiar and decisive advantage of the English. Their language bears no affinity to the idioms of the continent; in the habits of domestic life, they are not easily distinguished from their neighbours of France; but the most singular circumstance of their manners is their disregard of conjugal honour and of female chastity. In their mutual visits, as the first act of hospitality, the guest is welcomed in the embraces of their wives and daughters; among friends, they are lent and borrowed without shame; nor are the islanders offended at this strange commerce and its inevitable consequences.28 Informed as we are of the customs of old England, and assured of the virtue of our mothers, we may smile at the credulity, or resent the injustice, of the Greek, who must have confounded a modest salute29 with a criminal embrace. But his credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson: to distrust the accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.”
So it sounds like what Gibbon is writing of what some Byzantine thought of MEDIEVAL England and that Gibbon doesn’t quite agree though does agree that nothing close to strict purdah was the rule in England either.
Lots of history, and lots of social changes. In the late eighteenth century early years of the nineteenth, sounds like purdah for virgins.
In Pride and Prejudice, published early in the nineteenth century, the protagonist has not been subject to purdah, and the Duchess seriously disapproves of this fact and regards it as unusual and inappropriate. The protagonist responds, not by arguing that something like purdah is unusual and no longer socially required, but that it is harsh – which concedes the Duchess’s position that lack of something like purdah is unusual and socially inappropriate.
Disney principle: Disney always orphans its child protagonists, because otherwise their parents would ensure no adventures, and the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice has weak, lax and irresponsible parents, because otherwise they would ensure no adventures.
In her books, mother is always irresponsible and foolish, and dad is sick or something like that which prevents him from being an effective dad – which suggests that if her characters had had an effective dad, dad would have prevented the plot from unfolding. In one book, maybe more, I have not read all her books, the character that has romantic adventures is, shades of Disney, an orphan.
But that the Greek mistook a simple embrace of greeting for widespread and serious immorality, implies that something much closer to strict purdah was the norm in the Greek’s home society.
I’ve only ever seen the movie (and only because of someone else chick flick and chick literature) but it seemed to me that the Duchess disapproved of multiple daughters being out “in society” so she seemed to think the younger ones should have been in purdah in order to not compete with her sister. So she wanted the younger sisters in purdah but not because being in purdah was bad for them rather it was bad for her older sister.
The most extraordinary indulgence of her father was letting one of the younger sisters go off to live and party with the local regimental officers and basically the whole family other then the father objects to this saying that she would get knocked up and disgrace the family (which she promptly does) he basically says he knows she will but he didn’t seem to think he could successfully prevent it no matter what he did.
Mind you I’ve only ever seen the Keira Knightley movie.
If all sisters but one in purdah, then the one meeting men will be meeting men selected by her father and meeting them under paternal supervision – with the prospective marriage all wrapped up before she meets them and has the opportunity to get pregnant. We can see in Pride and Prejudice a social order that presupposes daughters will fuck the most alpha guy around the moment Dad’s back is turned, even though the author denies this presupposition.
As Disney assumes that the precondition for children having adventures is dead parents, she assumes that the precondition for daughters having romantic adventures is weak, absent, irresponsible, or dead fathers.
Pride and prejudice has a weak and grossly irresponsible father. Another book by the same author has an abandoned daughter, and another has a dead mother and a father who is nearly an invalid, and physically unable to supervise his daughter, who is effectively a mother to her father.
The protagonists of her books are anomalous, in the same way that Disney protagonists are anomalous.
It did not seem like most of the things the father let the girls do was so out of the ordinary the one thing everyone seemed to think was far far out of the ordinary was let the younger daughter who got knocked up go off to live and party with the local regimental officers (which the whole family except the Father was angrily opposed to).
The Father may have been irresponsible but perhaps he was right because he seemed to think if he didn’t let her do it she would run away and probably get knocked up anyway perhaps by someone far more unsuitable then even the cad officer who knocked her up.
She implies it was not so far out of the ordinary that everyone was shocked – the Duchess is represented as an old fuddy duddy who is not hip with the times, which by 1813 was probably not far from the truth.
On the other hand, that all the fathers in her books are irresponsible, ill, weak, or absent, implies that normality was that girls did not get the opportunity to have romance. The new rules had been declared normal, because women are supposedly naturally chaste, but actually following the new rules was not yet normal.
I conclude from the absence of functional fathers in her stories that officially, women were trustworthy, and therefore could be allowed out – but, from the absence of functional fathers in her stories, I conclude that in practice everyone knew that it was just a polite fiction. It was the next generation that failed to get the joke. The polite lie was intended to gaslight women into good behavior – but after a while, people started believing it.
Reality is that women are only chaste when subject to authority of male whom they perceive as alpha and who can and does command them to have sex from time to time. All women are like that. Therefore all fertile age woman need to be subject to alpha male authority, and after a reasonable time, married.
By “normal” I do not mean “normative” but “inherent and genetic” behavior. It has been normative to suppress female hypergamy for millions of years, yes, but it is still there, the same way a crocodile has kept its form for millions of years without changing. “Normative”or culturally-approved behavior is a matter of selecting which inherent genetic instincts to enforce and lend status to.
This comment reeks of vicarious experience. Real parents love their children from multiple perspectives and to varying levels. Shitty parents view their children as accessories. In both segments of the parenting spectrum, there is room for selfishness, manipulation, good and bad conduct, all with varying outcomes of intended and unintended consequences. I know my children are potential sacrifices; the questions are to which god, on what alter, and for what cause.
The difference is that the the nobility of Carthage believed in unfalsifiable things about the next world that made their conduct good, while the left believe in falsifiable things about this world that make their conduct good.
This not only makes them evil, it also drives them mad.
For the internal stability and coherence of Carthage, yes. Carthage was not going to fall to civil war and genocide because of their policy of child sacrifice.
But it is falsifiably true that the nobility of Carthage are more use to Carthage as living beings than as charred carcasses; killing the kids of the most successful and competent is dysgenic because the more fertile your nobility is, the more their good genes permeate the rest of the gene pool and make your people more competent on average, which matters a lot when you fight an existential war against the Roman Republic.
And if even one man of Hannibal’s caliber was given to Ba’al as an infant, the outcome of the Punic Wars could easily have been the exact opposite. So Carthage’s crazy did not entirely bear on the next world, but had repercussions in this.
A Nazi system can work. There are no internal barriers of it functioning well.
If successful, there are spoils to distribute to the underlings after the revolution, for example subjugated people(s) as slave caste, or lands; and the economy will run just fine.
A commie system can’t work, because it always cripples the economy by making self interest illegal. The promised spoils after the revolution are just not there, and those who remember what they were promised too loudly must be silenced – and perhaps, if there are less people, the little there is of distributable resources will be more per capita if there are fewer capita.
Nazi system can’t work unless it ignores the socialistic aspects of National Socialism.
Hitler’s economy did well for its 1st two years because he was ignoring the socialist aspects of National Socialism as he let Hjalmar Schacht decide economic policy and did not interfere with him.
But from late 1935 Hitler started to implement the more socialist aspects of National Socialism some of this was about supressing civilian consumption in order to prepare for Total War but that can’t explain all of it (as Hitler was reluctant to suppress civilian consumption too much until 1943) and it particulary can’t explain the disastorous nazi agricultural policies.
Great point. In 1942 Germany controlled more natural resources and factories than the US had but produce only about 1/4 to 1/3 the goods the US produced. If they’d been a capitalist empire instead of a socialist one, they would have paid for the goods want they wanted from local producers and easily beaten the Soviet Union.
It would have been hard to get their industrial production up that high (and in short term total wars everyone uses some aspects of a command economy) but their agricultural problems were entirely caused by socialism and the food shortages were the underlying cause of most of their mass murders (whereas originally they only wanted to send the various “untermenschen” out of territories that were going to be incorporated into the Greater German Reich).
The other problem with their planned economy is Hitler liked producing all sorts of complicated to make botique weapons rather then concentrating on mass producing a few good simple to make weapons (which is what Stalin always insisted on) and furthermore despite Speer advising him otherwise he would not allow many resources to be allocated for spare parts.
>and in short term total wars everyone uses some aspects of a command economy
The US didn’t. Well FDR tried to do so and the military ignored the boards he setup and made orders directly with the factories. Gave huge bonuses to get product times down while maintaining quality. Rationing was largely ignored by the US public.
Civilian goods production except for alcohol and cigarettes was either stopped or rationed very tightly in that way at least the command economy was observed.
Not that I’ve read. The military simply offered more money for stuff they needed to be made and the factories owners responded to the incentives by making the goods exclusively for the military. The public in turn was encouraged to buy war bonds to slow inflation from the amount of goverment printing going on. There were attempts at things like gas rationing, but counterfeiters printed so many fake ration books that rationing quickly became ineffective and was widely ignored.
https://fee.org/articles/the-two-price-system-us-rationing-during-world-war-ii/
Price controls and rationing created opportunities, however, for people willing to break the law. Active black markets developed all over the country. Substantial proportions of all transactions in some goods—especially beef and gasoline—occurred illegally. Housewives routinely bent the rules by trading, giving away, or selling ration stamps, which the law forbade. Mobsters entered the scene en masse, stealing ration coupons from OPA offices and reselling them, counterfeiting ration coupons and selling them, and hijacking trucks and selling their cargos without collecting ration stamps. Cattle rustling made a comeback.
Between February 11, 1941, and May 31, 1947, the OPA instituted 259,966 sanctions of various sorts. “One in fifteen businesses—wholesale, retail, service and so on—was charged with illicit transactions,†and “one in five of all establishments in the country received some kind of warning short of criminal prosecution,†according to Lingeman. Of course, many violations escaped notice, even though the OPA enforcement corps included at various times 2,000-5,000 investigators, working under 500-1,000 attorneys, and many thousands of part-time volunteers. As economic historian Hugh Rockoff notes, “[B]lack-market activities do not leave good statistical records and any estimate must be viewed as having a wide margin of potential error.†Yet he also remarks that “the appearance of deterioration and related evasive schemes in relatively homogeneous commodities,†such as fuel oil, coal, and gasoline, “testifies to the ubiquity of evasion.â€
But yes they could have done better industrially. Probably the most productive Reich territory was the “SS fiefdom” of Bohemia and Moravia.
The SS were (in general) the most right wing and “capitalists” oriented of the Nazis and Heydrich improved the Czech economy basically by reintroducing something close to real capitalism within the protectorate (inputs of essential raw materials still had to be cleared with either the Four Year Plan ministry or the Armaments Ministry).
Command economies do not work, except as a short term measure to grab other people’s stuff for war.
A Nazi economy can work if it models its self on feudalism rather than socialism. A feudal economy is non capitalist in that control of assets is handed out politically, but it is capitalist in that the guy awarded the assets is free to use them in self interested ways, which tends to result in him conceding rights to the merchant and yeoman class to use his assets productively.
The Nazi system does not work because it is priest rule. Nazism is priests larping as warriors. It is good that they understand the value of warrior rule and want to emulate them, but the history of the Third Reich is the history of Nazi priests disastrously overriding the sound military judgement of Nazi warriors.
Nazi priests saw the need for aristocracy, but they thought that they could create a new aristocracy by ticking off boxes on an official form, thought that they could determine who had the purest descent from old Hyperborea, when a good leader disposes with all that priestly bullshit, throws his men into the crucible of combat, and rewards the competent and loyal.
Similarly, Nazism could not take a sane stance on the JQ, the stance of Christian rulers toward Jews for 1500 years prior, that Jews are shifty, sleazy people lower status than Christians, but add enough value that they can stay as long as they behave themselves, and if not, you kick them out.
FDR’s government was also priestly rule, and far more disastrous at home than Nazi home rule, Nazi home rule being far more sane than liberal managerialist socialism, but at war he was smart enough to simply let his brutal and insane warlords off the leash and let them win at any cost.
Nazism tended to shift between warrior and priest rule depending on who Hitler was backing at the time.
Priestly power within the Reich tended to be approximated by how much power Bormann and Goebbels (the leftists Nazis who advocated priest rule) had vs other top Nazis.
The warriors were at the height of their power over the priest right before the Hess mission and it declined after that.
The power of the SS does NOT correspond to priest rule, Heydrich wanted the SS to be a warrior society and said SS training should have very minimal political indoctrination and feature mostly combat training and martial sports such as boxing and judo.
After the July Plot the priests gained total supremacy as the people in party organizations all stayed loyal whereas not even the whole of the SS (Himmler had actually realized that the war was lost right after the 1941 drive on Moscow failed) stayed loyal but the war was hopelessly lost to the point nobody would even possibly bother negotiating by then anyway.
Nazism failed because Hitler while he was brilliant in some ways had some toxic Marxist ideas and that he later went mad under the influence of amphetamines. Originally he quite clearly wanted warriors to rule but in his later madness and given that some of his warriors could quite clearly see that he was mad (while his priesthood remained fanatically loyal) he changed his mind.
One more post.
That isn’t how that works.
From genetic analysis we know that the common European Jew is descended from 330 people 600 to 800 years ago, his remarkable talents and adherence to natural law forged in the crucible of the Pale of Settlement for several hundred years.
In terms of raw manpower, the strength of European Jewry multiplied 33,300% over this time period.
In other words, they spent several hundred years becoming worthy.
And then about three hundred years ago they began accepting power. And about one hundred years ago, they threw off their shackles to remould [the world] nearer to the heart’s desire.
This isn’t a game. In the long run, the Jewish will-to-power will beat the Cuckstain one every time.
Convert or die.
Jews are bad at (for) civilization because they never evolved in a environment where it was necessary for them to have such capacity; wherever the Khazar went, he found civilization already made, and never endeavored for a place where it wasn’t.
Some rightists say Jews are Khazars, and geneticists say that Jews are not the natives of Khazaria, without noticing that there is no contradiction.
Like Chechens, or Hurrians? Y-Haplotype J2 spread through Syria and Iraq…
Jews generally enter some country, redefine it as Jewish (or pro-Jewish), destroy it, and then leave. The Ashkenazi can be from Khazaria, and have once been called Khazars, without having any substantial admixture with the native population of Khazaria.
>The Ashkenazi can be from Khazaria, and have once been called Khazars, without having any substantial admixture with the native population of Khazaria.
Neither is true. Namely,
1) Ashkenazis did not originate in Khazaria and didn’t live there.
2) The Judaism of Khazars was limited to the ruling elite, and they were mostly –or likely even all– local converted Turkic people, with possible admixture/origin from some Persian Jewry (at least, that’s what they themselves claimed, as legitimization of their lineage). They successfully ruled over a vast region for generations, until the Varyag expansion, and persisting in part until the Mongols.
As to destroying countries: Ashkenazi Jews in Germany existed there since at least 10th century, and if anything were instrumental in building it up into a civilization from merely barbarian series of outposts.
Btw, I’ve consulted with Elders of Zion and your future conversions will be denied for spreading libelous shit.
And also: the original Y-DNA of Israelites isn’t J-2, but J1e/J-P58, which is (likely) the DNA of Kennites, Edomites, Midianites, and the Southern tribes (Judah and Benjamin), the pastoralists.
J-2 is Canaanites/Phoenicians that converted into Judaism (or proto-Judaism) in Biblical times, post Egyptian Exodus.
Gotta agree with Eli OC…
We’re NRxers not costume nazi larper wigger nationalists when we discuss the JQ (which they overemphasize to the neglect of the woman question) we should get our facts right and not throw in ridiculous Julius Streicher bullshit.
Many many if not most reform Jews under us will get helicopter rides as part of the Final Solution to the Leftist Question but its a mistake to equate Stephen Miller to Chuck Schumer.
@Cominator: thanks, man.
Btw, it feels pretty nice to sit at and walk around a major leftist academic institution in a MAGA hat, in Boston (which I’m doing right at this moment).
The gist of my schtick: just as it’s legitimate for apes to walk with their pants down to their knees and chicks with breasts out and camel toes and ass-cheeks on their yoga pants, it ought to be normalized to walk around in a MAGA hat. And someone ought to start doing it, esp since it’s not that bad, and some (some!) passerbys even explicitly welcome it.
I’m also honest enough to admit that, as a naturalized Jew living in the US, I probably have dual loyalty to this country and my notional birthright (though I’ve never been in a situation of having to choose). I leave the final resolution of this question to future times and God, if such a conflict ever arises… Either way, I’m one of the last people to be considered an enemy by the locals, if at all, in practical sense: I pay my taxes, am a good neighbor, and support the wall.
If such times come where I do need to make a decision: I’ll either have to convert or remain a Jew and leave. We are not at this point, and, as a practical matter, you likely will need to start with other people before me, regarding the whole “convert-or-leave” question, if it ever comes to it.
If I have anything to do with it, the deal will be that for a statal or quasi statal job in the US, the applicant will have to plausibly claim adherence to the official religion – which will be incompatible with adhering to the Jewish religion, but Jewish businessmen in the US will do fine, except that finance and insurance tends to be quasi statal. And I hope that in the near future, for a statal or quasi statal job in Israel, the applicant will have to plausibly claim adherence to the official religion, which will require adherence to the Jewish religion, but, if all goes well, Christian businessmen will continue to do fine in Israel.
We already have effectively have this rule in the US, in that for a statal or quasi statal job, one has to pretend adherence to progressivism, and progressive Jews only nominally adhere to Judaism, and their grandchildren do not even nominally adhere.
I am sure Eli is familiar with the deal where a native governing elite disloyal to its native people hires Jews to do the dirty work, then, the dirty work being done, blames the Jews. The west is now moving from phase one, the disloyal native governing elite hires Jews into powerful and well reward quasi statal jobs to bad stuff, to phase two: “It is all the fault of the Jews”, as we are now seeing in Britain. But if Jews are not in quasi statal positions, if they are merely buying stuff and selling stuff, and maybe sometimes getting a bit creative in interpreting contracts, it’s obviously stupid to blame the Jews, which is why Star Trek had to demote the Ferengi from arch villains to comedy relief.
That is an exaggeration, but there is a disturbing amount of truth in it.
The problem is that Judaism is a religion of exile, and still is a religion of exile, even in Israel, so is always hostile to its host nation, even when that host nation is Israel. Needs to become a religion of Israel. Needs a temple and an official statal or quasi statal temple priesthood to get them out of our hair and heal the wound of exile.
I don’t think the Ashkenazi are from Khazaria. Looks to me that they came from the middle east with the crusaders to what is now Italy – the Crusaders brought back smart Jews as part of their program of looting dusty unused Muslim libraries, and in this sense the Jewish claim to have brought greco roman civilization back to the west has a grain of truth. And the antisemitic claim that Jews are a hostile and indigestible group also has a grain of truth, though progressivism seems to be digesting them mighty fast. It is often said that the difference between Trump and the Jews attacking him is that he has Jewish grandchildren, and they don’t.
You might be able to get away with walking around in a MAGA hat in Boston (I advise you strongly to leave MA as soon as you can and Boston, which is the asshole capital of the planet, in particular) but for the love of god don’t have any stickers on your car.
>Looks to me that they came from the middle east with the crusaders to what is now Italy – the Crusaders brought back smart Jews as part of their program of looting dusty unused Muslim libraries, and in this sense the Jewish claim to have brought greco roman civilization back to the west has a grain of truth.
Looks to me like an absurd degree of semitiphilic signaling based on pet theories and vapor. I’m not aware of any serious historian who attributes the renaissance in large part to the Ashkenazim.
We have substantial evidence of Jews being involved in the crusader program of translating old Muslim books. (Which was a crusader program, though Jews try to spin it as a Jewish program.)
We have evidence of smart Jews in the west after that time. We don’t have evidence of smart Jews in the west before that time.
If you don’t think that is the origin of the Ashkenazi, then where and when did they originate? The Khazar story does not seem to have any evidence supporting it.
The Carolingian Revival that led to the mass proliferation of Greek and Latin (mostly Latin) texts among monasteries predates the Crusades, and for the key volumes that began the later interest in Greco-Roman writing, such as Cicero’s Letters to Atticus discovered by Petrarch, I don’t see any indication that they came from translations made by Jews (or even that they were’t already in Europe prior to the Crusades). For Aristotle translations we have James of Venice, Michael Scot, William of Moerbeke; for Plato and Homer, Manuel Chrysoloras; for Plutarch, Guarino da Verona, and at lest as far back as Aquinas Christians were directly converting Arab translations.
To the extent that the Crusades returned Latin and Greek works in the west, it usually seems to have come from Greeks fleeing the collapsing empire. Certainly there were Jews who translated some Hebrew translations of Arab version of Greco-Roman works, but mostly the Sephardim in Spain. I don’t see any indication that Jewish translations of Greco-Roman works happened at a rate that would come anywhere close to justifying the claim that Jews brought Greco-Roman civilization back to the West.
Well of course it does not justify that claim – just that there is a small basis of truth for an extravagantly strong claim made by Jews. As is usual with Jewish claims. They don’t totally make stuff up out of thin air, unlike blacks and Muslims, but they are apt to get alarmingly creative in stretching the truth.
>Similarly, Nazism could not take a sane stance on the JQ
That’s because they were, like all moderns, egalitarians at heart, despite all that Führerprinzip, the idea of a racial brotherhood is inherently egalitarian. The egalitarian cannot simply treat someone as lower, he either has to accept him as an equal brother or treat him as an absolute non-person. This, IMHO is the secret of both Communist and Nazi murderousness.
I don’t think that was the case; the Japanese were certainly neither viewed as equal racial brothers nor as non-persons. Neither were the Italians, the Finns, or numerous other groups.
When Hitler’s British nephew came to Germany angling for a job, presumably eyeing some high level Reich position, he was made a bank teller, suggesting that Hitler didn’t have trouble with the idea of meritocratic hierarchy, even in his personal bloodline.
My plan is to enserf those who fail to display the necessary characteristics to be full citizens and deprive them of the opportunity to reproduce. They will stop coming and no one will care about border control. We will still have border control but it will only need to focus on criminals, smugglers, and invaders, rendering the question “are you white” no longer terribly interesting or particularly important. People who come will be people who want to fit in and can fit in. If they cannot fit in, they will leave. If they cannot leave due to being chronically stony broke and unable to support themselves, bad things will happen to them. The Nazis regarded the Japanese as honorary whites for a reason. A strict definition of race turned out to be a bad thing, such a bad thing that even the Nazis frequently wound up ignoring it.
The Nazis wanted a strict definition of race so that everyone who fitted the definition could be equal. Bad idea. Did not work.
The time for talk has long gone; there is nothing to be gained from “civil discourse” with the Communists any longer except perhaps as a way to identify your, ah, targets. We need a new version of the Golden Rule, the Lead-and-Copper Rule: “Do unto others as you know they will do unto you if given the chance, so do it first.”
There is no need to wait for an attempt to kill before bloodshed is morally justified. The Old Testament threshold for mortal insult is sufficiently low to justify killing the entire Left right now.
I’d love to study up and read those verses, if you would be willing to share.
That’s not the right way to do it. Put the Scourby’s KJV on your phone’s media player, random shuffle. Immerse in the whole spirit of the Bible. Feel clown world scoured from your soul.
And for some reason this makes commies more palatable and nazis less. Something to do with betraying your duties I think? Lenin/Stalin promised the proletariat many things, and welched on all of them, instead delivering suffering and death. Hitler promised the persecution of the Jews and delivered the persecution of the Jews. We can’t have people delivering on what they say! That’s responsible, and leftism => irresponsibility. I think that’s the key factor?
A sophistry that’s been flagrantly successful, normally called ‘framing’. 98% of twitter accounts will get wrapped up debating whether Y or not-Y, without ever questioning X. For tribal signalling, all you need is Y.
funny AI walking vid.
shows how seeming volition can arise out of evolutionary generations.
A.I. Learns To Walk
3,056,615 views
Code Bullet
Published on Apr 19, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-wIZuAA3EY&list=WL&index=3
Jim, you say volition is a property of consciousness, but it seems to me that anything sufficiently complex that is subject to natural selection for as many generations as Earth’s life has been will start exhibiting signs of volition and desire.
It is routine to program AIs by billions of random variations in their neural nets and selecting those changes that improve achievement of some goal. They don’t look like they have volition. The look like Eliza with a bigger database.
Maybe if we knew the right trick to have the right organization in the neural net, natural selection would give us volition, but the right trick is far from trivial.
I mean, so what? Your neural nets may be running an evolutionary strategy with billions of variations, but the neural net itself wasn’t evolved. Material life isn’t limited to binary, and it has been subject to selective pressure since the primordial ooze. Obviously our machines can’t replicate that, but there’s no reason to believe it’s something mystical either.
I am not saying it is magic.
I am saying it might as well be magic, because we have no comprehension of what it is, nor any ability to emulate it.
Any claim that this stuff is trivial or straightforward has been well and truly falsified. The problem is not emulating a human being, the problem is not the Turing test. The problem is emulating a small patch of the frog’s retina or emulating Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism with exactly three hundred and two neurons.
Maybe there is some simple and obvious algorithm that will be blindingly obvious after someone figures it out, as after the Wright brothers realized that a plane needed three axis control, it was blindingly obvious that of course a plane needs three axis control.
But if there is some simple algorithm, no one yet has a clue.
It is obvious that living creatures are using recursive bayesian filtering and adaptive dimensional reduction, but our efforts at recursive bayesian filtering have something missing and it is hard to explain what it is, and our adaptive dimensional reduction is not a substantial improvement on random dimensional reduction. Everyone winds up using regular bayesian filtering and random dimensional reduction, and just throwing a bigger database at it – which merely gives you Eliza with a bigger database.
[*deleted*]
Unresponsive.
I talk about Caenorhabditis Elegans, Baysian filtering, and random dimensional reduction, and you respond by telling me about intellectuals verbalizing the behavior. Consciousness and action came before words.
Right. Sure. And I’m saying that the problem is there’s only one layer of evolutionary learning being applied. Whereas life is like a babushka doll in which every doll has been shaped by evolutionary learning, except more so. If we can see something that looks like volition from our one-layer simulation, then it’s reasonable to infer that more realistic volition is just a question of adding more layers.
Been tried. So far the results are just more of the same.
Does not mean that what living creatures do is magical, but so far, might as well be.
What do you mean, been tried? Those walkers were made of rectangles and joints, not meat and cells. I really doubt anything approaching a simulation of the tree of life has been tried.
I am not referring to those walkers.
It is provably not an algorithm, because any algorithm that is supposedly conscious works just as well if it is not conscious. 2 + quale = ?. Without loss of generality, if ‘quale’ is just two, then ? = 4. Problem: neither 2, 4, nor + are qualia. If your equation has an answer, in other words is computable by a von Neumann machine, it is not conscious.
Again, without loss of generality, if the equation, sequence of events, or model retains necessary references to qualia, then it will have unobservable or inexplicable outcomes. 2 + quale = ?, as in ? per se.
This is because adding non-math to math is not a valid operation
Also, Wittgenstein. Define ‘volition’ or quit wasting time.
I don’t think he’s talking about qualia.
Not defining volition, because we recognize it when we see it, but we don’t understand what it is.
If we could define it, it would be a whole lot easier to create self driving cars with volition.
You and Koanic flatly disagree on whether you see volition. It would seem that what each of you knows is different.
Do we disagree?
I see volition in most of the descendants of the urbilaterian, perhaps all of them. I don’t see volition elsewhere.
Koanic, show me this thing that is not a descendant of the urbilaterian and shows volition, or a descendant of the urbilaterian big enough to read its behavior that fails to show volition.
I’m not convinced there’s a bright behavioral line between bilaterians and non that should be named “volition”, especially not as the key to AI.
Looks to me more like a gradient.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/secret-social-lives-jellyfish/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20691-zoologger-no-brain-but-at-least-its-got-personality/
In other words, not volitional. When currents accidentally bring jellyfish close together, a jellyfish follows a navigation algorithm that takes the presence of nearby objects into account, but no one would feel like saying the jellyfish “wants” anything. It responds to stimuli.
Also, no dominance, no submission. No indication that they actually want something.
Compare and contrast with a tree ant. I put my hands on a tree that it regards as its queen’s property, it will communicate its indignation and displeasure to me with unambiguous body language. Pretty obvious it does not want me touching its queen’s tree.
It leaves me in absolutely no doubt that it wants me to go away, and if I do not go away an army of its sisters might well gather in the tree above my head and drop down upon my head.
If it is a gradient, it is a mighty steep gradient.
I don’t know enough biology to identify the relevant low-volition bilaterians for comparison. Obviously if you take the non-volitional behaviors of the non-bilaterians and compare them to the volitional behaviors of the bilaterians, you will get the desired result. Sounds to me like those anemones are fighting for dominance.
Perhaps the anenomes are – but you can reduce the decisions to an algorithm. Maybe that is all they are doing, following an algorithm.
You are going to have trouble figuring out an algorithm for that tree ant.
A self driving car does not want to avoid collisions. It is following an algorithm that has the effect of usually avoiding collisions. But sometimes the algorithm fails, and when it fails, you can see that it is merely an algorithm. The car does not actually want to avoid collisions, it is merely generating an illusion of wanting to avoid collisions.
I see the same “wanting to avoid” in the instinctive shrinking of a jellyfish from harmful touch. I see algorithm failure in the behavior of a confused ant. I see unpredictability in the personalities of anemones.
Anyway, sure I can see how there’s something important to AI that happened to separate urbilaterians from other animals. It’s a brain innovation, after all. I’m just not willing to call it volition.
Maybe it does want to avoid, but a simple algorithm can do the same things. A simple algorithm cannot do what a tree ant does.
Not only can an ant navigate essentially arbitrary surfaces on top of generally taking care of itself, creating an ant costs about five cents.
Why is it difficult? Anything that has some ways of manipulating the world has volition if it does so in a way to consistently get closer to a goal, and end state of things. Granted this does not help us tell “does not have volition” from “has volition but sucks at achieving its goal” from each other, but does that matter? A spider wants to build its web and it wants to build the web it does build because this is what it does, and because other spiders build similar webs so there is probably no constraining resource for them to get what they really want. Is it hard to build AI-spiders, at least for creating 2D pixel webs or something? What is the problem here?
I just see volition as behavior itself, end of the story. Even if someone puts a gun to my head to hand over my wallet, that is volitional albeit not voluntary, it expresses a preference for being poorer rather than for dying. Every higher behavior, that is not something like digestion, is volitional. What is the problem.
If it was the end of story, we would have self driving cars and sweater folding robots by now.
For the past seventy years some people have been telling us that consciousness, at least at the level of simple animals, is an easy problem, that it is no big deal.
And for seventy years, they have been failing to emulate simple animals. Behaviourism was never intellectually coherent – its presupposition and argument that rats are not really conscious proved to much, for it implied that I am not conscious either.
And in the end, it was revealed as failing to describe the behavior of rats.
I know that I am conscious. And when I get into a disagreement with a snake or with tree ants on my property, they compellingly persuade me that they are conscious also. In a conflict, you are forced to model your opponent, and modeling a living opponent as a video game ai opponent does not work too well.
Didn’t mean behavior in that awful Pavlovian stimulus-response machine way, Jim. The problem with that kind of behaviorism is ignoring just why does an organism even bother to respond to stimuli. Well, because it wants to maintain homeostasis. And that is where volition is. Or consciousness.
Wanting to maintain homeostasis is a very good way to describe organisms. EvoX has good posts about it, but I think even that super complicated Karl Frisson stuff Scottkind wrote about boils down that, too: organisms want to avoid surprise, not about the external world but about their own internal states.
Does that imply a thermostat is conscious? Well. What is consciousness even? Dunno, but for example making decisions seems like a big part of it. So if a thermostat makes decisions that in its absence I would have to make, why not say it has a tiny bit of consciousness?
Pretty sure that if you wind up saying a thermostat has a tiny bit of consciousness, that reveals your definition is nuts.
A computer can play better chess than a grand master, but it turns out it matters that the human playing chess knows he is playing chess, and the computer does not know anything.
Similarly, a video game AI can, and routinely does, perform vastly more complex decision making than a snake, and a snake vastly more complex decision making than a tree ant, but when I have a disagreement with a snake or a tree ant, it is absolutely obvious that they both have something that the video game opponent lacks.
The trouble with your definition is that it implies that when computers have more processing power than the human brain, and when a computer can beat a grand master at chess, we have solved the problem. Obviously we have not solved the problem. Google “knows” more than I do. My desktop has more processing power than I do. My desktop can beat me at chess. And yet, and yet, it is absolutely obvious that Google knows nothing.
If a thermostat has a little bit of consciousness, then a video game opponent must have a lot of consciousness, and yet, obviously, it does not. If consciousness is just decision making, Google makes a lot of decisions. Is Google conscious? Is my computer conscious? If not, why not? If consciousness is merely decision making, then the snake must be less conscious than the video game opponent.
The proposition that consciousness is merely decision making implied that when computers were powerful enough, they would almost automatically become conscious. They are now powerful enough, and yet …
AI security expert tricks Tesla into thinking stop sign is a 45mph sign by putting some stickers on it.
“In March, we covered UC Berkeley professor Dawn Song’s talk at our annual EmTech Digital conference about how she used stickers to trick a self-driving car into thinking a stop sign was a 45-mile-per-hour sign”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613555/how-we-might-protect-ourselves-from-malicious-ai/?utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=72935587&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8S9NRy1QkHlNPyTXY8ZDNxsSv3HIVh4VhvrpAO6EbZmnOHZHwVPjsaoJcGUZ8QXJgEBFku8JFzljq1mRxtU_Evd8vn0Q&_hsmi=72935589
You can see Karl Sims doing this in 94.
https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150FP/archive/karl-sims/siggraph94.pdf
Using evolutionary optimization and similar articulated simulated objects. He sets up competitions to grab a ball and keep is as far from the opponent as possible. Some create develops with two huge arms, one to quickly grab the ball, the other to push the opponent away from the ball. A lot of current reinforcement learning uses evolutionary optimization. It’s just a blind optimization technique, but we attach more meaning than there is to the result we see.
Have you seen this?
http://openworm.org/
The real problem with capitalism is when business councils push for more immigration, as the Business Council of Canada just did.
Canada is doing what Trump is doing – making some words about illegal immigration, doing almost nothing, and what little they do is offset by increasing legal immigration.
It’s all about the money.
The ideological justifications of capitalism serve the demographic dispossession.
Obviously businessmen want more H1Bs, and we want fewer. But illegal immigration is outvoting us, and is considerably larger than H1B immigration.
And Trump has done the right thing on H1B immigration, even though businessmen do not like it. The demopublican party yielded to Trump with scarcely a whimper, despite the supposed might of the business lobby, while they are fighting him tooth and nail on illegal immigration.
He says he wants more legal migration on merit – and promptly demanded to see merit evidence for H1Bs.
Businessmen want H1Bs for diversity points, not the labour. Honest observers like Gregory Clark note that foreigners are cheaper because they are worth less.
The mere fact that businessmen/capitalists/employers/whatever can import Pajeet Streetshitter, alumnus of Hyderijerabad, Bumfuck, India, and call him “engineer†destroys the respectability of the profession, kills its prestige, depresses its compensation, and demoralizes its workers.
It doesn’t really matter whether Pajeet is producing anything at all.
…and businessman want to do this, you’re implying? Depress the prestige of their own firm?
Odd isn’t that woke capital won’t use H1B’s for HR… shouldn’t that save them money? Rhetorical question of course.
If it was up to businessmen, HR should be subjected to H1B… but it’s not…
Good point.
Why would they need H1B for diversity points? Aren’t there plenty of brown skinned American citizens? I think the point is rather both: Pajeet still does a better job than what Tyrone would. But Mexico has 6 IQ points over India, which makes me wonder.
Repetitious nonsense. You made that argument before, it was rebutted before, and you did not respond to that rebuttal.
Jim, what are your thoughts on the falsification of history? What facts, if any, do you think would be unrecognizably distorted in a century?
History is massively and radically falsified, and the falsifications tend to change unpredictably and accrete one on top of another, like the infamous Soviet Encyclopedia, which kept getting hilariously flagrant revisions. The most predictable change is that communism will get, is getting, the whitewash that the enlightenment got – but at the same time the most disastrous elements of communism will be interpreted away. Cultural Marxism will de-emphasize, is de-emphasizing, economic Marxism. The reason that entryists continue to beat the drum on (obsolete) economic Marxism is that it is instantly obvious that they are entryists when they beat the drum on Cultural Marxism.
This is the enlightenment.
Many millions of people feel that a techno-organic para-sentient System encrusts and penetrates the world. Perhaps almost everyone feels this, albeit almost always inarticulately.
If no plausible interpretation of this System as other than “Capitalism” is offered, then Leftism will triumph because it will seem that only the Leftist honestly acknowledge the existence of this System.
Alternate interpretations might include the Gnostic (the System is tyrannical psychic governance by literal Demons), the Libertarian (the System is Bureaucracy), the Naturalistic (?: the System is Culture itself, or perhaps Language).
SCALE
The bigger it gets, the further the remove from the ancestral environment, the greater the individual alienation.
One paradigm is that we are in the process of giving birth to our successors, digital life.
>SCALE
>alienation
>paradigm
“They noted that “the law of transformation of quantity into quality”, “holds that a new quality emerges in a leap as the slow accumulation of quantitative changes, long resisted by a stable system, finally forces it rapidly from one state into another”, a phenomenon described in some disciplines as a paradigm shift.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#As_a_heuristic_in_biology_and_elsewhere
Organizations naturally tend to bureaucracy, even without government interference, which problem is enormously worsened by government interference. In this sense the libertarian is correct that the problem is bureaucracy. Bureacracy is hierarchy succumbing to social entropy.
Collective decision making tends to evil and madness.
The problem you discuss is the combination of these two tendencies: Groupthink leading to evil and madness in collective decision making, and hierarchy suffering the social decay depicted in many books on the topic.
[…] on Michael Knowles recent visit to UKMC. Quoting […]
You’re a software engineer and cryptographer with cryptocurrency speciality; you relentlessly shill for the “Restoration†of Feudalism Nao; you muddle entrepreneurialism, free enterprise, small craftsmen and proprietors, massive multinational corporations, wage labor, corporate subversion, and the sextuple-dipping usury of the Federal Reserve System together into one big undifferentiated morass which you call “capitalismâ€, trace back to the beginning of recorded history, and of which we simply can never have enough; and you’ve censored every quotation from The Creature From Jekyll Island, probably because they would reveal the men behind the curtain of your oh-so-precious Russian Revolution and subsequent.
This image is beginning to resolve into a coherent picture.
Next time, it’ll be you and your usurious employers under the guillotine, and I will be your Robespierre.
Neoreaction has its own views on banking which do not support the Federal Reserve system you should perhaps familiarize yourself with the neoreactionary view of banking before attacking Jim along these lines.
I’m familiar with the nrx view on banking. It doesn’t correspond to the jimian view on banking.
For example, Jim doesn’t want anyone to know that one man, Peter Schiff, personally gave 500 million dollars for the execution of the Christian Caesar in Russia.
But what do I care? I don’t, not enough to return to this website. Good day to you, Mr. Cominator.
GOOD DAY
Not really sure that Jim has any major disagreements on banking with Moldbug but okay.
I entirely agree with the Moldbuggian view on banking.
Again, we see entryists telling us what we think. You are going to tell us that Moldbug was a Marxist.
This stuff about Peter Schiff is a Third Positionist rant. True or false, does not matter, Third Positionists have always been in the pay of the Marxists that they supposedly hate.
The rant is intended to identify the person making the argument as one of us. The left thinks we hate Jews, so he tells us he hates Jews. The left knows we hate commies, so he tells us he hates commies. And then, will tell us that we already agree with the commie position on everything – that there is universal consensus that Marxism is true.
During World War II it became absolutely obvious that the supposedly anticommunist Third Positionist were in the pay of Moscow, and today, they smell of Harvard.
Were the commies in the pay of the Jews? Likely they were. They were also in the pay of the Kaiser. But that is irrelevant to what is wrong with communism, and the third Third Positionist is here to explain that, apart from those horrid Jews that he supposedly hates (while strangely admiring) there is nothing wrong with communism.
I thought so but I didn’t know for sure, how the banking system should be is a very complicated topic so its entirely possible you had some major disagreement with Moldbug on some aspect of banking I didn’t know about that you stated years ago.
I disagree with him that gold will ever be remonetized barring a nuclear war (it won’t) other then that I agree with him.
The squeals of the multi-pseudonym garrulous gammas departing this blog remind me of Legion rushing headlong into the sea.
They have been promising to leave over and over again for ages. I have silently deleted a huge number of “I am never going to comment on this blog again” comments.
The idea is to apply social pressure on reactionaries to not challenge their re-interpretation of reaction. It works on some people, quite a lot of people. People respond to this social pressure and stop posting stuff that is radically inconsistent with the entryist account of their position.
“It is wonderful that reactionaries agree with all right thinking people. I totally love and admire you. You are great. Oh, you don’t? Well I am taking my ball and going home.”
Thus, for example, the reactionary posts that women love negs, love sexual harassment, love domestic discipline, and love rape. The entryist enthusiastically “agrees” that due to capitalism, or the Jews, or the Masons, or some such, the behavior of women is so horrid that of course we all want to beat and belittle them, and the reactionary starts going along with the purple pill account of women, so as to be loved by his new friends and stops giving the red pill and evolutionary psychology account of female nature.
When someone presupposes you think X, instead of explicitly and overtly arguing X is true, you just tend to go along with it, and if they tell you that they like you because of X, and threaten to not like you if you cast doubt on X, you tend to go along with it more.
It works. If it does not work on me, it is partly because as an excommunist, I am inclined to suspect that when I get that treatment, my new friend has put me on the list of people to disappear.
It’s true that a minority, perhaps 30%, can handle debt responsibly. However, there’s this mandatory-or-forbidden thing, which is a problem. Constant debates between one who wants to legalize debt for everyone, and another who wants to ban debt for everyone. Don’t even need anything new: could use existing credit scores.
Debt distorts the price of the following things the most and its also where people get into trouble.
1) Education
2) Real Estate
Subsidized loans for the former should stop and far less people should go to college… in real estate the leverage rules should be as tight as it is for stocks. Do this and debt problems will generally disappear though given the current Federal Reserve system it’d be tricky to do this without catastrophically contracting the money supply.
I don’t quite understand the leverage part in real estate, but just want to say the credit union / building society is such a neat idea. It is Chesterbellocian Distributism correctly implemented. Why isn’t it more popular? They do offer better rates than the banks, don’t they?
“I don’t quite understand the leverage part in real estate”
You don’t?
People should have to put up a lot higher % of real estate property to buy real estate. With stocks you have to put up 50%. With houses you often don’t even need to put up 20%.
Racial terms are inherently broad and unspecific umbrella definitions, with fuzzy edges- there will never be a formal, empirical delineation of where “white†precisely stops and begins just as there will never be an empirical delineation of where Europe stops and Asia begins. Maybe you can get most people to agree to the Urals as the boundary- okay, which meter of the Urals? Is this inch Europe or Asia? The conclusion to reach from this is not “Europe doesn’t existâ€, of course, as many leftists would like to conclude about race- the genetic umbrellas are real and tangible, clusters of population groups are biologically distinct and often distant from other clusters, and the tribal realities of race are meaningful both biologically and in terms of social technology. Just as the human mind can be presented with the image of a person and almost immediately conclude whether or not it is attractive, likewise it can conclude wether or not it is “usâ€.
(Of course, the relevance of the macro-tribe “race†is not static. Tell a person in China 500 years ago that he and the Japanese were both “East Asian†and it would mean very little to him- tell him it today and it would mean more, but still not a ton, unless it’s a worldly young person. But put Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people in the same city in the US and Asian-ness will become a thing. Race takes up more and more of the tribal position as the conscious perception of the “playing field†is increasingly global and multicultural. “White†in the colonies is essentially an ethnicity, albeit a broad and shallow one.
And yet- give that Chinese man 500 years ago the option of having his grandchildren be half-Japanese versus half-anything not Asian and I think it’s clear what he would choose).
In general, white simply means European- specifically someone of European descent, meaning genetically European dating back thousands of years ago to the time that the bulk of the European gene-pool “settled†after the Aryan migration. That does mean that some European populations with significant admixture from groups like the Turks or North Africans could be considered non-white, not completely white, or at least significantly distinct from the Northwest European Germanic-Celtic core of what virtually everyone in the world would consider white at first glance. Slavs, of course, are genetically and culturally distinct from Western Europeans.
I’m not sure an arbitrary, formal definition is necessary, even for explicitly ethnonationalist positions. An individual state would decide their own personal immigration and naturalization policies. As The Comintator referenced, Catholic immigration was damaging to the US, and it wasn’t because they weren’t white; it was primarily because they viewed themselves as, and were viewed by the native population as, an outgroup at odds with the Protestant Anglo core, with plenty of historical fuel to reinforce that perception. It’s all a matter of who “we†view as “weâ€.
There will, however, almost certainly always be a strong genetic aspect to that sense of in-group, until humans stop resembling humans. This holds true even when there is a very powerful “artificial†tribe composed of things like religion and identity- see, for example, how the Ashkenazim treated their “fellow Jew†Mizrahim when they migrated en masse to Israel after being expelled by the surrounding countries.
(double-post, can be deleted here)
Well, if you want a racialist immigration policy, you will need a formal definition. However. The thing is, almost all people like living with their own race. If all other things are equal, they self-select into migrating to a country of their own race, if they have to migrate. So if all other things were equal, instead of policing immigration, you could rely on migrants own racial consciousness to go to countries they fit in to.
But of course all things are not equal and it is mostly about money. Cutting out all kinds of welfare would in itself be an immense help, but still some people would immigrate to countries not of their own race just because of higher wages. Which means self-selection works only in the presence of somehow artificially equalized wages between countries.
So that means putting an extra tax on immigrants if the wage levels in their country of origin are lower. (If they are higher, it is virtually guaranteed only racially compatible people will come from that country.) How to calculate that (wage levels, but also price levels) is a technical difficulty to be solved later. The point is that everybody is allowed to immigrate, but no welfare and their wages, quality of living, will not be higher than in their home country for 5-10 years because of the tax. If you do this, it is pretty much sure you get only racially compatible immigrants, because you removed all motives that distort the natural desire to live with ones own race.
An individual state would need formal guidelines for its immigration and naturalization policy, but that doesn’t require a formal definition of “whiteâ€; they could opt to say “white only†like the US did create a non-universal definition, making formal judgments in individual cases where status is in question like the US also used to do.
The self-selection idea would work in most cases except there would still be the issue of refugees and people fleeing severely dangerous areas, and with sub-Saharan Africa estimated to make up nearly half of the world population by the end of the century I’m sure there would be plenty of millions opting to be dirt poor in Europe rather than dirt poor in Africa. I could also see China making use of a portion of its excess male population by incentivizing them to immigrate to influential democracies.
Usury does not exist today. Loans against property are not usury, and if I default on an usurious loan against my person, I will not go to debtor’s prison nor will a rough man come to my house in the night, break my knees with a nail bat, and take my possessions to a pawn shop to recoup his employer’s losses. Usury is only usury when the loan can be enforced with violence, and today in the first world it cannot, therefore no usury.
Largely true, but not entirely true.
College debt, and tax debt, is usurious.
To be non usurious, a loan should share the risk between borrower and lender – a loan against property should be entirely extinguished by the borrower maintaining that property in good order and condition and the lender taking that specific property back.
A loan against the person, such as credit card debt, should be enforceable against honor only. If someone defaults, you blacken his credit rating.
This is in substantial part the way it works, which is to say, non usurious. But it is not entirely the way it works.
Debts that are enforceable against the person, for example trade debts, fines, lawsuit debts, should be non interest bearing. Debts that are interest bearing should be enforceable only against the specific property or against honor. Then there would be no usury.
Lenders tend to get their pals in the government to protect them from risk, and when they are protected from risk, we get too much risky borrowing and risky lending, lenders lending to borrowers who should not be borrowing, to spend it on things that they should not be spending it on. Lenders need to be exposed to the burden of unwise or unlucky expenditures. Where we see the greatest usury, college loans, we see the greatest unwise and unproductive capital expenditures.
I’m talking about is and not ought. I agree with you on the ought.
An interest-bearing loan against my person is not really usurious today because it is de facto against honor and honor only. I know a woman who racked up $30,000 in credit card debt buying high-end fashion. When her husband’s business failed, she was unable to repay. The bank did not come and take her car, or her house, or take her jewelry to sell, or throw her in debtors prison as would happen as the usual consequence of usury throughout history.
Her credit rating went through the floor, is still through the floor, and no one will ever lend to her again, but other than her honor as a borrower being stained, she suffered no consequences from the free money.
The only people who can use violence to enforce repayment of a debt, and repossess unrelated property to recoup that debt, is USG, and they will gleefully do so.
If we lived in a society that allowed lenders to enforce usurious loans through slavery or violence, we would have an usury problem, but our problem today is not usury. Lenders are forced to make college loans. I know this to be the case because if I, at 17, with no skills and no employment history other than bussing tables in a restaurant, asked a bank for $160,000 to start a business, I would be laughed out of the room. They would consider the loan absurdly risky and unprofitable, which means almost all college loans are risky and unprofitable, which means that the lender is forced to make them.
yup. This is also why payday loan companies charge so much interest.
The US government cancels your passport if they decide you owe child support or back taxes. You (Jim) must know guys this happened to. What are you supposed to do when getting back into the country requires a vast sum of money that you don’t have? Do you become a stateless person?
1. Try to stay under the radar. If your wife is unfaithful, kill her as commanded by the Old Testament, bury her in the swamp below the high tide line, wrapped in coarse wire netting with rocks inside the wire netting, and you will not be billed for child support that you cannot pay. Pay your taxes, and avoid situations where they are apt to conjure improbable income out of thin air. Avoid complicated tax situations unless you can hire a congressman.
2. If you do become a stateless person, it is a less serious problem than you think for wealthy stateless persons.
Jim its really not easy to get away with killing your wife or even girlfriend if you’ve been dating a while and get away with it, even organized crime figures subject to divorce rape generally don’t do it for that reason. Whitey Bulger was an exception (he frequently killed his girlfriends) but he knew that Robert Mueller was protecting him.
If they disappear or worse their body is found and it doesn’t appear 100% natural or accidental you are going to get the CSI treatment.
CSI are a bunch of blundering idiots. In actual crime cases, unable to find their ass with both hands. Read up on the Green River killer.
Situations were the killer is unknown are quite different from one’s where there is a very narrow circle of suspected killers. In the latter case, all they need is to build evidence against the husband. If they dig enough, good chances they will.
The green river killer was not unknown. Several people fingered him. They did not try very hard even though they had a pile of bodies and a suspect. If they don’t have a body, not going to try very hard.
Finding a killer vs proving that the killer is the killer are very different problems.
Proving the killer is the killer to the satisfaction of epistemology is not hard. Proving it to the satisfaction of the Warren Court is much harder, because Warren’s purpose was and is to support murders against their victims.
Ha Ha — Jim advised me to kill my ex-wife too, a couple of years ago when I was upset about how she was impeding my relationship with my son. I’m still not sure whether or not he was kidding. He sometimes says amusingly Evil things — another example, from the same time-period, was his advice to Eat Lots of Red Meat With Plenty of Salt! (I eat lots of red meat with plenty of salt.) Also: Spank your Girlfriend! (He denied that this was just a fun game that made his girlfriend giggle in between yelps. (I’d rather tickle a girlfriend; perhaps that’s why I don’t have one right now.))
Old Testament again. Surprised no new neo-con piece about how people of good conscience should invade Venezuela.
I’m finally out: tried the blog/Twitter thing for a couple of days, noticed I was getting narcissistic and obnoxious so packed it in.
Then realised this is no different.
Cya Shlomo
People of good conscience should invade Venezuela because there is a lake of oil that is not being pumped, and a mountain of gold that is not being mined.
Unfortunately, neocons will favor imposing progressivism, which is unlikely to result in the gold being mined or the oil being pumped, but which will result in teaching nine year old girls to put a condom on a banana.
This problem could be bypassed if Erik Prince invades, and then funds the invasion by leasing the oil to Exxon, and the gold to Anglo. This maybe what is happening right now – hard to tell. There is shooting happening right now.
Maduro relies substantially on copters. There are no reports of copters being used, so maybe his airforce is sitting on its ass waiting to see who wins, or maybe someone hostile has seized his copter base. Or maybe the copters are grounded because he is out of gas and out of bread. If the ability or the will to hose down the streets from above with machine gun fire is missing, chances are Maduro will fall very soon.
You didn’t, and now you’re an aging loser. COINCIDENCE?
Maduro MIGHT fall but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Coups fail most of the time if the existing leader isn’t either killed or flees the country within the 1st few hours. Romania was a major exception to this but Rumania had also lost any foreign backing it might have had when the Soviet Union fell.
Maduro is to my knowledge still backed by China and to some degree Russia.
He is opposed by the hegemon – which would ordinarily be instantly fatal for him and everyone around him with the result that no one would be around him and the hegemon would never need to take any overt action.
But the trouble is that the hegemon is facing internal division – if the US openly intervened, an infestation of US lawyers, NGOs, and state department diplomats would descent upon Venezuela and destroy the place as thoroughly as they destroyed Haiti and Iraq, which chaos and destruction would prevent the oil from being pumped and the gold from being mined.
What the hegemon can do is block intervention by Russia and China, without which Maduro will fall – and if we are lucky, with Maduro, democracy.
Trouble is it is dangerous to intervene directly because the US army comes with a bunch of parasites attached who will steal anything not nailed down and restore the democracy that recently voted for socialism.
Venezuela presents a clear, obvious, and urgent need to end democracy, hammer a stake through its heart, and leave the corpse in running water. Difficult to do that if you directly involve the US army.
Maybe they are but you are going to be the prime suspect so if you made any mistake no matter how tiny you ain’t getting away with it because they are going to assume you did it if they think she was murdered. So generally if you do it you are the bigger idiot until proven otherwise…
Now if shes a known drunk or something there are ways of making it look like an accident where you won’t necessarily even be suspected but even then you better not fuckup…
Too true. Killing the predatory alimony-leech ex-wives of strangers (and her enablers) is much safer. the Bible frowns upon avenging oneself.
Around here, normies seem to think that private killings are OK if done for adequate reason.
A few weeks ago I hosted a party, at which one of the guests accused his wife, half playfully, of disloyalty, which she vehemently denied, I think truthfully. He then spontaneously discussed secure corpse disposal in front of his wife, and in front of guests, and I told him that I had suitable wire netting for his plan, and if he were to ask me for some wire netting, I would not ask him what he wanted it for. Kind of joking. Pretty sure his wife is not disloyal. Pretty sure she might be if he was insufficiently alpha to do something about it.
A few days ago I heard that the truck of an acquaintance of mine had been stolen, and the thief had destroyed it in the course of his joyride. This morning I happened to see him, and said to him “If you find the thief, make sure no one else ever finds him.” He then spontaneously assured me that the thief would never be found, and briefly outlined a method for secure corpse disposal. I was not joking, and I doubt that he was joking.
The methods of corpse disposal I mentioned on this blog are not ideas that I came up with, they are things that normies have spontaneously suggested in social settings, in front of friends and family.
People who live near the wilderness and have land, boats, and earth moving equipment have lots of options for making corpses vanish, and the existing justice system is hostile to us, so we seem to be quite relaxed about substituting ourselves for the justice system that is too hostile to protect us, and too dysfunctional to protect our enemies, sufficiently relaxed that normies discuss it in front of friends, acquaintances, and family.
The trouble with corpse disposal is that it involves spending time with incriminating evidence. If you’re going to do unto others, then do it for others, not yourself. Motiveless patternless serial killers are extremely difficult to catch. Whatever injustice you wish to avenge for yourself, probably happened because much more egregious ones went unpunished. Start upstream. If the person is so heinous that many had motives, that makes it all the easier.
You over estimate the justice system
The Green River Killer had a regular pattern. He left conspicuous dead bodies all over the place, he had been fingered by numerous witnesses, one of whom gave the police his address and license plate, and one of whom had memorized his license number, and still they did not get around to catching him for years.
Near as I can figure, the police only go industriously corpse hunting if family and friends go corpse hunting, and the police want to be first. And the kind of people that the normies around here kill, no one misses enough to go looking.
With the Green River Killer, they could not ignore the corpses, and so went through the motions of a massive manhunt – but pretty sure the manhunt consisted largely of shaking down the owners of donut shops. They knocked on the door of the Green River killer, but did not search the place, even though they had adequate grounds for a warrant – a witness saw him abduct one of the girls. Had they searched the place, would have found he was keeping a trophy collection of human body parts.
I’m saying better know what you are doing and better not make any mistakes for instance I’m told to weigh down bodies in water takes far more weight then a layman would think…
You’d almost think the cops wanted that guy on the loose killing hookers, the better to discourage their daughters from running off and becoming whores.
I wish.
But observe the remarkable efficiency with which child support laws are enforced – and the utter disregard for the welfare of the children with which they are enforced.
I don’t think I am overestimating the injustice system. I believe the injustice system varies in quality within the USA and over time. Given the high personal stakes, it is worthwhile to proceed with an abundance of caution.
This is especially true when pursuing a politically incorrect agenda. A low probability multiplied by a severely negative outcome is worth avoiding. Negative outcomes are broader than a binary conviction. While diversity is degrading the quality of policework, technological and professional advancements cut the other way.
It is arguably better for a man to retain his honor by dying resisting arrest than to suffer capture and imprisonment in the US injustice system. I do not think it is wrong to kill US cops, any more than it is wrong to kill Philistines. They are Uncle Samael’s honorless dogs, and dogs sometimes die when prey is brought to bay. The fact that they would behave better under a good master is irrelevant; the job ruthlessly selects for dishonor. The idea that it is wrong to kill the armed agents of tyranny is completely un-American, and they knew that when they signed up.
Right now, the State and institutions in general have the informational edge over the individual, which advantages them when operating at postmodern scale. I aim to change that. When the individual’s memory is longer than the State’s, when waiting a decade to execute revenge is trivial, then the balance of power will shift from bureaucrat to house hitman.
A young man coming into his years of peak aggression should inherit a ranked list of targets, as well as a comprehensive library on the art of violence. He should choose work that allows him to moonlight as a goel hadam until his rage has cooled enough to focus on family and career. The Law assumes this to be the case, and merely sets limits to protect the innocent target.
Sportsball is an idiotic effeminate surrogate for a man’s duty to deliver lethal justice for his family and tribe.
Regarding the Green River Killer, his pattern was difficult for the technology of the time to penetrate. He picked up hot-enough prostitutes and runaways on a highway, then dumped the bodies in the woods. Broad target category, transience * transience, decay. Being a white married working religious man deflected suspicion; killing whores likely reduced the motivation of cops. Advances in forensic technology convicted him. Those advances make it much easier to turn a suspicion into a convicion; hence my priority on avoiding suspicion.
Child support laws are easy to enforce because there is no doubt as to the identity of the father, in the eyes of the law. Their enforcement should be compared to that of criminals in similar circumstances, such as bail jumpers.
Take good care of your wife’s pets and possessions in case she comes back to claim them. If you’re hauling her shit off to Goodwill or posting YARD SALE signs the day after her disappearance, that’s going to arouse suspicion.
Your wife should not have any possessions. Everything in my house is mine, and only hers because she is mine. She challenges this frequently, but it is only a shit test, which I easily pass. If you fail to pass it, you wind up occupying a man cave in the basement, as she escalates her property demands to force you to man up and pass it.
And if you retreat to a man cave in the basement, she invades your man cave to force you to pass the test.
“The methods of corpse disposal I mentioned on this blog are not ideas that I came up with, they are things that normies have spontaneously suggested in social settings, in front of friends and family.
People who live near the wilderness and have land, boats, and earth moving equipment have lots of options for making corpses vanish, and the existing justice system is hostile to us, so we seem to be quite relaxed about substituting ourselves for the justice system that is too hostile to protect us, and too dysfunctional to protect our enemies, sufficiently relaxed that normies discuss it in front of friends, acquaintances, and family.”
Blatant fedposting, yet you seem to still be here.
There’s a reason for that, readers.
No difference between me and the acquaintance who implied that the man who wrecked his truck would never be found – presumably because sleeping with the fishes. Maybe he was joking – what he said was quite deniable. He did not say anything that would be grounds for conviction, and neither do I.
Feds urge people to engage in terrorist acts that will be conveniently visible to the feds and their pet newsmen. I urge people to enforce law and order in ways that will be conveniently invisible.
Jim and Koanic, you guys advocate vigilante justice but how are we supposed to balance Jesus’s command to forgive others with the societal need for extrajudicial justice?
Can we get a Jim annotated Bible please?
Already have it. Church dealt with this problem as soon as it became the official religion.
Attend church and you will be required to pray “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth, peace to men of good will.”
Which implies that war is OK under some circumstances. Peace is only obligatory if the other guy allows it to be a plausible option. Failure of the sovereign to maintain order was one of those circumstances, under ample precedents ensuing as Rome fell.
Fortunately the communion of saints has been annotating the bible to deal with real world problems for two thousand years. We are now in a situation echoing the fall of Rome, as illustrated by the Kate Steinle incident. Christianity is not a suicide pact, though there is plenty of biblical support for making it a suicide pact.
Precedent is that the suicidal aspects of Christianity are supererogatory. Christ did it so you don’t have to.
See also my post How to Genocide Inferior Kinds in a Properly-Christian Manner.
Much of what you say also applies to the Central American hordes. In rural white communities, outsiders are likely to wander into flying bullets and end up in unmarked graves or dog stomachs. They’d better make for the nearest sanctuary city and stay there.
Liberals are like women, always demanding things they don’t really want or will quickly get tired of. How many immigrants can liberal cities absorb before they beg Trump to close the border?
Turn the other cheek is an invitation to brawl. One sees it all the time in MMA – offering the chin.
One can overlook personal slights and still find plenty of reasons to remove the sort of person who delivers them indiscriminately. Avenge thy neighbor instead.
Ask Hans Reiser how that’s working out for him.
What if your no-good cheating ex-wife is in the US, and you aren’t, and you can’t get back in because you’re $200,000 behind on child support (based on the income you used to earn in Silicon Valley before they fired you for being an Evil White Male)?
If you say, “Fine, I won’t go back”, how friendly are the countries you frequent toward Americans who don’t have valid passports?
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/07/01/deadbeat_dad_flees_to_philippines_leaving_four_kids_without_support.html
The Philippines is nice.
If he is talented and productive, he will find a place somewhere, somewhere where they are willing to use the talents of evil white males.
I am seeing a considerable movement of the inappropriately excluded to east asia and the middle east – people who cannot get jobs in the US because being smart, they are suspected of crimethink, even without impossible child support orders – which are actually orders to support a parade of thugs strolling through your wife’s bedroom and beating up and raping your children. No amount of money, no matter how great, can provide a decent living situation for children in this circumstance.
Did you meet a lot of Swedish expats in your travels? I read somewhere that half a million men have left Sweden, an astoundingly high number for a nation with only eight million people of both sexes.
I once asked a 30ish coworker if she was going to get married some day, and she snapped, “I can’t see the future!” She was slim and athletic, so I had naively assumed that if she wanted a husband, she would show it by e.g. growing out her hair, wearing dresses, smiling more, speaking in a more feminine tone of voice…
On reflection, a few. Males are fleeing female power.
Deleted for ignoring the feral woman problem, presupposing that there is no feral woman problem, and that no one here would imagine that there is a feral woman problem..
I’m genuinely curious to hear the entryist script on the woman question since its something that for some reason they normally just avoid. On 4chan the crypto-leftist say there is no woman problem and that anyone who talks about it is a jew. Was that CR´s script on the woman question or was it something else.
His script was that I am a Jew, that not only is there no woman problem, but we totally agree there is no woman problem, and that there is a woman problem that totally justifies our supposed desire to beat and belittle women, but it is caused by Jews, capitalists, or some such, and will be solved by the destruction of capitalism. He also attributes female behavior to males while denying females engage in that behavior. In short, all of the above, without regard to consistency. He also denies all of the above, except calling me a Jew, while attributing it to his interlocutor.
His position on the woman problem resembles the Troofer account of the real story of 911. They both have a massive oversupply of real stories.
Okay same script as crypto-leftist pretending to be Nazis use on /pol.
Personal bankruptcy is an America-only thing, not a whole first world thing. Doesn’t exist in Europe, people go under with their mortgage, give back the house and still owe the difference forever, which is precisely how Zippy defined usury. It is actually worse – it is not the average market value of the house that gets deducted from their debt but just however much the bank manages to auction the house for. Usually below. Especially for cars.
Moreover, here the collection officer of the court of law can just order your employer to dock a monthly installment from your pay. That is violence exactly in that special and limited sense that taxes are.
It is a weird thing that Catholic countries have a more usurious loan system than a predominantly Protestant one. Does anyone know who and when invented the concept of personal bankruptcy?
Yeah, in 2001 I had a long talk with a Finnish guy on a train in eastern Europe. He said that some years earlier, Finland’s central bank held interest rates too low for too long and people went on a borrowing binge. When the bubble burst, those who couldn’t repay were docked one third of their income for life, on top of all the other taxes Finns have to pay. That was a huge motivation for young people to leave Finland.
If returning the house or the car in good order does not fully discharge the loan, the loan is usurious, and the lender has bad incentives to lend irresponsibly.
For the incentives of lender and borrower to be aligned towards cooperation and good conduct, the risk has to be shared.
Prohibiting usury does not mean borrowers get free money and lenders get reamed. It means properly aligning the incentives of borrower and lender so as to ensure that the wise man borrows responsibly, and the wise lender lends responsibly to the wise man, rather than encouraging sharks to ream fools.
If a man borrows money he should not have borrowed, he should be in trouble. If a lender loans to a man who should not have borrowed, the lender should be in trouble.
Usury laws should align incentives for cooperation, which means that in many situations, such as high leverage, a very large part of the risk needs to be carried by the lender.
Enforceable apprenticeship means that if you make the equivalent of a college loan to a dumb loser, you lose money on the guy who should never have attempted that educational course, but if you make the equivalent of a college loan to someone who can and will take good advantage of that education, you can damn well make him pay it back with a healthy profit for yourself.
To properly align incentives, we declare all college loans to be usurious and make them enforceable against honor only, which is to say, only against the borrowers credit rating, confiscate the college endowments to pay back the money lost on college loans, and we introduce enforceable apprenticeship. Colleges should lose money in proportion as they gave expensive educations in stupid stuff to dumb losers on borrowed money.
[…] Michael Knowles at UKMC  Marxists, Human biodiversity deniers, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warmists, and sexual difference deniers simply lie loudly and repeatedly. When one of their lies is rebutted, they ignore the rebuttal, and instead of responding, issue a dozen new lies, then return to the old lie, assuming not only that it was never rebutted, but that everyone, including the person who rebutted it, agrees that it is the obvious, unquestioned, and unquestionable truth – a style of debate that reveals that they know that they are lying.The New York Times’s latest error of judgment: this anti-Semitic cartoon |  […]
When I described the MGTOW / NEET / grass-eating phenomenon to my dad, he said, “If I tried that, I’d have been drafted and sent to fight in Korea!”
What if they brought back the draft? It would cover both sexes of course, but we know that even women who aren’t pregnant will be routinely excused from doing anything strenuous or dangerous. What happens when the government tries to use hypergamy’s surplus males as cannon fodder?
Gangs are incipient civilization, germinations of order in chaotic neighborhoods.
Hence, any good society will have official gangs, like boy scouts, or hitler youth, or so on; these naturally in turn feed into the conscription all fine male citizens in good standing participate in.
The lack of initiatory rite of passage, and concomitant band of brotherhood, is a major void in the soul modern man.
I suspect a draft would get the same reaction as recent bump-stock/magazine bans. Of the few men who did show up, most would be sent home for being grossly overweight, grossly underweight (vegan soyboys), or high on drugs. Men have no moral obligation to defend a society that despises and dishonors them. Chasing down and imprisoning draft-dodgers would only worsen any manpower shortage, and cripple the economy as men skip work for fear of getting caught in the dragnet.
There is little relevance in speaking of militarism in terms of the current social organism as such, because the current social organism as such is not militaristic.
You wouldn’t know it from the way Hillary talks about Russia, or Eric Swalwell talks about middle-America.
Point being we’re talking about different use-cases here.
jim, question for you.
what do you think the Left’s response will be to the trump-2020 landslide?
Are you actually [***]?
Don’t use official government names, even if well known.
I thought nothing of it because it was public knowledge but noted.
I suspect that elections may well become transparently irrelevant by late 2020.
But if elections still matter in 2020, the Left’s response will likely render elections irrelevant not very long thereafter.
I still estimate the left singularity for 2026, but as we approach 2026, expect the unexpected.
Trump had a delay on taking power for two years because Sessions betrayed him and us.
I suspect it will take about 3-4 years to take power completely but Barr seems to be moving things along nicely. He should easily win 2020 if Barr’s DOJ stops fraud and it looks like they will. So if Trump stays alive and Barr stays alive until 2022 and some disaster doesn’t cost him the election king Trump in all but by then and hopefully with good successors Democracy quietly dies unnoticed after the left dies loudly and I suspect in some cases quite literally.
All other scenarios I can imagine lead to either Cathedral fanatics starting a war with Russia… or civil war.
And to all the blackpillers who say Trump is just some lucky incompetent boob who never could pull it off.
Michael Flynn, Erik Prince and Peter Thiel princes of the red deep state picked him out for a reason (and the latter two are known to be very sympathetic to not just dissident right ideas but specifically neoreactionary ideas).
“If someone tells you that capitalism is recent, he intends, personally and individually, to murder you, because he believes that is the way to acquire value. As Michael Knowles said “They rage and rage and create nothing.—
Flyover America is poor because its economy is based on agriculture and manufactured goods. Silicon Valley is rich because its economy is based on Facebook. Harvard is even less substantial than Silicon Valley, and even richer.
“Murder” in a political sense is usually the flyover class of workers deciding to produce warriors to secure their fair share. The alternative is ending up like Ireland during the potato famine, a starving food exporter, while London was rich because its economy was based on finance and insurance and paperwork.
A lot of good thought becomes buried by association with Marxism. Marxism since 1990 is in fact mostly used to assimilate and neutralize any quality dissent to the rigged competition of capitalism.
I think you have not been to silicon valley lately. Needs a coat of paint, some maintenance, and the feces on the street needs to be cleaned up, as do those shitting on the street.
Flyover America used to be poor because Obama was smashing the economy to force the great centralizations, to force white working class males to move from places where their votes mattered in federal elections, to places where their votes did not matter, because massively outvoted by hostile aliens imported to live on crime, welfare, and voting Democrat.
Under Trump, the great centralization abruptly and mysteriously reversed, and we now have the great decentralization. White males are pouring out of the bicoastal megalopoli back into places like Texas, places where their votes matter a great deal in federal elections.
Now it is flyover America that is prosperous. New York and Silicon Valley are looking shabby, and white people are moving out.
The reason coal mining and fracking are targets of special hostility is that they tend to employ white males, and tend to employ them in places where their votes matter federally.
Alienated maladapted millennials seem to often wrongly buy into the kind of arguments a certain entryist poster advances about capitalism because they were victims of both women on a rampage and Obama’s socialism and have neither a pot to piss in nor much in the way of skills to get a pot to piss in.
To which we should say yes all white leftists and especially rich white leftists will get helicopter rides and there will be plenty of loot but knock off anything that sounds like Marxism yourself, its Trump time so go out and make money…
Jim,
A question I’ve been struggling with is what is the definition of white? Is it Anglo-british? Italian? Spanish? Irish? German? We know white civilization is best continued by white people. America for example was founded by Anglo-Brits. Does this mean that allowing white non-british europeans is and was suboptimal policy?
If you want to ask about where the US went wrong with European immigration in the 1800s… we probably should have banned all Catholics from immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s.
At the current point though its best to assume that anyone who identifies as white and is not a leftist is white. Remember also that the sex pill outranks the race pill.
Why should the US have banned all Catholics? Progressivism is derived from Protestants, so allowing Catholics to immigrate probably slowed the moral decline of the country.
People talk about racial IQ differences so much that it’s hard to believe that the woman question is of higher importance than racial issues.
Catholics are Americans in the same way that South Americans are Americans.
If Americans were predominantly Swedes I’d agree but as it was they just incredibly undermined what Spandrell calls aasibayah.
What specifically about Catholics makes them so distinct as to not be Americans?
How would Americans being mostly Swedes have made a difference?
I couldn’t find the meaning of the word “aasibayah†anywhere. I’ll
just assume it means something like cultural homogeneity.
Catholic Americans don’t exist anymore, other than the mestizos. There are really only two types of white Americans now; Whites, and Ashkenazim; maybe some Italians. There are no English people in the US and there are no Irish people in the US, other than a handful of first generation immigrants. There may be some traces of European ethnic loyalty left, but past the 2nd generation not much stronger than what you find dividing Northern and Southern Englishmen.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Catholics (Catholicism is certainly no worse than Protestantism- is any denomination on Earth worse than Protestantism?), the problem is that in a democracy outsiders beget outsiders if they feel like outsiders. The Catholics in large part did- particularly the Irish because of centuries of conflict with the English and English arguments for Irish inferiority. With Southern Italians/Sicilians, maybe a longer term issue because some of them reach the level of visible minority- but for Catholic French, Germans, Irish, no inherent problems- Ireland was certainly undeveloped under English rule but like Finland post-Sweden it racks up good numbers across measures of quality of life and national prosperity, sometimes higher than the UK, and obviously the diaspora has been successful in the US and Australia.
The issue is when a group feels that no matter their achievements, wealth, or education, they’ll never really be able to enter the rings of highest status in a society. If that is viewed as a guarantee, they’re often going to try and remake the society, even if it means burning a significant part of it down, rather than be satisfied with being second-class status citizens (this, by the way, is a part of the dynamic of Ashkenazim group behavior that often gets ignored- a generalized fear of pogroms is a motivator, sure, but so is resentment from being banned from the country clubs. In fact, the latter and it’s associated implications are probably stronger than the first). JFK is a great example of this; by all standards he was the quintessential WASP, other than the ASP part, and you can see that if left a chip on his shoulder. Today this wouldn’t have been the case, as the core America is no longer Anglo, but just white- or at least, Northern European. Of course, Jewish migration and all the more recent non-white waves have been more damaging in these regards than Catholic migration, and the Catholics as a whole never made a concerted effort to maintain a tribe alternative to Americanism.
Now, I can understand that if someone feels that the Episcopalian Church (or at least Protestantism) needs to be the state religion of restoration America, that changes things (though I think most whites would convert), but I don’t realistically see Christianity being the new state religion.
Whatever religion winds up being the state religion, probably advisable to call it some bland and ancient version of Christianity, even if Odin gets in as a saint.
>but I don’t realistically see Christianity being the new state religion.
At least, not a stable one.
Orthodoxy seems to have been reasonably stable for a mighty long time – that is why it has the name orthodoxy. And it is a live religion, though its center of life is where nukes protect it from progress. After a long period of savage communist repression, Stalin started treating it as though it had two hundred thousand troops.
Episcopalianism is utterly dead, create the Imperial American Orthodox Church, except call it Episcopalianism.
Could probably work long term if we went back to the days of common people not personally reading the New Testament, though it seems like it would be exceedingly difficult to restore an old-style Church hierarchy in the modern Western world. I guess enough sticks and carrots could enforce it, but outside of the Muslim world there seems to be a clear trend of humans drifting away from anthropomorphic monotheism in the same way that they once drifted away from natural-world polytheism, and that’s quite a heavy wave to beat back. But, things looks like patterns until they don’t.
One of the great unanswered questions of WW2 for me is what would’ve happened if Himmler and co. had succeeded in the genesis of a post-Christian European religion in the wake of a German victory; an exceedingly difficult thing to pull off but maybe the enormity of that moment- the first ever unified Europe, the dawn of the atomic age, the sheer fervency of belief of the fascists- could have led to prophets emerging.
Holiness spiraled religions die. The Church puts women up on the pulpit to speak in Church, and the Church mysteriously fades away, eventually becoming an anarcho-communist-lesbian bookshop and homeless shelter.
Christianity is dying because the state and education system have taken over most of its functions, and because Christianity is being converged to progressivism.
That everyone can read the bible is certainly a problem, but I don’t think it is the real killer. The real killer is the education system. We need to discourage unauthorized bible reading, much as the state now discourages unauthorized climate research and unauthorized psychological research, but if the progressive state cannot outright forbid it, we cannot either, and I doubt it is the big problem. Unauthorized bible reading is nowhere near as dangerous to Christianity as unauthorized climate research and psychological research is to the progressive state.
Orthodoxy is certainly the best example of Christianity remaining. I do wonder though if the appearance of Orthodox societies resisting the poz is actually closely tied to the religion or to other factors that the Slavs and easterners behind the Iron Curtain have that we don’t- Catholic Poland and Hungary are also resisting.
The problem with Protestantism is not that the Word is not meant to be read, but that it is meant to be heard.
All that is necessary for men to restore the true Faith is that they hear and obey. The iPod will do what the printing press could not.
Orthodoxy seems to have the virtue of not being able to be made subversive against the state BUT at the same time not being permanently subvertable by leftists either. It would be ideal if the future American emperor could force all Catholic Churches to become Orthodox ones but I’m not sure how well American Catholics would accept it, maybe with good enough propaganda…
Stalin interestingly may have secretly converted back in 1941 in his post Barbarossa depression. He never again allowed the communist state to bother the Orthodox church again while he was alive.
We need to discourage progressive interpretations of the bible… But the relatively literalist Southern Baptists are probably the least pozzed Christian denomination (even if an entryist recently captured their central bureaucracy its decentralized at the local level against just such an event) so bible reading is not per se the problem.
We cannot realistically keep people from reading scripture other then not having people read and we don’t want that for men though perhaps women should be discouraged from reading.
There is no problem with people reading the bible for their own edification. The problem is that someone is apt to snatch some mysterious phrase, conclude he is holier than everyone else, and preach a religion based on that phrase. We definitely need to put a stop to that.
The Old Testament has a solution to these people provided they try to claim holiness and prophecize the future it commands that False Prophets be put to death.
Catholicism is innately wrong because of the Gregorian Papacy, the bishop of Rome claiming to be practically a stand in for Christ did not exist in the time of Constantine and was an usurpation.
The Papacy has always been Christ’s representative on Earth. The Pope is not a ursurpation, but a medium to Christ. The Gregorian reforms centralized papal power and reformed canon law.
Nuts
The pope has been hereticaly claiming more and more authority since 1100 AD.
Problem is that with the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, the boundaries of Papal authority no longer corresponded to the boundaries of empire
You are ignoring actual history in favor of papal propaganda. In the time of Constantine if the bishop of Rome issued a document like dictatus papae he probably would have been burned alive and certainly would have been deposed. In dictatus papae Gregory claimed supremacy over the emperor. Before him it was the other way around and Christians opposed to supremacy of monarchs were known as Donatist heretics.
Papal supremacy is priest rule which doesn’t work and even worse it’s an international and celibate priesthood. Orthodoxy is a good reactionary religion Catholicism is not.
I read the wiki on Donatists and the heresy seems to have nothing to do with papal supremacy over monarchs.
Where is the heresy in increasing papal authority? Jesus never prohibits putting God before earthly rulers. Jesus states that God has primacy over emperors and monarchs. Papal lineage can be traced directly back to Saint Peter who was given authority by Christ himself.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God, the things that are God’s“
All things belong to God, and since the Pope is the vicar of Christ, then the Earth belongs to him.
If the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists then papal authority shrinks accordingly. You can only have authority over that which currently exists.
Priestly celibacy has been around since the Church’s inception. Priests should focus on their job and on serving God, not the fickle and profane sexual needs of their wife.
If Roman Catholicism is false, then please tell me which church is the one true faith?
Nuts.
Your interpretation runs directly contrary to context, and also violates our knowledge of the history of the times, and the events that Jesus was addressing.
The Romans demanded onerous taxation, but they built roads, ensured clean drinking water, provided law and order, and provided law an order over a large area which enabled Jews to benefit from the broader world economy, and obtain wine and stuff. The wine that Jesus drank at the last supper was most likely imported across the Mediterranean, and the stuff brought by the wise men imported through a Roman port on the Red Sea. Pontius Pilate attempted to put Roman Eagles on the temple, but backed off when Jews said he would have to kill them if he did that.
So, in the context of the times, Jesus was saying that Caesar was entitled to govern Israel in worldly matters, but not entitled to put eagles on the temple.
“I read the wiki on Donatists and the heresy seems to have nothing to do with papal supremacy over monarchs.”
Constantine claimed supreme authority over church discipline (though that doctrine should be settled by councils and not one man even himself, which is the general formula the Orthodox follow) the Donatist battle cry was “what has the Emperor to do with the Church”.
Later on the Pope’s started saying “what has the Emperor to do with the Church” then started claiming worldly supremacy over the Emperor.
“Where is the heresy in increasing papal authority? ”
Donatism definitely and probably several others. I’m not enough of a scholar of the early Orthodox Church to enumerate the others but no one man got to speak for God in the early church that took a council to determine doctrine. As it was in the beginning so should it be in the end. If the Pope did not speak for Christ immediately after Christ its very strange he should suddenly acquire that power when Gregory issued Dictatus Papae.
“Priestly celibacy has been around since the Church’s inception. Priests should focus on their job and on serving God, not the fickle and profane sexual needs of their wife.”
Nonsense priest need a stake in future of their country and the world to serve their flock. Priestly celibacy did not exist until the 11th century (it did for Monks but not for priests) and it wasn’t enforced even afterwords (except to delegitimize their children from claiming Feudal rights to church lands and offices) until the reformation.
” Jesus states that God has primacy over emperors and monarchs.”
Of course the Almighty has providence over mere mortal men. The problem is positing any man to be a stand in for God.
It is best to instead believe no man is a stand in for God but that monarch’s are annoited to rule by God, and that their annoitment is of a higher power level then that of any priest.
In terms of speculating on a potential new state religion it’s legitimate to evaluate such dogmatic structure- but in terms of the actual behavior and belief of people, I would suspect the average white American Catholic spends about as much time listening to the Pope as the average white American Protestant spends giving benedictions to Martin Luther.
Which is why I hope Francis is pope forever JP II was just as big a shitlib but he hid it better and Catholics listened to him. If it were a state religion itd be different and a big problem Emperor Trump would need control over the archbishop him being in Rome would be a problem.
Even in the case of John Paul II, white Americans listened to him in the sense that they listen to “humanitarian celebritiesâ€, not in the sense that they were hearing the edicts of Christ on Earth. Maybe there are some exceptions among the elderly but the adherents of all mainstream Christian denominations in the US effectively follow sola scriptura now (filtered through the proper progressive interpretation of course, which is troublingly simple for the New Testament). For a new state religion where people actually follow the doctrine, obviously having a leftist Argentinian who stole jewelry off a corpse at the top is unthinkable.
The exceptions would have cost Trump the election I want Francis to live forever and Catholicism is a bad state religion. Orthodoxy is god
If one is determined to have Christianity as a state religion, certainly better to have national than international, and Orthodoxy would be the best starting point. But- Orthodoxy looks good in the same place that Catholicism looks good, Eastern Europe, and we’ve seen how Catholicism went in the west. Even Atheistic Czech Republic resists the poz better than far more religious western states. It’s still Christianity, and a significant portion of people who read the words of Christ are going to interpret him as a left-wing rabble-rouser, and not with zero justification. Orthodox Christianity in the East has the benefit of spending most of the last century being openly and obviously opposed by an openly and obviously left-wing egalitarian ideology, so how could Christianity be progressive? But that’s not an inherent aspect of the religion that would necessarily transplant to the west.
I always thought that allowing the Bible to be read by everyone was a mistake. Biblical interpretation is tricky. I really thought I had the right interpretation.
Here’s where I got my interpretation in case anyone is interested.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/03/jeffrey-f-barr/render-unto-caesar-amostmisunderstood-newtestamentpassage/
“Jesus tells His interrogators, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” This response begs the question of what is licitly God’s and what is licitly Caesar’s.
In the Hebrew tradition, everything rightfully belonged to God. By using the words, “image and inscription,” Jesus has already reminded His interrogators that God was owed exclusive allegiance and total love and worship. Similarly, everything economically belonged to God as well. For example, the physical land of Israel was God’s, as He instructed in Leviticus 25:23, “The land [of Israel] shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine, and you [the Israelites] are but aliens who have become my tenants.” In addition, the Jewish people were to dedicate the firstfruits, that first portion of any harvest and the first-born of any animal, to God. By giving God the firstfruits, the Jewish people acknowledged that all good things came from God and that all things, in turn, belonged to God. God even declares, “Mine is the silver and mine the gold.”
The emperor, on the other hand, also claimed that all people and things in the empire rightfully belonged to Rome. The denarius notified everyone who transacted with it that the emperor demanded exclusive allegiance and, at least, the pretense of worship — Tiberius claimed to be the worshipful son of a god. Roman occupiers served as a constant reminder that the land of Israel belonged to Rome. Roman tribute, paid with Roman currency, impressed upon the populace that the economic life depended on the emperor. The emperor’s bread and circuses maintained political order. The propaganda on the coin even attributed peace and tranquility to the emperor.
With one straightforward counter-question, Jesus skillfully points out that the claims of God and Caesar are mutually exclusive. If one’s faith is in God, then God is owed everything; Caesar’s claims are necessarily illegitimate, and he is therefore owed nothing. If, on the other hand, one’s faith is in Caesar, God’s claims are illegitimate, and Caesar is owed, at the very least, the coin which bears his image.
Jesus’ counter-question simply invites His listeners to choose allegiances.â€
I learn a lot here.
Your interpretation fails to make sense in biblical context, fails to make sense in the historical context, and violently contradicts Paul.
The historical context is that they asked Jesus about taxes in the context of an ongoing dispute with the Roman authorities that looked like it might well lead to war in the readily foreseeable future and eventually did lead to war.
In the context of this dispute, accurately parodied in “Life of Brian” “What have the Romans ever done for us”. Jesus’ reply can only mean that Ceasar has rightful authority over those sort of matters, an interpretation vigorous pushed by Paul.
Yes, the Romans were bleeding them white, as the revolutionaries accurately complain in “Life of Brian” but they were also providing good government, which, when war finally broke out, the Zealots conspicuously and spectacularly failed to do.
Your interpretation of Jesus’s position, in the historical context, has him advising them to pursue the course leading to war with Rome, for the dispute with Rome was always whether priests, pharisees, or rabbis should rule, rather than Rome or Rome’s pet Kings.
(Re-posted as this ended up in the completely wrong place)
Racial terms are inherently broad and unspecific umbrella definitions, with fuzzy edges- there will never be a formal, empirical delineation of where “white†precisely stops and begins just as there will never be an empirical delineation of where Europe stops and Asia begins. Maybe you can get most people to agree to the Urals as the boundary- okay, which meter of the Urals? Is this inch Europe or Asia? The conclusion to reach from this is not “Europe doesn’t existâ€, of course, as many leftists would like to conclude about race- the genetic umbrellas are real and tangible, clusters of population groups are biologically distinct and often distant from other clusters, and the tribal realities of race are meaningful both biologically and in terms of social technology. Just as the human mind can be presented with the image of a person and almost immediately conclude whether or not it is attractive, likewise it can conclude wether or not it is “usâ€.
(Of course, the relevance of the macro-tribe “race†is not static. Tell a person in China 500 years ago that he and the Japanese were both “East Asian†and it would mean very little to him- tell him it today and it would mean more, but still not a ton, unless it’s a worldly young person. But put Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people in the same city in the US and Asian-ness will become a thing. Race takes up more and more of the tribal position as the conscious perception of the “playing field†is increasingly global and multicultural. “White†in the colonies is essentially an ethnicity, albeit a broad and shallow one.
And yet- give that Chinese man 500 years ago the option of having his grandchildren be half-Japanese versus half-anything not Asian and I think it’s clear what he would choose).
In general, white simply means European- specifically someone of European descent, meaning genetically European dating back thousands of years ago to the time that the bulk of the European gene-pool “settled†after the Aryan migration. That does mean that some European populations with significant admixture from groups like the Turks or North Africans could be considered non-white, not completely white, or at least significantly distinct from the Northwest European Germanic-Celtic core of what virtually everyone in the world would consider white at first glance. Slavs, of course, are genetically and culturally distinct from Western Europeans.
I’m not sure an arbitrary, formal definition is necessary, even for explicitly ethnonationalist positions. An individual state would decide their own personal immigration and naturalization policies. As The Comintator referenced, Catholic immigration was damaging to the US, and it wasn’t because they weren’t white; it was primarily because they viewed themselves as, and were viewed by the native population as, an outgroup at odds with the Protestant Anglo core, with plenty of historical fuel to reinforce that perception. It’s all a matter of who “we†view as “weâ€.
There will, however, almost certainly always be a strong genetic aspect to that sense of in-group, until humans stop resembling humans. This holds true even when there is a very powerful “artificial†tribe composed of things like religion and identity- see, for example, how the Ashkenazim treated their “fellow Jew†Mizrahim when they migrated en masse to Israel after being expelled by the surrounding countries.
Race probably gets as specific as fourth or fifth cousin relatedness if you want to dive really deep into genetics, so whites are probably not cooperating 100% optimally in any Euro society today, but we have much bigger fish to fry then the slight friction of people not mostly interacting with people related to them around the fourth cousin level.
I’m a Scot, when I’m around Scots I notice it’s very slightly easier to get along with them compared to the German-Italian mixes that predominated where I grew up, but though it’s noticeable it is still very small and like I said, bigger fish to fry.
It would be optimal imo for most people to stay where they were born and interact mostly with their local communities, said communities becoming racially homogeneous and competing with other, slightly different communities in friendly, slow-drip eugenic rivalry, but impossible to implement by fiat without command-economy-style disastrous consequences.
While racial differences between European groups are true and perhaps even nontrivial, obsessing over them is like trying to snipe a sparrow on the wing while a hungry wolf is sneaking up on you. Maybe it is sound policy to exclude Slavs or the Irish, but that is something to worry about After.
White is as hard to define as beaty. You’ll recognize it when you see it
Whites are loyal to nations, which are synthetic culturo-religious groups, which is why they are more loyal in the US to Progressivism, which wishes to exterminate them, than to White Nationalism, which wishes to protect them from Progressivism. Whites are not loyal to Whites, even if they tend to view Whites as more agreeable than non-Whites on a personal level.
It does not really matter who is White. Whatever is the synthetic tribe enjoying common acceptance, Whites will be loyal to it. If it contains mostly other Whites, it will work well. But Whites will be loyal to it even if it does not work well.
Allowing in non-British meant that America became a “nation of immigrants” rather than simply Britain somewhere else. This made America’s synthetic nation open to everyone in the world. So yes, this ruined America, even though many of the individual non-British Whites allowed in were not a problem per se.
Deleted for presupposing that Anonymous Fake’s comment is true, uncontroversial, and undisputed.
The destruction of flyover America’s economy was not capitalism, but politics, and proof of this is that it was abruptly reversed when Trump got control of the executive orders that had been ordering its destruction.
The great centralization overnight became the great decentralization. Remember “those jobs are gone and not coming back”. Now they are coming back, and coming back to locations where the votes of people who live by working, rather than by crime, welfare, and voting democrat, matter in federal elections.
If you want to argue in favor of Anonymous Fakes position, I insist that you present actual arguments, rather than fake consensus.
>Flyover America is poor because…
… it’s of no value to Washington DC and coastal elites. In fact they’d much prefer if it didn’t exist.
> Silicon Valley is rich because…
… it’s of value to Washington DC so they funnel money into it.
This is called “venture capitalism”.
Silicon valley used to be rich because of silicon.
It is now rich because of Sarbannes Oxley.
>If someone tells you that capitalism is recent, he intends, personally and individually, to murder you…
Nonsense.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=capitalism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccapitalism%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccapitalism%3B%2Cc0
99.99% of the world population will tell you capitalism is recent, because it is. The word “capitalism” is recent.
Just because someone knows nothing about you or your pet definitions doesn’t mean he’s out to murder you.
The red pill is recent, but has existed far before the term. So has capitalism.
The relative recent coinage of the word capitalism is interesting though. It’s an interesting word. Many associations. I like capitalism, some don’t. However, pretty sure that if someone hates capitalism with the heat of a thousand suns, he is a hardcore marxist, and hardcore marxists are out to get people killed.
I was born and raised in a community that was behind the times. The red pill was in the air that I breathed, a long time before the word was coined. The word was coined not because red pill ideas came into existence, but because under attack by blue pill ideas.
So too has racism existed since time immemorial, but the word only appeared c. 1920 because until then, the preference for one’s own phenotypes was so obvious and natural that there was no need to stick a label on it.
The word “racism” appeared only when people started arguing that caring more about people close to one and like oneself was a sin, not because people suddenly started caring more about people close themselves and like themselves.
The word “capitalism” is recent because until recently, it was not thought of as “capitalism”, it was just the eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments.
And again I ask you: If capitalism is recent, why is it that King Solomon’s story of the good woman depicts practicing capitalism as natural, right and just, why is it that the parables of Jesus presuppose wage labor and the rightness of wage labor, presuppose the return on profit from investment and the rightness of return on profit from investment.
And again I ask you, if capitalism is recent, why did Governor William Bradford, in his condemnation of socialism and his report on the Pilgrims failed experiment in socialism, presuppose that capitalism was ordained by God in the fall? If capitalism is recent, why did Governor William Bradford perceive socialism, not capitalism, as the new and crazy idea?
The word capitalism does not appear in the Book of Proverbs, but the idea is quite adequately expressed, and if there is no word for it, it is because King Solomon presupposes it and takes it for granted as the natural social order ordained by God, King and Temple, and backed by the King’s mighty men.
And again, I tell you, respond to this argument, do not just ignore it and presuppose a consensus. Subsequent comments that ignore rebuttal and simply reassert a false consensus, without evidence and argument will be silently deleted. Don’t tell us about a supposed consensus that exists only among evil crazies.
Concede, or present a rebuttal. Tell us why the household of Solomon’s good woman was not practicing capitalism.
I don’t “presuppose a consensus”, I gave you proof that the word is recent, and I assert that 99.99% of the world population will say, if asked, that capitalism is recent. That’s not pre-supposing a consensus. It’s an assertion that consensus actually exists in the real world, now.
King Solomon has nothing to do with whether there’s consensus among the currently living people that capitalism is recent. This is something that exists (or doesn’t exist) here and now, and your quoting old sources can’t change it.
I’m not saying that the consensus is correct, but this is not the same thing.
Unresponsive.
It is utterly ridiculous to claim that a large proportion of people think that capitalism is recent.
It is a lie, you know it is a lie, and lies are a waste of bandwidth.
Let us not debate the whether a handful of Marxists have successfully conned the world into believing them (they have not, and they don’t even drink their own Koolaide) Lets debate whether capitalism is indeed ancient.
A debate you are strangely reluctant to engage in.
Whatever your intentions, I agree with the strictly worded claim you have made. People believe capitalism is recent, and many believe it is a recent historical abberation from a socialist norm.
My great uncle is forever telling me that the pendulum must soon swing back back against the extreme capitalism of the 80s to 2010s to the socialism he remembers from his childhood. When I ask him how long before he was born this socialism was in existence, he has a lot of trouble saying “between about 1940 and 1980”, a period which is incredibly short in the span of human history.
Since he is smart, he does eventually say it. And then, next time we meet, he will tell me again that current extreme capitalism is surely doomed as we moved back to the natural “moderate” equilibrium of 1970s Britain. Because he is not so smart?
That capitalism was explicitly defended in the Commandments shows, like the term “red pill”, that capitalism was under attack, and probably has been under attack through all of history. At the same time, few people can analyse in a dispassionate fashion how often in human history the state has seized 50% of income, subjected about half of the remaining private sector jobs to licensing, and all of the rest to extensive indirect regulation. If this is capitalism, what the Bible defended was not capitalism.
The theory that capitalism is recent is incoherent: people who argue it do not exactly believe it. Thus, for example, Carlylean Restorationist has never been terribly clear when and where capitalism started, a question you might suppose to be of some interest to him.
They believe that capitalism is recent the way that they believe in angels, not the way that they believe in rabbits, hence cannot be pinned down as to the details. If Carlylean Restorationist thought that capitalism was recent the way he thinks that Australia is in the southern ocean, he would be curious about when, where, and how it started.
They believe that capitalism is recent the way that that other people believe that God is Three and God is One: Except that the people who believe that God is Three and God is one generally do not believe that capitalism is recent, and the people who believe capitalism is recent generally do not believe that God is three and God is one.
People who believe that God is Three and God is One have an excuse for skipping over the details, because beyond human comprehension. What is Carlylean Restorationist’s excuse?
It is a religious belief transliterated to from the next world to this world, and a rationalization for smashing windows and messing up other people’s stuff. It is not like we are arguing about the causes of world war I or the rise of Julius Caesar.
If you want to debate the causes of World War I, a history buff will jump in enthusiastically. Ask a Marxist about the origins of capitalism, he will just fall into incoherent anger. At best he is going to act like a Christian asked to explain the Trinity.
Ninety percent of the public have never thought about when capitalism arose and have no real opinion on the topic. Of those that have an opinion, seems to me the vast majority think it ancient. Of those that think it new, they don’t believe it is new the way they believe Julius Caesar was assassinated, they believe it is new the way they believe in Global Warming and such.
If there was one person on this earth who believed that capitalism is recent the way that he believes that the internet is recent, rather than the way a Christian believes that Christ is Risen, then it would be possible to talk to him about Governor William Bradford.
If one man believes that Germany was at fault for World War One, and another believes it an unfortunate accident, or perfidious Albion, they can hold a discussion as to the causes, which which numerous facts are presented and discussed. You cannot hold such a conversation with someone who believes that capitalism is recent. You are pissing on his Eucharist.
There does not appear to be one well informed person on planet Earth who believes capitalism is recent in the way that he believes the internet is recent, or that World War One was largely fought in France.
I think you overestimate the proportion of people who hold religious beliefs with a wink. Most people who believe that three is one, and one is three, really believe it.
Don’t tell me what I said. If I said that, link to it and quote it before giving your interpretation and paraphrase.
Materialism — when viewed in the context of infinite temporal dimension: namely, of both the physical world and human generations — then ceases to be materialistic. Hence, it seems to me, Jim stresses the achievements of his descendants.
This is like coming up with calculus from notion of limits and of infinity, as applied to deltas and discrete quantities — an emergent, yet completely different realm of understanding.
Any materialist admitting possibility of emergence, infinity and its various gradations is not a materialist in the dumb sense thereof.
Spirituality arises from deep, logical contemplation of the world and its ways, both empirical and abstract. Mysticism per se (ie excluding the above) is for women, children, and small-brained men. Mysticism/spirituality derived from the above, however, is both beautiful and necessary, because it lets others culturally participate in the miracle/magic of Existence and Creation in a mutually productive, cohesive way.
Sorry for the assumption. Here is what I am remembering:
https://blog.reaction.la/culture/post-rationalism/#comment-874211
https://blog.reaction.la/culture/post-rationalism/#comment-874064
https://blog.reaction.la/culture/post-rationalism/#comment-874075
In light of these statements, I cant see how you dont view religion or spirituality as a means to a temporal end and not as a thing people (at least some people mind you, not necessarily all of them) genuinely believe.
You need to interpret those statements in the context of https://blog.reaction.la/culture/post-rationalism/#comment-875285, and the fact that we were discussing the Mormon prophet.
Also, in the context of my comment elsewhere that religion is our genes crying out for a father and a tribe.
You are not exactly wrong, but you are not right either.
The current context is my remark that Communists believe that capitalism arose recently the way Christians believe that God is Three and God is One, but Christians have the excuse that it transcedeth human understanding, while communists have no excuse.
Thus, like and not like. Your rendition of my position makes it exactly like. I don’t think it is exactly like. And, when interpreting my position on the trinity, be mindful of my comment that science, technology, and human flourishing requires a God that reached out to man by making himself small enough to be flogged through the streets of Jerusalem.
Also recollect my statement that any statement about infinities corresponds to a more complicated statement about very large numbers.
Jim I think you should do a post challenging them to prove instead to prove which ancient and medieval societies used command economies. So for instance Egypt did have a command economy (and probably history’s best run command economy) but the overwhelming majority of societies did not.
What exactly makes Egypt a command economy? Massive use of slaves? If that is the case, couldn’t you argue that slave-era Haiti was a command economy? I mean maybe it was, but I dont think I’ve seen it argued before.
Most Egyptians were theoretically not slaves but their work was controlled by government/temple bureaucrats is my understanding.
Egypt has a lot of history.
Mostly a market economy. Sometimes not.
Egypt at the time of Bronze age collapse appears to have been substantially socialist, with stuff produced by command and belonging to the state.
Bricks without straw sounds like the usual pathology of the command economy.
As do many of the economic complaints in “admonitions”
Rather we need to show that some economies were not command economies.
Plenty of ancient references to wage labor, investment, and profit.
Quite obvious most of them were not command economies.
They had to coin a new word, with the emergence of Marxist ideology (which, IMO, is old school Robin Hood type banditry married to centralizing statism).
According to Google, the word “racism” emerged in the 30’s. Does that mean that the ancient Greeks didn’t realize the systemic inferiority of Ethiopians and, generally, sub-Saharans?
It means they didn’t need a word for it.
There is an interesting discussion to be held on whether the ancient “racism” is the same as what is now called “racism”, and whether the ancient “capitalism” is what we now call “capitalism”. That latter question has interested me for a while; is there something that sets the two apart? Maybe Jim is right and there isn’t, maybe he’s wrong and there’s a defining characteristic that only the “recent” capitalism possesses.
Either way, deleting comments and claiming that people are out to murder you doesn’t really help in settling that.
Difference between ancient capitalism and the modern one is the difference between large scale industrial processes that require massive coordination (horizontally and vertically) and operations that are run by families, with mostly town-level coordination.
It’s an estimate in a rough ballpark, of course, merely to give the feel.
One theory of mine is that the distinguishing characteristic is that ancient capital was immobile – you can’t just pick up your vineyard and move it somewhere. The only mobile form of capital were ships. That’s where I would place the beginning of modern capital-ism.
The form a capital might take changed via an evolutionary process.
One of the main points that Jim is trying to make is that both the modern and the ancient capitalism are made possible and, in fact, require: 1) respect for and enforcement of private property, 2) entrepreneurial spirit. And of course, 3), it’s fundamentally fragile and easily destroyed if those 2 above are not in place.
It is amazing to me that people refuse to see what he’s been trying to convey all these years. Worse, they attempt to pervert it.
I used to consider “capitalism” a synonym for “free market and property rights”, and defended this meaning, but then at some point realized that this isn’t useful in practice, because nobody else uses the word to mean that.
Nuts
Everyone uses the word “capitalism” to mean that, to mean the free market and property rights.
Most people who use the word “capitalism” use it to mean “I am morally entitled to kill you and take your property, because you got it in the free market, and the free market is evil”, thus they are still using the word to mean the free market and property rights.
Members of the priestly classes think the free market is evil, because they think property should be assigned by status, and priests are of course the highest status. They don’t like the free market because Trump has a flying palace.
The essence of capitalism is that the entrepreneur uses the market to assign capital to its highest and best use. Members of the priestly classes don’t like Trump’s buildings because insufficiently holy. Brutalist buildings are temples to demons, therefore holy, as for example the British housing projects. Doubtless Trump would build temples to demons if they were profitable, but it has become painfully obvious that customers do not like to live in a demonic temple.
This is the core of their rage against the free market. Customers don’t like demon worship, and entrepreneurs are therefore disinclined to supply it.
It’s hard to pin down what people mean when they use “capitalism” instead of “property rights”, but I think that they mean “property rights in a Godless, Kingless environment”.
Normally, God trumps property rights, and the King trumps property rights. In their absence, property rights are supreme.
People usually try to express this as “unrestrained capitalism” or “unchecked capitalism”, but they are typically unable to articulate restrained or checked by who or what.
Nuts.
You are trying to tell me that the guys who burn down the supermarket are Godly conservatives.
They just like the sound of breaking glass and want to steal a case of beer. Watch what happens whenever unrestrained capitalism is “restrained”. The “restraint” manifests as empty supermarket shelves littered with debris, and people murdered in the street. After a while, things quiet down, but only because there are damned few shops left, and those shops have empty shelves.
The idea that there is an anticapitalist faction that supports God and Order just is not true. Anticapitalists just hate people and want to mess stuff up, as demonstrated time after time by actual conduct. They just like the sound of breaking glass. Apart from every experiment in socialism ever, look at the trail of environmental destruction left behind by any Save the Earth protest. Notice PETA and vegan protestors killing other people’s much loved animals.
I keep hearing Marxists telling me that they are on my side, but if they don’t like the guy who owns the pizza joint, they are unlikely to like me. OK, I hate Zuckerberg too – but then they start talking about pizza.
There is a legitimate anti-capitalism generated by the modern absence of restrictions on the free market present in the Bible’s Law. Marxism advances under this cover.
Not seeing what biblical restrictions on the free market you refer to, apart from usury law, which is a minefield, for the distinction between a usurious loan and a non usurious loan is tricky, and people are always trying to make it trickier.
There is also a biblical restriction on trade with enemies, because enemies seek to use trade as a vector for political and religious influence – which would be an issue if we were an independent nation and the Cathedral was trying to export its faith to us, but is pretty much irrelevant to our current situation.
America’s current egalitarian atomization is a direct consequence of her roots in vicious white slavery, whose excesses the Bible forbids. The largest Biblical restriction on the free market was in land: the patrilineages were bound to the soil. The law of honest weights and measures forbids the current fiat regime.
Fiat is government, not capitalism.
But yes, binding the family to the soil, and the soil to the family, is a major and drastic restriction on capitalism, intended to sacrifice economic efficiency for the spiritual benefits of rootedness, intended to root the now rootless Jews, and also to secure patrilineality and patriarchy.
Trouble was, they were allowed to lease the land, which improved efficiency, and removed roots.
Forbidding the leasing of land is excessive interference in the market. Market influences such as leasing land inheritance and temporary slavery prune the lineages, keeping them fit for capitalist competition. Meanwhile vigilante violence keeps the lineages fit for war.
>You are trying to tell me that the guys who burn down the supermarket are Godly conservatives.
Nonsense. You should delete your own post for telling me what I think.
I’m trying to tell you that if you take some random normies off the street and ask them whether private property is ancient or recent, they’ll answer “ancient”.
And I’m also trying to tell you that if you take some random normies off the street and ask them whether capitalism is ancient or recent, they’ll answer “recent”.
Assuming that I’m right about the outcome of these two hypothetical scenarios, what this tells us is that random normies do not consider private property and capitalism to be synonyms.
“Nuts”, you say. OK, which specific part of the above is nuts? And try to follow your own rules this time and don’t tell me what I’m supposedly trying to tell you. What I’m telling you is exactly what I’m telling you above, not more and not less.
Well, I don’t think the random normies are going to have a thought in their head about either question, but if you grab a non random normie who does have a thought in his head about the question, about one person in thirty, he is going to answer ancient to both questions. And if he does answer that capitalism is new, he is not a normie, because he believes capitalism is new the way other people believe Christ is risen, not the way he believes that the internet is new.
If a random normie existed who believed that capitalism was new, he would believe it is new the way he believes the internet is new, rather than the way other people believe that Christ is risen.
And if this random normie existed who believed that capitalism was new the way he believes the internet is new, I would be able to hold a conversation with him about it.
But see. I cannot have conversation with you about it. You will not tell me when capitalism as normies supposedly define it arose, nor the definition, nor when and where it arose according to the definition – because your definition resembles the definition of God or the Devil.
You attribute to me the position that capitalism is merely private property, despite being repeatedly corrected, you will not listen, obstinately and stubbornly imposing on me, not the left consensus as Carlylean Restorationist did, but the left consensus about what right wingers believe.
Carlylean Restorationist makes everyone a Marxist. You tell me that all normies are Marxists, and while, unlike Carlylean Restorationist, you acknowledge the existence of a tiny handful of non Marxists, you attribute to them a transparently insane and evil position. For if entrepreneurialism does not matter, if capitalism is merely private property, there is no reason for “capitalism” so defined to exist, and indeed, it should not exist.
And I predict you will refuse to tell me how this supposed normie defines capitalism, refuse to tell me when capitalism arose according to that definition, and refuse to acknowledge the standard definition of capitalism that I and everyone else uses.
You won’t criticize the normal definition of capitalism. You will refuse to acknowledge that anyone, even Ayn Rand, uses the normal definition of capitalism, no matter how clearly, passionately, and repetitiously the normal and almost universally accepted definition of capitalism is repeated.
The position that capitalism is recent is not a historical position, like “Germany invaded Poland”. It is a religious position. Instead of “Christ is Risen”, Satan has risen, satan being capitalism.
Because random normies have been educated exclusively by Marxists and normies (by definition) don’t question the underlying assumptions that they’ve been handed.
Take the experiment one step further and ask the normie what “capitalism” means if not “private property + contract enforcement + state backs up property owners when they defend their property” – you’ll get blank stares or something about big corporations.
The typical normie has the right instincts but has the wrong beliefs because he accepts what he’s been taught but senses what’s right.
> Members of the priestly classes don’t
> like Trump’s buildings because insufficiently
> holy.
Thank you for that.
No lie: The very hardest part of being in business, for me, is making my customer’s preferences and tastes more important than my own.
Ridiculous and true.
Ships are ancient. The merchant and the pastoralist are capitalism. The word “capitalism” is derived from “capital”, and the word “capital” from “head”, as in head of cattle, from the days when men counted their wealth in cows.
I don’t think that is a relevant distinction. Carlylean Restorationist demonizes the man who owns his local pizza joint, Black Lives Matter burn down their local supermarket, and Trotsky urged the peasant with one cow to murder the peasant with two cows.
They hate the small scale capitalist more than the large scale capitalist. They pretend everything is run by Wall Street and all that they are going to do is move Wall Street to Washington, but watch whom they spill forth hatred for. People like me are whom they are thinking about. They want to kill me. They are not thinking about people like Bezos or Zuckerberg. They are thinking about people like me. And if you read the 1930s stuff, they were thinking about the peasant with two cows.
Look at the rage. Carlylean Restorationist is always working up a lather about his local pizza joint, whose owner is approximately my own social class, and probably my own race and religion.
Basically because CR buys pizza he can’t afford (or personally knows someone who does) and thus sees the pizza joint owner in living colour. By contrast, he never gets close enough to Zuckerberg to make him feel like a real person.
CR suffers from Godlessness. He wants the King to save the people from their vices, which is the job of the local priest.
Unresponsive
You appear to be responding to what I would have said had I followed the script.
Your script is irritatingly and boringly unresponsive – failing hopelessly when your interlocutor strays off script.
Tell your boss to issue a script that responds to our definition of capitalism, and which discusses biblical references to capitalism.
LOL you are telling CR to tell his boss to introduce elements of blaspehmous crimethink into CR’s script how delightfully devious I never understood why you put up with responding to him so much until now.
You are trying to send the NPCs a poison redpill program back where they have to discuss wrongthink…
The problem is I suspect they’ll never do it. They can’t think of capitalism being in most ways ancient anymore then they can think that orange man might not be all bad.
Alas, history shows that Marxists evolve into murderers, once the floodgates are opened.
Look up “Socialist Revolutionary Party†— those were moderate socialists. They were mostly murdered by bolsheviks, ran away or joined them.
Marxists did kill some 3,000 in my country upon coming into power, basically decapitating the nation.
On the other hand, the French Reign of Terror killed many more, without needing any Marxism to do it.
It’d be an interesting game to predict the death toll of communists taking power in a country today. Britain will probably be a bloodbath.
French Reign of Terror was driven by same desire for power-via-bureaucratically controlled entropy that is at the heart of Marxism. It was “capitalist”/”bourgeois” merely on the surface. It’s a Marxist version of the story. Whatever support given to it by common tradesmen was temporary and mainly reactionary in nature: driven by socialist/Marxist policy of the idiotic French monarch himself (https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-french-revolution.php). It became apparent quite soon that those who drove the Revolution were interested in power, not in defending fundamental life-giving principles of a nation, as they have been delineated in the Scriptures.
Just as idiotically, Alexander II decided to dispossess the Russian nobility of their serfs by decree, in the 1860’s, thus laying the foundations of his own line’s downfall, among other horrible things.
Marx was never a great scholar. Marx wrote down what people like the French Terrorists believed, in a systematized way. In other words, telling King Mob (vox populi) that he’s justified in doing what he was going to do anyway.
They didn’t a word for it, because there were no Diversity and Inclusion commissars requiring to think otherwise.
It was obvious to them that niggers are niggers, and we do have evidence of that. In Talmud also. Also: no one needed to dwell on that, because niggers were in Africa, very rarely in Europe.
@pdimov
The Left’s most potent weapon against a heavily armed opposition is entryism and fake opposition leaders. There’s a reason Jim is emphasizing this.
Yeah, joke’s on me for taking the bait. Now I get to enjoy the perks, such as being put on moderation and having CR’s views randomly misattributed to me.
Well, does anyone want to discuss the origin of capitalism?
If 99.99% of people believe capitalism is new, if there is one person on earth who believes capitalism is new in the way that he believes the internet is new, rather than the way other people believe that Jesus Saves, why cannot I have a conversation with that person?
You made a relevant point. Several people made relevant responses to that point. The word racism is new, but human biodiversity, the broad inferiority of black people, is accurately depicted on three thousand year old Egyptian paintings.
You have not responded to that point, and have retreated from discussing the age of capitalism.
Well?
Do you think it is new?
If so, when or where?
If 99.9% of people think it is new, are they deluded? If so why. If correct, why?
If you refuse to hear the normal definition of capitalism, no matter how frequently and passionately I tell it to you, what definition of capitalism do you attribute to “normies”?
Do you think that by the “normie” definition of capitalism, capitalism is recent?
I’ve debated several people about when capitalism started. When I get done showing them examples of pretty much every capitalist activity pre Adam Smith, they generally shutdown from cognitive dissidence. Everyone in school is taught Marx’s history of economic systems and most tend to believe it because there isn’t a formal counter narrative of it presented anywhere.
Yes, they shutdown. They don’t react as if they are being corrected on a normal historical fact – like “Oh, the government role in creating the internet was important, but hardly central” or “Standard Oil got its monopoly by radically reducing the price of petrol through improved refining methods”, but as other people would react should you deny Christ is risen.
Therefore, not normies, not one of them a normie.
When someone tells you capitalism is recent he is telling you that you got your stuff by killing people and grabbing their stuff, or at least the guy who owns his local Domino’s pizza franchise got his stuff by killing people and taking their stuff, therefore he is morally entitled, neigh, morally obligated, to kill you and grab your stuff. He is not telling you that Hitler invaded Poland. He is not talking about history, he is taking a moral stance.
That capitalism is recent is not believed as a fact about the external world and history, but as a fact about the moral rightness of killing people and taking their stuff.
That capitalism is recent is not a claim about history any more than the claim that Christ is risen is a claim about history. It is a claim that Satan is risen, and therefore the person making the claim, being morally superior to you, gets to nominate people as representatives of Satan, mess up their stuff, and kill them.
People don’t debate whether capitalism is recent the way they debate whether Germany was responsible for World War I, or Versailles responsible for World War II. They debate it the way other people debate whether Christ is Risen.
I was wrong. After doing a survey of most people I know it turns out that everyone of them thought capitalism was ancient, with the most common reason for that position being stories from the bible that accept capitalism as natural and normal. The people I’ve been debating about it online were almost certainly Marxists.
I think you can safely say that anyone claiming capitalism is recent is a Marxist.
Yes, all normies believe that capitalism is ancient, except for the very large number of normies who respond “Huh? Capitalism? What is capitalism?”
Very few normies have a definition of capitalism, but those very few of them that have a definition of capitalism, have a definition that involves the capitalist creating capital and applying capital to its most productive use, that involves the capitalist causing value and capital to increase. I doubt that there is one person on the face of the earth who has a conscious and explicit definition of capitalism who believes that capitalism merely equals property rights. Either they are commies who believe it is capital ruling the oppressed masses, or they are normies and rightists who believe it is King Solomon’s good woman creating capital: “all her household are clothed with scarlet.” Or they are Randians who believe it is heroes advancing technology and creating wealth.
On the other hand most people who don’t have a conscious and explicit definition of capitalism would, if you pushed them, kind of presuppose that capitalism was just private property rights and state backing for contracts and private defense of private property, would implicitly come up with the equally implicit ten commandments definition that capitalism = property rights which commies falsely attribute to Randians.
Commies attributing this definition to Randians is troofers like depicting the World Trade Tower building seven as falling down on its own footprint like a demolition – because the Randian definition is the most strongly and vehemently different from “Capitalism is just property rights” commies particularly target and frame Randians as accepting the definition that “capitalism is merely private property rights”, just as troofers particularly assume that we agree that building seven fell down on its own footprint, because in reality building seven conspicuously fell down on the square to the south of it, therefore the fall of building seven conspicuously caused by conspicuous terrorist damage to its south face.
Marxists know their definition of capitalism (supposedly, capitalism is rule by “capital”) is incoherent and makes no sense, so hang their backup definition (supposedly capitalism is merely private property rights) on us, so that they can apply their backup attack – all private property was originally stolen, so restealing it is totally legitimate.
Being already subject to their backup attack, we of course already vehemently reject their backup definition of capitalism. Normies probably do unconsciously accept the Marxists’ backup definition, but the backup definition implies that capitalism is ancient beyond history, so normies correctly believe that capitalism is ancient beyond history.
The part where capital gets put to its highest use isn’t part of the definition as I see it but is a consequence of incentives and the type of people we are.
In pre-contact Africa they likely had the “property rights” version of capitalism but not the “highest use of capital” version because the incentives aren’t there for their particular human species.
By this formulation, capitalism as property rights dates back to before fully modern humans emerged. Capitalism by “highest use of capital” dates back to the adaptations to living somewhere where storing up food was necessary and useful.
As far as the “everything was originally stolen” part goes well… originally someone had to claim property rights over some bit of unclaimed land so it’s not exactly factually wrong. If you want to live without perpetual war you have to accept settled distribution of property.
Early feudalism tends to have somewhat mobile banditry, in that there are apt to be frequent transfers of capital at sword point. This results in capital consumption and technological decay, technology being an intangible form of capital. When things settle down to stationary banditry, the Lord is apt start creating capital, often by providing a secure environment for members of the merchant class, and granting them property rights secondary to his own property right, whereupon they start creating capital also. And sometimes the King creates a secure environment for engineers and scientists, protecting them against members of the priestly classes, as the Charles the second sent his guards to secure meetings of the royal society.
Thus a definition of capitalism that explicitly invokes entrepreneurial creation of capital and market allocation of capital is useful in understanding economic systems, useful in understanding the wealth of nations, and mighty useful in discrediting arguments made by people who aim to murder us.
The definition of capitalism as rule by capital is hostile, the definition of capital as property rights is neutral – but we need a definition that acts to keep us alive in the face of a group of people increasingly determined to kill us and getting closer to a situation where they can kill us. We need a definition that is on our side.
In the war of the definitions, the neutral definition has almost vanished, because no one has a motive to push it. One definition is pushed in order to kill me and everyone like me, one definition is pushed by me and large numbers of people similarly threatened, and the neutral definition, no one pushes.
Aside being useful in keeping us alive against people who are plotting to murder us, a definition of capitalism in which the capitalist and the creation of wealth by capitalists is the focus of the definition is useful in understanding that some societies are less capitalist than others – thus societies with a lot of mobile banditry are less capitalist, hence poorer, societies where it is hard to do transactions over distance are less capitalist, hence poorer.
If the clan respects property rights within the clan, but trade between clans is inhibited by cattle raiding and wife stealing, the talented member of the merchant class lacks scope get rich through market activities. It is useful to have a definition of capitalism that makes such a society less capitalist, thereby explaining why they are poor.
And, in case I did not mention it, useful in staying alive.
The word racism is new. Observing human biodiversity is ancient.
I haven’t really looked into the genesis of the word “racism”, but I venture a guess that it was created because it was politically beneficial to be able to call your (geo-)political opponent “racist”.
What follows is that in the past, before the word was created, it wasn’t politically beneficial to accuse your opponents of racism, and then it became so, presumably for some reason.
If we make the analogy with the word “capitalism”, and I’m not entirely sure the analogy holds, but if we go with it: in the past it wasn’t politically beneficial to accuse your enemies of being capitalist, so the word didn’t exist, and then it became beneficial (presumably for a reason), so it was created.
Well yes.
“for a reason”.
The reason that you decline to state being to smash windows, set fire to people’s homes, kill people, and take their stuff, as “racism” was applied in Detroit, and “capitalism” is being applied in Venezuela.
And now let us discuss what the definition of capitalism that you attribute to “normies” is, and whether capitalism is recent by that definition.
We obviously cannot discuss the normal definition of capitalism, since you refuse to hear it no matter how often, how plainly, and how passionately it is stated.
But though you cannot hear me, I can hear you, so if we cannot discuss the normal definition of capitalism, let us discuss the “normie” definition of capitalism.
Racism is a Marxist/Cathedral word.
The closest thing anyone in the past would use to the modern word racism is they would say “bigoted” or perhaps “racially bigoted” and generally the meaning wasn’t that racial distinction was bad it was saying the said bigot was being ignorant and unfair in making their racial distinction.
Pretty sure that the “bigot” was not applied, and was unlikely to be understood, as prejudging people on the basis of race, that the use of “bigot” in this sense postdates the coinage of “racism”.
Or, condensed, you don’t need a word for racist when everyone is racist, and you don’t need a word for capitalist when everyone is capitalist.
>We obviously cannot discuss the normal definition of capitalism, since you refuse to hear it…
As I already stated, the “normal” definition of capitalism is “property rights”. The other features you listed, such as the right of the entrepreneur to direct the use of his property to maximize its potential, are implied.
I also consider “private property” largely synonymous. For the avoidance of doubt, this is my view, and I am not attributing it to you, as you’re accusing me above.
You know that is not true, that is not how moderns define capitalism. And if there is any person on earth who uses that definition, it is certainly not the definition I use, nor reactionaries use.
That definition is the definition that leftists falsely attribute to Randians, and then they think that anyone who disagrees with Marxism must be a Randian.
Property rights is the Moses/ten commandments definition of capitalism, but it is not the King Solomon/Book of Proverbs definition, nor the Ayn Rand/Fountainhead definition.
And it certainly is not my definition.
The trouble with the “Capitalism is property rights” definition is that while it does not presuppose the leftist position that property is neither created nor destroyed, that the only way you can get what you want, the only way you can take a bigger piece of the pie for yourself is to take it from someone else, that I got my stuff by killing kings and aristocrats and robbing and enslaving blacks, so you are morally entitled to kill me and take my stuff, neigh, morally obligated to do so, it does not explicitly rebut that position either.
Therefore moderns always use a definition of capitalism that explicitly rejects the leftist argument that we deserve to be murdered, that explicitly rejects the proposition that wealth is not created or destroyed, a definition that explicitly tells us that capitalists create wealth, a definition of capitalism that implies that you are not entitled to murder me, a definition that emphasizes the creation of capital by the entrepreneur’s decisions, a definition that explicitly and overtly rebuts the left wing position that you are morally entitled, indeed morally obligated, to kill me and take my stuff, which the “property rights” definition fails to explicitly and overtly rebut.
Ninety nine percent of normies have no idea whether capitalism is ancient or recent. My new wife is a normie, and I just checked her by asking: “What is capitalism?”
She replied: “Huh? Capitalism?”
I then asked her: “Is capitalism ancient or modern?”
She replied “Huh?”
So, anyone who has an opinion on the topic, probably has thought about it. And he has probably thought about it because people like himself keep getting killed for being kulaks and people like himself got expelled from Detroit. In which case, he probably favors a definition of capitalism that necessarily implies you are not entitled to murder him. Which the “capitalism is just property rights” definition fails to necessarily imply.
Most people have no idea what capitalism is or whether it is ancient or recent, but the vast majority of the small minority who do have an opinion, have an opinion that implies that they should not be killed.
Just as a woman’s political opinion always amounts to “come the revolution, I should be considered hot”, a white male’s political opinion, if he has family and a house, always amounts to “leave me, my family, and my house alone” And so when a white male has a definition of capitalism, that definition, if he has a family and a house, always emphasizes the creative role of the entrepreneur’s decision making, that the capitalist’s power creates capital, which the “capitalism is just sacred property rights” definition fails to do.
If you ask a white male with property for his definition of capitalism, and whether he thinks capitalism is ancient or recent, chances are he is going to answer “Huh?”
But if he does give you an answer it will be, every single time, that capitalism is ancient, and the major part of his definition of capitalism will be the creation of wealth and capital by the decision making power of the entrepeneur – a major part of his definition will tell you that the value does not come from taking it from someone else, but by creating it – in other words his answer is always going to be that you are not entitled to kill him and take his stuff, just as a woman’s answer is always going to be that she should be considered hot.
If he just said “Property rights” this would not make it explicit that capital is created, thus fail to repudiate the argument that you are entitled to burn his house down and kill him because the only way he could have property is that he took it from someone else. So his definition is, one way or the other, always going to explicitly tell us that capitalism is the power of the entrepreneur creating capital.
Any modern definition of Capitalism is going to contain the entrepreneur creating capital and applying it to its most productive use, because all modern definitions of capitalism are issued by people who are being demonized preparatory to murdering them. If they were not being demonized preparatory to mass murder, it would never occur to them to define capitalism, or wonder how long it has existed.
“Bigot” originally meant sanctimonious hypocrite. Possibly related by “By God”. A perfect term to describe anyone who uses ‘racist’ as an epithet.
Congrats on re-marrying!
Capitalism is free trade, in which business owners offer goods and services for sale and voluntary customers choose to buy or not buy them.
In such instances as a transaction takes place, both sides are better off than they would otherwise have been, and in such instances as a transaction does not take place, the signal is sent to the producer that more thought is required.
Writ large, this institution maximises the happiness of the entire population and every one of the as yet unmet needs of the largest number of people is satisfied.
This was historically impeded by the state’s insistence on guilds, special favours, privileges of all sorts and silly stuffy prejudices of all kinds.
Once the principle was established that I can do whatever the hell I want with my money (within reason) without having to get a written permission slip first, the next innovation was the joint stock corporation, in which rather than have the bogus authority of ‘outright owners’, the company can be owned by the masses in such proportions as they themselves see fit. This free interchange of partial claims to the business entity brings an extra dimension of accountability to the masses, and enhances the ability of the markets to signal the producers of the factors of production as to what to do next, as opposed to the Socialist Commonwealth which was notoriously unable to do this.
THAT is the institution I’m claiming was an enormous egalitarian mistake that led inexorably to envy-driven politics, redistribution and, at best, was unable to do anything to hold back the forces of ‘cultural Marxism’ and poz.
This comment will be saved and published elsewhere if it’s censored and responded to with “that would be the Marxist view of history, and an advocacy of Marxism”.
The guilds were capitalism because they were associations of private employers individually and privately hiring employees, individually and privately owning the means of production, and using their ownership of the means of production to individually pursue profit, subject to certain rules and restraints that they agreed amongst themselves with other capitalists pursuing the same business in the same town.
Your comment is responsive, and corresponds to a definition of capitalism actually used by people who advocated free trade at around the time of the French revolution.
But it falsifies history, and falsifies the argument those people made: Bastiat and Adam Smith entirely took capitalism within a region governed by a single sovereign absolutely for granted, while you falsely depict them as advocating capitalism within such regions. Bastiat and Smith presuppose that capitalism has always existed since prehistory, while you falsely depict them as advocating the introduction of a new system.
Bastiat and Smith take absolutely for granted that the economic system within an area ruled by a single sovereign is capitalist and always has been, capitalism in one country.
The guilds were dead as an economic institution cartelizing capitalism by the fourteenth century in England and the sixteenth century in most of the rest of Europe. Bastiat was not arguing against guilds. He was arguing against commies like yourself, and also arguing that the sovereign should make it easy for merchants to transfer goods from the protection of one sovereign to another.
They never addressed the guilds, because the guilds were long dead by the time that they wrote. They never depicted the guilds as “not capitalism”, because the never depicted the guilds at all. The guilds died as the king acquired centralized power over justice and law enforcement. The guilds, when they existed, were a reflection of the dispersed and decentralized police power characteristic of feudalism. A guild monopoly extended over the territory of a single lord, and as the power of the lords diminished and the power of kings rose, the economic power of the guilds similarly diminished.
In the reactionary narrative of the guilds, they were feudal institutions whose cartel powers gave them the ability to defend the property rights of the businessmen that they coercively cartelized.
In the reactionary narrative, defending property against people like you costs, and the guilds were one way of paying for it.
The guilds were not socialism. The guilds were how capitalists exercise police power and judicial power under a feudal system. In a feudal system, police and judicial power is private property, and if a lord wants merchants on his turf, he needs to give them a share.
Thus William the Marshal grabbed a large area of land with his famously swift sword, mounted upon his swift horse capable of carrying a man in heavy armor at high speed. The King then granted him possession of what he already possessed, a distinctly uncapitalist transfer of capital.
Then William the Marshal found the land was of limited value because it had a limited number of not very useful serfs. He needed more people and better people, so had to attract them, attract them voluntarily. So he offered farmers and merchants a deal, and part of this deal was delegating his right to enforce justice to the merchant guilds – which cartel power gave them the funds and the incentive to enforce justice, and thus enforce property rights in contract and employment, while William the Marshal’s law tended to be more martial.
The reaction supports Bastiat’s advocacy of free trade – and Trump’s advocacy of free trade. But for trade to occur between a region subject to one sovereign and a region subject to another sovereign requires the transfer of property from the protection of one sovereign to another sovereign, which requires a bilateral agreement between sovereigns. And sometimes, coming to agreement is hard, and you don’t want your sovereign to roll over and be a doormat for the other sovereign. Trump engages in trade wars, not as an end in themselves, but so that trade war will be concluded by a reasonable trade peace. Trump’s trade wars are not an end in themselves, but rather, war is necessary for peace. Trump always wants to make a deal.
The guilds were capitalism, not socialism, just as Trump’s trade wars are capitalism, not socialism. We need police power to defend property against people like you, and Trump’s trade wars are a manifestation of that police power, in that they result from the need to have arrangements to transfer property from the protection of one sovereign to the protection of another and the guild’s restrictions on trade were a manifestation of that police power, in that they resulted from the lord delegating his police and judicial powers to a committee of capitalists.
Police power unavoidably tends to be provided by violently enforced monopoly. Such is life. That police power is apt to be provided by a violently enforced monopoly has an adverse effect on the economy, but if capitalists still get to create wealth and value, still a capitalist economy. The guilds were capitalism as much as Trump’s trade wars are capitalism. The reactionary narrative differs from the anarcho capitalist narrative, in that sometimes you damn well need a violent monopoly, violently enforced. It does not follow that we want a violent monopoly, violently enforced, on bread and pizza.
The guilds were capitalistic but IMHO crony capitalistic, local monopolies on industries sold by local lords or people who bought town charters from local lords.
Now here is where I disagree with Jim… Jim said in previous posts that monarchs were loath to interfere with guilds but this generally was not the case as monarchs tended to loath strong local authorities and when they impeded the commerce of the kingdom and decreased tax revenue as guilds tended to do they really didn’t like them. The common people also tended to hate the guilds (they restrained trade and jacked up prices in the way government granted monopolies do), monarchs abolishing or siding with people against guilds tended to make them more popular without any downside so in most countries the rise of a strong monarchy meant the downfall of the guilds and generally the development of a more purely capitalistic economy. Monarchs sometimes sold national monopolies as a way to raise revenue but guilds were local monopolies generally established by the local government and abolished by the national government.
The only exception to this that I’m aware of was Spain which had all sorts of local chartered monopolies that went unmolested (they called them not guilds but “Fueros”) by the central government well into the 19th century and I don’t think they were fully abolished until Franco started de-socializing in the late 1950s.
The guilds as crony capitalist institutions did fall in France but Colbert brought them back as central government controlled cartels and tax collectors so CR’s purely socialist government guilds did exist in France for a short period before the French Revolution. The 3rd Reich also had something similar with its enforced industry associations (but made up of theoretically private companies).
Not exactly crony capitalists: A baker (by which I mean the man who owned and built the bakery, not the wage laborer who baked the bread for him) was not exactly a crony, but likely the son or grandson of a baker that the lord had granted a portion of statelike power to, a portion of what moderns would call his judicial, police, and regulatory authority, though medievals had no such concept.
The baker did not exercise statelike power by having friends in high places, but by hereditary right. Chances are he inherited this hereditary right from his granddad who did have friends in high places, but his granddad was not granted this right for kissing ass, though he did kiss ass. He was granted this hereditary right because the Lord needed capitalists around to make his domain more valuable, and capitalists were rightly mistrustful of judicial, police, and regulatory power exercised by the lord.
The King had trouble controlling the lords: judicial, legislative, and police power was private property. To attract merchants to their domains, lords frequently yielded a portion of their property right in in this sort of authority to local capitalists, granted a hereditary property right in judicial, legislative, police, and regulatory power to capitalists in their domains.
The Marxist story is that capitalists were so under the thumb of aristocrats that capitalism did not exist. The reverse was the case – some capitalists obtained a grant of aristocratic authority as part of aristocratic programs to economically develop their domains.
Under the guild system markets were substantially less free, but capitalists substantially more powerful. The Marxist story that capital rules was far more true of the guild system than it is of the present day.
Wallmart security in the US can arrest a shoplifter, but they have to hand him over to police. In England, they cannot even arrest him. In medieval England, a member of the guild could arrest him and imprison him. The guild system was a reflection not of capitalists being pally with the state, but capitalists actually being the state.
Warriors had direct political power, which the King had grave difficulty controlling. A knight was cop and a judge, after the fashion of Judge Dredd. High ranking warriors needed logistics to support their knights. Needing capitalists to organize logistics, the warriors granted a portion of their direct political power to the people providing their logistics.
If the baker faced a horde of shoplifters, if he faced the equivalent of Black Lives Matter or Occupy, he would contact the lord, and some knights would take care of the problem, Judge Dredd style. But one shoplifter, his security guy would take care of the problem, Judge Dredd style.
Yes, Kings hated guilds, because guilds had aristocratic power, and the King wanted aristocratic power.
And so, as Kings rose, guilds declined.
But aristocrats continued to have power all the way to the Crimean war in England, and all the way to World War I in Europe, whereas guilds, lacking their own military capability, succumbed to the power of Kings mighty quickly.
But guilds were associations of capitalists, and capitalists having statelike power back at the start at of the thirteenth century, and then losing it by the end of the fourteenth or fifteenth century is the reverse of the Marxist story.
Deleted for confidently lying about the way that medieval guilds worked, without evidence, explanation or support for your claims.
Deleted for presupposing that we agree with your ridiculous claims, that everyone agrees with your ridiculous claims.
Deleted for argument from fake consensus.
No, the guilds were not command socialism – they were local, very local, capitalist cartels armed with local aristocratic police, judicial, and regulatory power.
If you want to argue that they were a command economy commanded from the very top, provide evidence. Did Queen Elizabeth set maximum or minimum prices? Shakespeare ridicules the concept of prices set from the top as self evidently absurd, and puts the program in the mouth of a socialist he depicts as a capricious mass murder motivated by class hatred.
If the guild economy was commanded from the top, why does Shakespeare presuppose that this is absurd and homicidal?
Notice that I just provided evidence and argument that the guild capitalists had local authority. You, instead, claim a consensus that we supposedly share.
Deleted for telling me what I think.
You ask me do I believe X or not X, where both X and not X presuppose that Marxism and whig history is true, and that I agree that Marxism and whig history is true.
No, I have not stopped beating my wife.
“If the baker faced a horde of shoplifters, if he faced the equivalent of Black Lives Matter or Occupy, he would contact the lord, and some knights would take care of the problem, Judge Dredd style. But one shoplifter, his security guy would take care of the problem, Judge Dredd style.”
My one quibble with your post here is your very last point.
EVERYONE in the Middle Ages had this right with criminals caught in the act since there were no police of any kind. The castle had guards but the chief method of “law enforcement” outside a castle or an army camp was the “hue and cry” someone would yell “STOP! Thief” and everyone was supposed to chase after the thief or thieves.
Jim, could you reverse argue a reactionary position, in the same manner that Communist Revolutionary “argues” his positions, in this case capitalism and women?
It would be in such a way that presupposes reaction is true, and that everyone agrees that reaction is true.
Which, unlike Communist Revolutionary, wouldn’t be so disingenuous, since the only person on this blog who sides with Communist Revolutionary is Communist Revolutionary.
I do, for example whenever I refer to “the priestly classes” this presupposes that Harvard is still the religious institution of the state religion of New England, as it always was,except that New England has conquered the world. And similarly when I refer to judicial robes.
And whenever I talk about the state religion, I presuppose that we always have a state religion, the only issue is to what extent the state religion is true, or at least unfalsifiable.
And whenever I refer to “feral women” this presupposes that women are not psychologically suited to be part of society – that they can only be part of the social order by submitting to and being durably attached to a male who is part of the social order, as is also presupposed in the famous query concerning a misbehaving woman: “Whose bitch be this?”
The difference is that if is someone is likely to reject these points, I am prepared to make them explicit, as I just did, and to provide evidence and argument for them.
But so far, not running into much debate about these points – crimestop prevents people from engaging me on them.
The trouble with the entryists is not that they do this, everyone does this, for it is hard to have a conversation without presuppositions. The trouble is that when their presuppositions are challenged they refuse to debate them, they go right on presupposing them as if unchallenged and unchallengeable, which is manipulative and deceptive. Also wastes bandwidth. In order to have conversation, have to have agreement on presuppostions, and make points of disagreement explicit. If someone just goes right on ranting as if there was agreement on his presuppositions when his presuppositions are disputed it is just a waste of space.
If no agreement on presuppositions, have to hold a conversation on those presuppositions. If not willing to hold such a conversation, just noise and spam. I would happily allow troofers if they were willing to debate the fall of building seven and the hole in the pentagon, but they are not – indicating that they know it is a lie.
And I would love to discuss with pdimov what normies think about capitalism, but he has so far absolutely refused to discuss the question. I have not censored anything by him, because he has not issued any comments that continue to presuppose that normies think capitalism is recent and that we agree that normies think capitalism is recent, but neither has he yet retracted his claim, nor presented supporting evidence for his claim, nor presented his claim in a context that acknowledges it is not universally accepted and entirely uncontroversial.
I just silently deleted a pile of posts by Carlylean Restorationist that patiently and at great length explain to me what I mean by capitalism. Supposedly I believe what leftists imagine Randians believe. Supposedly Randians believe that Marxism is true, but for some strange reason support the bad guys. He then patiently points out to me that being a Marxist Randian is incompatible with being a Marxist Moldbuggean. And, of course, it is.
I think I have issued thirty responses telling him that not only do I not believe anything remotely resembling the beliefs he keeps attributing to me, but there is absolutely no one on planet earth, least of all randians, who believes it, but he just keeps on going like the energiser bunny.
Notice that shopkeepers had more rights in the Middle Ages than a shopkeeper in Ferguson, USA.
Deleted for telling me what I think.
Whenever you tell me what someone thinks, it is invariably wildly and flagrantly untrue.
Not only do I not take the position you attribute to me, there is not one person on earth that takes the position you attribute to me, least of all Randians. You are arguing with what Marxists imagine non Marxists to believe.
“Notice that shopkeepers had more rights in the Middle Ages than a shopkeeper in Ferguson, USA.”
That’s freedom for you: you can let someone lose £50,000 in one night gambling and nothing will happen to you, but refuse to serve a drunk-ass nigga and you’re in for a world of trouble.
Equality every step of the way, that’s the liberal way.
We have every intention of continuing the tax on stupidity. Fools will continue to be able to lose money to the house, provided the house continues to give the lions share to the government when we are the government.
A tax on stupidity is eugenic.
It is always the case that members of the ruling coalition are higher status than members of the subject coalition – that members of the ruling coalition are protected from insult and assault, and can safely insult and assault members of the ruled coalition: the privilege of the aristocracy. Equality before the law is a lie, always was a lie. It is never practical to implement it. To implement equality before the law, the ruling coalition must be composed of angels, who will not be equal before it.
Observe that today whites can be insulted and assaulted, and are not allowed to defend themselves. Colored people, gays, and feral women have the privileges of aristocrats. A white person dare not insult a member of the official victim classes, but an official victim can insult, or attack, a white. We intend a coalition of the able, the industrious, and the prosocial, ruling the stupid, the lazy, the incompetent, and the antisocial, which necessarily implies that white people will once again be able to insult and beat up black people, and black people will no longer be able to insult and beat up white people.
Equality before the law was always a lie, which no one ever had any real intent to implement.
And in particular and especially, when I am grand inquisitor, women are going to damn well stop interrupting and talking over their bosses, and will fall silent when their boss interrupts them.
“We have every intention of continuing the tax on stupidity.”
Right, and that’s what I’ve been saying here for a long time.
Your priorities are no better than globohomo’s. You’re optimising society for efficiency.
Tucker Carlson’s position is different: the government ought to prioritise the benefit and welfare of every person it serves.
That’s true whether it’s a democratic parliament or a monarchy or any other form of government: the thing it’s FOR is the people of the land.
If that’s not the case then it’s just an occupation government and deserves to be replaced with something that DOES care about every member of the family.
We are going to optimize society to conquer the stars. If all goes well, the Holy American Empire and the Chinese Hegemony will race to each grab as much of the universe as they can before the other does.
>“Whose bitch be this?â€
Jim, it’s “Who bitch this is?” Overuse of “be” is the signature error of Whites attempting AAVE.
If government doesn’t really care enough then it deserves to be replaced!
I am a sincere rightist. Kek
“If that’s not the case then it’s just an occupation government and deserves to be replaced with something that DOES care about every member of the family.”
This is dysgenic and borderline bioleninist, it allows weak links to drag down society and keeps us from our optimal potential. It has the core problem of leftism, leftism may be entropy and everything else Jim says it is but among other things it is the systematic encouragement of failure, weakness, idiocy etc.
You say we need to keep encouraging failure. Perhaps the genetically less gifted can be elevated in the future with genetic engineering, cybernetics and nanotechnology but we can’t do it by encouraging failure in the meantime.
If you want to debate it, by all means debate it.
If you want to tell me what I think, and tell me that, like everyone else, I totally agree with cultural Marxism and whig history except that I am on the same side as the bad guys, I am going to delete your comments.
If you want to claim that there is an important difference between ancient and modern capitalism, explain that difference, and give me some rough dates for it.
Trump’s policies, with projected results:
“The Department of Defense is planning to spend $7.4 million on a troop mission at the United States-Mexico border that includes feeding and caring for migrants and border crossers…
Last month, alone, more than 92,000 border crossers were apprehended at the border. Experts have projected that at current rates, illegal immigration this year could outpace every year of the Bush and Obama administrations with potentially 1.28 million border crossers and illegal aliens entering the country.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/29/pentagon-approves-7-4m-for-troops-to-feed-care-for-border-crossers/
If they are in the hands of the army, not caring.
When Australia started stashing illegals on islands, they soon stopped coming.
They won’t stop coming because the left is actually paying them to invade though.
The “organic” illegal immigration stopped for the whole of Trump’s 1st year… the left had to go to those countries and raise armies er I mean “caravans” to get people to come.
People who use phrases like ‘truth is what is useful’ tend to use it when wanting to imply a certain range of other sentiments. (More specifically, they often tend to be people eyeball deep in superficially occult left hand path kinda shit.)
One would be ‘non-truth can be truth’, which is brainlet definition overloading. Another is ‘non-truth can be useful’, which is somewhat less risible. Yet another would be ‘there are no supervening truths or ultimate truth’, which is a typical hubris of a feeble ape creature attempting to rationalize away it’s feebleness; there must be no supervening truth, because if there is supervening truth, but it does not grasp it, that would mean it’s capacity is *deficient* in some way, which is a thought the pathologically insecure cannot abide, to the ruin of both them and those around them.
‘If P is true, i would be sad; therefore P is false.’
He’s not wrong.
“The Pentagon plans to send about 300 more U.S. active-duty troops to the border as cooks and drivers”
“100 general support troops will prepare and hand out meals to detainees and 20 military lawyers will help Immigration and Customs Enforcement in legal matters”
“According to CBP figures, the 92,000 migrants detained crossing the border in March was the highest monthly figure since 2007.”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/300-troops-head-border-serve-cooks-drivers/story?id=62652274
Meanwhile, while the Army hands out meals to aliens and drives them about some think this mass of people is a-ok if ‘in the hands of the army’. Yes to the hand that feed the aliens.
The legitimacy of legitimating capitalism is destroyed when seeing this creates mass support for aliens entering, all justified, sought, encouraged by consumerism and macro-economic indicators.
To legitimate capitalism is to drive demographic displacement.
“The legitimacy of legitimating capitalism is destroyed when seeing this creates mass support for aliens entering, all justified, sought, encouraged by consumerism and macro-economic indicators.
To legitimate capitalism is to drive demographic displacement.”
You people always give yourselves away.
https://pics.me.me/how-do-you-do-fellow-members-of-a-right-wing-1135640.png
@Booker (aka. Captain Save A Ho)
Giving women the pussy pass when it comes to consumerism, check.
Ignores the fact that HR is unaffected by H1Bs, check.
You’re both right. I’m not a reactionary and never said I was.
I had to comment initially due to my shock at how hard it is to get change. I’m still shocked but I must accept there are larger forces at work.
Okay what do you claim to be?
New subthread because it was getting unwieldy.
> In which case, he probably favors a definition of capitalism that necessarily implies you are not entitled to murder him. Which the “capitalism is just property rights†definition fails to necessarily imply.
OK, I see your thesis. I’m not sure I agree with it though.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=private+property%2Cproperty+rights%2Cfree+market%2Ccapitalism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cprivate%20property%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cproperty%20rights%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfree%20market%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccapitalism%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cprivate%20property%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cproperty%20rights%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfree%20market%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccapitalism%3B%2Cc0
“Private property” is the old term. The other three, “capitalism”, “property rights”, and “free market”, appear in concert. And anecdotally, most people who want to kill you and take your stuff oppose “property rights”, in my experience.
How I interpret this chart is that the word “capitalism” appeared, created by Communists. In that time, anyone using the word “capitalism”, or calling you “capitalist”, intended to kill you. “Property rights” appeared as a counter; people using “property rights” were those who didn’t want to be murdered.
“Capitalism” was later appropriated by the First World to have positive connotations, so now you have the first world problem that not everyone calling you “capitalist” wants to kill you, therefore you need a more nuanced heuristic. Here in the post-Second world, we don’t. To a first approximation, everyone calling you “capitalist” wants to kill you. No need for any ancient/recent distinctions.
>FWIW I am not sure pdimov is a cryptoleftist…
No leftist will recognize me as one of his own, and in the hypothetical event of a revolution, I see myself among those killed.
That said, my economic understanding has indeed been moving to the “left”. Right is orderly, stable, hierarchical society, and left is blowing up order, stability, and hierarchy so that you can end up at the top. So, is it theoretically possible, even as a thought experiment, that preserving order, stability, and hierarchy might necessitate economic intervention, the ultimate evil of the Anglocentric “right”?
Maybe it isn’t, and everyone who suggests that is a cryptoleftist, wanting to have you killed.
As Spandrell says in his debt post, the natural course is for the majority to leak capital, increasing inequality. At some point you end up with a critical mass of capital-less people, which presents a path to power, and when there’s an opportunity, opportunists appear.
Spelling this out is kind of taboo, because it places you in the same boat as Oxfam, who are emblematic of the “want to kill you and take your stuff” gang.
But, Oxfam aside, is it true or not? If it’s true, should the legitimate right interfere into this natural process somehow? Whether by doing a debt jubilee, as Spandrell observes, or via other means, such as having a religion that makes saving a virtue, and frivolous spending a sin, or by having a family-centric culture where the family – instead of the individual – accumulates capital.
All that said, what is my current thinking on ancient/recent? “Ancient capitalism” is when the majority holds and accumulates capital, and “recent capitalism” is when the majority doesn’t hold and leaks capital.
Good point. Debt jubilee is a legitimate restraint on capitalism.
The Jubiliee was a restraint on capitalism, but it is not exactly the restraint on capitalism that you imagine it to be. Rather it was the part of the deal tying Hebrews to the land, and land to the Hebrews, rooting a nomadic people, restraining land from being sold or indefinitely leased or permanently lost by failure to pay a mortgage. So, stuff was supposed to be paid off by the time the Jubilee came around. And when it generally was not paid off, they were apt to postpone the Jubilee.
Then as now the market economy subverted localism, roots, and rootedness. Which is a problem. One way around the problem is to give the landed aristocracy non transferable rights in police and judicial authority, and restrict the freedom of movement of people that cause problems, limiting movement at the bottom and the top. Serfs are immobile because someone will haul them back, aristocrats are immobile because they have property rights in intangibles connected to location and kinship.
Under the guild system, capitalists tended to be immobile because they had a right to invest in a certain business in a certain location, and other people did not have that right, but that tends to be very bad for the economy, though it is good for the local aristocrat whose grandfather gave the capitalist’s grandfather that right. Rooting capitalists has a substantial harmful impact on the economy and economic development.
But in practice, the restriction was on certain businesses and not others. If only the son of a man who owns a bakery in town X is allowed to build a bakery in town X, that is not going to screw up the economy too much provided you have an adequate supply of sons of bakers in town X.
If you extend the restriction to more specialized businesses and higher technology businesses, that is going to profoundly inhibit industrialization and the advance of technology.
I do not care about the sins of the Hebrews in the same way I do not care about the vastly worse sins of Plantation Americans. They were answered with misery.
> And when it generally was not paid off, they were apt to postpone the Jubilee.
How do you know?
Some Hebrews suggested that the Babylonian exile was punishment for their failure to observe the Jubilee. The discussion of the Jubilee claims that God will miraculously intervene to fix the economic problems that the result from the conflict between the Jubilee, and the market economy, which implies that they had problems reconciling the two – and that when God’s intervention failed to materialize, kept postponing the Jubilee, rather than bugger up the market economy.
This suggests that they were observing the Jubilee before, then stopped, then were exiled to Babylon. Otherwise there would be no correlation to imply causation.
As for the promise of provision against the disruption of Jubilee, it is no different than the promise for the sabbath year, or for mana for the sabbath. One cannot infer anything from that.
Sounds right.
The Hebrews needed to be rooted in the land, and the market economy undermines rootedness by making land into capital, and capital fungible. But the rooting program did not favor the poor against the rich, rather it sought to ensure that land remained in the patrilineal family and did not irreversibly wind up in the hands of strangers from far away.
In the end of the book of Judges, the tribe of Benjamin is massively exterminated down to a small remnant.
But you notice in a few books later, that tribe is more or less a going concern again. I suspect the Jubilee laws have a lot to do with it. The remnant was probably able to make use of it to get a rapid demographic takeoff (lots of children per generation) off the economic restoring action that it gave said tribe.
Yep. Like I always point out, maintaining long-term social stability requires balancing two systems:
1. Market economics measuring thermodynamics in gold
2. Tribal honor measuring thermodynamics in genes
Oy vey
In fact one may divide the whole NRx program, indeed all human action, into three topics: gold, genes and God.
In fact one may divide the whole NRx program, indeed all human action, into three topics: gold, genes and God.
So the bio-Leninists defile genes, the Marxists devalue gold, and the Progressives blaspheme God. Leftism may be expressed as r-selected deviance from this center, and rightism as K-selected deviance from center. For example, a Nazi intent to ethnically cleanse Slavs, or a Texan intent to ethnically cleanse South America, could be viewed as right deviation on genes, since although there is arguably some benefit for human genetic fitness, the act is not sanctioned by God. Similarly, importing Somalians to Minnesota is left-deviation on genes.
However, since the popular center is shifted so far leftwards in the Weimar West, the popular right encompasses the entire absolute right as well as the true center and much of the absolute left.
It’s nice to have a political spectrum that isn’t hopelessly mired in relativism.
The deviation of each of the three topics has both a flavor and an absolute error. The absolute error is the distance from true center. The flavor can vary. In the age of mass politics, the West is divided along the r/K axis. But in other contexts, different types of divisions are more salient.
Flavor is the axis that splits the popular center. In a multi-ethnic society, this defaults to ethnicity. In a multi-religious one, to religion. So flavor is variable.
There is a permanent flavor, that noted by John Glubb, which corresponds to r/K, and generates the cycle of history. But this flavor does not always usefully bisect the popular center.
I like this take, Koanic
People won’t move as much naturally under our system since we will massively restrict foreign immigration and there will be no need to flee states because anti capitalist have ruined the economy (since anti capitalist will become part of the final solution to the leftist problem). People will still move due to weather but moving due to economic necessity will be far less common.
>the natural course is for the majority to leak capital, increasing inequality. At some point you end up with a critical mass of capital-less people
Debatable. In homogeneous, high-IQ, politically stable countries, that doesn’t seem to be the case. When Diversity and Progress are introduced, then it is apt to become a “natural course.”
Thus, cultural Marxism. If blacks don’t own and run the supermarket in Ferguson it is racism. The problems of colored people will be solved by killing white people and taking their stuff.
We are the capitalists, we are Wall Street, as the peasant with two cows discovered he was Wall Street.
Most of the older white males I know own land, are engaged to some extent in some kind of business. Very few of them employ wage labor, though they employ agents and contractors, but they have stuff and that stuff makes money. Racism.
I don’t see a critical mass of middle aged white males without substantial productive capital, which is increasingly what is pissing off the Marxists and making them angry at white people generally.
Thus Carlylean Restorationist insists that the guy who owns your local pizza franchise is Wall Street.
The critical mass of people without capital is not white males. It is people brought here to live on crime, welfare, and voting for the left. Economic Marxism is in practice a thin cover bioleninism and racial Marxism, and every day that cover gets thinner.
“The critical mass of people without capital is not white males. It is people brought here to live on crime, welfare, and voting for the left.”
Feral women as well whether native or alien (sad to say alien ones tend to be more pleasant)… lets not forget them. But of course we have plans to solve that problem as well.
>In homogeneous, high-IQ, politically stable countries, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Low time preference would obviously work against this posited tendency, at the very least slowing it down if not countering it entirely. Still, Spandrell’s post is about China, and it fits all three. And yet,
“It’s interesting to note that the Song Dynasty, famous for its fabulous wealth, commercial mindset and urban culture, and thus a polity which you would expect to have more care about enforcing contracts, had over 200 debt jubilees over its 318 year history.”
There’s always a left half of the Bell curve.
“As Spandrell says in his debt post, the natural course is for the majority to leak capital, increasing inequality. At some point you end up with a critical mass of capital-less people, which presents a path to power, and when there’s an opportunity, opportunists appear.”
Reform the tax system along semi-Georgist lines but no jubilees. Make the student loans dischargable in bankruptcies but still no free ride out… we will not have a problem with student loans in the future.
OT: State of the laundry-folding robotics field, since the topic is Jimian.
“It takes a little bit less skill to use Foldimate than to do it by hand, I guess, but I’m not sure that the robot actually speeds up the process, and it’s selective about the folding that it does. ”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/is-there-a-future-for-laundry-folding-robots
Summary: Still some way to go.
Foldimate is not so much robot folding, as robotic assisted. Human sorts the laundry basket and orients the clothes. Once sorted and oriented, robot can do a better job and faster than human – but the usual thing is missing – and it is kind of hard to say what that thing is, though I know it when I see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo
This machine seems closer to a true laundry folder.
That video is manipulated – notice that there are moments in the video when the towel moves in an unnatural fashion.
Which implies that if you watched the unmanipulated video, would not look all that close to a true laundry folder. Poster girl principle. If this is what they come up with, the set of people that the poster girl supposedly represents has precisely zero members, and the set of robots that the poster robot represents does not exist.
In the discussion, the robot programmer reveals that if you there was shirt in among the towels, the robot would be totally screwed – and to judge by the video manipulation, even if dealing with a presorted pile that contains only towels, still somewhat screwed.
Video was simply sped up. This is standard for slow robots.
Maybe. But the robot seems to be astonishingly slow.
And, supposing that it can indeed fold towels, given sufficient time, the laundry basket is pre sorted, and the towels do not look as if they were simply dumped, but rather artfully arranged.
Yes, very slow. Plus does a lot of preparation before actually folding. Looks very brittle, and we are likely seeing the success cases.
It’s remarkable such heroics are needed to do something that looks “simple”.
Which moments do you mean? I didn’t notice any odd movements that didn’t seem to be artifacts of the 50x speed boost, though you’d think if they were honest they would upload a real-time video.
They do have slower videos, but one of them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq33WIW-JtA) starts with the towel perfectly flat and laid out and another (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7eHT-Irxk) requires human input to fold the towel, both of them more recent than the supposed autonomous sorting from a random pile. Something fishy going on.
Intentionality. Which is part of the semantic problem.
The person has a goal and can tell when they’ve failed. The robot has no goal and cannot fail.
Intentionality is a terrible word. Nevertheless, humans have intents and robots don’t. Consciousness appears to be semantics per se, which means it’s not particularly mysterious that robots have issues with intent.
It is obvious that even though a computer can beat a human at chess, the human knows he is playing chess, and the computer does not know anything.
So, self-awareness. Hypothesis: what if consciousness is dual? Like, literally, two halves of a brain monitoring each other. One plays chess, second is self-aware that the first is playing chess.
Then you can simulate the first half with a computer and (only) the second half contains the mystery of self-awareness. Don’t see how that makes the problem less hard.
I don’t think self awareness is consciousness – because most of the time I am focused on something external to myself, and am obviously conscious, but not, at that time, self aware.
Consciousness involves recursion, and self awareness is recursion – it is an example of consciousness, but is not consciousness.
It is important to disambiguate self-awareness mode of consciousness from simple awareness. Pretending awareness is always and simply aware of itself without extra effort in parallel or by serial recursion, makes people think consciousness cannot be implemented within a single connected causality.
Awareness is basically attention/working memory. Urbilaterian awareness seems to be particularly efficient at implementing context creation for working memory. By analogy to AlphaZero’s 10,000X efficiency at searching for moves [1], urbilaterians can switch context (rather than switching task/object) after only considering a small number of promising ones.
Achieve a dozen AG0 caliber breakthroughs.
Put the learning system in a semi self-sustaining body that must move around IRL, must calculate immediate context for deciding next move, in order to achieve a long term objective (like reproduction). The problem of calculating a context for current position and next movement of the body in 3D, within the medium term constraints of fleeing predators, obtaining food, vanquishing prey and competitors, within the ultimate constraint of reproducing, is what selected the urbilaterian attention mechanism to be so good at quickly coming up with a small number of very promising contexts that, demonstrate deep insight into game of life (similar to A0’s godlike moves), and, are generalizable (must work in all combinations of {current position – possible moves} in 3D). This is a problem of both finding the right approach (breakthroughs similar to AG0’s overcoming of unstable self-play via MCTS) and fine tuning of meta-parameters under selection. I think by 2035, we’ll have cybernetic systems that look conscious the way a spider looks conscious.
[1] Given only 1/10 of its opponent’s thinking time, A0 still beats Stockfish while considering only 60k positions/s vs latter’s 60m pos/s.
Chess programs work because in fact they’re human vs. human but one side gets to use a thinking machine. In the classic chess program, the only surprising thing is how much of an edge the machine has to give the assisted side. The machine grinds out hundreds to thousands of man-hours of thinking in presenting possible options to a list of instructions itself designed through thousands of man-hours. You could do it yourself on a piece of paper, but it doesn’t fit in the 2 minute time limit if you do that, so basically it’s cheating.
It’s more complicated to show that ‘deep learning’ is also just cheating, but it is.
That’s not how AlphaZero works. It just played very many games against itself, no man-hours were involved.
And if you look into how Stockfish is developed, you’ll see that even if it involves man-hours, the process is actually a manual approximation of what a genetic algorithm would have done. People submit (usually incremental and evolutionary) patches that change some small aspect and the patched Stockfish is then tested against an unpatched one in self-play. If it wins, the patch goes in.
The only amazing thing about AlphaZero is how many matches it has to play to ‘learn’ chess. It’s the same as the image categorizers: a human needs to see one cat and be told, once, it’s called ‘cat’. An AI needs to see millions of cat pictures – all carefully labelled ‘cat’ by a person.
AlphaZero can’t tell if it’s won or lost, except that humans say so. It does not care if it wins or loses, it discards or retains things according to human whim.
Of course it’s all very clever. But, no, it works exactly like I said. The fact you have to get very clever to even mimic a solution is almost a proof, by itself, that this is the wrong approach. This is like trying to fly by strapping boards to your arms and flapping really hard. If you built a flapping machine that could flap hard enough it would technically work… But the Wright brothers cannot remotely afford to make a flapping machine that vigorous.
The AlphaZero approach will make a humanlike AI by painstakingly listing every decision a human might make, categorized by what conditions the human makes it in, and having a human tell it which one is the right one. ± the bugs, it will look human.
So instead it’s provably like trying to fly by drinking something that increases your proportion of elemental air and fire.
And even if our machines could effectively extract interesting patterns from a single picture and so to some non embarrassing extent recognize its second cat, still does not touch on dasein, on the driver of the meat vehicle, on the thing in the cave that watches the shadows playing on its walls. No second brain system monitoring its base systems would, even if configured in such a way as to have dimensionality reduced representations to observe. It seems obvious to me no level of intelligence would touch on this. The idea even some ostensibly very smart people raise to explain this is a ‘side effect’ of material processes, a side effect of chemistry, or electronics, or signal systems of arbitrary nature, either arising in logic space or matter.
It is such an incredible stretch to explain what we know immediately. Qualia and volition is the substrate in which we exist. Matter is a thing that casts shadows on our cave walls, of which we have secondary information. Of possible consonance between matter and “soul”, we have tertiary information.
Side effect!
“Seems obvious” is not a proof. To the people making AI, it seems just as obvious that nothing further is necessary.
If you are working in AI, you are bound to make some progress on something. And having made some progress on something, apt to declare you have solved the hard problem of consciousness, and all that remains is some minor detail.
We have been hearing such announcements for quite some time.
I have an idea for a spam filter that would detect higher level patterns than existing spam filters detect. Pretty sure it would work, and would be useful against spearphishing. Then a marketing department would tell the users it is artificial intelligence. Pretty sure they would be lying.
I dabble in AI. Others making AI seem to partially agree with you, partially not. Those that agree with you seem to lack the capacity to talk about the issue, thus lack the capacity to understand the issue. Perhaps they ought to read Plato, or Schopenhauer, or buddhist literature, or teravad gita. Or just the Bible, although I needed to read the others before seeing it in the Bible. I have trouble figuring out where the miscommunication lies.
If consciousness is a set of functions of the mind, the distinction between subconscious and conscious becomes weird. Which ones and why that subset? Whatever we call consciousness is not that, it is the aforementioned presence. The proposition that it will, even that it possibly could, arise from functional complexity is on par with propositions of how the everything arose from a previous state of nothing. Magic at best, madness at worst.
Not one single AI thinker or consciousness thinker ever, not once, touched upon a possibility of how this might occur. It is not obvious to the people making AI that nothing further is necessary.
The problem is precisely that no one understands the issue, myself no more than anyone.
And anyone who thinks he understands it, understands it considerably less than I do.
I have proven analytically that emergent properties are not real properties. Although there’s reasons to believe complexity is not totally irrelevant to the issue, they are clearly beyond the scope of this discussion.
You’re proposing that it is not obvious to the Wright brothers whether they need to fix their wings or not, which is why they’re continuing to work solely on flapping wing designs. It’s not an impossible situation, but it means they themselves are not taking their own ideas seriously.
If you’re not sure how a fixed wing design might work, then you work on learning more about fixed wing designs. You don’t work on flapping wing designs and hope…what, inspiration will strike?
—
As always, I have a design for a machine that might work. If it doesn’t work, it shows where else to look. But nobody will try it seriously, because they’re all convinced nobody could possibly understand the issue better than they can. Very democratic and egalitarian.
And I designed it partially because I knew in advance this was the case, and wanted to demonstrate it empirically.
Since clearly ‘seems obvious’ has been declared a valid argument…
Seems obvious that the inability to think seriously about consciousness is psychological, not epistemic. Something to do with having power over other people and secularism.
A conscious entity is much harder to rule than an unconscious one, so it’s best that nobody else understands how to fully use their consciousness.
If a mind cannot be created in pure software, others might figure out the functional uses of consciousness, and thus be able to use their god-given hardware that much more effectively.
Similarly, if a mind cannot be created using pure software, then secularism becomes dubious. And we can’t have that, can we? What if Darwin’s atheism isn’t the last word on the subject?
To a lesser extent, it’s the fact that algorithmic non-thinking cannot address the topic. Objective experiments can never detect subjective events. But not using objective experiments is low status, so we have to avoid giving money to anyone who might actually be on to something.
Even if this will change, it will not change faster than the new dark age will come.
I am suspicious of analytic proofs on principle. People who rely on analytic proofs always wind up proving stuff that is either trivial or false; If they use an analytic proof in the proper domain of analytic proofs, mathematics, they prove stuff that is true, but was already obvious and well known to be true. Outside the proper domain of analytic proofs …
Plus, no two people using analytic proofs agree that the other guy’s proof is analytic, even in mathematics.
Whatever consciousness is, I think the key to it lies INSIDE the neuron, not external to it. I think the extra-neuron architecture of the brain is sufficiently finite, mappable and modellable. It’s the I/O functionality of neurons that nobody understands.
When people think of “the brain” they typically think of the vertebrate cerebrum, but it occurred to me that this is probably the SIMPLEST (architecturally) part of the brain. It’s nothing but a parallel resource engine servicing the more “primitive” structures beneath it. Millions of undifferentiated parallel processors if your will. Some animals can still function after being de-cerebrated. Although not humans, as they have “uploaded” many of their more primitive brain functions into this “ram”. But it’s why people who suffer cerebral damage can often recover. The brain just reallocates resources to undamaged areas. But suffer damage to the more “primitive” areas of the brain and you’re permanently fucked.
I think neuron to something. Soundendrite to me.
The thing about evolution is that all of the pieces are crossfunctional and adaptable. They’re all way, way smarter than anything humans have ever done. They’re designed to tolerate shuffling. So I don’t think the transcendence is in the neuron or the cerebellum – it’s everywhere.
Humans can’t build anything that will survive an eyeblink in Nature’s playground.
“The problem is precisely that no one understands the issue, myself no more than anyone.
And anyone who thinks he understands it, understands it considerably less than I do.”
This is why I never say much on this topic… I’m not sure we really rationally understand consciousness anymore then fish understand water. We know we have it… we don’t know too much more about what it is though.
Eventually they agree that proofs in mathematics are true.
Results in physics are frequently the result of analysis. There’s no particular reason philosophy cannot do the same thing. Indeed it is the same thing, in a different language.
Though certainly it’s possible that I’ve made an error. Historical results suggest I haven’t, though. The correct response to having an error is fixing it, not giving up. I tested the method an enormous number of times, escalating from the trivial to consciousness.
Most of my proposed machine would fit inside an organelle. For example, it could intentionally use a low-accuracy DNA copying method. It would also explain what’s up with sleep.
Notably neurons are known to rewrite their DNA, and I read once that there are free-floating snippets of DNA in the brain.
This is why there’s a blood-brain barrier, by the way. Your immune system is apt to see this edited DNA as foreign and attack your own brain tissue. This is also why there’s a blood barrier around the gonads.
Alrenous,
I have read some of your comments on this topic before, found them interesting. Maybe you had some great insight that i can’t see.
Your allegory with the Wright flying machine though. For this given mode of flight, functional wings are necessary. Work on creating them necessary. With complementary technology, will enable flight.
I don’t see how this fits to consciousness. Build a rudimentary mind in software, reaching the analogue to functional flight. Perhaps it will be eerily similar to us, making us doubt whether consciousness is even an interesting concept or that it indeed is an attribute of systems. Perhaps something will be severely lacking, a machine that sort of does what you want but not much more. Where is the consciousness and from where and how? Does not touch on it. Thus, a presupposition it is there, perhaps as an unreal emergent property.
(nuclear particles are emergent properties of configurations of lesser subatomic entities. everything above are emergent properties of these. The subatomics are emergent properties of standing interference waves in quantum foam. maybe. what is real?)
Max Tegmark is supposedly very wise and wrote an entire book where he also does not touch on it, reviewed by considerably less wise men but in high numbers, who did not bother commenting on it. ‘Seems obvious’ is not at all an argument and was not presented thus, the argument would go ‘if all these wise and not so wise men saw the issue, they would explain it, they don’t, so it is unresolved’. If it were possible to explain, attempts at explanation would occur, instead, handwaving at the shadows on platos cave wall.
Consciousness is not thought, we think unconsciously, and we are conscious without thought. Oriental meditative traditions quite often aim for the latter, heavy doses of psychedelics or dissociatives illustrate it in confusing ways too. As does out of body experiences or near death experiences, which are externally verified to provide the experiencer with novel correct information at disturbing rates. Or it’s all just hippie bullshit. But it is certainly not explained, or anywhere close to it.
You can’t build minds in software. This is trying to fly by drinking a potion to increase your air and fire.
You could build a mind emulation in software. This is like building a flapping machine.
We already have a wealth of demonstration that trying to do mind-things in software is amazingly expensive. It wouldn’t be similar to us at all.
Where is mass from, where and how? Where is space from? When does time occur?
Props for being on topic, at least.
On the contrary, thought is consciousness. If you ‘think’ unconsciously, it is not thought. It is merely bit manipulation.
Are you not arguing that consciousness would or could arise from sufficiently mindlike and competent algorithms? I’m arguing that there is a qualitative observable difference that everyone lives in and observes all the time.
I fully agree with this post except “thought is conscious”, so our disagreement is pointless.
And the last part is a semantic difference.
“On the contrary, thought is consciousness. If you ‘think’ unconsciously, it is not thought. It is merely bit manipulation.”
Consciousness cannot arise without thought or a critical mass of sense data but it is something else.
In certain meditative states this becomes quite apparent.
If we grant that the substrate of sophont beings are ansibles for possession by relevant entity(ies), it would only be natural for the character of the substrate to influence the character of the possession.
Consciousness is clearly a cord with one frayed end a bundle of neurons and the other a spirit. Death cuts the lower half of the cord, leaving only a spirit, like Legion. The reborn will receive a new lower half, as Jesus did first.
When Jim says “consciousness” he is usually referring to the lower half of the cord.
Humans understand jack and shit about the lower half of the cord, much less the upper.
Might intent, volition and so forth be an illusion spawned from our evolved faculties to not notice this?
Supposing consciousness is an illusion is to contradict that consciousness exists, and thus to contradict the idea that there is any mystery to be explained, and thus contradicts the very fact you’re trying to explain something.
“TRYING to explain something”
I’m seeing a problem of semantics here, as you noted earlier.
There’s a lot of No True Scotsman arguments in the consciousness discussion and it’s enlightening that so many big-brained atheist types insist on the ‘qualia’ type view of consciousness as an insoluble mystery, often indulging in talk of ‘cosmic consciousness’, pantheism and the ‘consciousness’ of insects.
If you’re intensely relaxed about the fact that every human had a human for a mother YET we’re descended from tree-dwelling monkey creatures, you shouldn’t be wrestling with The Eternal Line beyond which things are conscious and before which they’re unconscious.
It is interesting that something that can beat us at chess and mathematics is very plainly on the wrong side of that line.
All lines are blurry when you look at them close enough, but that does not mean there is no line.
It is also interesting that members of the priestly classes spend so much time, effort, and energy performing scripts that could easily be performed by things on the wrong side of the line. Ninety nine percent of judicial, legal, professorial, human resources, and mass media tasks could be and should be performed by javascript running on node.js
Accounting is being efficiently automated, and as automation proceeds, accountants generate makework that could be automated, but is not, their tasks becoming more like those of the priestly classes. The FIRE economy is the economic sector of people performing tasks better performed by robots, but who have the power to stop robots from doing their tasks.
As leftism goes ever lefter, judges, newsmen, bureaucrats, and professors around the world sound ever more like third world call center workers robotically performing scripts written for them in a language that is not their first language, scripts written for them by people far away who do not know them, trust them, or much like them. You project centralism and robotic character onto members of enemy classes, because your class is centralized and robotic.
You are arguing a definition of consciousness that defines those following a script as conscious, and their opponents as unconscious. Nuts
You presuppose that I agree with a definition of consciousness that makes the priestly classes conscious, and non human animals not conscious – which definition is transparently stupid for it makes me unconscious most of the time.
That you fail to find common presuppositions with your interlocutor suggests that that you are a spambot, and not conscious.
In order to have conversation, one must discuss points of disagreement, instead of framing your interlocutor as already agreeing with a position he has vehemently rejected as insane and motivated by evil desires.
I think a tree ant is conscious, I think a snake is conscious, because of the way they interact with me. You don’t interact – you display the characteristics of a spambot.
The difference between an electron and a quark isn’t fuzzy. The difference between a chair and a table is fuzzy because it’s a human conceit.
Come to think, the difference between 1 and 2, or most especially 1 and 0, is not fuzzy either.
I am going back to silently deleting your posts without explanation, for I have given you the same explanation more than enough times: You have to acknowledge and respond to your interlocutor’s actual position, rather than assuming he agrees with something he just called stupid and evil. If you want to argue it is not stupid and evil, you have to acknowledge that not everyone agrees rather than supposing a consensus that is vehemently disputed.
>It is interesting that something that can beat us at chess and mathematics is very plainly on the wrong side of that line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
“Contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”
My hunch is they don’t actually require that, rather we are computing the wrong things.
You are free to give exposition of ideas provided that you respond to the counter arguments to those ideas that have already been presented far too many times. Repetitious and unresponsive expositions are spam.
Misrepresenting your interlocutor’s position is a loss of bandwidth. Such comments subtract information, and if I were to allow such comments, your interlocutor would have to repeat his position all over again.
And now, it is back to silently deleting your comments – usually because they tell us what we think. When you tell us what we think, it is never what we think. Don’t tell us what we think.
Re: Tree ants.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/08/us/paper-wasps-logic-scli-intl-scn/index.html
When I interact with tree ants, which happens frequently as they keep trying to assert property rights over trees in my garden, they act as though I am a conscious being, rather than an inanimate natural force, and I am forced to interact with them as conscious beings.
Ants can smell that you’re an animal and not a plant or mineral. Activates a different set of pre-recorded behaviour.
Wasps can be caught in infinite loops. Although as per something I saw on SSC, neuron size can vary enormously. Crows have about as many neurons as monkeys, which is why they’re roughly as smart.
There’s a den-digging wasp that closes its den with a door. It opens the door, checks the surroundings, then enters the den. If you close the den again while it’s not looking, it will get trapped in a loop until you stop.
Maybe paper wasps have smaller neurons and are smarter, but I expect not very much. Ants can also get caught in loops until they starve to death. Literally a loop, in the case of ants.
If their behavior is pre-recorded, they somehow manage a better emulation of a hostile conscious creature than a video game AI does.
@alrenous
A leftist singularity is humans stuck in an ever tightening loop.
Insects seem obviously conscious to me. I trapped a fly by a leg, and it clearly panicked. They are extremely dumb but have some clever programming – the den wasp doesn’t get trapped in a loop unless something much smarter than it intentionally traps it. Apparently only blind ants can get stuck in natural loops. I believe this demonstrates that consciousness can exist in very small packets.
E.g. in the ant’s case, perhaps it allows it to recognize a smell as a smell, despite costing about five cents.
Yes. Humans can also get trapped in useless loops. We can see the ants are trapped because we’re smarter than ants. A smart human can watch a dumb human get trapped in destructive loops too, which is part of why I think some humans are Turing complete, but not all humans.
Opiate addiction.
To paraphrase Descartes I intend therefore I intend.
There are no things, only events. A stable objects is in fact an event that cause similar events to re-occur.
To wonder if you exist is an event, thus a ‘thing’. Descartes notes that to wonder if you exist is necessarily in itself a form of existing. This curiosity might be the sum total of your existence, but it’s logically impossible for it to be less than that.
Afaik this is about the state of the art on this question:
http://mit150.mit.edu/symposia/brains-minds-machines.html#tab_videos
I distinctly recall the observation being made that biologists would like for CS/theory people to give them some insight to figure out how the brain works, and CS/theory people would like biologists to give them some biological insight into how the brain works. In that panel a recurring theme was the need for good theory on AI, since there is a big gap between theory and practice.
People are playing around with this stuff without very much knowing what they are doing (which is fine, if they admitted it).
The use of one of the top deep learning techniques is justified without much proof as “reducing internal covariate shift”, which experts only understand vaguely.
I am sorry, that I interfere, but, in my opinion, this theme is not so actual.
—–
instagram web viewer | https://inhashtag.com/
That’s not how we spell Tovarish, bindi spambot.
(OT) This over 120 years old book’s anonymous author mirrors Jim’s opinions well:
“Readers must distinctly understand that SEXUAL MORALITY is nowise condemned in these
pages. In all sexual relations (as in everything else) “morality†is what Strength decrees.
Women are frail beings at the best of times and in their secret hearts are probably lovers
of the unlimited. For the welfare of the breed, and the security of descent, they must be
held in thorough subjection. Man has captured them and besides providing for, and
protecting them it is necessary to keep them “on the chain†as it were. Woe unto him,
woe unto them, and woe unto our Race, if ever these lovable creatures should break loose
from mastership, and become the rulers or equals of Man. (But that is impossible.) From
the earliest ages, Man has captured his wife by force or stratagem and to this day he does
the same. Marriage ceremonies symbolize his proprietorship — his capture. The marriage
ring is one link of a chain, emblematic of the fact that the prehistoric bridegroom chained
his “beloved one†in a cave; till she became tame, tractable, reciprocative.
The sexual degeneracy that is now so prevalent among us, is the result of Christian
Civilization; that is to say, the Demonetization of Man and the equalization of woman. As
long as the husband is absolute Imperator within his own four walls, the poisoning of the
marriage bed (now so common, and so loathsome), cannot take place. If his wife or an
intruder dares to dishonor him, their death is an effective deterrent. His daughters,
controlled with equal vigor, are not permitted to mate with every strumous Dick, Tom
and Harry, that comes smirking along; but are “given away†to Men who are born of
Good Stock; or who have proved their inherent manhood and capacity — in carnivorous
combat.”
M.i.R., ca. 1890
Thanks for that excerpt! Outstanding! Title/author or link?
Here you go, Sir.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Might_is_Right
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1172822.Might_is_Right
https://www.amazon.com/Might-Survival-Fittest-Ragnar-Redbeard/dp/0972823301
http://www.o9a.org/wp-content/uploads/texts/mightisright.pdf
While women are highly responsive to this archetype, and we need to create an environment where it appears to them that the man to whom they belong is of this archetype, we need to create a social order that facilitates very large scale cooperation, with which this archetype is incompatible. We need to simulate the environment for which women long, as a garden simulates our ancestral savanna.
On the other hand, I agree with Xenophon’s argument for war. If the other party obstructs large scale cooperation, manipulate them into giving you legitimate grounds for war, kill them, kill their children, enslave their women, and take their land – but our side will only win if we have a high trust society in cooperate/cooperate equilibrium, and they don’t, and the archetype for which women long is not going to result in high trust society in cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.
It looks like the alleged man behind the pseudonym only had one child. Not exactly a scalable situation/approach, albeit N=1 here.
“(…) we need to create a social order that facilitates very large scale cooperation, with which this archetype is incompatible. ”
The book is actually much more nuanced than the simplified “kill or be killed”, superficial message implies.
This:
“In all practical operations, non-principled persons possess a distinctive advantage over
“principled†ones. Honesty never succeeds for when it succeeds, it is not honesty. There
is no fair play in Love and War; and all life is made up of Love and War. Genuinely
honest men, die as a rule like dogs — in a ditch; and in business affairs they are
“nowhere.†In their dotage or ‘in God’s good time’ — they (nearly always) go over the
hill to State Infirmaries, unknown, friendless.”
is counterweighed by
“Certainly it is not good strategy for a man to openly proclaim his loss of faith in
conventional moralisms: if he desires to get-on in the world. *******A wiseling keeps his real
sentiments on this point to himself — guards them as his own life.****** The best mask for
moral heresy is one of pretended sanctity. It is very effective. Nearly all the Higher
Thieves are ostentatiously pious. Thus when you hear pulpiteers and journalists
vociferously proclaiming their profound acquiescence in “moral principles,†it is safe to
conclude that they are engineering some subterranean swindle.”
So far, only prudent, nothing really revolutionary insight-wise.
But – the society you guys envision will be, of course, unequal, harboring men both smart and dumb, weak and strong, ugly and handsome. There will be conflicts, not necessarily (like it usually is) recognized by all. A “true” morality “one size fits all” is unlikely to work. Some have to be the chumps. Those will be numerous, and it seems wise to manufacture a belief system for them that keeps them quite docile and hard-working, perhaps even content, which must be fundamentally different from that of the ruling class.
Some time ago I talked to Jim about my tendency to think that humans have not really free will (We cannot want what we want, only do or not do what we want, and if we don’t do it, we need willpower, which is limited, thus sooner or later humans will do what they want, that is, what their genetically programmed reward center functions dictate.)
So if the society you envision shall work, you better design it by exploiting universal human nature.
Truthful cooperation is mighty difficult, because at the biological core of human beings people compete against each other, and in no light terms: They fight over status/resources and mates, effectively reproduction, and very nearly everybody in this war is the enemy of everybody else. The real stakes are high: Nothing less is decided but who is being killed off, exterminated, and who and whose offspring is allowed to live on.
Many current and recent religions, quasireligions (political ideologies) and constitutions are actually rather accomplished at hiding this gruel reality from many/most, greatly benefiting order and cooperation.
To quote a Jew I like, commenting the financial system, but also applicable here, I think: “It’s a scam, but a good one!”
ADDENDUM:
The best rational argument I know for “large scale cooperation” is that every human is extremely limited in terms of life time, capabilities and strength.
Nobody can do and know all the things he wants competently done,
and this necessitates specialization, which necessitates a reliable and reciprocational system for exchange of the fruits of said specialization, that being products and services. Everybody’s an egoist, and greedy, too (we all want more nice things, and sooner, and cheaper), so everybody should be interested in large-scale cooperation in terms of exchange of ever-better, ever-more products and services.
Obstacles arise do to varying biological qualities, which translate into different productivity (and thus ability to trade for/get nice, desirable things), and the resulting differences in power/social status/wealth/reproductive success.
The lowest of the low in biological fitness for this process have two extreme stable outcomes that favor them:
1.)Socialism (Redistribution),
2.)Civilizational destruction (hopes for social status gains and reproductive success in chaos).
1+2 are also often combined, out of sheer practicability.
I feel there is a 3rd option:
Trick the unfit, manufacture false beliefs in their minds, distract them, make them content.
It’s exploitable that the most unfit are also very much the most stupid, so this should facilitate it naturally.
There’s booze, food, tobacco, drugs, porn and electronic entertainment; who knows what’s more available tomorrow. As far as I can observe, the unfit can be held rather content by those things.
The only source of discontent among them are smarter individuals who incite unrest among the unfit,
for example Socialists/Marxists, ultimately to use the unfit as their tools to rise to power/high status.
Sometimes such intent is clad into the gowns of a religion.
So, the mortal enemies of any stable social order, and thus “large scale cooperation”, are those who are manufacturing discontent and revolutions by inciting the otherwise sleepy unfit.
Stability can be brought about by disabling the manufacturers of discontent in the unfit,
or by making the unfit somehow immune to their message, or to prevent the message to reach the unfit.
Ultimately, the successful winners and profiteers of such cooperation must not only invest in their business,
but also in managing the unfit and the potential revolution inciters.
We compete within rules, and the rules are more restrictive on competition between near, and competition within the ingroup.
The rules should be constructed so that prosocial behavior is rewarded, and antisocial behavior punished.
That competition is inevitable does not mean that destructive competition is inevitable. Individual defection should have bad consequences, and collective defection terrible consequences, resolved in war that in the short or long run results in the collective eradication of the collectively defecting group.
Not everyone is equal. If a man is effectively using the gifts God gave him – playing his societal role well (even if it is not the highest status role) – then he has a rightful claim on pride. I have a great relationship with my mechanic. He’s been working with his hands since he was a kid. He takes pride in his job and he should; he’s good at it. I have a lot more respect for him than a lot of ‘smarter’ people with more money.
Like Jim said, we need to cultivate positive sum games. We also need an ideology that understands that not all people are equal and rewards prosocial virtue (read partly as competence). The lack of rapport between contemporary social classes is largely a result of egalitarian lies. This has not only poisoned inter-class relationships but poisoned our relationships with ourselves and with God.
I suppose part of the issue is that people hardly even notice that such a thing as destructive competition exists, because the two most visible forms of competition: business and sports, are not destructive.
E.g. before reading Moldbug I had no idea that political parties competing for power can in itself be bad, that the competition can cause collateral damage, I thought all the bad in politics comes from the wrong guys winning…
The very conservative traditions of the West tend to emphasize a sporting spirit, which makes it hard to notice destructive competition.
Thanks, ERTZ!
Jim,
Is there any chance that our failure to understand consciousness and make good AI comes from the following? In Scholastic thought, interpreted by Feser, the ability to have knowledge of particulars is an entirely natural ability of the mind (so animals can have it) but to have knowledge of abstractions, universals, essences is a supernatural ability because abstractions do not exist in nature: only triangular objects exist in nature, trianglehood does not, yet we are able to perceive this.
So it seems Scholastics, medievals had the view that thinking is a perceptive activity, ideas are out there, we just spot them. Contrast this to the modern view where thinking is a creative activity, we make abstractions, we make models, we make the universals, we invent trianglehood by abstracting away the common features of triangular objects, it doesn’t exist as such.
I tend to support the modern, creative view, but not without reservations. One of the reasons I support it is that the Scholastic account is incoherent, because they are also saying essences like triangularity exist in a pure form only in God’s mind, and in nature they always appear mixed with matter (hylomorphic dualism, matter-form dualism). Since we do not have a telepathic link to God’s mind, we cannot possible just perceive those essences, it is clear we are creatively abstracting them away from their instances as they are implemented in matter.
One reservation is that everybody who ever invented a mathemathical concept felt like they discovered something, not invented or built something. While there is no evidence of a Platonic realm where ideas live existing somewhere, doing mathemathical research surely feels like there is one, and who am I to argue with the guys actually doing the job? (Source: Penrose, TENM).
The second is that I worked with information all my life, I respect information, consider it a very important thing, and I find simple materialism tends to underestimate its importance. Saying the world consist of matter only sounds like a cobbler insulting a programmer. Of course the world consists of matter and information. Information is not matter, the whole point is that it can take any material form, the number four can expressed as the pixels in a 4 shape on a screen or IV scrawled into sand. And scrawling IV into sand very much feels like mixing information with matter. Using a 3D printer very much feels like mixing information with matter. Hylomorphic dualism can’t be all bunk.
If God’s mind is or contains logic space, trianglehood exists there since it is a logical relation. Also, since we have partial knowledge of logic space, we do have telepathic if incomplete and unreliable link to God’s mind, as we would expect being created in his image, and him not being the monkey king.
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1080558105962831872
Abstractions do exist in nature, for every natural kind exists in nature in particular examples of that universal kind. One of the big mysteries of consciousness is that we can recognize the category “cat” after seeing one cat, a capability we obviously share with lower animals, and that computers do absurdly poorly. Most animals have no difficulty with the concept that if one lion is dangerous, so is another.
The number three exists in a pile of three seashells on the beach, and that three plus three equals six is truth about seashells on the beach – that any set of three items can be matched one for one with another set of three items. The color red exists in every cherry.
Finite mathematics is discoveries about piles of seashells on the beach, and transfinite mathematics is about the piles when they get so large that we stop tracking individual seashells, and treat them as a bucket of sand, and treat the sand as if it were a continuous fluid, rather than a multitude of grains.
The paradoxes and absurdities of transfinite mathematics occur when one considers operations on a large pile of sand that necessarily involve each individual grain.
>One of the big mysteries of consciousness is that we can recognize the category “cat†after seeing one cat
But not so with objects. When a toddler is learning to speak, we point to a glass ashtray and say “ashtray”, and then she goes on to create and test hypotheses like points to a drinking glass or a glass plate and asks “ashtray?”. There is no immediate “clicking”.
While yes it is so with animals. This might be why picture books for toddlers are full of animals. Toddlers get what a cat is faster than what a shoe is, even when she has shoes but no cat nor ever seen one IRL.
We might have some strange innate, inborn knowledge about animals. No, not knowledge, but more like learning ability. It is as if we are born with some general concept of animals and when learning just fill out the details.
Worth noting that recently it was figured out how people recognize faces. It is pretty much like those videogames where you set up the face of your character with sliders, one slider is nose width, the other nose length etc. when we remember a face, we store these slider values, one slider per neuron. They were identified which ones. We are clearly not a general purpose intelligence. Faces matter, ashtrays not.
But, when computers are trained to recognize faces, they can be fooled into making ridiculous identifications by the right pattern on the eyeglasses. sp it is not trivial that that neuron correctly assesses the length of the nose.
Sure there is immediate clicking. You will only have to clarify on one glass. A computer will need a thousand glasses.
Agree with Jim. That’s clicking along two axes.
First, they recognize that ‘ashtray’ is a single symbol, not two discrete sounds.
Second, they recognize that it refers to some category of property that is held by the glass ashtray. Something something Shannon entropy: of course they have to clarify, you underspecified.
Or put another way they immediately start using a recognizable category, indeed one you already have a word for: ‘glass’.
“The paradoxes and absurdities of transfinite mathematics occur when one considers operations on a large pile of sand that necessarily involve each individual grain.”
Indeed. A prime example is the so called Banach-Tarski paradox. The theorem says you can take a solid ball, decompose it into a finite set of disjoint subsets (which have a rather infinite complexity), then reassemble these subsets into two congruent solid balls. Of course, these subsets have no measure, so the pathology here is you’re going from measure -> to no measure -> then back to measure again. So it’s basically a super fancy way of dividing by zero, but since there are no *LOGICAL* contradictions (i.e. A=~A) mathematicians think it’s cool.
I’m not really sure what the word “supernatural†is supposed to mean in a sense like this. If God exists, in the sense of an agent axiom of media, then it is the only thing that exists, as all realities and possible realities are merely extensions and aspects of it. If there is any element of existence independent of or separate from God (other than by its own artificial imposition) then it isn’t totally principal, and therefore it may be “a god†but it isn’t God. Certainly dogs comprehend abstractions, even based on linguistics, and presumably other animals do as well. So the recognition of abstractions being a supernatural phenomenon is only the case if all sentient consciousness is declared the be supernatural, which seems inappropriate as sentient consciousness appears to be a relatively important and common part of nature in our local slice of it.
That which is “natural” expresses a “nature” — natures are plans “in God’s mind” so they’re sort of behind or above the level of the “natural” things that follow (or are the putting-into-effect-of) those plans? And since the “super-” prefix indicates this “behind-or-above-the-level-of”-ness, it’s appropriate to say that natures are supernatural? (Natures are supernatural, while the natural things that express natures are only naturAL.)
I think that I see things more or less as you do, Eynon — but what do you mean by “agent axiom of media”?
I will share a relevant pet conviction of mine, which I’m inclined to hoard — but if it’s true then it’s really my duty to share it, and it’s not original with me, for several 17th century Englishmen, including perhaps Newton to some extent, believed this, and I picked up from a book by a guy named Koyre on the history of physics-ideas: God is conscious self-forming (real infinite) space; space is God. So, God is literally everywhere and we literally live within God. This thought has frequently calmed and enlivened me: I recommend it!
“This is the way God wants things to be” (for example, with respect to NATURAL sex-relations) has always seemed to me to be the only political justification that makes any sense. “Natural” = “desired by God”, for Natures (dog-nature, elephant-nature, woman-nature) are aspects of God’s overall plan.
On understanding consciousness: if awareness is basic then it can’t be understood, even by God; it can only be noted (as in, “yup, I’m aware.”)
Understanding and proof are different. We know the laws of logic even though they can only be known because you already know them, and can’t be proven.
I’m thinking that when you understand something you note its parts and the way in which they’re stuck together. So, if the thing is basic it has no parts and you can only say, “Yup, there it is.”
Part of at least the FORMATION of consciousness is the sense data -> processing feedback loop.
If deprived of all 5 sense but kept alive I suppose you will until something kills you be consciously trapped in your mind and in certain states of mediation you find that your consciousness in some form seems to remain in the absence of verbal thought…
But deprived of sense data and language I’m not sure how self aware you would ever become, the youngest infants do not seem all that self aware…
Well, have to agree with you there. Because there’s nothing to understand. It is that which understands, as in that which stands under.
>but what do you mean by “agent axiom of media�
Axiom of media in the sense that it is the propositional starting point by which all perception and occurrence has relevance; everything from it, in it, and of it. Agent in the sense that it acts with intention, or at least intention as perceived by humans.
>God is conscious self-forming (real infinite) space; space is God. So, God is literally everywhere and we literally live within God.
This would generally fit the definition of Pantheism, which strikes me as more truthful than the conception of a creator deity who stands separate and apart from creation, though I like Panentheism better still, where the universe is all God but all of God is not the universe; it’s the universe plus all potentialities beyond it.
Consciousness is inherently abstract, and thus abstracts in fact exist in nature.
You do not see triangular objects. You see the Form of Triangle, which is used to represent the object.
“So it seems Scholastics, medievals had the view that thinking is a perceptive activity, ideas are out there, we just spot them. Contrast this to the modern view where thinking is a creative activity, we make abstractions, we make models, we make the universals, we invent trianglehood by abstracting away the common features of triangular objects, it doesn’t exist as such.”
Let’s take two simple examples, integers and rational numbers. These are abstractions. I’m pretty sure if we ever make contact with intelligent space aliens they will also know what integers and rational numbers are. If two beings/cultures/species, etc. independently come of with the same concept, I think it’s pretty safe to claim that the concept exists independently of the beings/cultures/species.
Mathematics is a framework for presenting things; there are a number of mathematics, in that there are frameworks like the mathematics you might be personally familiar with, but different from it.
There are other frameworks, native to a given thede for a given concern; produced by the thede for that concern. Different thedes can use alike elements, while still using different frameworks; that it has a particular framework, particular to it’s concerns, is means by which one can even say there is a thede to begin with.
A given framework is like a sieve or a net in a given configuration; they apprehend some parts of Being, while others pass though. Like an aperture of a given dimension; some parts of Being fit, while others are shorne off.
Different frameworks can be more or less appropriate for a given aspect of Being; can be more or less felicitous in a given aspect of Being.
From a given point of concern in Being, a framework can be more or less expansive, encompassing of Being. To speak of a totally expansive framework of Being, would be to speak of Being.
Things such as frameworks can only be completely arbitrary if things to be presented are arbitrary; can only be if the things doing the presenting are arbitrary. If not, then they can not. At the limit, not even the interchangeability of signs would be completely interchangeable; some sorts of things trending towards some sorts of signs more than others; some sorts of signs more suited for some sorts of things more than others.
That is to say, that it is not without consequence, to use a sign one way or another.
The author was once young, but even as so far long, there was a niggling sense that debates over the idea of free will were a red herring. Or at the least, that people involved were really about other things besides the point.
It is useful to assume things behave in causal ways. Rather, even amongst those (you might converse with) which might seem to not so assume, there are parts of them that do (something that says things like ‘there is no causality’ is probably (a pseudopod of) something that, is wanting to investigate the causal relationship of killing you and taking your stuff).
‘Projections that die in your place’, replacing somewhat more physical evolutionary selection in nature, with an evolution in the mind; to play the teleology of things ahead of time; time before time; world formation.
The first act of magic was to tell the future. That is, the first act of magic was an act of Creation.
~
At the same time, there are plenty of things that become increasingly non-trivial to *definitely* predict at exponential rates, so assuming that definite causality is the case largely becomes a trivial or irrelevant truth anyways, simply as a matter of practical effect.
Most people, as an artifact of Modern philosophy unconsciously haunting the discourse, tend to analogize causality in ‘mechanistic’ terms, so to speak. That is, in terms of strict necessity (if->then, only if every possible if is enumerated for any given then). Such a conception which becomes clunky and inelegant when applied to broader or more transcending contexts (like the motions of institutions, capital, warfare, memes, and other lesser gods that inhabit this plane who hold agents in thrall). A specifically pertinent point, given that Being is ultimately indeterminate (in such a respect) by any being within Being (and hence, the ultimate failure, and pathology, of the so-named ‘enlightenment’ project).
Aristotelian conceptions of causality in terms of ‘Powers’ is more wieldy for these purposes. Powers tend towards their realization, but they are not *guaranteed* to realize. Further, different powers can interfere with each other, or cohere into superpowers. An elegant analogy for the indeterminacy of complex systems, and many things besides.
Something else that most free will debates tend to gloss over (for obvious reasons of political expediency) is how different beings can differ in their *capacity* for agency (another example of becoming trivial or irrelevant with regards to praxis).
In the broadest terms, a being cannot direct itself towards (nevermind succeed at) a certain course of action, if it is not capable of imagining it in the first place.
Any given action is an assertion of value; a given value is an implicit teleology; it naturally entails a logical consequence, or a certain state that its participation would lead to. To participate in the value would be to advance a given teleology to it’s end; to promote a certain Power towards it’s real-ization. One does not have to be explicitly conscious of a teleology to be advancing it; conscious of a Power to be serving it’s realization.
The more capacitative a beings imagination, it’s world formation, the more transcendent teleologies, higher Powers, such in which lesser teleologies are subsidary, it can conceive of; and hence, the more transcendent values it can intentionally participate in. What one might call a ‘natural noble’, then, is that which essentially can self-motivate, to a greater degree than it’s fellows; is something that can essentially see futures, to a greater degree than it’s fellows. Something with more *agency*, than it’s fellows.
Vice versa, the more limited a being is in such capacity, the more limited in capacity to form values on it’s own, the more limited the teleologies it can conceive of, the more limited its capacity to self-direct, the more limited it’s *agency*.
A being on the lower end of the world formation scale, is in practical respects a solipsist, a *congenital* solipsist. For such is it’s deficit that they cannot truly conceive or model the motions of other beings (and hence, reflexively project their own mindset onto all others). His principle form of steering, that which he is sensitive too, that which heretofore had so far seen his ancestors successfully through life, is in it’s own way an elegant principle of economy; he reasons only so far as to rationalize, his values and opinions formed by the validation those values and opinions receive, blown hither and tither by the winds of social forces.
For such a being to participate in more transcendent values, then, is dependent on receiving them from a tradition, or by direction, or by insuperable demands of circumstances, an increasingly inevitable Power or confluence of Powers tending towards something and sweeping up agents along for the ride.
~
Language itself is a sign post pointing to something; it is a seed that has not yet grown. The positivist project for ‘logical atoms’ with which one could make a ‘universal’ language of perfect expressiveness was doomed from the very beginning because of this. At the end of the day no matter what, language has to be ‘met halfway’ at one point or another; the ability of the receiver is a crucial part of the equation. Capacity for world formation is the water that makes that seed bloom into meaning. The less ‘water’, the less meaning (and many other things besides).
Certainly, calculative aptitude is still possible without (a lot of) imaginative aptitude; such is what Chinese Rooms are after all. Another phrase for the range between being long on calculation and short on world formation would be ‘the autism spectrum’. (The positivist project was basically sperg rage over the difficulties they had comprehending already existing language games.)
The Chinese Room itself is not wholly without use either however; it represents, in a way, an ‘extension’, or ‘offloading’, of another being’s formational ability. And hence, can serve as a sort of bootstrap for a lesser being, participating in a given value-system ‘naively’, without necessarily having to (be able too) understand it to a sufficient degree. Law is transmuted sophia of the lawgiver.
It is not a hard and fast delineation either, but rather a range in praxis, of more or less reliance; calculation serving as ‘way-stations’ between which further thought can organize, or sparks from which further though can stoke. As that great sage Thomas Carlyle once observed, “conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows”.
(It is a foremost pathology of the mind of course, in there being subjects who rely on little *but* such naive calculation on it’s own for judgement; they do not see where they go boink, and they frequently (and inevitably) go boink somewhere. And from one boink, any boink.)
~
Frameworks, as such that are spoken of here, are themselves things designed for a sort of thing that can use them.
A framework has no utility to something that cannot use it. However fine a seed may be, it is useless to something with no ‘water’. It can be very useful, however, to something with some, if not a whole lot, of His water.
Greetings. First I’d like to thank you for this blog. It’s one of the most informative websites out there.
I’d like to ask the following question. Are there any decent resources helpful for learning how to interact with women in a nonsexual manner? Such as with family members, or elderly women.
In addition, do you have any thoughts regarding technologies allowing men to reproduce without women, or women without men? Is either option a possibility, notwithstanding the scientific decline caused by progressivism?
Women don’t react in a non sexual manner. Even old married women with children are still women. They just tone it down a bit. Even old married women with children still get hostile if they have beta males around while they are not being supervised by an alpha male. You have to game them too, even though you are not attracted to them.
Even with an older woman, you can never relax, never let your guard down, unless there is a higher alpha male around. If no alpha male around, and you are not alpha, she will turn on you viciously.
You can relax if she is married and her husband is pretty alpha, otherwise you will still come under attack, which has to deflected by the usual means – albeit the usual means are a lot easier on old women.
Women without men is easy, just buy sperm, though you can’t always trust the quality. One fertility clinic said its sperm was from white college students with high SAT scores when it was actually from a retarded Indonesian dwarf or some such.
Men without women is a bit more complicated, but entirely doable with today’s technology:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/9fef2y/the_long_term/e5vwwu6/
Jim points out that the expensive part is paying a woman to look after the child, or deep-sixing your career to do it yourself.
Heartiste was just kicked out of wordpress. I wonder why now.
Things seem to be accelerating.
The only question was: why not earlier. To which the answer is: they’re not that competent.
F for Heartiste though. Rough casualty.
HOLY SHIT!!!
I hope that this immense body of wisdom is backed up in a thousand places.
It always seemed nuts to me to run that blog on wordpress – that they were inevitably going to shut it down, and refuse to release the backups, and the only surprising thing is that it had not happened already.
Needs to run the blog on wordpress software on a debian virtual machine, to which he has the root login and the full backups, and that machine located in the Chinese hegemony (but not in China) or the Russian hegemony, what there is of it.
Since I saw this coming, I should have made a full backup of his site, but I never got around to it.
If you are running a blog with unapproved contents, need root login, or at least your own domain name and full backups.
There is at the very least a month old snapshot:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190503123116/http://heartiste.wordpress.com/
F
Jim as much as ill miss new articles and comments from you if you think you need to make a backup of the snapshot here (of the internet’s 2nd most redpilled site) we understand.
I’m really surprised it took them this long.
They’re probally mass banning rightwing redditors too. I’ve had 3 accounts banned in the last week, none of which broke any rules on the site.
The Cathedral and their pet glow in the darks are panicking because the Barr tab is due.
https://i.ibb.co/nfXFn5s/1557196949603.jpg
Roosh just needs to claim HITLER was a TRANS BLACK WOMAN …like Shakespeare- and he’ll be back in.
Fuck it: if they wanna claim White mens achievements they can own them all.
Want Hamilton, Shakespeare, the Moon landings?
They can own HITLER WAS A BLACK WOMAN too.
You’re allowed to have words mean whatever you want, but if you want them to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, you need to say so first.
Yes. Although the use of ‘possession’ here would seem tendentious.
Not an argument. A waste of words.
ref: https://blog.reaction.la/politics/michael-knowles-at-ukmc/#comment-2060303