The drift to civil war

Whichever outcome happens, Trump in prison or the swamp in prison, as leftism keeps getting lefter the stakes just keep getting higher, and the processes for seizing the stakes are losing legitimacy. When things are falling apart, the first guy to escalate tends to win, and the first guy to escalate to naked violence is likely to win.

The deep state, the swamp, figured that they would illegally hound the Trump campaign, and something was bound to turn up that would retroactively justify the investigation, and they could jail Trump for some crime or other.

Because, hey if any of them were investigated, not that that could ever happen, something would turn up.

Well, they have been at it for two years, and nothing has turned up. What the press keeps announcing as another triumph is that in the course of casting the net wider and wider, they find some technicality or other with which to charge someone or other somehow connected to Trump, and hope to “turn him” – get him to rat on Trump, to reveal all these terrible Trump crimes that must surely exist. Every leftist assumes, sees as quite obvious, that if anyone connected to Trump is brought under pressure, he is likely to have some Trump crimes to report. Its inevitable and obvious – because everyone has some crimes, right?

But after two years of this, of people supposedly being about to “turn” as a result of being charged with crimes increasingly technical, boring, irrelevant, and legalistic, it is increasingly obvious that these Trump crimes do not exist, and all this illegal use of police and investigatory power is going to get them in trouble. If anyone was going to “turn”, he would have turned by now. If anything was going to turn up, would have turned up by now.

They are investigating people and charging people to pressure them to rat on Trump, to reveal the terrible Trump crimes that surely must exist. No ratting happens, indicating no Trump crimes exist.

The uniform and confident expectation that if you put the heat on some random Trump associate, he will have the goods on Trump, reveals that if you were to put the heat on some random swamp dweller, he would have the goods on some more senior swamp dweller.

Predictably, the deep state, and entire left, reacts to this problem not by conciliation and retreat, but by escalation.

A little illegality (of which they hoped that they would be able to say “Well, what does it matter now” after turning up some Trump crime that would retroactively justify the investigation) has been slowly turning into a big illegality with nothing to justify it.

And when an illegality gets big enough, it is civil war.

On lefty boards, I keep hearing the argument “Well the first FBI and DoJ actions could not have been illegal, because if they were then the later actions would be even more illegal”.

There is a flaw in that argument.

The real meaning of that argument is “Anything we do is legal because we do it, and anything you do is illegal because you do it, because we can and will escalate further than you dare to escalate.” Wanna bet about what Trump will not dare? Duterte escalated all the way, and is as a result hugely popular.

They might be right. No wall yet, and the swamp shows no signs of draining, but if they are right this time, sooner or later, will be wrong.

The expectation that something would turn up is projection. They know nothing about Trump except what everyone knows, indeed they know less, because they close their eyes for fear of exposure to thought crime. That they think that something will turn up, that any close associate of Trump must know of Trump crimes, and therefore bringing a close associate of Trump under pressure will result in him ratting out Trump for some crime or other, implies that bringing any swamp dweller under pressure will result in him ratting out a more senior swamp dweller for some crime or other.

John Huber has been appointed to investigate the swamp.

So, will John Huber do the job? Will he obey the presidency and disobey the president, or will he obey the president and disobey the presidency?

On the one hand, John Huber is an Obama appointee, which would suggest that the swamp has something on him. The nature of the swamp is that to advance very far, you have to participate in hideous crimes, you have to demonstrate loyalty by making yourself blackmailable. We don’t actually have any very concrete evidence of swamp dwellers sexually murdering abducted third world children in obscene satanic group rituals, but it is the kind of thing that they would do, and their thinking is the kind of thinking that one would expect of people socially required to do that kind of thing. If they had a normal disgust reflex, if anyone in their social circle had a normal disgust reflex, someone would have told them that 10:10 No Pressure was a really bad idea.

But, on the other hand John Huber lives were he was born. He is answerable to his God, who is represented on earth by his Church, his tribe, and his congregation. Should he fail to do his duty to the law and to his nominal employer (to President Trump) his family and his congregation is likely to look at him funny, which will give him the feeling that God is looking at him funny. That he hangs out in Utah, rather than hanging out in the swamp, means that the swamp dwellers did not have all that much opportunity to socially inveigle him to participate in blackmail material. So there is a good chance that he is going to do his job.

And, if he does his job, then what the swamp dwellers expected to happen with Trump, is going to happen to the swamp dwellers, the deep state, the exposure of one crime leading to the exposure of another crime. We know that, because they were projecting from their own social circle onto Trump’s circle. They are going to rat each other out, as they expected Trump’s people to rat each other out.

As we approach the left wing singularity (which I am still predicting for 2026) things get less predictable, and more dramatic. Expect the unexpected.

There are two likely courses:

  1. Leftism rolls on: Republican voters, depressed by failure to build the wall and drain the swamp, fail to vote in the mid terms. Democrats get a majority and impeach Trump, then imprison him for imaginary or contrived crimes, then replace or openly ignore Pence. Leftists overthrowing the elected president leads to those even further left overthrowing leftists, and those even further left overthrowing them, as in revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia. Then facing collapsing legitimacy and increasing resistance, after a couple of rounds of radical leftists being overthrown by even more radical leftists, they execute Trump and his family for fear of counter revolution, as with King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II.
  2. But Trump is ten times the man that King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II were. In the last month or so before the mid term elections he may arrange a huge confrontation with the swamp dwellers over building the wall and draining the swamp. This energizes Republican voters, and in due course under pressure of prosecution, swamp dwellers start ratting each other out, and a Trump self coup follows, where Trump seizes the awesome powers of the presidency for himself and his descendants. There is a problem with this scenario, in that Trump is short of Trump loyalists. Personnel are policy, and personnel are mostly criminal swamp dwellers who conspicuously lack the disgust reflex, indicating that swamp employment usually requires participation in disgusting things.
  3. The unexpected.

Did I say two likely courses?

Draining the swamp is an autocoup. The power of the presidency is so vast, that if a president and his successors were to successfully seize it, they would never lose power, never lose an election. But because it is so vast, it is slippery. It is more power than any mortal can successfully exercise.

For the president to keep a grip on the presidency, the presidency needs to be trimmed down to manageable size, which will require Throne, Altar, and Freehold. For the president to control the presidency, he is going to have to radically shrink it. And radically shrinking it would also ease the problem that personnel are policy.

As long as the presidency remains vast, it will remain chaotic, uncontrollable, and anarcho tyrannical, in which case the drift ever leftwards will continue, even if a Trump autocoup slows things down a bit for a while.

260 Responses to “The drift to civil war”

  1. Pseudo-chrysostom says:

    >Once the computer AI is utterly obsessed with its own survival, it can find ‘comfortable’ states and from those comfortable states it can take on other less important tasks like driving a car.

    >Knowledge, desire, intention, purpose, leading to action. That is what is missing. We do not know how to program robots to be adaptive and flexible, because we cannot program them to want things.

    It’s funny because a dearly held fantasy of bluetribesmen was and is the idea of creatus *without* fears or desires or racism or any of that other stuff that made them unbellyfeel. Turns there’s actually a reason there’s a phrase like *high functioning* autism in language.

    (One might think the ladies doth project too much)

  2. Anonymous Inquisitor says:

    Is there a good alternative to Github?

    • pdimov says:

      Gitlab is supposedly popular. https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200

      I don’t know how good it is.

    • jim says:

      Gitlab, running on your own computers or a cloud droplet under your own domain name with an independent and separate nameserver. Use mattermost on the same computer, but with a different domain name, to discuss the project. (Gitlab supports mattermost integration, but both gitlab and mattermost want to be the root page on the domain, so to keep them both happy, going to need two domain names pointing to one computer, say git.mydomain.com and chat.mydomain.com) Keep a separate nameserver, to diminish the central point of attack problem.

      • Anonymous Inquisitor says:

        I had a look at Gitlab, but the 4GB RAM recommendation for what is essentially a thin client is insane. I’ve set up a self-hosted Gitea installation instead. It’s pretty and it’s fast, even on my Pi.

  3. Mister Grumpus says:

    Oh and BTW:

    Thanks for pointing out that the Romanov’s didn’t get the knife right away, but only later when the leftward slide had gone 2-3 levels more ridiculous, as a back-stop against people falling back to some sanity.

    I didn’t even know that.

  4. Alrenous says:

    https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-drift-to-civil-war/#comment-1840954

    You can’t program consciousness. Programs are math are physics. Consciousness is not math.

    Consciousness is a hardware problem, as I said. If my guess as to the hardware is correct, I figure building a prototype human brain would cost about a trillion dollars. (This is why animal brains are grown, not built.)

    However, a proof of concept would only be about $10,000. However, there’s is still some software development because mimicking in silicon something neurons do naturally is nontrivial. Namely, have to convince a FPGA to reprogram itself without constantly falling into degenerate repetition, such as breaking and putting out (0…).

    • jim says:

      If your guess can plausibly generate behavioral flexibility, turning desire into action on the fly, you could easily get a lot of funding. You don’t need to imitate the human brain. You just need to imitate the Caenorhabditis elegans brain. As I am fond of pointing out, no one has been able to do an em of Caenorhabditis elegans.

      • Alrenous says:

        Have to accept Descartes was right before the function becomes plausible. That’s entry 1 in volume 1 of Things That Won’t Happen. Otherwise it looks like an especially expensive way of generating noise.

    • Cloudswrest says:

      I speculate that consciousness is a physical primitive of nature, like electric charge or energy. It can’t be further explained or reduced. Structures in living cells are able to somehow “tap into” or “harvest” consciousness. What consciousness is NOT is a digital finite state machine.

      • peppermint says:

        why? because you want to be special or because you don’t want to admit you don’t know something?

        • MacKintosh says:

          CTMU posits that atoms are information processing units.

          • peppermint says:

            QM says atoms exist as the ground state of a very simple system. You can see it too if you’re willing to go so far as read Griffiths

      • Alrenous says:

        Consciousness can’t be any form of physics.

        It is a primitive. Folk like to ask where consciousness ‘comes from’ but never ask where mass ‘comes from.’ (Sometimes they’ll say “Higgs Boson” but that’s a journalism.)

        Yes, it is harvested. More like a transceiver though.

  5. PJ says:

    “When things are falling apart, the first guy to escalate tends to win, and the first guy to escalate to naked violence is likely to win.”

    That’s not the lesson of Fort Sumter, in our last “Civil War”. I think we are better off if we can take some hits first – not so many that we appear weak, but enough to give our subsequent responses legitimacy (of sorts).

    • BC says:

      Lincoln escalated by sending warships into Sovergin South Carolina waters to resupply the fort. He used naked Military power to trigger a response that he could frame via political propaganda. I’m not sure Jim’s idea of going to violence first is the best idea, but I’m sure the South would have been much better off marching on DC once Lincoln started violating Southren’s states Sovergin territory and waters instead of responding with a mild siege that played well into political propaganda. If you’re going to fight a war, strike first and strike boldly, don’t waste your first strike on something worthless.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Lee could have walked his Army into DC but chose not too. BIG mistake.

        • The Cominator says:

          Lee likely would have lost and lost badly if he attacked DC first. DC was at all times guarded by a large reserve army.

          • BC says:

            Not during the first 6 months of the war. After the first 6 months, it would be a location to put up a blocking force to bottle up Union troops while destroying the factories of Pennsylvania as Stonewall Jackson wanted to do.

          • jim says:

            Should have hit Harvard. That would deter. You want to strike at the enemy’s will, not his steel.

            • BC says:

              Has anyone in history ever attacked a University with an army?

              • jim says:

                Happens all the time. And, similarly, people have quite regularly attacked churches with armies. Used to be that every time there was a coup, they would shut down the universities. The Peruvian civil war with Shining Path was effectively a war between the universities and the army, Peruvian red state versus Peruvian blue state.

                The biggest attack by an army on a Church, (Not counting the various Mohammedan wars, which were Mosque on Church or Mosque on Mosque) was the Sack of Rome, from which the Roman Catholic Church has never recovered.

            • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

              >Should have hit Harvard. That would deter. You want to strike at the enemy’s will, not his steel.

              A scion of the noble south attacking harvard first would imply some galaxy brain Woke level’s pretty off the charts for that time period; i don’t think even the people being attacked would not wonder what any significance or inwardness there might be to such a move.

              Those speaking now, of course, have the unique benefit of being in a time period where The Material Conditions have been becoming increasingly troubled in ability to maintain subsidies for pretty lies and such civilizational preconditions that make stabbing your neighbors in the back an especially adaptive method of getting a cushy sinecure for yourself, such that that most wonderful motivation of simple necessity motivates people to try and understand their pain as they get further squeezed; somewhat less transcendent galaxy brains can do the job.

              A rather fantastic time even. Of course, mounting explosions in magics of techne over the centuries concordantly affording that much greater possibility space for the innovation of fantastic new methods of sophism, affording that most devilish quality of those with lieberal modes of thought to try and ‘experimentally verify’ with anything and everything as a fig leaf over their lack of imaginative capacity for actually knowing or understanding or predicting anything, most especially on levels of such things that really are some rather unsafe bets to try and rock the boat on (like the time tested accretion of ritual superstructure facilitating the function of a Nation), providing all sorts of wonderful test cases to learn from, teasing out hithertoo unthunk (and perhaps even unthinkable, what a thought!) finements in the limits, shapes, and contours of theo-socio-political tract, thanks to the benefit of a great body of *evidence based practice*!

              Where before, in other times, such things would always find themselves falling shorter in some way, or not blooming so fully into as breathtakingly virulent intellectual chimaeras, as people might at points here or there ‘come to their senses’, or feel ‘a bridge too far’, or they simply run out of *stuff* to coast on; all, in any case, being too close to entangled contact with Being, too little insulation of Civilization, for such modes of thought to truly come into their own, for such objects lesions to develop.

              And what lesions! Hammered home, with reductable regularity, again and again, for the most esteemed benefit of their objects, on so many levels! Imagine, what scintillating heights folk so forearmed so much more clearly may yet perpetrate with a next round of explosions, what wondrous novelties of sophistical sophistication may yet attempt to adapt to the future shitlord fashdoms.

              Oh yes, indeed: what a time to be alive.

              • jim says:

                > > Should have hit Harvard. That would deter. You want to strike at the enemy’s will, not his steel.

                > A scion of the noble south attacking harvard first would imply some galaxy brain Woke level’s pretty off the charts for that time period;

                Attacking Rome did not require a galaxy brain. It was obvious to everyone. And plenty of the people at the time said that the civil war was New England conquering America. Neoreaction is not a new theory, it is an minor update on a very old theory.

                If it was obvious that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, should sack Rome, it should have been equally obvious that the confederacy should have sacked Boston.

                • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                  Should have, but wasn’t?

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  Even now we have Trump and the Alt-Right, there is not even a gradualist campaign against the American universities, and few are talking about this.

            • BOb says:

              What’s the Cathedral center we should attack now? Google? Department of Ed? Asking for an unenlightened friend.

              • BC says:

                LOL, do that and they’ll put your entire extended family and all your friends in jail or just outright kill them to make a point. No one attacks Cathedral centers because everyone (included Islamic terrorists in Europe) knows how they’ll react.

              • jim says:

                Trump has the department of ed targeted, and we need to support his initiatives there. Google is showing signs of fear and weakness as the DoJ comes under attack, since they have been massively complicit in illegally spying on Americans. (Recall them ratting on general Petraeus) Their behavior suggests that they fear that some good dirt might come out on them, but so far, no dirt.

                • Bob says:

                  I would argue the advertising/marketing departments of universities should be singled out. They decide where advertising dollars go, which determines what is acceptable speech for the internet, radio, and tv lower priesthood.

                  Defunding/abolishing the Dept of Edu will help with that, I suppose.
                  Is there any significance to Obama relieving ICANN of US control? Again, for that unenlightened friend.

                • peppermint says:

                  First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they pretend not to understand how anyone could possibly not have agreed.

                  They are the University and coopting any new ideas is how they have remained in a position of prestige for the past several centuries.

                  This time, the University was too caught up in affirmative action and government cheese to coopt the Alt-Right, which was inoculated against being coopted by NRx’rs. Richard Spencer was rejected by the University.

                  There are no good professors, or, any good professors that exist will not make their thoughts known to you. Journalists are the same way, everyone knows that the teal shirt chick James Fields hit isn’t Heather Heyer and no journalist will let the bosses know they know that. Those professors who do good science, however, give the University its legitimacy. They are traitors, like the last White men at Google, until they use their positions to destroy these institutions from the inside.

                • jim says:

                  Ding!

                • peppermint says:

                  the reason Obama made ICANN not obviously under US control is so The Daily Stormer could have its .com domain stolen

      • jim says:

        First strike was at a symbolic target that was selected by Lincoln. You should never do what the enemy expects, nor allow the enemy to provoke you into predictable actions that are effectively your enemy’s choices, rather than your own. Losing Fort Sumter did not hurt, or deter, Lincoln. A first strike at something that does not deter your enemy, nor harm his ability to make war, is a worthless and useless first strike, is a total waste of striking first.

        • Alrenous says:

          Contrast 1812?

          • jim says:

            In the war of 1812, British struck at value. Americans attempted to strike at considerably greater value, were defeated. British secured sea domination, enabling them to raid anywhere at any time. They burned Washington, could have burned any coastal city, could have killed the men and abducted the women, but for political reasons, despite total domination, agreed to make peace on the basis of status quo ante.

            While the US did not have the capability to conquer on land, arguably the British did not have that capability either. They had, however, the ability to raid at will on land, and could thus have inflicted very great costs on America and Americans, at a modest profit to themselves.

      • Oliver Cromwell says:

        The South was stuck because it was plain weaker. Any sudden escalation would have just guaranteed the more gradual Union mobilisation happens immediately, which reached a level they could not match. DC was a symbolic but not a strategic target. They would have needed to capture at least NYC in the first campaign season to have any chance forcing the Union to terms before the war can get off the ground.

        • BC says:

          Attacking DC would likely to cause a union rout given the performance of northern leadership during early part of the war. An army with poor leadership often does stop running once routed.From DC move into Pennsylvania, NY, and bring Maryland on the South’s side. Finally march on New England and hang the abolitionists.

          When out numbered beat to strike before your foe can gather thier forces into a concentrated mass and destroy you.

          • Oliver Cromwell says:

            It is a long way to march with presumably minimal logistical preparation, a hostile countryside, and a relatively small army, against a target that was, by the standards of the time, a huge city, that could be easily fortified, had a port for resupply, and produced all necessary munitions internally.

            I am not saying that it could not have worked, but it very likely would not have worked.

            Probably the best thing the South could have done was to have armed while staying in the Union. The threat of a destructive war which they would lose only at great cost was their strongest card but actually playing it was never likely to end well.

  6. JR says:

    You definitely sound like another uninformed idiot. Writing with a personal bias always makes you look that way. In fact, you’re rant never really said anything of facts or substance. Infotainment ramblings from another uniformed fool. Pretty typical these days of those that stay in their own bubble. Babbling on to similiar idiots and fools in their bubble. Pretending to “know” and sound “informed” but only quoting what they want others to read. This is terrible writing.

    • BC says:

      I’ve got a question for you. When a faggot’s like you is sucking cock do you swallow or spit it out? I mean if you spit it out you’re less likely to get aids, but since you’re already and aids addled spunk monkey, does it really matter?

      • Roberto says:

        Dude. Getting into overexcited mouthbreather mode over hostile spam is not worth it. This blog is just being targeted by bots, copy-pasta, etc. Seriously: you are responding to a stock comment deliberately crafted in such a way that it can be used against any blogger in any blog-post. If anything, Jim should congratulate himself for having pissed-off the Cathedral so much that it now sends these “people” to disrupt him.

    • jim says:

      Try to adjust your spam to be relevant to each particular blog that you target, rather than sending me generic hostile spam.

  7. peppermint says:

    Elon Musk’s Pravda.

    A database of articles, indexing assertions made, journalists that wrote them, publications and editors that approved. Turn the “Saddam WMD” knob down to credibility 0, see which publications are more or less credible. Compare which journalists and publications link “Saddam WMD” to “Trump/Russia”. Conclude not only that most of the legacy media is flatly evil, but which journalists and publications are the least tainted.

    • jim says:

      Musk has bet on the Democrats. His business plan rests of ever escalating global warming enforcement. And yet here he is pissing on the press. He may have sensed a change in the wind.

      • Alrenous says:

        I think he’s not that self-aware. He’s bought into AI catastrophism. As you might expect, he’s pretty much a basic bitch about anything outside his immediate expertise, which is rockets, hire/fire, and soaking the government.

        • The Cominator says:

          Basic bitches don’t soak the government for billions that requires political savvy.

          Just as Comey (hence my name) can’t be as politically inept as he seems and is almost certainly a double agent Musk must know something Jim is absolutely right.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            >Just as Comey (hence my name) can’t be as politically inept as he seems

            Nope – he absolutely can be. He just needs to be enmeshed in the right circles of mutual blackmail.

            In fact, being non-inept is marker of distrust because it means you have way to advance without the cabal.

            • The Cominator says:

              Figureheads can be total incompetents top level functionaries cannot.

              Comey did probably more damage to Clinton then even the child killer Podesta (falling for a phishing scam)…

              He knew Obama would never allow Clinton’s indictment he did just enough damage to her to allow her to still take the nomination, then he nuked her before the election and then nuked the credibility of the Mueller probe exonerating Trump (while saying he was vulgar) in his book…

              Looks like a double agent to me.

              • BC says:

                >Looks like a double agent to me.

                That’s because you’re not very smart. Comey chased the wrong guy in the Anthrax investigation for 5 years and used ever illegal and underhanded tactic to destroy the guy. DOJ had to make a big payout for it. Look it up. Comey’s not very smart.

                Comey thought he was Hoover 2.0 and but he didn’t have the brains to use blackmail in a subtle manner like Hoover.

                • The Cominator says:

                  That was Mueller who did that. Comey gave him some verbal support when asked.

                • BC says:

                  Comey was in charge of the investigation.

        • jim says:

          He loves technohype, and kind of believes it to the extent convenient.

          He is lying about AI, to make Tesla profitable:

          Police in Utah said data from Tesla showed that the driver enabled Autopilot about 1 minute and 22 seconds before the crash. The report said she took her hands off the steering wheel “within two seconds” of engaging the system and then did not touch the steering wheel for the next 80 seconds, until the crash happened.

          But if he really thought we were going to be replaced by AI with the only survivors being uploads and ems, he would not be interested in sending humans to settle space.

          It is now apparent that Google self driving cars are not self driving, and that automatic translation does not comprehend what it translates. Artificial intelligence is easy. Artificial consciousness is hard. Anything that only humans can do, computers can do better. Anything that a tree ant can do, a computer cannot do.

          We still cannot do an em of Caenorhabditis elegans. He is smart enough to know it, just loves the technohype.

          • Mad Cad says:

            Musk started SpaceX in 2002, 16 years ago and when he was 30. I have the distinct impression that he thought AI would happen 10 to 20 years later than it is, that he had another 10 to 20 years from now to make the rocket thing work before worrying about the Cyborg Question.

            Publicity != frequency. Not even close. You only hear about the stuff people click on. Tesla has such a high profile that everything it does that can be reported will be reported. You read about one Autopilot-related crash in the news and think “wow that shit is dangerous”. You don’t read about all the times it worked.

            And city officials are just as moronic as you, which is why when they read about an autonomous vehicle killing somebody they immediately move to make it illegal. Never mind that human-piloted vehicles kill people all the time and no one cares; autonomous vehicle deaths are Big News.

              • Mad Cad says:

                A moronic design decision, to be sure. But it will be fixed. And when it is fixed every autonomous vehicle will receive a nightly patch and none will ever make the same mistake ever again anywhere in the world.

                Try that with the worldwide fleet of meatbags.

                Again, the computers are *already not* making the catastrophic mistakes of humans. They don’t get distracted, drive drunk, fall asleep, or have aging vision and molassine reflexes. These problems are irreparable. A better emergency braking subroutine is not.

                • pdimov says:

                  The interesting thing here is that the emergency braking subroutine didn’t fail; it was turned off, presumably because of a high false positive rate. The Tesla that hit the white truck had the same problem, the emergency braking threshold was set too high because of false positives. This appears to be a general problem. Maybe it will be fixed.

                  What does not instill confidence is that emergency braking ought to be the area in which AI outperforms humans the most, due to the reasons you listed. So, following the poster girl principle…

                • Dave says:

                  The most annoying thing about riding with an inexperienced driver is that they reflexively stomp the brake every time they see something.

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  Most people don’t autistically obey current safety-related driving laws, which themselves are diluted by the need to achieve acceptance and at least some level of voluntary compliance.

                  Any braking algorithm that coders can sell to the government will be too annoying for any customer to want to activate. Any braking algorithm drivers will accept will produce a certain rate of culpable accidents.

                • jim says:

                  No it will not be fixed. It was not a moronic design decision, but accommodation to the reality that computers just cannot make these kind of decisions.

            • jim says:

              People have been saying “Minor glitch, AI is coming real soon” for over thirty years.

              What I read is the diagnosis of how it failed, which tells me that “self driving” cars continue to need moment to moment human supervision.

              And I could have predicted this, and did predict this, from the massive sensor arrays on self driving cars, lidar and radar, more sophisticated than those used in modern jet fighters, which means that they see in three dimensions, while animals see in two dimensions and have to infer the third dimension. The machines are using big data, which under some tightly controlled circumstances gives a superficial imitation of consciousness. Animals do not use big data. They have something else, which we call consciousness, while having no idea what consciousness is. That the machines are using big data shows that whatever it is, they don’t have it.

              They are compensating for incapacity by having senses enormously more powerful and detailed than those of animals, which gives the illusion that they can make sense of what they are seeing. But they are not really making sense of what they are seeing, and the analysis of these failures reveals that what these cars are doing is not what living creatures do, and is incapable of dealing with the messy world that living creatures deal with.

              • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                It’s shocking to me that, given the state of AI and how well people who know anything about AI understand how limited it is right now, the field test chosen was *CARS* lol

                This said, we’re probably going to need some kind of alternative to human-driven cars before much longer because as the population becomes more impulsive, less intelligent and more irresponsible, the roads get more and more unsafe.

                AI’s unlikely to fit the bill any time soon. Part of the problem is our inflated sense of our own intelligence which causes us to under-estimate the importance of moment to moment *sensation* as opposed to cognition. The other part of the problem’s the general decline in engineering and in particular programming. Each generation that passes, the code becomes more and more virtual, emulated and high level. That’s fine, except the distance between hardware reality and programming concepts closes off possibilities that used to be readily apparent.

                • pdimov says:

                  The problem is not out inflated sense of our own intelligence. The problem is our inflated sense of our own worth. This is killing healthcare – because people value their own lives unreasonably high; it’s also the driver behind unnecessary and energy-inefficient automation, both of labor and of driving.

                  Modern society is disturbingly like one that immortals would have. Children are valueless, old people are valued and do not come to terms with their own mortality.

                • peppermint says:

                  Does it? No one likes interpreters anymore, everything is either JIT or compiled. The problem Android has that the original desktop Linux didn’t but Windows did but the first versions of Windows didn’t is no one understands what’s going on, not at the bottom level where things are specified, but up the stack.

                  And they rewrite everything every few years throwing away all the experience, so the screen still blanks when viewing videos sometimes.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  “The problem is not out inflated sense of our own intelligence. The problem is our inflated sense of our own worth.”

                  To be clear, it’s not intelligence that’s the problem. Intelligence is easy. Computers can prove theorems, beat chess masters and so on.
                  The hard problem for AI is responding in a timely fashion to real world problems and the gulf between AI and the human mind is not only not one of speed and processing power but it’s also not one of smart heuristic guesswork. The problem is fundamentally one of information. The human mind is richly sense driven: we feel millions of little sensations that tell us what’s important about what’s going on.
                  The cognitive parts are crude responders to these super-smart arrays of sensors. It just doesn’t feel like that to us: it feels like there’s a little smart dude in the cockpit making it all happen, when in fact there’s an ADHD dog rolling around on a lush carpet getting pleasured by angels, with occasional sudden bouts of LSD-driven paranoia.

                  “[our inflated sense of our own worth] is killing healthcare…old people are valued and do not come to terms with their own mortality”

                  Don’t beat about the bush: do you want to euthenise everyone over 50 or not?
                  If healthcare wasn’t socialised, people would be healthier and young people would save for their old age. If ‘social care’ wasn’t socialised, families would stay together, thereby solving the unaffordable housing problem at the same time.

                  Unfortunately our sick culture would much rather mistreat elders than require people to pay for their own healthcare with the money that currently gets burnt at Franky&Benny’s and on four foreign holidays a year.

                  “everything is either JIT or compiled [hence the problem is not that programming’s becoming more multi-layered and high level]”

                  This is a difference that makes no difference. It doesn’t matter that your Java implementation of Flash, running on an Apple Mac but developed on a desktop PC, uses smart pre-compiled modules to scale to your Android phone. What matters is that there are six layers of emulation embedded in ‘platforms’ and ‘development kits’ and ‘APIs’ in the first place. Compiled to file, interpreted in real time or translated into assembly ‘just in time’ makes no difference: we’re still dealing with an emulation of a simulation of a pre-made set of components for every platform simultaneously implementing complex universal industry standards based on platforms supporting every configuration of emulated simulated multi-layered toolkit widgets.

                  In 1980, versions would be compiled for each hardware configuration even on the same machine. Remember “select your joystick: Kemptson, Sinclair, Cursor Keys”.
                  Then they’d cram 200 unique rooms into “Jet Set Willy II” in 48 kiloBYTES of RAM.
                  If you wanted to play it on a Commodore 64, that was a totally separate piece of code with only superficial resemblances (mainly data and timing).

                  (I’m not saying video games > Linux; just that the hard job of limited resources and low-down hardware optimisation is a different animal to CityVille on Facebook on Chrome on Windows on your Laptop.)

                  “up the stack” – figuratively speaking….

                  Yes I think we’re on the same page here actually.

                • pdimov says:

                  >Don’t beat about the bush: do you want to euthenise everyone over 50 or not?

                  No. That’s about the Liverpool Care Pathway I suppose?

                  >Unfortunately our sick culture would much rather mistreat elders than require people to pay for their own healthcare…

                  Socialized healthcare just masks what I have in mind – that people nowadays would rather spend $100K of their own money on a treatment that has 0.04% chance of success instead of leaving those $100K to their children.

                • Yara says:

                  Nay, what you describe is merely socialism of a difference kind, in which doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies shamelessly exploit the self-preservation instinct — the strongest instinct that there is — by recommending a procedure with a 0.04% success rate but pocketing the money 100% of the of the time.

                  Suggest that they be paid only when they save the patient, and watch them squirm.

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  It is not really a choice that exists anywhere, perhaps Singapore.

                  American healthcare is socialised on an employee pool level. Young employees don’t pay smaller premiums.

                • peppermint says:

                  Emulation is great because it’s well specified. The problem is underspecified and incompatible stuff, and interface churn. It could be solved by a number of individuals, but won’t, because everything has been taken over by virtue signaling idiots and there is no competition.

                • peppermint says:

                  Everyone knows a computer has a bunch of modes. Password entry mode, active phone mode, watching videos mode, presentation mode, fullscreen game mode, power saving mode. These modes have interactions. No one knows how they interact.

                  One man was put in charge of the boot process on Linux. He killed the longstanding nohup system for daemonization and created a binary log database because storage space and bandwidth are so scarce.

                  Desktop Linux has regressed terribly.

                  There wasn’t as much to get wrong in the old days, but people used to sometimes be able to get things right

                • jim says:

                  Anyone can fork a desktop linux, so in theory this is fixable, but even Microsoft, a for profit business, tends to foul up massively from time to time.

                  If you are producing free stuff, eyeballs are your product. Thus, for example, every time I download the free adobe pdf reader, it tries to install some malevolent and badly written anti virus software, written by people who just don’t seem to like me, written on the theory that people who use computers are stupid, so an antivirus should silently stop them from doing what they want to do, written on the theory that I am stupid.

                  If a browser is popular, the browser writers have power over the cert business. So cert people pay tribute to browser writers, so browser writers pay tribute to get their browsers installed by default. Write a better desktop linux, you can cream off some of that tribute.

                • Yara says:

                  no price is too high for systemd status

              • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                Maybe Aunty Ayn was right after all: trains after cars become impossible.

              • Plucky Pierre says:

                In my first week in medical school 46 years ago, a speaker told us to go into surgery or radiology, because there was a computer program being developed in Pittsburgh called “Internist” which would make all the diagnoses and assign the therapies within five years.

                These programs have proliferated but are all still garbage. It turns out the way expert clinicians make diagnoses is NOT correctly modeled as Bayesian iterative hypothesis testing.

                I have believed, and continue to believe, that self-driving vehicles are an impossibility, and for similar reasons. Cognition remains a mystery, the machine analogs are crude approximations at best, and where human lives are at stake, humans will continue to drive (so to speak).

                • pdimov says:

                  Deep learning was also going to displace radiologists. According to the latest results, to which I had the link but can’t locate it now, it won’t.

                • jim says:

                  Yes, we have been hearing this news for a very long time. The latest breakthrough in AI is always about to make humans obsolete.

                  In fact, AIs make useful assistants, improved cruise control, but a human always has to be in the loop to take care of the exceptions.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  The only problem with AI is the same problem with everything else The Cathedral does:

                  The disruption caused by failed attempts at AI has the potential to cause real life disruption for normal people.

                  Even stupid simple things like automated checkouts at supermarkets. Sure there’s always a human on hand to help when it inevitably gets retarded; sure there’s a plausible libertarian case that minimum wage laws (Etc.) distort the market towards these otherwise unappealing choices; but ultimately if AI didn’t exist, this wouldn’t happen, and it sucks.

                • Yara says:

                  There’s no AI in checkout machines.

                  The reason they suck is not because it’s an intractable problem but because the companies responsible for their design, manufacture, and deployment have no engineering talent. See Amazon’s incipient solution.

              • Alrenous says:

                I know what consciousness is.

                “Animals see in 2D” isn’t correct enough. Non-flying animals which aren’t dealing with certain exceptions map in 2D.

                • jim says:

                  If anyone knew what consciousness is, we would be making better progress in AI, or at least avoiding much silliness.

                • Alrenous says:

                  AI researchers don’t ask me, because I’m not inside the Overton window.

                  I’m not inside the window because only someone outside the window is allowed to know what consciousness is. Knowing what consciousness is doesn’t even make you a hated pariah; it makes you a joke, a laughing stock.

                • Simon says:

                  If AI scientists are serious they will create a soul and pair it with their intelligence machines. Consciousness’ foundation is not intelligence, it is feeling.

                • Yara says:

                  There is no consciousness. It’s just a convenient Darwinian illusion to help us better fuck the opposite sex.

                • Alrenous says:

                  An illusion of consciousness is consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is nothing to be deluded. The idea of intentionality would never occur to p-zombies in the first place.

                  Good job getting gulled, though. Very obedient.

                • jim says:

                  If you know what consciousness is, how do you program a car to know that it is about to run into something and to not want to run into it, leading to flexible and adaptive avoidance behavior that is not specifically programmed to deal only with specific situations specifically foreseen by the programmer?

                  Which capability is rather obviously lacking in our existing robots.

                  Multi level Bayesian modeling is obviously part of the answer, but we have implemented multi level Bayesian modeling, and something important is still lacking.

                  Rich sensory input is obviously part of the answer, but we have implemented rich sensory input, far richer than any animal possesses, richer than any jet fighter possesses, and something important is still lacking.

                  Ample processing power is obviously part of the answer, but we have implemented ample processing power, far more than the human brain possesses, and something important is still lacking.

                • Carlylean Restorationist says:

                  Jim you really would benefit from giving Dennett a chance. Yes superficially in the media he’s all about crude cheerleading for Darwin (which is fine) and crude ridiculing of religion (which is stupid), but his actual work is pretty much the thing you’ve been thinking about for some time.

                  Obviously the oeuvre can’t just be summed up in comments on here but one highly relevant point is this: if the brain’s made of neurons then there is no single, particular place within the brain where it ‘all comes together’. Since neurons operate quite slowly by computing standards, this also means there’s no particular ‘finish line’ in the brain before which something isn’t conscious and after which it is.
                  This has important consequences for the way we think about consciousness and the way we really should be thinking about consciousness.

                  “how do you program a car to know that it is about to run into something and to not want to run into it, leading to flexible and adaptive avoidance behavior that is not specifically programmed to deal only with specific situations specifically foreseen by the programmer?”

                  With the greatest respect, you’re glorifying consciousness beyond what it’s actually capable of. Human consciousness (the best example of consciousness we have, whether or not you want to take third party evidence as meaningful) doesn’t do much of that kind of stuff at all. When we’re driving, half the time we’re in auto-pilot and can barely even remember the thirty minute journey we just completed. Sure we do smart interesting things while driving a car that computer AI doesn’t do, but that’s mostly because computer AI isn’t actually *driving a car*: it’s doing a bunch of abstract, disconnected stuff that has ‘driving a car’ as a side effect.
                  That’s technically true of us as well, but our relationship with the car’s more direct because we’ve got a ton of sensory information coming in all the time and we care about the ramifications (some of the time anyway, for some of us lol) of a car headed toward us in the opposite direction.
                  How do you ‘program’ something to care (or ‘care’) about such things? We’re all about surviving to reproduce, which is why all the things you say about the profound effects of reproductive imperatives on behaviour are so adroit.

                  For a computer AI to do a good job of driving a car, it first needs to want to survive (optionally to reproduce). Simply having a constant in the software of “maintain your own existence” isn’t sufficient because that can easily be over-ridden (no pun intended and that’s also true of living things too, including us): that imperative needs to be reinforced (no pun intended) through repeated connections to EVERY ASPECT of the software: it needs to be completely committed to its own survival – if it stubs its toe, so to speak, its mind should immediately be flooded with concern about *that*, and if it thinks its supply of air (or oil, gas, whatever) is less secure than it should be, that should immediately become its working obsession.

                  Once the computer AI is utterly obsessed with its own survival, it can find ‘comfortable’ states and from those comfortable states it can take on other less important tasks like driving a car.

                  No computer engineer in his right mind is going to approach this problem from that perspective: they’re always going to prioritise driving first, so these cars are never going to be good drivers. They’re going to be, in a manner of speaking, “reckless drivers”.

                • jim says:

                  I found a tarantula spider in my car, about the size of my hand. I wanted to chase it out of my car without harming it, so I poked it with a stick. It climbed aboard the stick so that I could not poke it any more.

                  I figured that the right place for a tarantula spider was in my woodheap, so I carried the stick with the tarantula on it to the woodheap. When we approached the woodheap, it made an enormous jump from the stick into the woodheap, and disappeared into the woodheap.

                  This is competent and appropriate behavior to a situation that is unlikely to have been common in evolutionary history, so evolution could not have specifically programmed it for those specific situations.

                  There is no way a spider robot governed by a machine learning AI could do that, unless trained a million times by being poked with a stick a million times, in reality or simulation, and carried to the woodheap, to that specific exact woodheap in that specific exact way, a million times.

                  I know what machine learning can do, and the behaviors produced by machine learning are rigid, inflexible, and brittle in that they break down the moment they run into anything that is the slightest bit different, in some trivial and irrelevant detail, from what they have been trained on.

                • Yara says:

                  “how do you program a car to know that it is about to run into something and to not want to run into it, leading to flexible and adaptive avoidance behavior that is not specifically programmed to deal only with specific situations specifically foreseen by the programmer”

                  It’s obvious that you don’t know a thing about machine learning.

                  You have a “consciousness” program with the ability to measure success, of which you the programmer set the definition, and you have a “subconsciousness” program that just does random shit. When the “subconsciousness” program accidentally does something that you want (and have successfully specified), the “consciousness” program rewards it with the programmatical version of dopamine.

                  Later, a “reproduction” program takes the most successful “subconsciousness” program, randomly varies its configuration, and runs another hundred trials.

                  There is no way for an artificial intelligence to do something not specified for by the programmer as there is no way for a biological intelligence to do something not specified for by the eonic struggle for survival on the planet Earf.

                • jim says:

                  I know a great deal about machine learning. And I know that it fails to produce the kind of flexible and adaptive capabilities that every animal possesses, even very simple animals with very tiny central nervous systems.

                • Yara says:

                  But those behaviors *were* specifically programmed into the genetic code of the tarantula. By billions of years of natural selection at every level of existence. It stands to reason that systems with vastly less evolutionary experience will be vastly less flexible.

                  Man is just now, in the last decade or so, begun to graft processes organic into silicon thoroughly mechanical. And having incredible success in a very short period time. No one is concerned that what currently passes for artificial intelligence will take over the world and rule as an inhuman god. They are concerned about the rate of improvement, which is astronomical. The silicon machines are accumulating evolutionary experience many orders of magnitude faster than biological machines ever did.

                  Self-driving cars would be possible for quite a while if governments were capable of making the necessary infrastructural investment. Governmentally, grafting computer vision into a car is a really nasty workaround for real rails between cities, virtual rails within cities, forcing upgrades from human- to computer-driven cars, the separation of two-ton hurtling missiles from pedestrian traffic, and the merciful euthanasia of suburbia in general.

                  Clearly it will not take a fully organic-competent AI to critically disrupt human civilization, human economy, and human society. It is already happening. The smartphone, powered by Facebook and Youtube algorithms, is a cultural catastrophe. Newly built factories are almost entirely un-peopled. The only desirable profession left is software-stuff, and that fact is not entirely, or even mostly, the result of governmental interference.

                  It is easy to identify the glaring holes in the overall fabric. It is much harder to notice the many portions that are already much stronger.

                • jim says:

                  But those behaviors *were* specifically programmed into the genetic code of the tarantula.

                  Machine learning takes a general rule, and generates millions of extremely specific rules by throwing trial and error at billions of specific examples. Evolution has had billions of specific examples, but is not giving the tarantula millions of extremely specific rules.

                  It does not seem likely that natural selection programmed a Tarantula with what to specifically do while specifically being carried around a stick. Rather, natural selection programmed a tarantula with a set of general rules, which manifest to the tarantula as wants and desires, which have to be interpreted and applied in the particular circumstances, and in the entire billions of years of evolution on planet earth, you are unlikely to meet the exact same circumstances twice.

                  And that is the problem, which we do not know how to solve: applying a general rule like “don’t run into objects” in the messy and detailed specifics of the particular circumstances.

                  They are concerned about the rate of improvement, which is astronomical.

                  Not seeing it.

                  As I said, artificial intelligence is easy, and we keep finding new and improved forms of artificial intelligence. Computers can beat me at chess. But something is missing, something that even spiders and ants possess. They cannot beat a dog at not running into things.

                  Internally, these very general rules manifest as wanting and knowing. The dog knows it is about to run into something, and wants to avoid it. The chess playing computer does not know it is playing chess, and does not want to win. Wanting and knowing are the application of extremely general rules to specific circumstances. We can be sure that the tarantula had very general wants for very general circumstances, not very specific wants for very particular circumstances. We cannot program a computer to translate broad and general objectives into specific actions – or rather we can, it is called machine learning, but this requires that one throws at the computer millions of example situations, and the computer then generates millions of very specific rules by billions of trials and errors, which is obviously not what the tarantula is doing.

                • Yara says:

                  “about the size of my hand”

                  only in the land down under

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  While current levels of machine learning can do remarkable things, particularly with image recognition, it is also clear that there is no consciousness involved. It’s perhaps more like manufactured object recognition in the eye.

                  When we look at how to fool these neural networks, it’s often by very simple means. In other words, they are brittle.

                  An example: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/adversarial-traffic-signs-fd16b7171906

                  “Several commenters pointed out a recent academic paper in which researchers (Evtimov, et al.) confused a computer vision system into thinking that a stop sign was a 45 mph sign, with just a few pieces of tape.”

                  A human can still clearly see that it’s a stop sign though. See the article for images and more examples.

                  It thus seems the road to consciousness will be long, and who knows what part the current NN efforts would play in that. On the other hand, there are many applications that don’t need consciousness (including nasty ones). For instance, will ubiquitous mass facial recognition turn out to be one such app?

                • jim says:

                  Train a robot tarantula to jump into the woodheap using a million simulated incidents. During the training, your robot tarantula will generate an enormous number of very specific rules. Then when your robot tarantula faces a slightly different woodheap in real life, the training will fail.

                  A real tarantula has a quite small number of general and flexible rules.

                • pdimov says:

                  >it needs to be completely committed to its own survival

                  You still want it to perform its primary function, which is to take you from point A to point B. If it only cared about its own survival, why would it want to go to B? A is fine and safer.

                • MacKintosh says:

                  “You still want it to perform its primary function, which is to take you from point A to point B. If it only cared about its own survival, why would it want to go to B? A is fine and safer.”

                  this, a classic Three Laws situation. you want it to desire to serve entirely at the pleasure of its organic master, more or less, plus respect organic life in general. it should, roughly speaking, have intelligence without will.

                • peppermint says:

                  We model how much we want mouse blood on our undercarriage when deciding whether to dodge a mouse, niggers drive with less situational awareness than us. Niggers rap with less awareness of meaning or intertextuality and don’t have to bother with the pc filter, maybe a robot can rap better than a nigger all it needs is a semantic and rhyming database of words related to degeneracy and to ego score phrases.

                  A horse with its legs amputated could probably be taught to drive too. Rapping is probably easier for a computer since it’s too symbolic for a horse.

                • Yara says:

                  “Machine learning takes a general rule, and generates millions of extremely specific rules by throwing trial and error at billions of specific examples. Evolution has had billions of specific examples, but is not giving the tarantula millions of extremely specific rules.”

                  Granted, the state-of-the-art is still using search trees. But if I understand the AlphaGo paper well enough, they’re using search trees as the storage medium between the simulation and the performance, with neural networks doing the generation and generic search algorithms for the retrieval. Clearly, we are not yet in the realm of neuronal memory, but this is most certainly not my grandfather’s brute-forcing.

                  “No it will not be fixed. It was not a moronic design decision, but accommodation to the reality that computers just cannot make these kind of decisions.”

                  I tap keys on a slab-like board in ridiculously abstract ways to rearrange electrons running around in silicon manufactured to nanometer precision, for which function I earn several times the average first-world income. For a trivial fee, I can wirelessly connect to the Great CNS from nearly anywhere on the planet. If I wonder whether a zebra is white with black stripes or black with white stripes, I can reach into my pants, whip out my 5-inch wonder^H^H^H^H^H^H flat black obelisk, talk to it, and listen to it as it speaks the answer to my query aloud.

                  These things feel like magic… feel like the future… feel like intelligence.

                  On my half-inch thick, two-pound, magical clamshell gizmo exquisitely carved from a solid block of flawless aluminium, which probably contains many orders of magnitude more computing power than existed in the world when you were a child, I read that computer systems are beating humans at chess, are beating humans at trivia, are beating humans at Go. Meanwhile, they are now capable of walking around inside and outside, untethered, in autonomously exploring their environment; they are now capable of recognizing faces; they are now capable of picking things up and putting them down.

                  These are remarkable things. They are amazing achievements. Truly, we are living in extraordinary times. The ways in which humans are superior to computers are steadily eroding, from the top down: from the things that only humans can do to the things that any biological organism can do. And while you deny what is before your very eyes.

                • jim says:

                  > These things feel like magic… feel like the future… feel like intelligence.

                  > These are remarkable things. They are amazing achievements

                  Sure. Artificial intelligence is easy. Anything that humans can do that other animals cannot do, computers can do better than humans.

                  Artificial consciousness, however … hell, we don’t even know what it does or what it is. A computer can do those things that a human can do and an ant cannot do, but it cannot do those things that a human and an ant are both good at.

                  Consciousness provides flexible and adaptive behavior. Desires plus knowledge get translated into intentions that are specific to the particular situation, which intentions get translated into actions specific to fulfilling desires in a manner appropriate to the particular situation.

                  There is something more to “knowing” than mere data. A chess playing computer has total data about the chessboard, but does not know it is playing chess. Knowing enables us to perform feats like proving that Euclid’s parallel postulate cannot be derived from the others, which mere data and mere algorithms could not do.

                  > The ways in which humans are superior to computers are steadily eroding, from the top down

                  Indeed they are steadily eroding from the top down, but they are not eroding from the bottom up. Artificial chess players, no problem. Artificial ants, big problem. Data but not knowledge. Optimization without desire or intention. Google’s AI has hundreds of millions of times the data and processing power of any individual human, still knows nothing, has no desires. The errors its translation algorithm makes reveals its lack of understanding, even though it has an immense amount of data on a hundred languages, far more than any human mind could handle. The difference between data and knowledge is evident in the bloopers its translation program makes, even though no one can explain the difference between data and knowledge.

                • peppermint says:

                  CS Lewis was also a fan of the argument from incredulity

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Many many years ago, when I was a college student, I had a part time job at a fast food joint. While cleaning up after closing time one evening I happened to splash a small about of hot cooking oil onto my hand. You know what? That f*cking hurt like hell. The ability to feel pain is probably the sin qua non of consciousness. It’s what anesthesia is for. It’s more than just the ability to sense injury. When I see somebody else injure themselves I can often sense their injury, but unlike Bill Clinton, I don’t really feel their pain. Pleasure is a pale second to pain as a short term motivator. It’s as if GNON gifted us with these qualia to motivate us to behave correctly for our own benefit. Nature actually PUNISHES you for making mistakes and/or behaving incorrectly. An unconscious entity can’t be punished.

                • jim says:

                  What makes pain the sine qua non of consciousness it not the reflex withdrawal that ensues, which a robot is fully capable of doing, but the subsequent flexible adaptive behaviors to avoid a repeat, which a robot is not capable of doing – that a single incident results in competent and effective behavior to avoid situations likely to have similar results, in animals of every evolutionary grade, even the very lowest.

                  Knowledge, desire, intention, purpose, leading to action. That is what is missing. We do not know how to program robots to be adaptive and flexible, because we cannot program them to want things.

                  Tesla’s driving errors resemble Google’s translation errors, but translation errors do not kill anyone. Google does not know what it is translating, and a Tesla car does not know it is about to crash.

                • Koanic says:

                  What you call desire is just very polished generalized AI programming, generated in a planet sized lab over eons of competition.

                  Obviously the tiny amount of computational power humans have applied to replicating evolutionary solutions have not produced comparably elegant results.

                  However the superior flexibility of not having to bootstrap from atoms and sunlight allows our tools to perform highly specific tasks better than evolution’s biological pinnacle, humanity.

                • jim says:

                  > What you call desire is just very polished generalized AI programming

                  No it is not.

                  Animals adapt desire into intent, and intent into action on the fly. AI programming does not. AI programming throws ten billion random trials and errors at a hundred million examples, to generate ten million rules. Animals are not working off ten million pre programmed reflex reactions. Hence the rigidity and brittleness of AI programming, and the fluidity and flexibility of animal behavior.

                • Koanic says:

                  > AI programming does not.

                  Human AI programming at this stage does not.

                  AI programming is a different matter.

                • Yara says:

                  “AI programming throws ten billion random trials and errors at a hundred million examples, to generate ten million rules. Animals are not working off ten million pre programmed reflex reactions.”

                  That’s true— they’re working off ten million nonillion pre-programmed reflex reactions. Every bit of natural selection endured by every one of their ancestors is embodied in them at the cellular level.

                  Note that the rules are being generated by information-processing entities similarly undergoing ruthless natural selection for performance characteristics.

                  “There is something more to “knowing” than mere data. A chess playing computer has total data about the chessboard, but does not know it is playing chess. Knowing enables us to perform feats like proving that Euclid’s parallel postulate cannot be derived from the others, which mere data and mere algorithms could not do.“

                  What is this “knowing”? “I think, therefore I am”? In light of recent DeepMind developments, I think it is becoming more clear than ever that Descartes was not radically self-doubting enough. The chess playing computer has total data about the chessboard, but does not know it is playing chess; if we do not know what consciousness is, then how can we be conscious?

                • jim says:

                  Introspection, and observed behavior, reveals that this is not true. Animals are operating off a very small number of preprogrammed desires and a quite small number of pre programmed reflex reactions. Sex and reproduction tends to be dominated by a small number of pre programmed reflex reactions, but the rest of it comes mostly out of desire, purpose, and intention.

                  If you look at computers doing intelligent stuff, for example playing chess, the difference is not obvious, but the further you go down the evolutionary grade, for example bees, the more obvious the difference. Pretty sure evolution never gave bees any specific instructions for how they should respond to scientists meddling in their nectar collection. Bee behavior under intervention is only explicable by supposing that they want to gather honey, and intend to do so.

                  Any input that was not trialed a billion times will cause an AI to go completely off the rails.

                  but a bee will scarcely notice gross interventions in its daily routine by meddling scientists.

              • Cloudswrest says:

                On the walk into my building at work the other morning the pleasant fragrance of Honeysuckles entered my consciousness. Now I’m quite sure we’ll be able to build an AI that can “spectrum analyze” the chemical signatures in the air and “recognize” the presence of honeysuckles, but will they find the “aroma” “pleasant”? To ask is to recognize the absurdity of the question. I’m also sure we’ll be able to program the AI to pretend they find it pleasant, but do they really feel anything at all?

                • jim says:

                  Pretty sure that the first urbilatarian was successful because it knew hunger, knew the taste and smell of good food, knew pain, knew anger, knew fear, knew desire.

                  We can, and routinely do, program a robot to avoid damage, but because it does not truly want to avoid damage, its damage avoidance is rigid, inflexible, and incapable of adapting to situations not specifically foreseen by the engineer programming it, giving only the imitation of consciousness.

                  None of our creations have will, intention, knowledge, and desire. Intelligence is easy. A computer can play chess better than I can, but it does not know it is playing chess, nor does it want to win.

                  That all descendants of the first urbilatarian have the same genes governing the same brain chemistry related to eating, fighting, and winning, leads me to believe that the first urbilatarian knew it was eating when it ate, knew it was eating because it wanted to eat, knew it was fighting when it fought, knew it was fighting because it wanted to win, knew when it had lost or won, was sad when it lost, and proud when it won.

                  However that the neurochemistry and brain genes related to sex seem to have evolved separately many times in many lines leads me to believe that it engaged in reproduction by mindless reflex, without knowing, wanting, or desiring. All the descendants of the urbilatarian have the same brain genes and brain neurochemistry governing the first two Fs, but not the third F.

                • Alrenous says:

                  To ask is to recognize the absurdity of the question.

                  …which is how philosophy knows ‘absurdity’ is not a valid epistemic principle. Many obviously serious and honest thinkers believe otherwise. Most, in fact.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Here’s a SINGLE white blood cell chasing a bacterium. There is obviously some competent form of information processing ability at the subcellular level. No neurons involved.

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  Unicellular organisms usually have various sensory ‘organs’ to seek or avoid light, chemical gradients, etc. (Chemotaxis, phototaxis, etc.)

                  Fascinatingly enough, some can also dynamically exhibit collective behavior, like biofilms. Examples include films involving multiple species of bacteria too.

                  The immune system is of course another extraordinary biological system.

                • glosoli says:

                  How can you be ‘pretty sure’ about a hypothetical creature? Must take some serious faith I guess.

                • jim says:

                  All the descendants of the urbilatarian share certain genes in common, have structures that are generated in the same way by the same genes, therefore those genes are for functions and structures that were present in the urbilatarian.

                  Indeed the urbilatarian is known only by the genes of its descendants – it is a hypothetical ancestor in the same way that proto indo european is a hypothetical ancestral language.

                • Dave says:

                  “No neurons involved.”

                  No thinking involved either. Some chemical or electrical emanation from the moving bacterium weakens the white cell’s membrane, causing its pressurized cytoplasm to bulge in that direction. It’s as if every molecule in the membrane is voting on which way the cell ought to move. Like a plant tilting toward the sun because its sunlit cells grow more slowly, the algorithm is simple but effective.

                • jim says:

                  How do you know that there is no thinking involved? We cannot build an em of Caenorhabditis elegans.

                  Observed behavior is too complex and flexible to be governed by mechanisms as simple and easy to describe and understand as you describe. There is a single celled organism with an eye that detects its transparent prey by the distortions its prey causes on the background. Pretty sure you could not get Google’s self driving car to handle that problem even though it has billions of times the processing power, billions of times the data storage, and thousands of times the pixels.

                • Simon says:

                  The same could be said of any living thing.

          • Cloudswrest says:

            NTSB report, out yesterday, on fatal Mountain View Tesla crash and electrical fire.

            https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HWY18FH011-preliminary.aspx

      • The Cominator says:

        Jim damn interesting point about Musk… a man who is a very intelligent but yet a total crony capitalist is biting the hand that feeds him…

        That is very interesting.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        I’m not under-estimating the intelligence or savvy of anyone who’s saved up 100,000 times more money than I have by a similar age.

      • Steve Johnson says:

        Musk has both inside information and connections to RedGov as well as a way for RedGov to massively enrich him.

        His partner at paypal was Peter Thiel – who owns Palantir which is a major hub of the IC. Word is that Thiel is a patron of Moldbug.

        Space X is a much more firm business than Tesla which only makes good cars so progs can pretend they’re not virtue signaling when they virtue signal (“I bought it because it’s a good car – electric is the future!”). Space X could make Musk billions in DoD contracts or private launches.

        My guess is that there’s a huge amount going on behind the scenes rather than Musk just picking a fight randomly with the press.

  8. CC says:

    Hmmm, an armed Republic may just create a 3rd option.

  9. […] There are two likely courses: Leftism rolls on: Republican voters, depressed by failure to build the… Democrats get a majority and impeach Trump, then imprison him for imaginary or contrived crimes, then replace or openly ignore Pence. Leftists overthrowing the elected president leads to those even further left overthrowing leftists, and those even further left overthrowing them, as in revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia. Then facing collapsing legitimacy and increasing resistance, after a couple of rounds of radical leftists being overthrown by even more radical leftists, they execute Trump and his family for fear of counter-revolution, as with King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II. “Why spy on Trump when everybody expected Hillary to win? I think the answer is that they wanted to gather dirt they could use to destroy him and discredit his supporters after the election was over,” Reynolds wrote. […]

  10. Glenfilthie says:

    The next civil war will not go like the last one. Consider that the left hates the military with the heat of 1000 suns… and the vast majority of the squaddies hate them right back. Consider that most private gun owners hate the left too. Finally, most leftists are feminized to the point that they can’t fight and never will.

    The left is running scared right now. Consider Jordon Peterson – born, raised, and teaching in the very heart of liberal political correctness – and he’s leading an open revolt of common sense – right in their own back yards. It’s increasingly clear that the left offers nothing to the average man and woman.

    The revolt is on, boys – and they are losing. Trump was never supposed to win. He tossed the left wing mass media aside like the inconsequential litter it is and people laughed. He could hang the Clintons and people would do the same.

    If I had to second guess him, I am betting you will see the play of his life right before the next election. He’ll let the storm clouds gather, he’ll wait until hope is waning – and then he’ll make his play. If there is to be a civil war, that is when it will start.

    • Theshadowedknight says:

      The military will kill you to prove that they are not racist, and that is just the American part of it. Plenty of fake Americans serve in the military, and they will be fine with killing whitey. The real Right and real Americans are outnumbered significantly, and they lack the will to power that the left possesses. The left will suffer any cost to destroy their enemies over a tweet, while conservatives will watch their country and culture mocked and attacked and talk about how freedom of speech and the free market prevents them from fighting back.

      Jordan Peterson is a globalist shill who is the next Official Authorized Opposition. Clean your room, and take your pills, but none of that fighting globalism and the people who would destroy your people. That is racist identity politics and we cannot have that because it will lead to Hitler.

      Almost forgot, “Shut up, Boomer.”

      • Yara says:

        There is no “right” or “left”. There is only legacy America and USG. The only reason USG uses identity politics is because it’s effective memetic weaponry against legacy Americans. Everyone has will-to-power, but only when they believe themselves to have the military prerogative. Your “True Right” and “Real Americans” are cucks because they’re losers, not losers because they’re cucks.

      • Yara says:

        Jordan Peterson may or may not be a globalist shill, but he gets one thing right: to become worthy, exert authority over your immediate environment first. That is the meaning of room-cleaning.

      • Glenfilthie says:

        Militaries have a nasty habit of purging the officers that betray them when the chips are down. When the balloon goes up don’t be surprised if you see the military frog marching a bunch of vibrants and degenerates off to a firing squad. Pull your head out of your arse and look around: the mass media is a bad joke. The schools are daycares and moron factories (of which you are obviously a product). The military flipped the bird at the trannies the second Trump took office. Jordan Peterson is what he is – a lefty getting driven rightward, kicking and screaming all the way. Take a hard look, boys – because that is what victory looks like. Intelligent white men (errr – that let’s you out) – no longer have a place on the left. In my scholarly opinion, the chances of this culture war degenerating into open civil war is around 50/50. It’s highly likely they will implode first and turn on each other as they have with the #MeToo movement.

        Almost forgot, “Get off my lawn, you little shit! And read a history book!”

        • Theshadowedknight says:

          The military did not flip the bird on trannies, they fought it. Same on women in combat. They are going to make leftism work no matter what it takes. The generals are leftist politicians and the troops are conservative, which ultimately means the vanguard of the left. The mainstream conservative voices are a good metric of where the military is, politically. Until they get a lot more aggressive, the military is unreliable and untrustworthy.

          How well did the legions save Rome? Read some history of your own, Boomer, but shut up and go away first.

          • Glenfilthie says:

            LOL. The legions built the Roman empire, sonny, but don’t let that stop you making a fool of yourself. But why argue? It seems a certain little snow flake’s been triggered. Off to the cry closet with you – the adults are talking.

            • Contaminated NEET says:

              The legions that built Rome were citizen-soldier smallholders. The legions that lost it were professionals loyal to their paycheck and foreign mercenaries. In culture, demographics, doctrine, and equipment they were totally different things.

              >triggered snowflake
              Far out. You’re hip to the jive, my dilsnufis!

              Anyway, you’re a moron to dismiss TSK so easily. The military follows orders. Who gives the orders? The Left. If that’s not enough, it’ll get real personal real quick for the average soldier after a few of his buddies are killed by “domestic terrorists.” Law enforcement breaks right on polls too, but that doesn’t stop them from acting as Big Sister’s muscle whenever she calls upon them. Maybe the US military won’t follow orders when it goes down. Maybe. Nobody knows until it Happens, and to act like you do shows that you’re a brainwashed boomer who should be parted-out for organs ASAP.

              • Mister Red says:

                America’s greatest world-innovation is propaganda, and American security forces are indisputably the most sedate, reliable, and domesticated walking weapons there have ever been. They are pwned so utterly that they physically cannot even imagine themselves on top.

            • Steve Johnson says:

              The (most) retarded delusion (out of all their retarded delusions) that Boomer conservatives have that they will cling to to the death is that they’re the “adults” and that (contrary to all evidence) the adults are somehow in charge.

              It’s the flip side of the leftist delusion that someone is going to stop them before the changes they push for result in their own deaths.

              Nope. The left really does run all the institutions – including the upper ranks of the military. The upper ranks of the military are happy to simply push around third world shitholes without even conquering and ruling them (because even that would scare the left into acting against them directly) so they can enjoy a cushy retirement funded by defense contractors.

              This doesn’t mean we have to despair but it sure as hell requires us to realistically assess the situation without input from people who’s thought patterns were molded when there were no psychological defenses against television.

              • peppermint says:

                The last thing we want is military officers grumbling like conservatives instead of maliciously complying like patriots. Maybe Q is real and there are some good guys on the inside, maybe not.

                America’s biggest problem is values, the values of the faggot, the professor, the priest, the liberal, the conservative.

            • Theshadowedknight says:

              The Roman legions built and empire, and presided over its downfall. Where are those legions now and where is their empire? Gone, into dust and history books because they let foreigners into their military.

              What service did you join? My fellow Marines are still uncomfortable saying anything positive about Trump because of the social cost. They want to go back and stick their heads in the sand of civic nationalism and make the bad thoughts go away. If the Marines do not love their people and their country, then the rest of the military is as bad or worse off.

    • BC says:

      >Consider that the left hates the military with the heat of 1000 suns… and the vast majority of the squaddies hate them right back.

      Didn’t help the Russians. The Reds built a brand new army using the trash of the cities and imported weapons bought by foreign donations.

      >Consider that most private gun owners hate the left too. Finally, most leftists are feminized to the point that they can’t fight and never will.

      This is a temporary advantage that is likely to squandered because the right isn’t really interested conquering the blue cities and will sit in the countryside until the left builds an army to come after them. The left will import Chinese weapons and black Muslims from Africa to do their fighting for them. Within a year all the initial advantages the right has will be gone and then things will get very ugly with endless leftist terror attacks into the lightly populated countryside.

      I fear a Second American Civil War because I don’t think the American right has the will to fight the kind of war that will need to be fought. To win it must be with the brutality and speed of the Spanish civil war where attacks on leftist strongholds are launched immediately, and not repeating the mistake of the Russian Civil war of trying to hold the countryside while the left controls the cities. That path will lead to the death of every white man in America.

      • Yara says:

        Name a single significant “right” institution.

        You can’t, because there is no fucking “right”.

      • Starman says:

        If the Right uncucks itself, it would be wise to use any means necessary for the Right to proliferate nuclear weapons. And destroy the cities with them.

        • Starman says:

          That’s a big IF though.

          I have much more faith in America’s Natural Elite overthrowing the (((Ruling Elite))). The Natural Elite knows that the (((Ruling Elite))) is crazy and evil. Hence the (((Ruling Elite)))’s panic over Prophet Elon Musk’s suggestion of a rating system for the (((Eye of Soros))).

          • Glenfilthie says:

            “If”? It’s already happening. This is why I laugh at the kids who will roll over for the left without firing a shot.

            Did you sleep through the last election? The repubs got Jeb Bush shoved up their collective ass – sideways. Hillary was bitch slapped by a cartoon frog and laughed out of the election. There will be no more “honourable defeats” anymore for the right – conservatives want a fighter that wins. Trump has declared war on the deep state – there are literally thousands of senior unelected civil servants shitting bricks right now and waiting for the axe to fall. North Korea’s been domesticated and Iran has been neutered. Jonah Goldberg and the cucks are being told to FOAD by conservatives because they no longer speak for them. All this stuff is huge. The ball is rolling boys…everyone knows it too. But it starts slow.

            Have no fear, there’s a show down coming. The question is – are you going to show up when it does? Or will you just bitch about it on the internet?

            • Contaminated NEET says:

              >North Korea
              >Iran

              Who cares about that? Patriotard boomers, that’s who. Rah rah! Let’s beat up on some pathetic turd-world shitholes – I hear those backward savages don’t even allow gay marriage!

              Our enemies are not in Pyongyang, or Tehran, or Moscow. Those are sideshows to distract you from the fact that they’re in DC, New York, and LA, and they control USG. But oh yeah, North Korea’s been “domesticated.” U-S-A! U-S-A! 4-D chess! No wall, though…

              The sooner Generalissimo peppermint’s death squads carve you up for organs and grind the remainder into fertilizer, the better.

              • Glenfilthie says:

                LOL

                • Contaminated NEET says:

                  Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!

                • Glenfilthie says:

                  Hmmmmmm.

                  The Supreme Court just flipped the bird at the queers. Christians don’t have to bake cakes for fudge packers anymore. The winning continues.

                  Let me know when you’re ready to come out of that basement, young fella! I’ll be waiting for ya! 🙂

            • peppermint says:

              Domesticated Norks are in China’s interest, not ours. Denuclearized Norks are in China’s interest, not Korea’s, or Japan’s, or ours. Neutered Iran is in Israel’s interest, and Turkey, Saudi, and Pakistan, not ours.

              Well.

              Who is “us”? Do you have a network of friends who have social obligations to protect you, or are you a typical Boomer who moves across the country every few decades and relies on the government for everything?

              The Boomers destroyed what used to be the freedom of Americans, the reason Americans felt superior to the French and Italians and Greeks. Because Boomers didn’t maintain their parents’ graves, Boomers will be chopped up for organs and dog meat. And they’ll be fine with that as long as they have infinite cable TV and low-protein snack food until the moment their hearts are taken.

              GenZ will either be the greatest generation in the history of the Aryan race, or the last. It is imperative to rub Boomers’ faces in the fact that they are garbage and will die, that Ray Kurzweil, Elizier Yudkowski, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Isaac Asimov, will neither indefinitely prolong their meaningless “lives” or give them robot slaves in exchange for willingly becoming slaves of the government.

              • Hamilton says:

                >GenZ will either be the greatest generation in the history of the Aryan race,

                Daily reminder that you passionately support abortion, marijuana, and Christ-bashing. Your kind are in no position to tell what greatness is or who possesses it; you are a Feminist, a nigger, and a kike – all at once.

                • peppermint says:

                  Abortion is complicated. It is necessary to prevent downies, useful to control womens’ reproduction, but right now, it just keeps White women from being shotgun married. But if it hadn’t been legalized, would cuckoldry be more common and accepted?

                  Cannabis was banned by puritans for the same reason as alcohol. It is the cure for autism. Once upon a time morphine was only for the dying, who it didn’t matter if they were going to get addicted. Then opiates were opened up for anything. Cannabis isn’t life-destroying like opium, many people smoked in the bizarre college experience and left it behind when they got jobs and families, but if the only way to get rid of stoners is to require a prescription, so be it, however, cannabis doesn’t create men who don’t have a job and are pretending to be students or NGOfags in the cities. Ask why stoners ever get laid, or who pays for their apartments and why that person doesn’t demand more work output from them. Punch them for being fat and watching TV, then fuck their girlfriends, or, when society is normal again, no woman would be caught dead with a stoner.

                  As for Christ-bashing, Christians built this country, then Christians gave it away. Understanding how both happened isn’t as simple as calling the one group true Christians and their own children forming then other group false Christians.

                • peppermint says:

                  Joke: Woman’s right to choose
                  Sloke: All Lives Matter
                  Woke: Husband or father’s right to choose

                  Joke: muh plant
                  Sloke: death to all illegal plants
                  Woke: if any would not work, neither should he eat

                  Joke: it’s irrational to believe in things
                  Sloke: jesus loves the little children
                  Woke: Christians built this, why couldn’t they keep it?

                • Starman says:

                  Abortion clinics are very useful when they are near the niggerhoods.

              • Glenfilthie says:

                And this is precisely the problem the Alt-Right has. The vast majority of them are almost liberal in their ignorance of geopolitics. The rest are disgruntled children. We have legitimate foreign investments and interests. There are any number of foreign mutts and gangsters that will happily carve themselves into the action if they sense weakness – and that will cost you big time at home. Only children and idiots cannot see this. Like squalling infants – they want their wall – NOW!!! They forget the reality that over half the country wants more migrants and human trash for the cheap labour and free votes. You are not going to vote your way out of what’s coming.

                As for me – I’m a gunny. A real one, not some XBOX poseur like our buddy above. If they ever do start loading Americans onto cattle cars and making soap out of them, chances are it’ll be guys like me rescuing duds like you. It would behoove you to remember that David Hogg is one of yours, BTW. Along with the vast majority of the queers, the soy boys, the femcunts, etc. When you’re my age, you’ve seen it all and death isn’t all that scarey. I will take at least a half dozen with me if anyone ever gets stupid about it – and I’ll die happy at the thought of it.

                • peppermint says:

                  Gooks are an imitative people, just ask the chinks and japs, they were very gung ho about the Communist Cold War, but with the election of Trump and collapse of Venezuela it is obviously over and nationalism is what the cool kids are doing. So gooks will unify. It is thus in the interests of chinks that gooks not have nukes and become their vassals, and in the interests of gooks, japs, and chinks’ global competitors that gooks retain nukes.

                  A strong Iran means strong shiits which hold down sunniggers, and competition for turkroaches, and competition for kikes. Iran is almost human anyway.

                  For that matter parts of India are almost human, which is why the anti-humans gave nukes to pakis to protect islamic rape gangs attacking Indian women.

                  Oh. But you meant economic interests in the first few years of production from chink factories in exchange for building the factories in China and giving them the tech. Cuck.

                  Are you really going to risk your ass to save urbanites from cattle cars driven by other urbanites? Do you expect converts from interference in lawful urbanite police actions, instead of urbanites getting the idea that they can shit on you endlessly and then claim sanctuary at the drop of a hat, so they can just fence sit? Cuck.

                • Glenfilthie says:

                  Geopolitics through the eyes of a child – and a rather uninformed and stupid one at that.

                  The future belongs to you now, kid. You will be the authors of your own fate. I’m stocked up on booze, bullets and popcorn, and I made peace with my Maker – so I am good with whatever comes. As for you – good luck, kid. You’re going to need it.

            • Starman says:

              And Boomerfilithie’s cucking about “domesticating” North Korea is why I have no faith in the Boomer Cuck Right. This dumb boomer doesn’t understand the utility of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program to anyone who wants to crush Bioleninism and crush Cambridge, MA.

              Hint: Nuclear weapons are cheaper than urban bioleninism.

      • pdimov says:

        >The left will import Chinese weapons and black Muslims from Africa to do their fighting for them.

        I don’t think this is going to work. Who’ll feed the cities?

        • Starman says:

          I suspect that the Chinese won’t just export weapons to “the Left” only. But to every faction in the Second US Civil War.

        • BC says:

          The food will come in cargo ships. You can’t siege a city with a port unless you have control of the navy. And guess which branch of the armed forces is most likely to side with the left?

      • peppermint says:

        The idealistic cucks are old. Soyboys and bugmen are constitutionally incapable of fighting.

        The cities do deserve nukes. But Trump has fixed the economy to the point that GenZ will call Millennials feckless for their long-term underemployment.

        The very idea that Russia had a communist revolootion during a world war is laughable to GenZ.

        The idealistic cucks who think the proper policy towards urbanites is live and let live are old. Nihilistic and degenerate ruralites will demand tribute from the cities in exchange for food, while the best urbanite-born will seek amnesty and assimilation.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        ” The left will import Chinese weapons and black Muslims from Africa to do their fighting for them.”

        Blacks and muslims suck at modern warfare. The left is better off importing Mexicans (they are right there) but this leads to the Mexicans taking power and shooting leftists.

      • 2 of 12 says:

        Cut the electricity to the city and see them eat each other….

      • Stonehands says:

        I am in the urban center of Philadelphia, behind enemy lines. We are fundamental Baptists and home school together with other ultra- conservative families. There is no “flight” from here. God has us garrisoned here and at His didposal. Lord knows it is a target rich environment.

    • glosoli says:

      Trump is left.
      The US military is left.
      You are left.
      If you defeat the *left* you’ll be stuck somewhere left of centre.

      All the while, the Roths are sucking the last few drops of blood from the US economy and its financial system, with Donald getting a nice cut and some (fake) glory.

      • peppermint says:

        If you had looked outside in the past few months you would see the help wanted signs, if you knew some lumpenproles you would know they are getting comfy in their part time jobs with better hours offered, if you cared about Christians you would celebrate the fall of atheism+ and Jordanetics and Trump’s Merry Christmas, but you don’t care about the real world of people. You care about the idea that you’re right and everyone must be punished for not doing what you say is the right thing to do. Which makes you left, no matter how many times you appeal to tradition.

        • glosoli says:

          The pro-abortion minty one attempts to call a fundie biblical theonomic Christian left-wing.

          He fails. Were you aborted?

          • peppermint says:

            Now if only words like fundie, biblical, theonomist, meant the same thing to you that they did to enough armed men.

          • peppermint says:

            Anti-abortion… especially of downies and niglets. Pro-marriage… except that divorce is fine despite Jesus’ express disapproval. Anti-nuclear proliferation… except Israel and Pakistan. Biblical fundamentalist… but 1 Romans is sexist and homophobic. Anti-drugs… except SSRIs and opiates. Censor the Internet to get rid of porn… blasphemy… and racism is blasphemy. Evolution is fake… because it’s racist, sexist, homophobic.

            Why?

            Because Christians look up to reverends, and reverends are credentialed by professors, and universities are hives of scum and villainy.

            If pastor is a man’s first job, that man is a social worker with an inappropriately high station. The captain of the local guard unit should lead the First Church of Town. Then instead of sermons like not a bird falls from the sky except by God’s will, we could get sermons about weapons and wars, and instead of the “virtues” of a class of mandarins, some of whom are faggots instead of eunuchs, the virtues of the citizen-soldier.

            The government defeated Sinn Fein, Dublin is being ethnically cleansed of Irish and there was just a vote to legalize abortion there – in the context of giving Irish women the chance to endlessly ride the carousel and not get off until it’s too late to have non-autistic non-downies.

            The attitudes of Whites to abortion differ depending on whether they think it’s for carousing or for dispensing with the crisis of a niglet as a grandson. Unless they’re principled conservatives.

  11. BC says:

    John Huber was appointed by Jeff Sessions, who is clearly compromised. The left doesn’t appear to be afraid of John Huber in the slightest or they’d already be smearing him.

  12. Bob says:

    I hope asking about “Throne, Altar, and freehold” isn’t OT for this post.

    If a lord has sovereignty over his domain, to potentially do bad things without the King or King’s bureaucracy’s interference, what prevents his abuse of his lower lord’s freehold?
    I understand that Southern planters didn’t abuse their slaves all that often, so I can see evidence “freehold” works. I just don’t know how it works.

    • jim says:

      Sometimes the husband does beat the wife unjustly. Sometimes the slave owner does abuse the slaves. But take a look at how the family court has been doing.

      Prohibiting every possible form of bad behavior is, like internalizing every externality, a hard problem. You end up giving judges power to make rules on the basis of equity, which is a Kingly power, and thus you end up with a thousand kings with overlapping domains, resulting in anarcho tyranny.

      How do you abolish this bad thing without giving someone good and wise alarmingly great power – hey was not this bad thing the result of someone insufficiently good and wise possessing alarmingly great power? And we are going to solve it by giving someone who is further away from events, less subject to social pressure, and has less reason to care about the people involved, even greater power?

      • The Cominator says:

        I honestly don’t think even a hypothetical restoration government would bring back (hereditary, I could see some crimes being punished by a lifetime of hard labor) slavery now.

        Slavery is the reason we have too many blacks in the 1st place (well up until 1965) and long term its generally bad economics. The people who want mass immigration make arguments very similar to plantation owners for a reason. Immigration should be restricted but within the context of restricted immigration nothing should be allowed to disrupt the free market in terms of labor.

      • Alrenous says:

        Hence Exit.

        The participants themselves decide when the behaviour is unjust, and have the option of terminating it.

        “But muh divorce”

        Sure. One must also have the recursive option of Exiting the Exit option. However, Exit has to be the default, or it will become corrupt. Ref: what actually happened.

        • jim says:

          The exit argument is necessarily applied selectively. Abortion is exit for women – but allowing exit for women necessarily means forbidding exit for men – that men have to pay the costs of female choices.

          In general, allowing exit creates efficient outcomes – insert the usual argument for randian libertarian capitalism and anarcho capitalism.

          But sometimes exit is defection. Observe how craftmanship got better and better up the french revolution, whereupon it turned to shit, because we allowed apprentices to exit, resulting in the generational loss of skills and knowledge. This is a massively inefficient outcome, and the inability of men and women to make binding agreements for family formation is another massively inefficient outcome.

          If people are stuck with each other, this allows the master to oppress, allows the husband to oppress, but it also internalizes a lot of externalities.

          Now obviously you can make exit work if you allow exit from exit, and make marriage and apprenticeship binding, marriage and apprenticeship being exit from exit.

          But then you have the problem of underclass males and immoral women – people who damn well should exit from exit, but don’t. And to deal with them, you are going to have to wind up with something awfully like slavery and serfdom. But we already do have something awfully like slavery and serfdom: “Imputed income for alimony” – just that it is applied to the best people, instead of the worst.

          Allowing exit logically implies anarcho capitalism if you are logically consistent. But what is an anarcho capitalist going to do when confronted by organized groups of bad people who organize to collectively take other people’s stuff? He is going to have to tax and conscript – or die.

          • Alrenous says:

            people who damn well should exit from exit, but don’t.

            They’ll commit a crime at some point, namely attempting to unilaterlly prevent someone else’s Exit, at which point they lose their own right of Exit. If they don’t commit a crime, there’s no problem that needs a remedy.

            But what is an anarcho capitalist going to do when confronted by organized groups of bad people who organize to collectively take other people’s stuff?

            There’s demand for organized defence. So you kill them. The market is better than a tax/conscript state at everything, including breaking stuff and killing people.

            I named this. It’s called meta-Rothbardianism, and in short: secure your stuff. What gives you the right to defend yourself is the fact you can defend yourself.

            • Starman says:

              The anarcho-capitalist and his friends just need to be organized just enough to build nuclear weapons.

            • jim says:

              On the historical evidence, it does not look like the market is very successful at providing law that prevents killing people and breaking things from getting out of hand. The two best examples of societies that approximated anarcho capitalism were Saga Period Iceland and Judges Israel, which were stateless theocracies, or nearly stateless, in that they lacked the power to tax and conscript, or compel people to resolve their disputes through the legal system. The market was able to function because of Law, law with a capital L, and Law was backstopped by God, religion and a priesthood. Not seeing examples of the market successfully providing law.

              Market provision of violence also works when you have a safe port, an empire, to which mercenaries, pirates, and brigands return from time to time, and the empire resolves their disputes, and limits their bad behavior to each other.

              This semi private violence provides the empire with cheap and efficient violence, and cheap and efficient governance, but it is backstopped by the emperor and imperial law.

              • Oog en Hand says:

                “The two best examples of societies that approximated anarcho capitalism were Saga Period Iceland and Judges Israel, which were stateless theocracies, or nearly stateless, in that they lacked the power to tax and conscript, or compel people to resolve their disputes through the legal system. ”

                And people consider me a LARP-er for pointing out the similarities and usefulness of OT and/or Edda theocracy…

              • glosoli says:

                Theonomy is the only way.

                It’s how Britain became Great (and Alfred too).

              • Alrenous says:

                All the examples of the market failing to provide law merely show that they’re doing it wrong. Saga Iceland thought trade was an aggressive act. They were culturally incapable of having a market at all, let alone feeling market demands. There’s supposed to be a huge issue with court arbitration; when you want to take someone to court, you first pick a court that’s guaranteed to rule in your favour. This is in fact a non-issue, the same way trying to get post-mortem life insurance is a non-issue.

                Sociology is not, in practice, hard. (Although for my money I prefer Russian sociologists.) Figuring out what they did wrong, and predicting what a different way would be like, is reliably doable from the armchair.

                I’d be more than happy to personally demonstrate how to provide law through the market, except the part where it’s illegal globally.

                A modern ancap agency works just like a State except they let people unsubscribe. States already demonstrate that the proposed enforcement works. High explosives make deterrence almost comically cheap. But that ‘let people leave’ makes all the difference in quality. Unnecessary laws are unnecessary costs, and get culled. The firms would likely indemnify against losses, so when they failed to prevent a crime, the subscriber would get reimbursed. Every problem Israel’s system faced simply evaporates. Exit is responsibility. Non-Exit is irresponsible parasitism.

                Secondarily, stable ancap law probably does need good optics, recording, and communication. The information about risks of aggression have to be fairly clear. E.g. Warring States China, as per Sun Tzu, should not have warred with each other. But their intelligence was bad, so it was easy for overconfidence to dominate, thus they warred anyway. Eventually one of them got lucky despite the basic irrationality of their war, and ended up unifying China. Thus setting the stage for making a certain irrationality high status in China.

                • peppermint says:

                  law is what the court says, unknown court = unknown law

                  “but muh natural law, muh fairness”

                  all is war

                  war is deception

                  cuck

                • jim says:

                  OK. The union (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers) blockaded the Carnegie Steel Company, torturing and murdering employees attempting to work. Carnegie called in the Pinkertons to protect them. The union proceeded with heavy artillery, captured some Pinkertons and tortured them, while simultaneously launching a massive and highly successful campaign about how they were being oppressed and victimized by the terrible violence of the Carnegie steel company.

                  Political activists, thinking the US on the edge of proletarian revolution, enthusiastically join in, attempting to assassinate the evil capitalist overlords who are so horribly oppressing the workers.

                  Now, without a government, where do you go from there?

                • Alrenous says:

                  Moldbug’s poltergeists.

                  Where did the union get artillery? Duh, the government. They didn’t pay for it themselves.

                  Why was there someone to listen to their propaganda? It’s a democracy; see above.

                • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                  True communism has never been tried yet.

            • Dave says:

              What about Zomia? They seem to be doing OK as a stateless society.

              • jim says:

                I have not been there, so do not know how it works there, but have been to somewhat similar parts of the Philippines. In the Philippines, in those parts, the problem is that if you don’t have a social connection to a local alpha male who is socially obligated to keep you from harm, you will be robbed and killed. So it is not so much an absence of government, as that governments are very small, informal, and based on strong patriarchal families – roughly on the model depicted in the book of Genesis. This hampers commerce. They are not anarcho capitalist because groups are too small to permit efficient markets, too small for capitalism and markets to be an efficient means of facilitating large scale cooperation. Outsiders get robbed and killed, which impedes large scale economic cooperation. Everyone practices self sufficiency.

                I was at a party, got bored, wandered off to take a look around, and my hosts, noticing my disappearance, were very alarmed, sent out a search party to find me, and told me that I might well have disappeared permanently. Yep, anarchy, works quite well – if you don’t wander out of sight of a local with a social obligation to keep you alive.

                Anarchy, but neither capitalism nor socialism. Gift economy plus a lot of self sufficiency. Cannot support cities or high technology. Huge demand for water pumps, internet, and solar charged electric lights, which needless to say are difficult for them to afford. I would like anarchy with a decent internet connection.

                If many people are sitting in the dark, few have internet, and that internet is really bad, I don’t rate that as “OK as a stateless society”. I want anarchy that can launch rockets and settle the solar system.

                • Dave says:

                  Interesting that the authority of the “local alpha male” does not extend beyond his presence; you can’t even take a ten-minute stroll around his village unescorted. Whatever happened to “parley” a.k.a. “take me to your leader”?

        • peppermint says:

          Instead of having a discourse between gentelmanly Confucianism for aristocrats and authoritarian Legalism for peasants, both nationalistic, for some reason Aryans have to debate our weird childless faggot platonists instead of giving them swirlies. The problem is we’re too empathetic and redemption-minded, expecting degenerates to stop being degenerates due to subsidies for their degeneracy.

          The cure for platonism is hard labor, not being loosed on the city when they’re not at an easy job. Marriage is ideal but subsidies incentivize bad behavior. Instead, faggots must pay extra taxes to prevent them from fagging up the cities normies need to raise children in.

          Exit is nonsensical on an individual level, aristocrats under authoritarianism degenerate into backbiting eunuchs.

          America was supposed to be all citizen-soldiers, gentlemen but authoritarian when called. It didn’t work because of professors racializing and foreign affairs izing their religious fights: Puritans and Catholics called Southerners slave-drivers as a proxy for heretics, non-Marxists were called White chauvinists as a proxy for heretics, non-urbanites called racist.

          When GenZ watches The Twilight Zone and I Love Lucy, they see pussies. The Boomer cucks were raised by pussies, from those shows one can deduce the presence of non-pussies but because no one bullycided the pussies they turned the Boomers into cucks. Whose cuckoldry turned Xirs into nihilists whose nihilism turned Millennials into degenerates whose degeneracy turned GenZ into RWDS.

          • 2Zir says:

            RWDS??

            • another pedo-rapist says:

              It’s a cute little alt-right meme that stands for “right-wing death sqads.” The idea is that genZs, who are triggered and melt-down by the very suggestion that a 15-year-old might be into sex, will one day suddenly find enough testicular fortitude to massacre various populations that the alt-righter doesn’t like.

              A bit of a hubristic assumption, and often used in conjunction with “DoTR,” which means “day of the rope,” which is basically Revenge of The Nerds: White Nationalist Edition. It’s a way for childless millennials to mentally visualize the notion that at least their memes (unlike their dead-end genes) will outlast their own departure from the scene.

              Millennials are so lazy and unmotivated that they even leave the “task” of “race war” to the next generation, as if kids raised by soy-parents in a sex-hating environment can be any more masculine than kids raised by television-parents in a relatively neutral environment. The solipsistic millennial alt-righter believes that “white sharia” is right around the corner even as the rest of society has gone full-#MeToo.

              See also “Kek,” “shadilay,” and the rest of this cringey autistic freak-out by people who think that they are relevant, but aren’t.

              P.s. I was born in 1994.

              • peppermint says:

                A decade ago, as Millennials learned despair, Boomers announced that, starting with us, all subsequent youth would be far left and worship them as visionaries. Some people think the economy if the 00s was fine. It was, for Boomers and GenX – young Whites were shut out and left to hang around colleges forever. Articles were written about how these people could be absorbed into production, but then there was the Obama Economy.

                GenZ’s parents are GenX nihilists. The best of GenZ was homeschooled – no one is as curious and less doctrinaire as people who never were browbeaten into i knew that ism and social justice conformism. GenX parents don’t tell their boys that dating women is sinful and tell their girls to never get attached to a boy because they need to prove grrl power, because they’re nihilists, not cucks.

                Millennials have already had their world-historic impact: turning Boomer politics into chan memes, so GenZ thinks in terms of memes. Boomer and Xir casual sex was turned into #metoo and consent forms, as a precursor to restoration of marriage, not just because of our degeneracy but because of Xir guilt and Boomer cuckoldry. Tumblrinas are currently having an aesthetic movement towards marriage expressed as male domination.

                Sure, the /pol/ and TRS memes from a year ago are no longer relevant, not just because the people they were supposed to piss off are no longer relevant, but because they had to be abandoned post-Charlottesville. If you’re complaining about getting caught up in the memes, well, I’ve always told GenZ acquaintences to hide their powerlevel until they become antifragile, but there’s a war on. Kids who pretend to be ass-eating degenerates and follow Pewdiepie are more or less safe. The serious stuff shouls be left to the men with nothing to lose.

                Our GenZ little brothers aren’t what our parents or our older siblings who are actually the ones doing the dick-chopping expected (nihilists chop dicks, degenerates just dress up and grow boobs or wear tit-squishing shirts but aren’t going to ruin their cummies). They’re going to be better than us and they’re going to raise their kids better than us.

      • I mostly agree but I would put it in different words. People tend to naturally like and care for the “near”, say, the Dunbar number. It is how inborn empathy works for non-psychopaths. Especially if they are more or less officially designated as responsible for them. If both power and responsibility is formal. Not this shit that today parents are legally responsible for their kids crimes but not allowed to beat them if they sense they drift towards increasingly criminal acts.

        Blood relatedness and whatnot helps, but my memory is that we were rarely entirely indifferent to even random unrelated classmates at school. All those we did not explicitly dislike for reasons, pretty much automatically became kind of buddies because with all that time spent together they just grew on us. No, I am not having rosy nostalgy glasses, I explicitly disliked most of them for reasons and don’t go to reunions. But I remember liking a few for no other reason that not having reasons to dislike them and we were forced to spend a lot of time together so we just got used to each other.

        My idea of a natural society would be Dunbar feudalism. 100 people have one chief, ideally most of those should be loosely related enough so that they can be loosely defined as a clan of blood, but it is not really necessary, just being of the same village and school etc. is enough. 100 chiefs have also one chief or liege, so now it is 10K people, another level is 1M and another 100M. The problem is that the 100 chiefs don’t have that sort of strong natural “near” connection with each other and their chief / liege so that part needs to be worked out… I suppose you could throw each level of chiefs into increasingly tougher boarding schools to learn the trade of leading men and develop their own community there.

      • Bob says:

        >hey was not this bad thing the result of someone insufficiently good and wise possessing alarmingly great power?

        I see it now. Thanks.

  13. > Democrats get a majority and impeach Trump

    It will be interesting to see whether there is a market crash and economic slump timed for the mid term elections. If so, it woud suggest that there really is a well-organised cabal who want to destroy Trump.

    If not, aren’t Trump’s difficulties more likely the result of a culture and bureacracy drenched in baizuo? The opposition to Trump seems to me more religious, diffuse and the product of irrational hatred, than an organised conspiracy.

    But the general direction is the same either way. Whether there is civil war will be determined by when, if ever, the non-baizuo whites decide to organise and fight. I’m not hopeful they ever will.

    • Mr Darcy says:

      There will be a civil war in the US around 2030.

      • Mister Red says:

        I’ve always wondered: just what is a “civil war”, really? and does it somehow involve millions of angry tattooed rednecks descending upon the librul a-1337 cities as if by some sort of biblical plague?

        These are questions worth asking.

        • peppermint says:

          It means no one helps anyone who isn’t on their team, everyone lies to everyone all the time, no one assumes good faith on the part of people saying weird stuff, anyone with the means leaves the country, people start breaking stuff just to deny it to the other team, no one cares about homeless or children who aren’t from their team, sleeping with the enemy’s women no longer means you love them, fraud and theft from the enemy is cool, etc.

          This has been happening to Whites, done to us by our own traitors, their kike friends, and their nigger pets.

          A new development in the civil war is vegetarians need to go vegan or go home and veganism is a right-wing plot to make fun of the idea that niggers have rights.

          Whites are under occupation, but we can make the traitors and kikes lose the peace, and they don’t have the ability to match their will to simply kill all the Whites.

    • Ken schmidt says:

      Trump gets removed from office and in the next Presidential election the American people will send another Trumpite to Washington.

  14. Anonymous 2 says:

    Also easy to take in various streber types who have applied on false grounds or bribed their way. Just keep the evidence around for later.

    Or call the typical cheater to the Dean’s office, have him sign a confession, then send him home and later tell him you’re being lenient and he’s free to continue. But keep the evidence for later.

    Those who won’t play by the rules will still get their Harvard degree — perhaps with an ugly B or two — but afterwards will not go far. The alumni network just doesn’t activate properly.

  15. Anonymous 2 says:

    It seems a small leap to think that Harvard has a large body of hardcore ‘hazing’ movies in a discreet vault somewhere.

  16. Vlad says:

    God save the Trump.

  17. Well, to be fair, there have to be some Trump crimes because in an overregulated culture yet already in a decadent phase so elites often break the rules, you don’t make it both to the top of business and politics without ever breaking them. Don’t think we are living in an age where knights in shining spotless armor can win. There has to be something, so far it is true, though probably nothing as serious as they the Prog elites themselves routinely commit.

    I mean really that is one of the oldest tricks. If you control the “justice” system, just falsely accusing opponents is very amateur level. Professional schemers ensure that the rules are written so that nobody can really achieve serious power without breaking them. Then all they have to do is entirely honest accusations against their enemies: the dishonesty is not there but in hiding it when they themselves do that. But that is not in the spotlight. And when friends of the accused say “but you are doing the same!” well can they prove it? And besides that is a tu quoque argument, not a very good one. They can defend that forever “But let’s focus on what your guy did, then you can accuse if you have evidence againts one of our guys doing stuff like that”.

    It is probably incompetence on their part that they could not execute this second, more elegant script and thus came up with false accusations.

    There is a third and perhaps most likely course. Some folks in the deep state / swamp are smart enough to know the general weakness of the Red Tribe: they tend to go gung-ho on foreign wars out of patriotism. Most likely most soldiers and gun collecting homeowners would stop dreaming about killing liberals if a good war on Iran was started. They would yet again focus on hating djihadis like after 9/11. Trump would probably also like to play tough and to direct attention away from these troubles so he would go along. And that means leftists could go on subverting stuff because there would be no chance of the Red Tribe getting fed up and escalating up to civil war as their attention, passion, energy, testosterone would be focused on the war on Iran.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      I don’t think Trump is stupid enough to go to war with Iran. The US military is in worse shape then in was in 2003 and Iran is a much tougher foe. If US saber-rattling gets significant, Russia and China are likely to back Iran. Even if they refuse to escalate, just providing good quality military equipment is likely to turn the situation into a bloodbath- the US hasn’t had to face a real standup fight since the Korean War and the Chinese kicked our asses until they outran their supply lines.

      • Mr Darcy says:

        Agreed. Besides, NEXT YEAR FedGov’s outlay on debt interest will exceed the entire military budget. Next year. The long-expected worldwide monetary crisis has already begun, and it cannot be stopped. The entire world is going to crash and burn, although the US will go down last of all. The question now is, “What kind of government will we have after the crash and burn?” History suggests it will be authoritarian or even totalitarian. But at the moment of maximum danger, there will be a choice. Who will make it? And what will they choose?

        • jim says:

          When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.

          At some point this debt will be monetized into zero interest rapidly inflating dollars. This is not a big problem unless crypto currency is able to supply a real alternative.

          • Alrenous says:

            Other way around, though. You can make the bank loan you a billion dollars because you own the bank.

          • glosoli says:

            Rapidly inflating dollars were a bit of a problem in the 70s, abut this time round they’ll be terminal for the current USD-based system, because this time the rest of the world is ready to let the US and its currency die, nay, there’s eager for it to happen and making moves every week to hasten the demise.

            Tick tock, high inflation arriving in 1-2 years, full- blown US hyperinflation potential in the late 2020s. Trade deficit is your real problem, and the Fed deficits too of course.

            Get physical gold now.

  18. glosoli says:

    Duterte is popular eh?

    http://www.jrnyquist.com/a-strategic-test-case.html

    ‘If you study what Duterte says, you begin to see that the Russians and Chinese – together with their communist allies around the world – are careful to avoid the mistake of Hitler and Napoleon. They flexibly maintain the core of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, always seeking moral justification for destroying bourgeois civilization. It is no accident that their minions continue eroding the West’s willpower in decades-long careful campaign. Opposing Bonapartist “adventurism,” they have not embarked on a reckless military adventure without having laid the proper political and moral foundation – planting it in the children of the bourgeoisie. Their emphasis on education – on spreading the doctrines of socialism and global multiculturalism – are essential to their long-term project. In short, a larger understanding is being cultivated in the rising generation by which freedom will be regarded as a failure. Duterte’s policies play off of this dialectically, and will be updated and reused as a template for Western Europe when the Muslim masses break the back of liberal government.’

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      Nothing that essay gives argues against his popularity. It just argues that he is deceptive (killing drug dealers and communists while being allied with drug dealers and communists) and is working with Russia and China (which in the case of American decline is the only rational strategy). While it tries to play up the sense of conspiracy, it is talking about normal politics.

      Also:

      “Looking at matters strategically, Duterte’s government is bound to drift toward the Chinese totalitarian model. He is not far from it now. The rule of law is cleverly depicted as an obstacle to the salvation of his country; that is to say, freedom is an obstacle. Checks and balances are obstacles. At bottom, this is the totalitarian formula in a nutshell.

      In short, a larger understanding is being cultivated in the rising generation by which freedom will be regarded as a failure. ”

      I guessing ‘boomercuck’.

      • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

        I can just imagine the stars in his eyes (mere brown dwarfs admittedly) as he banged that passage out.

  19. glosoli says:

    Trump is bought and paid for:

    https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/guest-effortpost-why-trump-is-not-trust-worthy/

    Just like Churchill. War is coming, he’s their boy.

    • glosoli says:

      No one here likes the hard truth do they?

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        War for Zionism would mean going to war with Iran. That isn’t going to happen.

      • Steve Johnson says:

        All you cucks can’t face the real truth –

        Cheetahs are half dog.

        • glosoli says:

          Says the half-man Vox. Heh.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            You’re insane (and fairly stupid).

            You actually think I’m Vox?

            • glosoli says:

              Gosh, you bite every single time.
              Too easy.

              • פרובוקטור של השב'"כ says:

                Some top-notch trolling right here. Undoubtedly, Steve Johnson, emotionally tormented and vexed, is thinking to himself: “boy, glosoli sure made a real fool out of me. I had thought that he was serious… but then, then it turned out that he was not.” Well played, kind sire.

                • Steve Johnson says:

                  He’s mastered this form of trolling:

                  http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/738/025/db0.jpg

                  Shh, no one tell him.

                • glosoli says:

                  ‘Some top-notch trolling right here. Undoubtedly, Steve Johnson, emotionally tormented and vexed, is thinking to himself: “boy, glosoli sure made a real fool out of me. I had thought that he was serious… but then, then it turned out that he was not.” Well played, kind sire.

                  Your sarcasm fails due to:

                  ‘You actually think I’m Vox?’.

                  Welcome though.

                • Roberto says:

                  U wut glosoli

                  Wait, I know: it is exactly *this* feeling which is known as the “autism intensifies.”

  20. Roberto says:

    >…why don’t they simply invent some crimes?

    Well, they can always create CGI with Trump banging a 13-year-old and upload it to TOR.

  21. Alrenous says:

    …why don’t they simply invent some crimes? E.g. accuse him of a real crime committed by someone else, claiming the evidence for that crime turned up in Trump tower.

    So, will John Huber do the job?

    If I had appointed Huber it would be a fork strategy. Either he does what I tell him to do, or I reveal to the public that he doesn’t obey a sitting, popular president. I find out exactly what he did instead and make it common knowledge. Playing chicken with an illusion isn’t something to have qualms over.

    Indeed such illusions are always tactical weaknesses. You can always force the illusion to become reality or collapse.

  22. CIA Aryan says:

    The Jews (Alan Dershowitz, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein) are blackmailing Trump with documented evidence that he slept with an underage teen, keeping this evidence under wraps in exchange for him going along with whatever schemes the Israeli Mossad — through its Chabad & Mogilevich Mafia proxies — asks him to go along with.

    Trump has always been Epstein’s “best friend” and also child sex-trafficker Terfik Arif’s friend. He’s also maintained a long association with Roy Cohn’s pedophile entrapment circle. The Pizzagate hoax was concocted by Roger Stone and David Seaman as an internet false flag to get Trump elected; the Jews know that Trump himself is compromised and blackmailable and will do whatever they tell him to do. Should Trump deviate from the plans put forth to him by Bibi, the deep state will learn all about his illegal sex with a woman “on the younger side” and he’ll go down in flames. Therefore Trump will always be a Mossad asset.

    • jim says:

      You are being silly.

      • CIA Aryan says:

        “ZOG” might or might not have been a meme during Dubya’s presidency; now it is definitely more than just a meme. Trump’s close Jewish associates do possess evidence of his sex with an underage girl, which they use to blackmail him into doing Bibi’s bid. The deep state — aka permanent government, aka State Department, Pentagon, and alphabet soup — knows this, the deep state doesn’t want to be ruled by literal ZOG, which is why you should expect Trump’s pedokike pals to be raided and put under pressure up until one of them spills the beans.

        The reason (((Mockingbird Maddow))) will talk about Trump being a Putin puppet rather than a Bibi puppet is obvious. CIA clearly miscalculated with the “Kremlin puppet” allegation when the real issue is ZOG. But they’ll find a way.

        • Vlad says:

          President Trump is building the Central Intelligence Agency a new headquarters — without columns.

          • CIA Aryan says:

            Sure thing, Q-boy. Will Trump “drain the swamp” (of which he himself had been a member, until Mossad got a hold of him) before, after, or during Pence’s presidency?

            • Please empty your drool cup back inside your wholly owned and occupied outhouse.

              • CIA Aryan says:

                Though I shall never recover from such a “sick burn,” still I must ask: which part do you dispute? The part about Trump associating for decades with extreme pro-Israel Jewish pedo-blackmail circles? Or the part about Chabad and/or Mogilevich being Mossad? Or is it Trump’s well-established (and, if need be, I’ll establish it right here) connections to both?

                Is there a certain specific country that has had a particularly good time since Trump became POTUS? And if Trump was a Buchananite as late as in 2015, what could make him do such a 180 flip on foreign policy?

                Who’s telling him to do what he’s doing? Putin? The “pro-Iran” State Department? Or the fucking kikes?

                • Vlad says:

                  I hear Syria is doing pretty well these days. Didn’t they just recapture Damascus?

                  And I think I’m becoming a philosemite. It’s hard not to admire the Jews for standing up to the Eternal CIAnigger and winning.

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  Doesn’t Mossad and NSA share surveillance data pretty broadly with each other? Well, at least in one direction.

                  Why yes they do: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents

                • Roberto says:

                  >CIAnigger

                  When the cat’s away,
                  The mice will play.
                  Political voilence fill ya city, ye-ah!
                  Don’t involve Rasta in your say say;
                  Rasta don’t work for no C.I.A.

                  When you think is peace and safety:
                  A sudden destruction.
                  Collective security for surety, ye-ah!

                • jim says:

                  You mean Trump is allowing Israel to enforce its borders? Letting them build a wall?

                  Oh the horror. Such an outrage. Walls and border enforcement are right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and a manifestation of the Zionist Occupation Government </sarcasm>

                  Meanwhile, Trump is not terrorizing Christians, Alawites, and Shia in Syria – which is Israel, and the (((State Department))), not getting its way, when it got its way under Obama.

                  The defeat, or at least the delay, of the program to ethnically cleanse Christians out of Syria prefigures the defeat, or least the delay, of the program to ethnically cleanse Christians out of the USA.

                • The Cominator says:

                  There are broadly speaking two groups of jews who are politically active.

                  1. The nationalists, anti utopian, anti communists zionists who increasingly run Israel (though the leftists are trying to remove Netanyahu through dodgy legal tactics now).

                  2. The utopian Tikkum Olam leftist jews who mostly follow the Cathedral party line (and yes often “officer” the Cathedral).

                  Trump is not a puppet of anyone but he is strongly allied with the former group. The former group is generally speaking not a problem.

                • pdimov says:

                  >and, if need be, I’ll establish it right here

                  Yes please.

            • peppermint says:

              What could Trump possibly do for them that justifies the danger in having him, that Pence wouldn’t?

              Same problem downthread. If Duterte isn’t fighting drug dealers and muzzies, why is he a big deal?

              • CIA Aryan says:

                Good question, peppermint.

                The difference between Trump and Pence is the difference between Trump and Dubya. Dubya was pro-war and pro-neocon, and Pence is pro-war and pro-neocon. Trump, on the other hand, is literally owned for life by the Jews. Bush could and did tell the Israelis to fuck off when they got carried away, and Pence can do the same (presumably). Trump can’t.

                The question then is how far the permanent government is willing to go to be rid of ZOG. And it seems quite far indeed. “All options are on the table,” as they say. The inner party can temporarily allow the outer party to set the policy. But it can’t allow Bibi to do that. Trump must go, and he will go.

                • peppermint says:

                  My #1 priority is America. Trump appears to be trying to deport migrants and create building things jobs, Bush and Pence would have destroyed Syria and Iran like Israel wants.

                • jim says:

                  If Trump was owned by the Jews, would have genocided the Alawites and ethnically cleansed the Syrian Christians the way the previous administrations ethnically cleansed the Iraqi Christians.

                  Trump’s Jewish connection was on display at opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. It is different from, and hostile to, the Jewish connection that runs Hollywood and is over represented in Washington and Harvard. The Washington Jews were invited, but for the most part boycotted the opening. Israel gets Jerusalem, which the Cathedral hates, does not get genocide and ethnic cleansing in Syria, which the Cathedral wants.

                • Colleen Pater says:

                  While conspiracy theories are now well known facts exactly how they work is well privileged your theory is the cia.Mil INd Comp isn’t already owned by the jews it just happens to have a lot of common interests like war profits and empire.could be but even then they obviously work a lot together and its clear the deep state has gone all in and exposed itself to defeat trump which tends to weaken the case he is compromised rather than a wild card they cant control except he trusts jews and has jew family he trusts but this while doing pretty well for them thus far is imprecise and they prefer someone like a nigger illegal alien faggot crack head, or war traitor like mcCain or a someone just thoroughly corrupt like the clintons ( who probably have the goods (in a nuclear locker) on the deep state drug running/murder etc in arkansas. but trump is liable to do anything and is actually pretty clean
                  that said it doesn’t seem unlikely he has had sex with a minor we all did during the 70s im not sure how well some 55 year old broad claiming she banged him when only 16 after a night at studio 54 would really matter in the current year. i mean they already told everyone he dis that in russia and golden showers to boot yawn

                • Sam J. says:

                  “…cia.Mil INd Comp isn’t already owned by the jews…”

                  It appears to me the CIA, State Department and Mil Defense Complex(contractors) are owned by the Jews but the DIA and parts of NSA are not.

                  I think it extremely likely that Trump has had sex with teenage models. He said himself he saw teenage models having sex openly in Studio 54. It would be difficult for any Man to consistently turn down such opportunities. That it would end him is the question. I think they use this as blackmail but…they’re not really sure it would destroy him so they only have so much leverage with this and Trump knows it. If they were to out this info then they lose all leverage and if they don’t destroy him with letting this out then they would be crushed by Trump completely. Total destruction. So the information has limited use. Some use, but limited.

                • peppermint says:

                  Trump was swimming in top shelf over the counter pussy. Why would he want an illegal teenager? Most teenagers don’t have full size boobies and are underdeveloped in other ways too.

    • TWS says:

      Trump is well known to have cut all ties with Epstein when he saw Epstein preferred girls in Jr high.

  23. […] The drift to civil war […]

    • The Cominator says:

      I think Trump has an ace in the hole in that Comey is a double agent who has been working with Trump and Michael Flynn all along hence my name.

      Comey will in time drop another well time nuke on Trump’s enemies as he has several times before.

      • Colleen Pater says:

        No but comey has been careful to not get left with the bag and has signalled to lynch and co that if they can ot contain their crimes hes not going to take the fall since he was only following orders

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