Moldbug' Fakeness Accusation Pleasingly Low in Fakeness

Step 1: I berate Moldbug.
Step 2: Moldbug doesn't read my blog.*
Step 3: Moldbug gets much better.

*(Nor does anyone else for that matter.)

The fuck? Why does this work?
Oh well, it does work so I'ma keep doing it. Yay acausal networks or whatever.
Still major omissions, though.

Reminder: America is faking the shit out of its mortality statistics because there's fabulous cash prizes for doing so. It's pessimistic to assume half of the stated c-vid deaths were in fact c-vid related. On the other hand the "lockdowns" have killed enormous numbers (largely via stress) so maybe it balances out? (Like 5-10% bonus mortality.) Fascists gonna Fasc; they were going to do something enormously self-destructive, the only question was which gun they were going to shoot themselves in the foot with. (In fact lockdown orders had no effect whatsoever on human movements; instead the isolations are internally-motivated.)

Also remember these are strangers and if they die it not only doesn't matter, but may even be slightly good. Seems Moldbug was confused by this intuition and thought it was about the election instead. God thought Grandma should die, and then she did. Vae victus.

Maybe take vitamin D like I told you to and you won't die next time. Not my advice? Not my responsibility, not my problem. Please subscribe to my youtube channel and click the bell - as if I wouldn't be immediately banned.

Also don't forget China is assraping their own statistics. We have no idea what the virus actually did or is doing in China. You could literally get more useful data out of a ouija board.

In countries who aren't buggering their numbers, ncov really has been just a flu. About 20% worse than a bad flu year, to be more precise. Mortality is best estimated at around 1 in 400, where flu usually tops out at 1 in 500. (1 in 100 detected cases are critical but 3 in 4 cases are asymptomatic.) My own country suffered 13% more c-vid deaths during flu season as compared to a bad flu season. Also the new virus kills the same people; influenza cases have plummeted because c-dog gets them before the flu can. Of course [not buggered] doesn't mean [good]. It means [not completely worthless] unlike China and America's numbers. Maybe the flu replacement thing is America-only and seems to be happening because bullet wounds are coronavirus now.

"It is incapable of a hard lockdown because it does not really have a government."
That would be lovely. In fact it has something like 1000 gerrymandered governments with 1000 petty kings, one each. I assume there's a Road Czar somewhere whose home county has properly built and maintained roads. A hard lockdown crosses royal jurisdictions, so good luck with that one.

Violently tell a burglar to fuck off and after see if you can still tell me there's no government with a straight face.

As last time this isn't an exhaustive list of serious errors, but it's no longer 1 per 2 paragraphs, a vast improvement.

Vae Victus is a Disease

But...do you truly understand how bad [vae victus] is as philosophy and as civilization? Let's fully sharpen the point.

Scene: you have punched a baby as hard as you can. "Vae Victus!" The baby deserved it for being too weak to defend itself. You can do whatever you want to that baby and it's not only okay, but "may even be right and proper."

As a general principle, folk make mistakes and say stupid things sometimes. Everyone has brain farts; it happens. Unfortunately everyone else immediately went groupthink on the baby-punching ideology. "Spot on, punch those babies bro." That's not a mistake. That's a disease. Plague-like.

Simplified: vae victus doesn't apply to traitors. Certainly if you have a open, honourable conflict between two full groups lead by adults etc, I hold little sympathy for the defeated. If you're all like, "Yeah I'ma punch an outgroup baby, it's better if outgroup doesn't get to be fruitful," and the parents fail to fight you off, my crib values say it's still sketchy but logically those parents deserved to have their baby punched.

If instead you're an SJW and are all like, "Anyone who punches babies is a Literal Nazi Concentration Camp Guard," as a way to get close to the baby you're punching, then you deserve to be kept alive as long as possible...given the circumstances. Keep blood transfusions handy and that sort of thing. If they believed you, it means they considered you trusted or an authority, which means symbolically you're attacking your own family. Fratricide.

Further, this disease is a lame, loser disease. The sovereign says you shouldn't believe [vae victus]. The sovereign's dad can unquestionably beat up your dad. Why aren't you surrendering? You deserve to believe whatever you're told to believe, cuck. Take it up the ass already. Vae victus.

I was sharpening the point fully, wasn't I? Vae victus is a pedophile idea.
The revolutionary government is always the same as the old government, isn't it? The West's old government is a bunch of satanic pedophiles, and the so-called dissidents' core commitments are fully on board. In retrospect, not surprising. Fascists gonna Fasc. 

But, yes, at some point endemic treachery also reflects on the betrayed. Did you see what she was wearing? Sympathy for the victim itself becomes a disease. "Have you considered not being a complete dumbass?" This doesn't make the rape a not-crime, though. The rapist should still be tied up by his dangly bits.
Responsibility is only half conserved. It has a minimum at 100% but 200% or 300% is not only possible, but easy. Blaming the victim doesn't mean the perpetrator loses any blame.

This is why proggies don't talk explicitly about their ideology, incidentally. They try to strictly adhere to hints, insinuations, guilt by association, and painting with a broad brush. If you write down your ideas then your ideas can be attacked. Progressive ideas are composed of duct tape, gum, and security holes. Writing them down is not a winning strategy.

Also incidentally: when the SJW manages to successfully punch a baby they are at least following their own depraved desires. What do you suppose is a meet judgment for someone who rhetorically defends the SJW even though they didn't get to punch a baby or even want babies punched?

Further incidentally, think about the cognitive horizon angle. The Yud likes to say logic is weak because it gets less reliable the more layers you stack. Although hardly false, it's also hardly impossible to git gud enough to stack as many layers as anyone could want. Proggies, the Yud, and fellow travellers instead like to argue for the weakness of logic to limit how gud you git so they don't have to submit to silly things like Truth or Reality. They want you to have a nice properly limited cognitive horizon so they can look where the horizon is and choose the argument that happens to prove whatever they want to prove just before it goes over your horizon.
Secondarily, it's egalitarianism again. Some folk (peasants) are too stupid to master logic. Therefore, nobody can master logic. Makes perfect sense, right?

Cendi intally, the revolution reproducing the government this way has already happened. The satanic pedophile proggies, seeing the satanic pedophile aristocrats, thought oppressing the peasants was just fine and dandy but was done too openly. Have to oppress the peasants but make it think it was their own idea. You Are Here. The next stage is apparently being a satanic pedophile but, you know, in a decentralized way. "What if we had satanism look like Christianity?" "Genius dood." Make [buggered children] traditional and irrefutable. It's been going on for at least 300 years, so it's already halfway there.

Maybe this sort of thing is why you believe in free will if you can't grok the galaxy-brain [wrong question] angle. If libertarianism is true then you don't have to merely accept whatever has already happened. It is true that you don't have to accept whatever has already happened, so it's always better to discard any ideology that says you do, even if you don't properly understand the converse ideas. 

If you want to be super charitable, vae victus is an empty idea. The baby deserved to have to her digestive tract mutilated by that pedophile, but also the pedophile deserved to understand woodchippers first-hand. Or first-feet, as it were. At best the principle offers no guidance. It says to do whatever you were already going to do. You could say the point of endorsing [vae victus] is to get moral nihilism snuck in, but as per the cognitive horizon considerations, this only demonstrates one should endorse moral nihilism directly, and thus still condemns what was in fact endorsed.

Vae Contradictus

New hypothesis: Americans are stupid because of alcohol. When they say it kills brain cells they aren't kidding. (In genuinely shocking news, there's something mainstream that isn't a lie.)
The Princess Bride iocane episode is real. If you consistently see a poison, the body maintains antibodies for that poison. Ancients, who by and large drank weak beer every day, would suffer much less from occasional binges, [drinking to excess], than moderns do. Moderns instead punch a hole in their brain every time they get drunk. 

I sometimes rate writers by their mean free path between self-contradictions. Journalists are in the 2-3 range. Moldbug used to rate in the 90s. Now barely reaches 50 on the best day. Severe sleep deprivation is also on the table. 

"Not only is it [election skulduggery], it may even be proper."
"We know exactly what a genuinely secure 21st-century voting system looks like. It looks like Sweden, Mexico or even Iraq." 

Security is improper. Got it.

"A democracy in which the losing party routinely and effectively delegitimizes the election is not a stable democracy. No one is thrilled that this seems to be the new normal."

Err...no wait I'm lost again.

"It is quite right and proper for the Department of Truth to declare the truth of the election."

Oh okay, lies are good. I...think? The truth is whatever the victor declares it is.
Yeah, that's definitely how it works.

 

"(All this is completely decentralized, of course. No one orders it—it just happens.) [...] A decentralized truth ministry, like ours,"
"managed to create an unaccountable government above the government.[..] The Times has its own form of government: literally, a hereditary absolute monarchy."

On the left you I present to you a fine exhibit of the the famous headless, decentralized monarchy, the kind that doesn't issue orders. 

"Only a fool would disregard these history lessons, and there are no Supreme Court seats set aside for fools."

Is that so?

"This bad philosophy has burned itself into their brains [...] The conservacon always gets nowhere [...] because he has the wrong goals."

I.e. they have been fooled. 

"it’s even tougher to be a general with the wrong map."

Is that so?

"not because he is a bad person"

We can easily see the political utility of soothing the ego of those you hope to take into your flock. Unfortunately, it is inconsistent with vae victus. If we assert the latter, someone who fails is a bad person. 'You're not a bad person, you just consciously dedicated your life to a lie and failed to even conserve the lie. No big. Failure of due diligence could happen to anyone.' 

"There he pleads that it was an accident and he could do no better. He is probably lying."

Americans aren't garbage, it's just that every leader born to an American is garbage, as part of some sort of Satanic miracle. 

"What if America prevailed not because of its philosophy, but despite it? A heavy thought, man."
What if America is full of garbage ideas because it's full of garbage people? Lightweight. Garbage thinkers produce garbage ideas which are lapped up by garbage peasants. Break any link in the chain and the transmission fails. The only thing that's surprising about this is the fact most of the rest of the world is even worse.

Are we sure? We are sure. Alternatively, America is a communist-occupied territory and its poor oppressed peoples are forced to swallow whatever raw sewage the occupiers choose to pump down their gullets. In which case the distinct lack of freedom found in the Land of the Free would be the main issue, rather than which exact shade of sewage is being delivered this week. The latter is, optimistically, a distraction.

Except...vae victus. The poor oppressed people suck for allowing themselves to get occupied. Eat garbage, garbage people! Haha oops!

 

Anyway, these unmistakable errors give you the flavour of it. I also counted 25 discrete falsehoods and 30 significantly misleading omissions. The essay is just over 100 paragraphs, so that's one serious error every other paragraph. It would have been faster to count the bits that were worth putting to HTML. The amount is nonzero! So, that's nice.

"In the 1850s, the Justices attempted to prevent the Civil War by using the supposed sovereignty of the Court to permanently quash what they saw as the cause of the impending war: the antislavery movement. In the 1930s, the Justices tried to stop the New Deal by using their sovereignty to write libertarianism into constitutional law.

In the first case they were brushed aside and in the second they surrendered."

Decent! Hardly perfect, but I have no serious complaints here. 

 

The first goal of any blog-like post ought to be to demonstrate good character. Facts and arguments are merely means of doing so; the nature of the facts is secondary. Problem: writing a blog-like post is itself a demonstration of a character flaw. 

Ockham's razor suggest that Moldbug sounds like a moron because he has become a moron, the only question is why and who else has been or will be affected. Ockham'z razor also suggests that the latter question has already been answered: practically everyone in America is a moron, suggesting they have already been affected or will be soon. 

Booze is a plausible explanation. If you're surrounded by morons, it's significantly more comfortable to dumb yourself down to their level. The sauce can do this temporarily - and perhaps also permanently. Reminder that playing the cards you're dealt is a loser/peasant habit. Decide your own hand or leave the table.

Things that simply will not happen, volume 28.
"The reason is to regain our ability to think calmly, reasonably, collectively and in public, in the presence of a vast tornado of political fear and loathing."
As above, I think the problem is alcohol. If not booze, it's some other irreversible past mistake. If you can't keep your own ideas straight, let me suggest nobody need attempt doing it for you.
Consider this conjunction: Moldbug is producing drek. Moldbug is the best public American writer. 
'The reason is to run a marathon...'
>collapses at the 200 yard mark. 
Yeah, okay. Not holding my breath. 

"“Might makes right” is not an ideal but a fact."
Sure, why not.
Only, Gnon is the mightiest, not America. Insofar as Jehova and Jesus spoke for Gnon, we can see America rebels against God. Are you shocked to see revolutionaries portray God as the bottom and themselves as the top? God is merciful, and thus America survives. For some values of [survives]. Merciful until He isn't, that is. Perhaps when He sends a plague.

George Washington was a traitor to America. Pure stuff from the 9th circle of Hell. I kid I kid - he was a traitor to George III too, plus obviously Washington was a puppet and I'm using him as a symbol to refer to his backers. America upholds this treacherous tradition to the present day. When it runs out of allies to betray it betrays itself.

Cthulu Doesn't Swim Left in China or Russia

Moldbug et al want Cthulu to be this systems-theory prospiracy nonsense. Moldbug in particular wants salami-slicing to be impossible for the right. Unfortunately for these theories, both Russia and China are slowly moving right, not left. 

The leaders of Russia and China wisely realize Fascism is a loser's game. To start with, they have scuppered elections. 

Everyone knows Putin fakes his way into office, and they just suck it up. As a result, he can allow a Fascism competitor, Orthodox Christianity, to rise in prominence. It's not my favourite religion but it's also not secular egalitarian humanism, so bully for Russians. 

China is pretending that capitalism is a kind of communism. This is increasing, not decreasing. Again, lies are bad mmmkay, but it's still better than Fascism. We can see they're trying to hide from America, not trying to hide from God. China does have nukes, and I think Gnon would favour them more were they to tell America straight to fuck off and die, but perhaps they know something I don't. (It's probably cowardice though.)

Belief flows from the barrel of a gun. The peasants believe whatever the biggest stick tells them to believe. Sadly, despite being peasants, these beliefs have consequences. The Empire, and the Empire alone, will continue to get more and more Fascist until God finally pulls the trigger on telling it to fuck off and die, just as God told off the Romans. Most likely, Americans as a race will disappear just as Romans degenerated into mere Italians.

What? Of Course There's a Specifically Montanan Kind of Self-Actualization

The weather is different. The genes are different. The Platonic ideal human in Montana acts differently as a result of local conditions. 

"To imagine “Montana culture” is to imagine that there is such a thing as a Montana armiger—a specifically Montanan path to human self-actualization."

The wildlife is different. The local hazards are different. The latitude and thus sleep's path of least resistance is different. And so on, and so forth.

This?
"What is Montana to them? A beautiful, low-tax AirBNB—a set of GPS coordinates."
A disease. A fundamental delusion. Without powerful subsidies it would not survive long.

"But how else can you do the armigers justice?"
For one, realize that 19 parts in 20 of these 'armigers' are fake. They're LARPing. Havel's greengrocer, except they're required to have entire Twitter accounts instead of a few bulletins. Much of the Prussian school system can be seen as an attempted scholar-caste transmutation device. Belief flows from the barrel of a gun and if they're not required to pretend anymore they'll turn on a dime.

I was watching VDH and noticed he's become consumed by shamanism. It's all about appeasing the anima - except he doesn't call 'globalization' an anima, so it's definitely different. Moldbug has the opposite problem, a total lack of shamanism. 

The sky tells you how to live. It's impossible to look at the stars and say, "Oh that reminds me, I need a good passive-aggresive line for Barbara in Marketing for tomorrow." Reading the sky isn't hard, and thus Americans don't like to look up.

Montana's sky is not the same as the Veldt's sky or the Outback's sky.

Moldbug as Secular Humanist

Moldbug is, at least, relatively consistent. Having decided that cooperation is bad and defection is good, he argues the government's problem is not being defective enough.

"As Bastiat would put it, the government goes around breaking windows."
Vandals are civilization, right?
I must then propose civilization is a low bar. We must do much better than civilization to achieve the thing known as being civilized.
Incidentally vandals=civilization has an amusing steelman.
There's an Envy angle here too. Humans, being largely envy-based, consider themselves civilized if they are more civilized than their neighbours. I'm supposed to be impressed as long as they don't live like the Pygmies do. 

Most of the problems Moldbug raises are hardly even problems, except that the solutions are illegal or heretical. E.g. America doesn't have a car culture. It has car laws which privilege machines over people. The people then play to win. If you're not playing a loser game it just isn't a problem.

Moldbug is still a secular humanist. Unfortunately secularism is a false religion, and causes severe economic problems, ref: read a newspaper. Humanism is not nihilism, it is pop-nihilism. It plays nihilism at parties, because it says nothing is sacred. In other words, 'Don't care about anything.' More precisely, the sacred ritual is defiling everything except the sacred defilement ritual itself. I think perhaps you can explain to me how such a philosophy leads to deaths of despair. 

When a secular humanist starts rejecting their unprincipled exceptions, to my tremendous shock, they come to the conclusion that defection is good and cooperation is bad. How did that happen. 

"Capitalists and communists agree that the production of utility must be maximized; they differ only on its subsequent distribution."
Inhabiting the stereotypes of your enemies is bad because it's reversed stupidity. Instead of sticking your hand in a fire, you stick it in a vat of liquid nitrogen. See also: the Fascist projection trick. Moldbug is still a utilitarian - it's unavoidable for secular humanists - so it's important for him to run around accusing everyone else of being utilitarian. 

"If there are still more than twelve people in Venezuela—now no one needs the rest of them. Good times!"
As any good economist knows, temporary price shocks are permanent.
I rather doubt Moldbug genuinely believes this. It's an arguments-are-soldiers moment. Adopt all arguments, no matter how ridiculous, as long as they support your pre-established conclusion.

In this case, this I think:
"Mercantilist economies exist in the world today—and seem to do better at passing our success metrics."
We don't need to give up our secular humanist Fascism. "Our success metrics" lol. We can simply Fasces better. 'Quit Totalitarianisming wrong! Do it right!' Defence against change, aka cope. He wants you to be a better utilitarian by going one step into counterintuitive strategies. That said I'm not 100% sure this fully describes his aim. I just know it can't possibly be what he said it is.
Conservatives never conserve anything because they don't want to. They don't learn because Reality doesn't punish them, and Reality isn't punishing them because they aren't failing. They like being on the left, but need some excuse to stay away from the exciting edge.
Moldbug, likewise, is pointed left, but from farther away. Human rights break windows. Trannies getting human rights consumes and destroys a whole lot of this "excess" capacity. It should perhaps be a little more difficult to reconcile Progressivism with an alleged reactionary. 'But trannies don't maximize their human potential.' Yeah? How do you know? Who gets to decide?
Moldbug is merely searching for an excuse to cause less harm. Admirable in its petty way, but doomed. 'How can we deviate without being deviant.' Yeah, good luck with that one.

Another reason secular humanism is false religion: you can't. It's biologically impossible to hold nothing sacred. There used to be many maids and butlers and the like. A groundskeeper is effectively someone who mows the lawn full time. Did economics happen? Religion happened. Can't worship a lawnmower, and thus humans aren't allowed to be groundskeepers anymore. It doesn't help that a nice century-old lawn is unmistakably a sacred place, which humanists are obligated to defile.

"public well-being is the supreme law"
The core of all leftism is irresponsibility. Pretending to care about strangers is irresponsible. Any leadership locus must discard this principle or it will become profoundly left-wing.

Do you know of a corporation that treats its front line with basic decency? I don't. As should be expected: beyond a very minimum size, it is biologically impossible to see them as subjects which can be treated well or poorly. They are objects on a good day. On an average day, they are one inert object. 

Necessarily, a deviant government cannot be on the side of the people. All political formulae (except Exit) are paeans to Satan, asking the Father of Lies to conceal the basic antagonism of the parasite relationship. If you genuinely believed defective government was superior to cooperative government, you would not feel the need to say this prayer.

Imagine: 'The peasants have too much blood and some of it needs to be leeched out, for their own good.' This statement at least does not attack itself. I shouldn't need to mention this but probably do: lies are irresponsible. All political formulae (except Exit) are sublimely left-wing.  

"Once we add human capital back into the formula, we easily see the need for artificial difficulty."
Moldbug strikes me as anti-glory. Being glorious is inherently difficult. With the demands of survival reduced, there is more available for attempts at not merely surviving, but attempting luxurious glory.

I wonder if this, too, is inherent to secular humanism. If we worship the human, the human cannot be fallible, now can it? Unfortunately, the human is fallible. This means a lot of sweeping failures under the rug. Or blaming them on the Eternal Enemy: Jews, Kulaks, Whites, Liberal Economists. (Anything to avoid seeing the Adversary as the Eternal Enemy. Naturally if God is Humanity, Satan must also be Humanity, in one way or another.) To keep the pressure down, nobody can be allowed error-prone ventures. Nothing difficult can be tried. Except artificially, it would seem.

Perhaps I should say: the conservative in fact does succeed at conserving. He succeeds at conserving Fascism. America has been Fascist for 100% of its history. It's Traditional. That is what the conservative conserves. 

Moldbug calls himself a reactionary. A radical conservative. His message: to save Fascism from itself, drastic measures are necessary. Maybe even some counter-intuitive concessions. 

The term prince is supposed to invoke monarchy. God tells a monarch what to do, not a Moldbug or an Alrenous.
Moldbug wants his friends to stop sucking by being so Fascist, without having to stop being Fascist. Certainly we can understand the impulse, but I do condemn taking such an impulse seriously.
Moldbug can see that taking the Fascism out of Fascists would require tremendous military force. He cannot see that having granted tremendous military force to someone, it is not going to be used as Moldbug intends, because this fact means his goal is impossible.

Having seen this I can now articulate why unequal treatment under the law is a bad idea. Inevitably, one class will have privileges the other classes don't. This results in endless spurious applications to be part of the favoured or advantageous class. If there are serfs and freemen, the serfs will constantly apply to be freemen, even (especially) if they can't handle the responsibility.
Race makes a wonderful class divider, since it's functionally impossible to apply to be a different colour. 

Points of order addendum.

"To liberal economics, a government is a service provider."
Nonsense. You cannot sue the government for failure to provide. Liberal economics is a pack of lies and little else needs be said on the topic.

"It is impossible to reconcile these equally compelling perspectives abstractly."
Reconciling perspectives is the purpose of physics. You may see the rod is 1.5 feet long while I see it as 3 feet long, but this difference is exactly what allows physics to show us the same sequence of events. E.g. to reconcile lies with truth, note the liar is just lying. When my calculation shows you should see a rod of 1.9 feet, it means my calculation is wrong and I need to find the error, because it's likely that isn't the only place I've made such an error. 

"You have to hold both in your head simultaneously"
If it turns out Moldbug is reporting a false speed to me, then I can fix many anomalies by throwing out all of Moldbug's speed reports. I don't fix anything by continuing to hold them. 

"Art is very important; art is the principal talent of enormous numbers of people; and art is very hard to fund and support."
Alternatively, Patreon already exists.
Plus the only reason you need a peasant Patreon instead of chad Patrons is because secular humanism bans the rich from flaunting via funding the arts.
Do you know what Dwarf Fortress is? No? Neither does anyone else. It makes over $80,000 a year on Patreon. Don't you realize one of the most successful business types is the FREE-to-play video game?