Anti-Universalism Practice

A fake Voight-Kampff test asked me if I prefer sunrises or sunsets. Presumably as an indirect way of asking if I prefer beginnings or prefer things to be over.

I stumbled across the proper non-universalist answer. In the morning, I prefer sunrises. In the evening, I prefer sunsets. Trying to have a sunset at noon or a sunrise at midnight destroys any virtue that the spectacles have. 

In general, trying to take things away from their home will cost more than any advantage you can gain by doing so. If you really want it that much, you should go to them, rather than the reverse. Try inner peace and figure how things are fine as they already are, rather frustrating yourself trying to justify the idea they're not fine.

Bees are Aesthetic and Cooperative

Bees go well out of their way to disguise the inherent hideousness of insectoid physiognomy. 

They are also productive. They pollinate flowers and make excessive amounts of delicious and medicinal honey. 

According to materialist Darwinism, this makes no sense. Why would flowers care what bees look like? They have no eyes. Other bees have eyes, but it's clear other insects don't mind how ugly their conspecifics are. If every housefly dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would miss them.

Maybe it happened by chance. Except, butterflies. Moths and butterflies have the same kind of relation as wasps and bees. The ugly one is a pest.

Butterflies are pollinators, like bees. Some eat pests, like aphids. Moths eat your clothes, or form a lunch buffet for the parasite bird, the cuckoo. Even within moths, the prettier ones are more useful, such as silk moths. A few moths are pollinators too, such as the finely outfitted oleander hawk moth. Butterflies pollinate edible plants instead of inedible ones, however. 

Pretty things are good for both the economy and the ecology. Ugly things generally aren't - or rather, pests end up being ugly, it seems. By process of elimination, it's clear the causation runs from pest-behaviour to appearance.

Don't forget rafflesia is an arch-parasite and deliberately makes itself look and smell like a dead body.

It's also super weird that wasps with a more vicious face, by human standards, are more vicious in temperament. It makes sense for a social animal like humans to evolve to recognize signs of aggression in other humans, and for aggressive folk to have more aggressive expressions. It makes no sense that this aesthetic to transfer 1:1 over to asocial insects. 

Yellowjackets don't sit around having a beer and complimenting each other on their sadism. It would make perfect sense for them to look vicious for our benefit, except the part where that makes no sense. At least, no sense in a Darwinian framework.

 

Darwin was of course correct. Natural selection is so true it's transcendentally true - if you move beyond physics, it doesn't stop being true. It is not, however, the entire story. Rather obviously incomplete, if you spend even a few minutes looking. 

P.S. From high up, American cities look like a grey death-fungus spawning from the sodden swampy environment of river forks.

Sympathy for Hysterical Trannies

Fascism: "You have boobs now, time to dress like a slut."
Girl: "I don't want to dress like a slut, I'ma be a tranny instead."

Modern society offers girls such a great deal they would rather pretend to be a boy, because it seems less degenerate.

Turns out Vkusno & Tochka Tastes Better than McD's

McDonalds sold all its McDonald's in Russia so it wouldn't lose any money on the virtue-signalling.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/miscellaneous/mcdonalds-reopens-in-russia-under-new-name

Naturally, it turns out the food is better now. They took the Communism out, probably. E.g. went back to frying the fries in lard instead of industrial seed byproducts a.k.a. engine oil. Probably less unhealthy too.

Apparently McD's keeps the right to buy them back in 15 years.
A) Have Russia confiscate the restaurants unless their yachts etc. are repaid.
B) Sell them but immediately abandon them and create proper knock-offs.

Don't React to Insults

Which means: don't make insults in the first place.

 

Socially speaking, reacting to an insult gives it credence. If you need to defend yourself, the accusation was vaguely credible; even if it's not strictly true, it's truthy. 

Hence, even if it really is true, you shouldn't react to it. Fake it till you make it: act as if they're accusing your hair of being medusa snakes. "No? What?" Act like you don't even understand how it's supposed to be insulting, or politely ignore it the way you politely ignore a faux pas to save the erroneous person the embarrassment.

Given that the correct strategy for dealing with insults is to ignore them, then there's no point in making them in the first place. "Ignore me!" "Okay!" "....wait, I didn't mean it!" 

 

"If you buy a gift for someone and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?" 

Of course one must always watch out for irrational or stupid observers. However, by definition, they are weak. You don't want to be their friend, and there's no problem if they're your enemy. 

If your audience isn't ignorant, insult reflects only on the person who offers it. 

 

E.g. I always notice it's merchant-caste posturing and I have no interest in merchant-caste games, since they are founded upon falsehood. They're flagrantly disqualifying. "I'm not even trying to speak the truth." "Ah, well, thanks for letting me know. Welcome to my block/ignore/comment deleted list."

 

Ascended Aside: Sociology is Easy, Immigration Edition

"Now, the people who wrote it knew that it would be so naturally spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone else that, in fact, it was no big deal.

""This is not a revolutionary bill," assured Lyndon Johnson when he signed it – he first tip that it was, in fact, a revolutionary bill."
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-great-replacement-electoral-strategy

The fact he had to make these defences immediately shows you that attacks along this line had been made.
As always, the fact such a defence was necessary - especially when it was already being signed - is immediate strong evidence for the opposite. The lady doth protest too much. 

"It's all bitterly amusing when you look back at it, because, of course, that is precisely what this bill did."

Indeed, exactly what it was intended to do. They were just lying about it. 

That's what you get when you sign up for coercive, deviant government. Perverse political incentives. Everyone competes to make the voters dissent the most, by causing them to suffer exactly enough that they won't actually do anything about it. 

Mainly it was about funding "The American Dream" though. Without rabidly crazy zoning laws, there wouldn't be enough energy behind immigration to get much done. Immigrants give suburbs new subsidies, and then the Sophists can skim some off the top of the subsidies. Someone has to administrate them, after all. There's sinecures to hand out to your supporters. The more immigrants, the more graft; there's your actual incentive. 

--

New conspiracy theory: what if they absolutely had to eject Trump since the suburbs would imminently fall apart without a massive immigrant-fuelled rain of subsidies?

Why Was Stuff 24/7 in the First Place?

I know a town with an official population under 10,000 that had a 24/7 grocery store. It was neat while I was living there...exactly because I was 100% guaranteed not to meet anyone at the store while I was shopping. Obviously they weren't making any money during the night hours I preferred.

Most places have reduced their hours, citing ncov, and obviously in fact because they don't like negative profit margins.

I can't explain why it didn't already happen though. Sure, maybe someone would foolishly try some 24/7, find it's bad, and then stop. Why didn't anyone stop? Why did it keep spreading? 

I assume it's some government shenanigans. It usually is. However, 'usually' isn't 'always,' and I'm interested in the details.

Musk Can't Buy Twitter Because it's State-Owned

You can't just buy out the government like that. 

Trump's "own" of Musk highlights his greatest value-add: bureaucrat-whispering. Musk somehow convinces the corruption to work on his side instead of against him, and as a result has the least expensive rocketry anywhere by far. 

Can you imagine? What if they let billionaires buy local police departments? It would be so embarrassing when security prices dropped by 9/10ths there, along with crime rates. 

The problem is that the bureaucrats whisper back, and someone told Musk it's better for his health not to buy Twitter. "Yeah you joked about it...it's not a joke, bud."

(Moral: seize the long end of the stick. If the government is handing out free money, ensure it's handing it out to you.)

Luther Wasn't Pious

As soon as someone starts virtue-signalling it's important to assume the opposite of whatever they're signalling. The null hypothesis is that Luther was even more corrupt than the priests he was condemning.

The real story goes roughly like this: a peripheral duke had a beef with a central duke, and decided to attack him on religious grounds. Thus the duke hired Luther to be his patsy, so it wasn't quite as obvious. The scheme got a bit out of hand. 

Even Luther started preaching against the excesses in Protestant fanaticism...once he had secured a nice cushy chair for himself, of course. 

 

Either the Catholics would have listened to reasonable arguments, or they were incorruptibly corrupt. If they would listen to arguments, nailing something to their door is a teenage tantrum, not a dialogue. If they were corrupt, then nailing something to their door is nothing but a publicity stunt...in other words, an adult tantrum. 

Luther was violently proud, in the sinful sense, at the very least. If you genuinely think the Catholics are hopelessly corrupt, then you perhaps don't even bother to call your division a protest. You call it a restoration, and denounce them as un-Catholic.

Is there any actual evidence for Luther's piety?
Would Luther in fact approve of what his intellectual descendants have done?

I think the answer to that second one is "he wouldn't care" because he was flagrantly corrupt, but I am genuinely asking questions here. Perhaps, had he known the result of his actions, he would have lived a quiet life instead.  

 

See also: "saint" Francis, who took a vow of poverty but somehow ended up with de-facto property rights over a whole abbey... 

Know them by their fruits. The Amish don't tell anyone else how to Christianity properly. They just quietly do it, and Gnon clearly loves them for this. 

P.S. There's also the issue that you can make your hierarchies hostile to corruption. It should be uncomfortable and difficult, at the procedural layer, for corrupt priests to fit in. Christianity, by contrast, is uncomfortable and difficult for the genuinely pious.

Ascended Aside: Public Bathrooms Attract Crime

https://spectator.org/starbucks-faces-consequences-of-wokeness/

"In June, Schultz admitted that he was considering walking back the open bathroom policy, as it was encouraging an influx of people “coming in who use our stores as a public bathroom.” Schultz went on to say that “we have to harden our stores and provide safety for our people. I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.”"

Apparently having a free bathroom attracts shitty people, kek. 

Would public versions of other rooms in your house attract cruddy neighbours? Free dining room? Free bedroom? Free kitchen? Might be major on "free" and minor on bathrooms being crappy. 

 

"Ascended aside" is my term for the phenomenon of an apparent minor tangent outshining the whole rest of the article. That part's useful, and the rest isn't.

Public Health is Unhealthy and Private

Do: anti-smoking campaign
(tobacco is medicinal for ~20% of the population)

Don't: anti-noise pollution campaign
(noise is medicinal for <0% of the population)

Never forget ambulances are loud enough to permanently damage your hearing in under a second. This is not some weird coincidence, it is exactly what you should be expecting.

Big Mac Inflation is 40%

Forty percent, big mac inflation is.
Never use Official numbers. Always use big mac index.

Sounds about right to me. America getting absolutely jacked.

So, UBI. They're going to have to print more money to pay for food stamps. Which will cause inflation. Which means they're going to have to print yet more money to pay for food stamps, which drives folk out of work, which means they need more food stamps, which causes inflation...

I dunno how strong this will be compared to the rest of it, but there's a Weimar hyperinflation pathway there. 

Of course they could always try the price controls thing. That has worked once, ever, right? I'm sure it hasn't failed literally every time it was tried or anything? 

I don't think hyperinflation is imminent. I think you're looking at the next 8-12 years for a nearly guaranteed hyperinflation event though. Time to GTFO unless you have an anti-inflation plan.

Could be as close as next year, but they're quite skilled at kicking the can. More ruin in a nation etc.

Alternatively the government collapses in 2024. Sufficiently unlikely in my opinion, but the opening is there. If the Eccles Building can't even staff itself, you can avoid hyperinflation. Kind of have other problems on your mind at that point, however.

Don't Give Birth in a Hospital

 https://nitter.unixfox.eu/ThatDakari/status/1546193016641183744

Check the replies too.

 

Really, just don't go to a hospital at all. They're extremely dangerous. Incredibly risky.

Humanity is Too Weak

It's really very simple.

Whether it's fair to expect you to be strong enough to survive or unfair, it doesn't matter. It's too late. There's a strict minimum. If you don't meet it, you will eat it.

Hobbit Creation of Dark Elves vs. Management Shortage

"The Hobbits have two immediate needs, first they need to distinguish Elves from Dark Elves, second they need to encourage more Dark Elves to exist."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/GreeneMan6/status/1546480676287008768

Of course they can't do either of those things, because they are hobbits. Not without some Elves first telling them to do it. 

Good luck with that!

I can't stop thinking of the lord shortage. There simply aren't enough elves of any kind to rule a substantial portion of America. It's ungovernable not because America is the home of the free and the brave - it's a collection of some of the most cowardly, supine, grovelling hobbits on the planet - but because even if you wanted to, the management capacity simply doesn't exist. 

If the UN got together tomorrow, agreed that the lord/peasant distinction was real, developed a lord test, and everyone in America voted, 100%, to support lordship-for-lords program, it would still fail. The biology cannot support it. Closely analogous to way you can't reach space by flapping your arms. It's not that you can't make a carbohydrate rocket, but it already didn't happen.

Much of the problem with the Woke is that the Woke are hobbits who think they've heard the Pope say something. He hasn't. Oops. 

P.S. "Can this be derived from the old stock elites? Hard to say."
Or: "I haven't read Son Also Rises, because I'm an illiterate peasant."  

I mean, I haven't either, but it flatters all my preconceptions so there's no actual need. Like most "books" you can cut it down to a two-page executive summary and nothing of value would be lost. 

P.P.S. "In Tolkien’s world the elves are fading away. Even though the age of men is at hand, their true strength is gone. Aragorn give hope that man’s nobility can be recaptured, but that is a hope."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/apokekrummenain/status/1546378266184916992

Tolkein, egalitarian/American: "We don't need the elves."
IRL: "We need the elves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Reminder: nobles weren't overpaid. They were underpaid, and they're "fading away" by quitting and letting you have democracy.

cope vs. horror

ncov: based virus kills the weak

leftism: based virus kills the weak

hail Gnon

 

"It’s important to understand that leftist antinatalism, whether implicit or explicit, does nothing to reduce the number of leftists Leftists mostly reproduce by mentally colonizing children of normal, healthy people."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/0x49fa98/status/1546279325124665345

Normal, maybe. Healthy, no. Not even a little bit. 

The message is that Americans don't need to accept any blame for what happens to them. Americans love having someone else to blame; they would rather hundreds of millions die than accept responsibility.
The true horror is they're going to get what they want, because they deserve it.

All Government is Graft & The Why of Voting

If there is a government, it is a graft scheme. Period. No exceptions. No reasonable person can disagree.

America is actually 500+ countries. This is much of the reason it's so expensive; the result of overlapping jurisdictions is a bunch of redundant graft. You pay through the nose for the tiny crumbs of service you get out of the frankenstein abomination. 

But why are there services at all? It would be cheaper and better for everyone to avoid that unpleasant complication. "I have stick, you give cash." "Okay."
A: political formulae. Every government department is basically this: "Wait, a political formula lets you steal without being seen as a thief and thus fooling their immune system. What else can we include in the formula?" Hence the department of transportation needs to at least maintain the polite fiction of a road network. Grudgingly, you get something which nearly resembles a service out of the deal.

While voting is broken in nearly every way and never had the slightest chance of being effective, you still need voting booths and campaigns and stuff or the "We totes a democracy" fiction breaks down entirely. However, it is, inevitably, merely another graft scheme. The point of voting is to pay off the supporters of the voting department.

And that's why America likes having more voters. That's why so they're so anxious for you to get out and vote. The more voting booths they have to run, the more excuses for graft they have. If natives subconsciously understand the scam and stop going, they will import foreigners. Coercive government is inherently cancerous; if it is not growing, it is dying. Worse, unlike a dying cancer cell, a dying government can declare war, effectively metastasizing on purpose. 

Can't have that, now can we? All State departments must grow.

Not a Recommendation: Accidentally a Shrine Priestess & General Musings

I just want to point out it is woman moment: the book.

Would you like to hear the protagonist worry about nothing, then get over it, then blather about nothing for paragraphs, until she starts worrying about nothing again?

Boy do I have a story for you!

Chapter: "I lit the lamps."
Next chapter: "I lit more lamps. These ones were outside!"
Not a joke. Though it is funny. Naturally, domestic tasks loom large in importance, for women.  

Based on the ratings, it seems like other women eat this shit up.

"This is completely, totally, fundamentally, profoundly, utterly pointless. I love it! I'll take two!"

Women are sensitive, see, and don't like being uncomfortably poked by a point. Especially not a sharp point. Thus, if you want to write for women....well, look, all women are perverts, so write smut. Excuse me, 'erotica,' which means the scenes are 'steamy' instead of vulgar. If you're too blunt she'll feel like a slut for liking it. If you don't write smut, get rid of the plot. Plots have too many points; women don't like them.

I especially like the part where she forgot the wyvern was supposed to be creepy just the previous day and decided it was cute instead. Women: don't even know what they themselves are feeling, let alone thinking. Don't worry if you can't figure it out. It's not like she's hiding it from you on purpose. Only the worst kind of woman is genuinely upset about it. 

If you offer a woman something and she doesn't like it, it's perfectly acceptable to offer it to her again later. Her opinion has no basis and thus it might, without basis, change. If she gets mad at you for trying, just ignore it. It's okay, she's also going to forget about it momentarily.

You might even get hit with the 'you always' line, but remember, most women live in an eternal present. She doesn't remember the past, nor does she imagine the future. So, yes, for all of eternity as she perceives it, meaning right now this instant, you have "always" done whatever thing you're currently doing. Most women don't really have social skills and can't convert her momentary emotional impression into something that makes sense to anyone that isn't her, so you have to do that for her. Much as you have to do many other things for her, starting with opening jars. 

"After I lit the lamps, it was scary! I was so worried! It turned out fine though, and then I lit more lamps!" Riveting stuff.

I suspect the primary reason women have trouble making friends is this comical dearth of social skills. She expects you to figure out what she's thinking because she sure as fuck doesn't know. Other women have it easier, since they're thinking the same thing, whatever it is....assuming they're practically identical.
Bit of a catch-22 there too. To figure out what a woman is thinking the easy way, you have to also be a woman, feeling the same thing, but also be significantly wiser. Meaning not identical. Meaning likely to feel something different.
It's difficult for women to even commiserate. If they manage to bitch together without offending each other, you should congratulate them and offer kudos, because that was genuinely an accomplishment. They went uphill both ways to get there.

Since women can't figure out what they themselves are thinking and feeling, they can't tell their friend, which means the friend can't get to know them. And vice-versa. Meaning....not really friends, now are they? Except, of course, in certain extreme cases which invalidate one of these assumptions.

 

"Great, more dry reading."
Pretty rich coming from you, Shrineling.

Perhaps women like obedience because, having no idea what she's thinking, it's a lot easier to just do what she's told by someone else, and let them do the thinking. Plus it helps her be identical to other obedient women, and thus less unable to be friends with them. 

My second favourite part is how unskilled chores like lighting lamps are given narrative weight like they're epic battles. "Now for the real test...lighting a bigger lamp! DUN DUN DUNNNNN!" (Spoiler: she's fine, she knows how to light the big lamp.) It's not slice of life, it's the legendary journey of the Chosen Sweeper, a vicious campaign waged with the mighty Broom of Ages against the dark lord Dust Bunny. "Oh no, the Chosen Sweeper swept enough to get tired and need a rest! Is this the end? Will she ever recover? Find out next time!"

The tension! The suspense! How many lamps will she manage to light today! Still not joking, just exaggerating a little! She's out of lamps because they're all lit, but, in a shocking twist, there are potted plants! They're nice plants!

My third favourite part was pointed out to me by someone lost in the mists of time...
Women don't really earn adulthood. It just happens. They are granted their important fitness-related skills from on high. Thus, stories by women often have magical abilities just appear out of nowhere, basically as a metaphor for growing tits. All the magic is "natural" and "intuitive," because that reflects how their important skills work in their own life. Except cooking, which is always a tremendous accomplishment both for the woman who learns and the woman who teaches it. "What, you mean I don't just know what to throw in the pot and how long to cook it? What is this nonsense, and how could you do this to me?"

Finally, I would like to point out how the author isn't capable of putting herself in the shoes of her own protagonist. "I don't particularly miss my parents, therefore she doesn't miss her parents." A woman who got isekai'd solo would freak all the way out. Her genes will interpret it as being bridenapped but her new husband was killed by a wild animal and now she's lost deep in the woods. More often than not they'll pass out from hyperventilation, and would die from it if they didn't fall unconscious. She would not go, "You know, I miss coffee. (Because I'm physically addicted to caffeine.) Gee the folks around here are pretty nice, isn't that swell. I think I'll make friends with them!" It is rather more likely she would be a broken shell for years.
"I'm imagining her situation!" No you're not, you're looking at a picture of her situation and continuing to feel what you were already feeling.
I think occasionally you find women capable of empathy, but it's easily unicorn territory. Never expect her to escape her own head, you will only be disappointed. 

"While Sophie followed Acacia back to the bakery, she also kept an eye out for strange mana wisps like she had seen the last time she was in Caulis."
You can tell Sophie is a Good Girl because she desperately follows up on every negligible detail. Very Diligent. It's not just monkeybrains availability bias or anything, no ma'am!
You have to act just like Sophie, or you won't be a Good Girl like she is!

"She was starting to think that it had been some sort of fluke after all."
Or, in English instead of womanese: "Things that don't happen every day only happen once ever, so I forgot all about it." 

this is fantastic

I cannot stop laughing.
https://fakenous.net/?p=1565

I am Alre-nous, and this is my cut-rate knockoff, FakeNous.

What am I? I am what a university professor of philosophy would be like if they weren't retarded. You're here because you want to know, "What if philosophy professors said things, that happen to be counterintuitive, because they are true, instead of being iconoclastic to signal they can get away with it?" 

Genuinely couldn't be more on-the-nose if I had planned it.

As I've said before, I didn't even try to go into Academic philosophy, because even as a teenager I was fully aware there was no philosophy going on in philosophy departments. (Kripke is a clown. You're supposed to think it's funny.)
Try not to be more naive than teenager-version me. This should not be a difficult standard.

In case anyone was interested in thinking about culture wars as opposed to doing tribal signalling

Alternatively: Rectification: Culture War

 

You can't win a culture war as normally defined. In such a culture war, you're actually both part of the same culture; cultures form a game theoretic game, meaning they have more-winning strategies, meaning they have Nash equilibria, both local and global. If you have decided you need to engage in a culture war, you have already lost, because the reason your opponents have the high ground is because they're humbly respecting the local game. The underdog is trying to "win" a culture war by disrespecting the nature of the culture they're trying to win. The winners are trying the Nash equilibrium and the losers are rebelling against the idea that the Nash equilibrium is an equilibrium. Neo-Nazism is a variety of Judaism. 

To wage a winnable culture war, first you must surrender and quit. (Hence passivism.)

You must have a genuinely different culture than the opponent. 

Don't be Satanists, you prats. If you want to win against Christians, you have to be Zeusists or Odinists or Shivaists or whatever, and then play the Zeus game better than they're playing the Yeshua/Satan game. 

Then you realize: actually, what foreigners believe is none of your business. If they want to be deluded, that's between them and god.
The point I hit endlessly: be Amish. The concept is already proved. Trying to win is losing; you inherently legitimize their power when you try to take their power. You're trying to out-lie Satan. Morons, don't try to seize the throne of Hell; even if you could succeed, your reward would be a load of Hell. Especially don't try to seize it through treachery. Try not to forget that eternals >> mortals.

The Satanists can't stop you from being Amish. Or Zeusist. Or, like me, Alchemist. Accept that, when your opponents choose Satan, you have already won. 

Satan never had any power. To repeat myself again: Christian Satanology is all terribly on-point. If you said, "Get thee behind me, Satan," Satan just kind of had to do it. Satan only had power if he could convince you to fight him for the power, which let him appropriate yours. 

Quit fighting and accept victory already. There is no need for a war. There is no genuine conflict; Satan, father of lies, was just pretending

If it's really that important to you, if you really can't mind your own business: the only way to win a culture war is with a regular-ass war. With like tochka-Us and kalibrs and howitzers and stuff. Belief flows from the barrel of a gun. Convert them by the sword or you reveal you yourself are a Satanist.

You're not a rat in a cage. The cage isn't even real, bro. Just like turn off the screen. Walk away. Touch grass, as they say. (I prefer pigweed, it's edible.) 

The Lowborn Highborn & Succession

Apparently my hobbit metaphor from 2014 is now all over the place because Moldbug signal-boosted it, and damn if that isn't funny. 

On a practical level, note that if I'd continued to use it regularly myself, this event would have been blocked. If you want to do this sort of thing on purpose, neglect is part of the strategy. Anyway, let's talk about the blood.

If you know how many aristocrats there are, how many children they have, and the proportion of aristocrat children who end up being hobbits, you can work out what percentage of hobbit-born children would result in more than half of all aristocrats being hobbit-born. 

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that aristocracy is the top 1%. To make the math easy, let's pretend everyone has the same family size, and all 100%, every aristocrat baby, is themselves an aristocrat. A bunch of things cancel, meaning the threshold is a simple 1/99 => if more than 1.01% of hobbit children are aristocrats, at any given time, more nobles are lowborn than highborn. 

Note that this is all linear or close enough, so modifying the number is trivial. If only 80% of aristocrat births are also aristocrat, then multiply the final number by 0.8. If aristocrat generations are half the size of hobbit generations, then divide the number by 2. Etc. 

 

Note that the 1%, if we're talking IQ, is 135. I consider that midwit. You need ~130 to have what I consider basic literacy; these folk might see a reference and actually read it. If you tell them to google a book, the book might actually get read. "This is the only group that can identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable." However, that's their limit. These folk don't do nested references - if a citation itself has a citation, it's not going to be read.  They can produce original thoughts only through tremendous luck; their ideology is scavenged, not constructed. If it's not in a book already, they can't think it. The innovation-class IQ is distinctly higher than 135.

Although aristocracy is not merely IQ, from IQ you can calculate the actual percentages and how they vary by innate social status. (I estimate the real percentage is something like 30%, not 50+.) Regression to the mean is more aggressive the further from the mean you are. If you're curious, get your lab rats to crunch the numbers. Someone will have to find out how many children aristocrats have, though. Nobody has gathered that information yet, because they won't admit that noble/peasant is a real distinction. 

Note that while it is very plausible that most nobles are lowborn, you don't get lowborn dukes and princes. You get lowborn squires and barons. The Gaussian has exponential decay.
Even if a duke or prince were born to a hobbit family, their distinctly mismatched environment is apt to do tremendous damage to them; you will get a ruined bastard prince, not a healthy prince. Especially in a tremendously envy-positive Fascist country. 

P.S. Since the odds of a duke giving birth to another duke - even if married to a duchess - significantly differs from 100%, primogeniture is a terrible idea. Basically Moldbug is right about stockholding. 

I would do something like distribute stocks of the estate evenly between the children, and they can work out succession amongst themselves via the buyout dynamic. Those who want it more can bid higher. If the non-inheriting children get something out of the deal (aside from their innate blue blood), it dramatically reduces the pressure they feel to commit fratricide. It no longer codes as, "Daddy loves one son 100% and all other children 0%." Bonus: they can buy out the father and have him step down before he goes senile and ruins the place. Anyone who deserves to rule can get the money without having to first inherit. Dukes especially should do it for free, but why not provide a healthy encouragement?

It also helps if you have them read Son Also Rises. If you strip a billionaire of every cent they own, after a decade they will be a billionaire again. If you grant a millionaire a billion-dollar business, it won't be a billion-dollar business for long. The world is fundamentally a just place; men of quality are rewarded, and men of lesser quality receive lesser rewards, even if someone tries to thumb the scale. Whether they inherit or not largely doesn't matter to their final fortunes, especially if the country isn't in the Malthusian trap. Remind them that mortal law can be bent. If their ambition is illegal, that's nothing but an inconvenience. 

Goes double if you can buy out the estates of other people's children.

 

P.P.S. Given that innovation-class IQ is distinctly higher than 135, estimate how high Greece's average IQ must have been to produce Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle close enough in time to have all met in a single pub, using a an effective source population of well under one million.

P.P.P.S. By far my favourite race in Master of Magic has always been the dark elf. If you're too boring to appreciate this, my condolences.

Jan 6 Protesters Wanted to be Arrested

Jan 6 protesters demanded arrest and the Regime supplied arrest. The invisible hand strikes again.

Did they not go to school? Of course they went to school. First lesson: the Regime protects criminals (bullies) from their victims' legitimate self-defence, instead of protecting victims from criminal trespass. Second lesson: you don't get detention for breaking the de jure rules (bullies again), you get detention for agitating against the Regime. 

You can be comically "disruptive" in class and they can barely send you out of class. Mess with a teacher's desk and you're apt to lose all the non-class time for a week, if you're not straight suspended. Imagine what would happen to someone who stole the homework while she wasn't looking. Breaking windows costs the school money, they will launch a rabid manhunt for you. Say something unkind to the principle while non-Bantu? Get fucked, bitch. 

You can vandalize other <strike>student's</strike> victim's desks all you want. Sneak into the principle's office and vandalize his? Too scary to even contemplate. Doesn't occur to anyone. 

Did you not know Charlottesville happened? Permit revoked post-facto, remember that? This is not exactly the first hint, guys. Remember when they audited specifically Christian and other R-voting non-profits for tax evasion? Jan 6 arrests came out of the opposite of nowhere. There's so many it all kind of blurs together and it's hard to remember individual incidents.

Nobody is this stupid. At least, nobody who can tie their own shoes. Children work out these rules without anyone having to say anything, and now we're pretending grown-ass men are too airheaded to work it out after direct verbal warnings?

 

If you showed up to the Jan 6 protest, you were angling for an arrest, because you wanted to be arrested. Even if you really were that airheaded, when it started going weird you should have skedaddled. Gotta get that v-card punched, and of course v stands for victim. Beat me harder mommy. 

It's not even just or unjust, it's a market transaction. They went to the arrest store because they wanted to buy an arrest, and it turns out arrests were in stock.

 

P.S. The fact the school system has to protect bullies reveals that bullies are weak. In a shocking twist, we are told bullies are cowards and bullies are in fact cowards. My mind legit blown a little. If bullies were self-sustaining the teachers would not have to bother to run interference for them. The bully can hardly do anything to you unless the teacher supports them. 

Turning this around, the solution to bullying (crime) is to interrupt the crime-suppression system. If you have to suppress crime you're saying the citizens are weak and can't sustain themselves. They will respond to this message by obediently becoming weak and thus opening up too many criminal opportunities to suppress even if the system were legitimately trying to do that. 

If you have no police system, the potential victims defend themselves until there's no criminals left to defend against.

Irrelevant Celebrity News

John Stewart seems to have become broken down. Men sometimes hit the wall too, you might think. Stewart hit going 60 and got rekt.

Joe Rogan looks noticeably more cringey and anxious too. Less confident, more dispirited. Developed nervous energy. 

I seem to recall Rogan had Glenn Beck on once, but apparently no record of this still exists on youtube; I found out about the above while searching.

Who says the heavens aren't just? They're just lazy. If you rely on the heaven's justice rather than supplying your own, you have to supply large amounts of patience as a substitute. No free lunch.

Fairly Sure Shinzo Abe Was a Satanist

Did see some obvious Satanism tells at one point. Not going to check; it doesn't really matter anymore, after all.

Chickens are Eggs

In most cases, an egg is a chicken. The chicken is an egg. It's like asking which came first: heads or tails. If you slice a coin in half to remove the obverse side, you don't get a one-sided coin. Which came first: inside or outside. If you remove all eggs, there are no chickens. If you remove all chickens, there are no eggs. 

This is also the reason the sins of the father are visited upon the son. The son is* the father, he is suffering from his own sins.

*(50% at least.)

Polite Company is Bad Company

What 'polite' means: there's a bunch of lies you have to tell. Polite conversation is false conversation. In other words, not a conversation. You might even call it narcissist conversation.

All "polite" company is boring and lame. Everything they say is predictable, or it isn't polite. It's not worth hearing because it isn't true, and it's not worth hearing because you've heard it before. 

Come to think, I suppose that's why politicians and journalists (but I repeat myself) are so fascinated by scandals. Women too. "He had sex with what?!?" It's incredibly none of your business....but at least someone finally did something impolite i.e. real i.e. not eyewateringly boring. It's a nice break for them, plus apparently talking about who other people had sex with is perfectly "polite" as long as you don't actually describe the actual act used. 

Only proles are interested in specifics that actually happened, don't you know. 

If the truth isn't polite, so much the worse for politeness. 

Americans, in their inimitable way, manage to combine the worst of both worlds. "Polite" conversation is a series of passive-aggressive insults. Extraordinarily rude, and yet you still can't speak your honest thoughts. 

This is a trend now. Americans also like to use the cheapest possible materials to construct the most expensive style of a service. E.g. artisanal handwoven polyester. Bespoke organic monocropping. Gigantic McMansions made out of particleboard and sometimes they even skip the pressure treating on the softwood studs. Individually shrink-wrapped artificially-flavoured sugar balls. It's 30c of lab-sourced flavouring and 30c of coffee, but you pay $8 for it. Infinite brand value backing shoes put together with, apparently, post-it note glue. Shoelaces instead of velcro, but the aglets are plastic.

Ritualized conversation is fine if it's a necessary part of interacting with strangers. E.g. dealing with retail should be polite, because neither of you cares about the other. The point is to finish the interaction as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's supposed to be shallow and meaningless.

Politeness is for speedrunning.
This also means it should be competitive. If someone proposes a shorter ritual they should get a bounty.

 

Polite company is the opposite. It's about wasting as much time as possible. Lecturers in particular seem to exist to show off how much of your time they can waste. I guess the idea is you can brag about how much of your own time you can afford to waste.

I have a better idea: instead of being so rich you can afford to waste time, be so rich you can afford not to have to waste time.
Freedom, of course, is doing what the government tells you to do. Having options is not freedom. I am thus staunchly anti-freedom: get rich enough you can waste time or not waste time, at your whim.

He's Quoted a Lot Because He Was A Sophist

“The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”  ― Voltaire 

Global warming bumming you out? Bro, just turn the thermometer down. Like dude what are you doing. 

Want a bigger house? Lifehack: shorter meter sticks. Measure area in square millimeters and all of your numbers will be eleventy hojillion. Huge numbers are better, right?

History Repeats and Gets Faster With Practice

The Nash equilibrium of the "Republic" game is Late Empire and Collapse. Having seen the game before, the players slightly understand the winning moves better, and thus make them earlier as compared to the last game. 

Meanwhile the Chinese are doing the treasure ships thing with ghost cities and superfast rail this time around.

Signal Boosting Non-Error: Aphorisms

Bardon Kaldian says: "Aphorisms are overrated.

True, there is some sort of wisdom in quotes from Oscar Wilde or Confucius & a few others (Nietzsche, Montaigne, and especially La Rochefoucauld).

But, generally- wit is shallow. And not just wit. For instance, Shakespeare’s “Ripeness is all” is one of those expressions that should convey some deep stuff & while it has poetic & “existential” value, it’s not such a big deal as most people consider it to be"
https://www.unz.com/isteve/california-reparations-report-is-based-on-the-concept-of-compound-harm-what-einstein-called-the-eighth-wonder-of-the-world/#comment-5374154

An aphorism can be profound if it's true and happens to be profound.

...how do you know it's true? Someone has to prove it. If there's an associated proof it's not an aphorism anymore, it's a scientific paper. 

Further, an aphorism, 99% of the time, only works if you already know the answer. If the aphorism is in some way news to you, then likely you need an explanation. At least a few paragraphs. Kolmogorov complexity etc etc. 

Maybe with a very high quality curator (a Pope if you will) you could know in advance the aphorisms have been selected for relevance, and you could figure them out on your own without wasting so much of your time it's more profitable to ignore them.

However, most don't do that whole [thinking on your own] thing. Division of labour is good actually. They need the aphorisms explained. What they need aren't aphorisms.

I guess aphorisms can function as mnemonics. However, to rectify the names, this means aphorisms can't be considered wise unless both the speaker and hearer are already wise. The wise person makes the aphorism high-status, the aphorism doesn't make the person high-status. 

Basically when Wilde says something snappy and not wrong, he got lucky. If you say enough things, some of them will be good more or less by accident, unless you go well out of your way to avoid it. (Progressives.) 

Nietzsche was genuinely wise but it's not worth reading him because he doesn't explain himself. Either you already know and it's not worth reading him, or you don't get it and it's worth even less than that. It's more about shared commiseration with him. "Yeah, big N, I feel the same way. So relatable."

Confucius didn't say most of the things attributed to Confucius, and that's a good thing. Single-author texts are dubious at the best of times. Confucius is short not because Confucius was averse to explaining himself, but because it's the written appendix of a largely oral culture. It's basically there to remind the teacher what to teach; most of the information is stored off-site, as it were, and as a result much of it is now lost.

Which is why: write it the fuck down, shithead. Explain yourself.

The others I'm not familiar with in the least, and if I found out, I would probably regret it.

 

P.S. Admittedly my own adventures in writing shit the fuck down displays why Nietzsche et al are averse to it. Nobody reads it (but they respond anyway). If they do read it, they don't understand it (especially those with responses). Why would I put more effort into writing it down than anyone is going to put into reading it? (Accounting for suitable proportionality?)

Luckily I'm immensely wealthy and can afford useless production. (As opposed to especially useless Veblenian consumption.)  

P.P.S. Confucius' major error is lack of Stoicism. Dude had 0 self-awareness. Humans are inherently hypocritical (which is why I call the species Caino hypocriens), which means Confucianism ultimately does nothing but regiment the vices Confucius was reacting against.