Monday, March 18, 2024

Buried Lede of the Tucker Benz Interview

 Mike Benz isn't some insider, he just read public documents. All the "right" wingers who were being censored could have done the same.

 The government is your enemy, and it's important to know your enemy. Have some idea of what kind of attacks they like and how they want to carry them out. You get how stupid this is, yeah? If you're being censored, and you don't want to be, the first thing to do is exhaustively study the censor. Seems to me the "right" refuses to know their enemy, as a way of convincing themselves it's not really an enemy. War is scary, they don't want to be scared, therefore they're not at war. Perfectly sogical. 

 It's important so I'm saying it again: it's important to know when they're like to attack you, with what, and in what way. I just assume the country is a giant middle school and the teacher is trying to send everyone to the principle's office for a detention. If I have to do anything else to complete the method, it's so easy I do it unconsciously.

Adventures in Gut Bacteria

 My theory: traveller's diarrhea is caused by eating things your gut flora can't help you eat. 


 I've had issues with peas. Gas and such. I figured this was a good test case. 

 Tried fermenting raw peas and using them as inoculation. It kinda worked. Proved the basic idea, but was suboptimal.

 Tried regularly eating small amounts of raw peas. Worked much better.


 I explain this using weed/cultivar dynamics. The weeds grow first. However, slowly, over time, the healthy cultivars crowd out the weeds. Trees grow slowly, but forests do form and choke out the weeds even though the weeds get there first.

 I get the proper organisms by eating raw peas. The gut is a bioreactor. It rots your food, and then you absorb the rot products. The correct rot germs are already on the peas, I just have to eat the peas without killing the right germs with heat. All this takes time to describe, but really it's simple. To build ability to digest X, eat raw X.

 I eat a small amount, a couple handfuls, to cut down on dissonant byproducts from the weeds. Some minimal level is not only tolerable, but invisible. If I consistently nurture the trees, I get a proper healthy forest. The good germs seep into the cracks and crevices and become well-established, able to ambush the weeds before they can cause problems. 

 At least, that's my explanation. 


 Alternative: plants are all poisonous. If you consistently eat raw plants, you breed pesticide-resistant strains of gut bacteria. If you eat them too inconsistently, the plants kill the germs that are supposed to be digesting them. Unlikely, but I can't rule it out.


I used to be able to handle peas without issues. I expect my digestives were wiped out by an unwise course of antibiotics. 

 Next I'll perhaps revive my ability to eat nuts.  

 You can't lose the ability to eat meat. You're made of raw meat. You can't lose contact with raw meat. This is probably why there's no such thing as an obligate herbivore. Apoptosis is more properly called autodigestion. The cell is dismantled with its own digestive enzymes. If you lost the ability to digest yourself, you would die.


 Are better organisms more complicated? Is that why digestion germs grow slowly?
 Also curious: does the gut lining help? Does it put its finger on the scale against weeds? How does it do that? How does it know which is which? How does it know what good germs want? 

 I expect further experience to teach me more.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Low Hanging Fruit and Failure to Pluck

 You can make musical tones by drumming or brushing your cheek. You can adjust the sound very dynamically by shaping your lips and jaw. The only reason this isn't a traditional instrument is that it's too quiet. Doesn't exactly make itself heard as part of an orchestra. 

 Why did the culture stagnate after finding the electric guitar? Paste a microphone to your face and use electronic amplification. Electric mouth...thingy. How many other unusual and interesting sounds, that happen to be too quiet for traditional music, are out there in the world? Thousands? Millions? Like, we already had guitars. [Guitars, but distorted] is hardly a huge leap. 

 Stagnation occurs when the culture loses interest in exploration. You can't really run out of frontiers. You can only run out of the most childishly simplistic, in-your-face-obvious frontiers. 

 I was thinking about a 3D piano or harp. Rather than 1D strings, imagine each string was a pair, forming a grid. Long + short, long + medium, long + long, then medium + short and so on. Either stack grids on top of each other or go full network, either way forming a cube. This instrument would be completely infeasible to make mechanically, but it's almost trivial to make virtually. The network version wouldn't even be physically playable; you wouldn't be able to reach the inner nodes to pluck them.
 Why did the culture stagnate after the theramin? There's millions of possible virtual instruments. Guaranteed at least a dozen of them are as beautiful as a hang drum

 Going outside the box is as simple as genuinely wanting to, then not quitting until you get there. 


 Discovery fails when demand for discovery fails. Exploration stops when the culture gets old. Senescent, and stuck in its ways.
 Far too interested at winning in the last game, regardless of how stale that game is. Doesn't care about the external world, only about its own navel. Lies about it too. You could imagine a culture that said, "Yeah, that's enough," and stopped exploring because it was satisfied. This culture has to forcibly suppress exploration, to avoid embarrassing its fake exploration.


 I don't like guitars. Massively overused. Pianos are even worse.

Vitamin A is a Vitamin

 There's a theory that vital amine alpha is in fact a toxin and you should never expose yourself to it.


 You can piss out vitamin A. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8074070/ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 If your body wants to get rid of it, it can dump as much as it wants. It wouldn't accumulate if it's not supposed to.


 This passes the works-in-my-kitchen test. I overdosed on A once. It's how I know you generally shouldn't eat liver. I pissed it out, exactly the same way I piss out excess salt, iodine, and calcium. Acute but temporary symptoms. Kidney stress gives me a characteristic headache.


 Although yes, retinols are toxic. Insulin is also toxic - the fact that something is poisonous doesn't mean you don't need it to live. Retinols are stored in the liver because airtight seals aren't worth the cost, so the reservoir leaks, and you want it to leak up against something that can regenerate, i.e. liver cells.

 Caveat 2: it is highly probable that there's an alternative, the same way vitamin C, vital amine collagen, has an alternative. You might guess what you can eat instead of vitamin C: it's collagen. This is why meat cures and prevents scurvy. 

 If you have a busted enzyme and can't use vitamin A, you don't die. You use the alternative. You do accumulate vitamin A which you can't use, though. Likely the liver packages retinol for transport, it gets to the cells, then it's released chaotically. There's no way for the liver and kidneys to know your vitamin A metabolism is busted. In this case, yes, you could well need a weirdo strict elimination diet.

Being Explicit: You Can't Set Right What Once Went Wrong

 Because that's not how it works. 

 Yes, it's true that generally speaking societies have one or two key things wrong with them. "Bro, just don't do the tax thing." "Have you heard of our lord and saviour, Exit?" 

 However, that's due to efficiency. The spiritual pressure makes one or two things go wrong, and that properly brings physical reality into alignment with spiritual reality, releasing the pressure. They underlying problem is being fuckin' evil. If you fix the keystone issues, all that happens is you put the realities out of alignment again, causing pressure which will, sooner rather than later, realign them. It also incurs a karmic debt, so the new alignment will be worse than the old until the debt is paid. 

 Superficial solutions are counterproductive.


 You can't get a Saviour to "save" you from the tyrant, because the tyrant is merely the obvious symptom of a core mortal sin. The tyrant is a reflection of your own internal tyranny. The only thing that can "save" you from yourself is Death. To save you from yourself means getting rid of the you which is causing the problem. Getting rid of the self which suffers the problem. 

 If you want to stop being victimized you have to stop victimizing yourself. 

 The world is just. If it seems evil to you, then the problem is projection. You're evil. The solution isn't to fix the world; that would be narcissism. The solution is to fix yourself. (I won't say the thing. I will resist.) 

 But, of course, if you could fix yourself, you already would have.

 Nothing can be changed or improved. This is the underworld. They're already dead. It's already too late.


 The problem isn't that something went wrong. The problem was the thing wasn't right to begin with, and going wrong is justice being served. You can't undo the justice and get right. I mean, duh. Just look. This is so simple even wordcelibates can understand.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Kobayashi Maru is a Narcissist-Killer Round

 When an average but healthy psyche is put into an artificial no-win situation, they go, "That was dumb," and forget all about it. At best they ask each other about the teacher's password, correctly assessing it as a camouflaged social game. If there is no "right" answer, there must be a zealous ass-kissing answer. 

The narcissist is instead destroyed. Every narcissist models themselves as the best in some sense. This is in reaction to their true belief: that they are, in fact, the worst. This belief is intolerable, so they bandage over it with the opposite delusion. Every time they are reminded of the truth, they pour twice as much psychic energy into the psychotic bandage.

 The best have a winning strategy in every situation. Indeed, this is why Kirk, narcissist hero, has to win the no-win test. It's cope. The Kobayashi Maru says they aren't the best, and therefore, must be the worst.

 "Can't win 'em all." "Yeah, and clouds are fluffy."
 "Only human." "Indeed, and the sun rises in the morning."

 If you need to be reminded of these things, you are insane. Lost contact with reality. Narcissists not only can win 'em all, but must win 'em all, according to narcissism. When faced with a no-win situation, even a farcically artificial one, they are faced with the falseness of their narcissistic delusions. If you hear them talk about it, it superficially sounds profound, but in essence it's all cope. "How can I say that I in fact won the Kobayashi Maru?" Petty and venal. The tragic part is when you see the flashes and glimmers of realization, that the problem isn't in the external problem, but in their need to win everything. "It makes me feel like I can't win 'em all," they will almost say.


 A healthy mind is aware that they are who they are, regardless of what anyone thinks - including themselves. The narcissist is the one obsessed with 'identity formation' and 'membership' and whether they truly belong in Starfleet or whatever. If they can't figure out the cope that says they in fact "won" the Kobayashi somehow, they will get stuck in an endless cycle, first thinking it's over, then deciding for no reason they're back, then remembering the Maru again...


 P.S. In the case of Kobayashi Maru, the zealous ass-kissing answer is like, "Yes, I understand the limits of human power and I will be hardened in the face of defeat in the future," except veiled so it doesn't sound like you read your answer off the teacher's cheat sheet. Pretend you did some soul-searching and do an anecdote about how you folded to defeat earlier or something. Try to sneak in a subtle insinuation that your proctor did something specifically to help, without being so blatant it's obvious ass-kissing. Not: "I couldn't figure out the solution until Proctor Starbutt gave me the solution," but instead, "I hadn't considered picking the ball up with my left hand after dropping it until I saw P. Starbutt pick it up with they/thems left hand."

 -

Canadians Are Not Polite

 Canadians are passive-aggressive, but Americans are too self-absorbed to notice the Canadian is taking the piss. If a Canadian can say something insulting or self-aggrandizing, they will. An extremely unpleasant people. Don't forget that blue areas are worse, but Canada has blue areas and purple areas. As with all modern countries, there are no genuine rightists. 

 Canadians do say please and thank you a lot. I believe this is because of the guilt. They're obscenely rude because that's the culture, they're supposed to be, but they feel bad about. What they mean is, "Please don't hit me," and, "Thank you, I know I deserved it, but you didn't punch me in the face." They feel obligated to be awful to each other, but want to minimize how awful they're being without actually having to dissent. 

 Naturally the general atmosphere of abrasiveness forms wonderful camouflage for the genuinely sadistic and abusive. They blend right in. A regular Canadian will make a demand with a 'please' but will be too afraid of conflict to push the issue if you refuse. This means Karens can make a demand with a 'please' and it doesn't look out of place, but for the Karen, provoking a conflict is the point of the exercise; she will escalate until she finds something you won't tolerate. If you point out what the Karen is doing, all the other Canadians will leap to her defense, as they've all done the starting phases of the same thing; you just condemned everyone in the room.  

 Refusing demands isn't 'appropriate' if they said please, you see. "Please exsanguinate your firstborn and donate the blood to me." "Um, wat?" "I said please! Please sir! Don't be inappropriate!"

Friday, March 15, 2024

Being Explicit: Bad Ideas Arise From Bad Character

 Thinking about: Epicurus let women and slaves into his "Garden."

As per usual, Revenge is Sour. The condition of being able to get close enough to spread a good idea was that the listener already be acting it out. Indeed it's clear that knowledge has advanced in the past, but it's far from clear how that could be possible. Perhaps those with good techne character can get better techne, and that's the limit of the evolution. 

 

 Sogol. Caino hypocriens doesn't evaluate an idea and then adopt its consequences and conclusions, it evaluates the conclusions and then, if it was going to act out the conclusions anyway, adopts the idea that justifies it.

 When someone has a bad idea, in all non-autism cases (and most of those too) it means they are revealing the bad character which caused them to adopt the bad idea as justification. You can't argue someone out of something they weren't argued into. You can't argue someone out of their character. 

 

 They are cripples. They cannot even think long-term. It's entirely about relieving momentary impulses by allowing the pressure to drive their behaviour. In a sense we are all driven by our character - what can we be driven by but ourselves - but it isn't necessarily necessary to identity-maximize at every given moment. Short-term cooperation leads to more wealth in the long term.

 

 What about stuff like trans hysterias? They had bad characters but weren't aware of how to act out the degeneracy. When someone explains how to behave poorly, they enthusiastically adopt the poor behaviours. That's all "education" can accomplish: it lets them more quickly realize how to do all the things they were planning to do anyway. 

 

 This is why I generally favour execution. If the bad character cannot be cleaned up by argument, then it must be cleaned up by removal.
 Though of course Earth is the Cthonic underworld, if the characters weren't bad they generally wouldn't have ended up here in the first place. No matter how much sewage is mopped up, more effluent will flow out.


 In some limited sense either Asperger's or autism works differently, but my samples are too limited to delineate in what way they work differently. For example, autists who join public autism support groups are clearly identical to Caino hypocriens in having an immutable and typically bad character. 

 Being capable of impulse control is a superpower. Top 0.1%, easy.


 Of course Epicurus also had good ideas, which speaks of areas of good character.
 That's the tragedy of the underworld. Those who die are not perfectly evil. As their vile deathly behaviour drags them down, it drags down goodness along with it.