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?

Copyright is Rebellion Against Gnon.

If it were truly unprofitable for a printing press to make copies of a work, for whatever reason, it should not have been produced. Unprofitability is one especially clear way Gnon tells you something is a bad idea. Copyright is contrary to natural law.

You may have noticed that in the present day, publishers lie all the time. I suggest to you: in past years, publishers lied all the time. In reality copyright was never necessary for profitability, but instead a successful attempt to seize an unnatural, artificial, human monopoly.

Thaumaturgically, copyright is the banning of an act of creation. Guess what kind of person* is attracted to this sort of act.

Correcting the pricing is trivial. It does not take a world-spanning genius to solve this puzzle. If selling an artifact is also to sell the blueprint for that artifact, then price the blueprint into the artifact, genius. Have you considered stockpiling the artifact before it's released, thus expanding the first-mover premium? That's two, from a dilettante. An expert should be able to hand you a buffet of a dozen solutions.

Property rights are founded in security. When printing presses were rare it wasn't entirely unfeasible to secure every press. Still stupid, but not entirely stupid.

A computer is functionally a printing press for every kind of data. Not only does everyone have one, most have several. Attempting to secure them all is ludicrous on a good day. Rub this point in.: every Twitter account is a publisher; a combined printing press and broadcaster.

The Riots Were For Fraud

I was fairly puzzled by the riots. Why riot in cities you already own? Isn't that counterproductive?

I get it now. I knew in 2016 they were planning to fraud the hell out of this election, and they did too. The riots were a preview of what would happen should these cities not fall into ideological lockstep on the post-fraud gaslighting. 

By the way.
Remember when multiple states paused counting state-wide all at the same time or thereabouts? If you don't think there's an orchestrator for these things, you have brain damage. 

Antifa is protesting Trump's lawyers. Just in case anyone thought the Enemy might win in the courts.
Broke: intimidating the witnesses.
Woke: intimidating the witnesses' lawyers.
Again, orchestrator. Again, orchestrator isn't an idiot, unlike their poor minions. The orchestrator planned for their minions to be idiots, but the e-right didn't plan on the orchestrator not being an idiot. Pwned. The inelectronic right, meanwhile, was never right at all. The term [outer party] is exactly apt. America is a one-party Communist state. (It would be great if someone could properly explain why the outer party is so content with staying out in the cold. That's some impressive submission technology. Are they all masochists?) 

Don't forget they could have foregone deep-sixing their own elections if they could manage to wait four years. Term limits are a bitch, but unfortunately they employed too many panicky morons. There's only so much you can control when your position's responsibility is fully laundered.

Proggies Fear Court Attention

Correctly, it is a confession. Every time the Progressives try to avoid looking at the vote counts, they admit there is something to find. They're saying they believe they would lose in the courts, else they would welcome the challenge. When they demand you accept the election they confess they cannot defend against those who reject it.

For completeness they could also be claiming that Trump owns the courts, but let's simply laugh at that counterfactual and move on.

Imagine someone challenged you to a duel and then said, "It's wrong to shoot at my feet." You just learned how to win the duel, now didn't you? 

Trump's legacy shall be that regular Americans realize they're living in a banana republic. Sorry North America, you did it first, South America was merely following your lead, as is meet for subject principalities of the Empire.

The Leadership Drought

Moldbug's usage of Brahmin was correct, and Yarvin's usage of Noble is not. An aristocrat is a kind of phenotype, not a culture. You can't become an aristocrat by drinking the right kind of beer, no matter how fervently this is commonly believed. Not even Harvard-brand beer. Nor going to Burning Man.

Under conditions of population growth, the peasants vastly outnumber the aristocrats. The lower classes breed faster. Peasants generate wealth and problems. Aristocrats solve problems. When the ratio decays from (say) 1:100 to 1:200 or 1:1000, problems outnumber solutions and the result is degeneration. America is full of peasants, so it is wealthy and degenerate.

Further, the Modern™ system is designed to deal with this leadership drought. In other words it actively punishes and interferes with aristocracy, because peasant-tolerant systems are incompatible with leadership. Bureaucracy is hostile to responsibility. This means, even if you have 1:1000 aristocrats, you can't solve 1/10 of problems, because they can't be arsed to wrestle the system. They are encouraged to leech off it - it's not like a peasant could stop them even if they noticed the problem. Sipping poolside etc.

Yarvin can call the members of Burning Man [noble] if he wants, of course, as per nihilism. However, they generate problems, not solutions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Progressives are problematic precisely because although they have a few nobles at the top, they are largely composed of peasants. Again you need approximately a 1:100 ratio for sanity, and proggies are more like 1:2000. They can keep any 5% under control at any one time; the rest are on autopilot. E.g. Twitter has Jack and maybe one or two other aristocrats, but 5000 employees. When you're banned it's by one of the thousands of idiots over whose shoulder Jack is currently not looking. Also fun: when a foreign tyrant pokes her head into the dark side of Twitter and demands Trump's tweets get warnings. Then, if Jack tries to revoke this (once he notices), it's like declaring war on this competing tyrant. Let's gloss over the heresy angle, and the fact Jack would dearly like to resign his tyrancy.

Deviancy and deception? E.g. ruining the family so there's more single mothers, who vote left? The peasants can handle that. They have to cause problems but they can choose the form of the destructor.

You can see this particularly in the ""justice"" system. Judge is a kind of person, not a job description. Rightly speaking, the Law is a record of the kind of things a true Judge says. Judges routinely use skills the peasants can hardly even imagine, which render at least half of [due process] a farce. Consequently there are many atrocious judgments entered into precedent. The peasants can't tell the difference. A peasant adjudictor is called a magistrate or something, useful for dealing with routine cases and freeing up limited and valuable noble time. Due to the leadership drought, even if every qualified American Judge was drafted, there wouldn't be enough to populate all the open positions in the ""justice"" system. The compromise is to lie, and Satan loves America for it.

I'm not sure if your classic king's court is due to irresponsibility driving out the true aristocrats, or if it's due to the irresponsibility corrupting the existing aristocrats. Either way the source is the fact monarchy is centrist due to its reliance on coercion. If the peasant can't sell his subject-hood, then the winning move is for your aristos to suck and betray the country.

Capitalism is to the Right of Monarchy

Paraphrased: "It is outrageous but getting outraged will only make you sick."

The proper Nihilist, passivist, Gnonist, rightist take on the outrages is that they are not outrages. The fact the government is doing them is proof that they can do them, which is proof they have the Mandate of Heaven to do it. All you can do is accept it or resent it.
Or: Formalist Manifesto is still Yarvin's best work.

Is it your America? Could you sell it to someone if you wanted? Can you issue executive orders? No? What USG does is none of your business. USG 'gives' you the vote, but this is exactly like handing you a flaming bag of dog poop. "Yeah...uh...thanks." Pat the poor retard on the head and quietly drop it behind your back. Whether you vote for Trump or Biden, you still vote, you still invest yourself in the system, you still validate the voting Game per se. The only correct vote is the vote to end voting, which is so far beyond the possible that it's literally more likely that aliens will ride to our rescue on unicorn pegasi.

Fun fact: leftism is obviously not entropy. What stops incremental rightism from working is that responsibility is not a winning move in the Fascism game. Leftism wins the totalitarianism game. Haven't you ever heard of consolidation? March forward, consolidate, repeat. It works. Unless there's a strong force, such as game theory, opposing the strategy.

Leftism has historically been a difficult infection because even monarchy is, at best, centrist in an absolute sense. More on this later.

Moldbug is obviously not a passivist. (See also: Scott Adams never tricked anyone about his plan to vote for Trump.) Yarvin has very particular goals for the evolution of American politics. The problem is he is completely correct about Mensheviks; they support the regime, as per Nietzsche. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

In fact, Moldbug may have convinced me that Trump is the accelerationist candidate. Biden will starve their funding? Vote Trump. Fund them as hard as possible. The Empire has a finite amount of total energy, and it will fall when it runs out. The more activated and excited they are, the better. The red star metaphor is extremely apt. Burn the fuel.

Moldbug's proposal is to overthrow the government by electing Biden. Wu Wei might be my favourite kind of (ironic?) activism, but it is still activism. Hermitix happily skewered Yarvin's central point. "If you remove the active resistance, won't they go looking for resistance?" Moldbug's Impact. If they can't get Impact for free, they will trespass. Push and push until you can't help but resist.  

America is ruled by a usurper. Democracy is a coup engine.
As with all usurpers, they are a tyrant. (Perhaps say 1000 jockeying tyrants.) However, unless you're proposing a way to recruit a shadow army with which to militarily seize DC, you cannot overthrow a tyrant. That's kind of the thing with tryants. They're not democratic. 

What does this mean? It means you accept your government is inherently illegitimate, and then you put it out of your mind and go about your day.

There are indeed specific outrages. The idea is to not have them impact you personally. Then it's particularly easy not to be outraged by them, now isn't it?
What can you do to accomplish this?
When someone's first proposal is to overthrow the government, then maaaaaybe they're not being entirely sincere. In reality they love being outraged precisely because it gives them an excuse to defect. If they ever finish defecting on the government they will find an excuse to defect on you. Ref: every revolution ever.

Proposing governmental overthrow is doubly abominated because it is unnecessary. Rescue, mythical aliens or otherwise, is unnecessary. Insulating yourself all but perfectly from the outrageous is not only possible, but I've already done it. As previously, if you're not a deviant then you think going Benedict is swell. I personally went techno-Amish. There's a disallowed list of technologies and practices, but the internet isn't on the list obviously. No car, no TV, no smartphone*, no processed foods. No beds either but that's because they don't work for me. Bagels are on the list to remind me not to take it too seriously.

If you want to propose to me that every State should be a coercive totalitarian theocracy, we can have a discussion. When you hide and obfuscate your central thesis, then I conclude you yourself don't believe in it, and are instead after ulterior motives. Naturally my first move would be to point out that coercion is deviant, thus irresponsible, thus leftist, but NRx in general likes to pretend this argument can't be proposed. Hiding is a form of surrender.

As with all Twitter rightists except Nick Land, Moldbug's actual thesis is that totalitarian theocracy (but I repeat myself) is perfectly okay, except America went with the wrong religion. When he supports various [traditional] American practices, it's about endorsing the fundamentally totalitarian nature of the government. Much as when he pretends to be a moral nihilist and then condemns lying, here he endorses totalitarianism and then plumps for Augustus' revocation of politics. As pointed out in a later podcast with Greer, totalitarianism means politicizing even drinking straw material. "The government can and should involve itself with individual lemonade stands - or gas station attendants, as the case may be, but unpolitically." Does not compute.

I am particularly amused by the idea that you can force chavs to do things for their own good, but you can't force the blue state university professor to do things (such as regime change) for their own good. "They have beliefs that benefit their own caste, often in counterintuitive ways." Wait, who am I paraphrasing here?

A genuine nihilist prince's ruling philosophy is: "I rule because I can, suck it." However, he is not totalitarian; he rules as little as possible because it's a pain in the neck. Totalitarianism is the peasant's foggy delusion of what a pure aristocrat is like. The prince doesn't have to pursue Impact because it's already well clear he's in charge. He makes it as difficult as possible for the citizens to challenge his rule. He does not allow choosing a plastic drinking straw, or importing a plastic toy from China, to be an act of sedition. He does, however, maintain lese majeste. The peasants are a bit dense and often need beating with Reality's teaching stick.

As previously, monarchy is centrist. Capitalism is rightist. Under capitalism, you can legally and openly buy your way out of whatever outrage you find outrageous, instead of having to do it on the sly. In other words democracy would be fine if you could sell your """human""" rights, and all that implies - as indeed you almost could in 1300s England. (I propose a thing that already happened.) You can spot the true aristocrat because he buys an indulgence against lese majeste, but his son inherits it because he never used it. If he wants to criticize the prince, he does it the responsible way, by making an appointment and doing it face to face.

What's wrong with capitalism? It's inhuman, so socialites (e.g. all Americans) don't like it. It rewards autists, for example. (Eww!) Yeah okay we have riots in the streets, science has stalled, our warfighting potential is in terminal decline, our daughters are whores, our crime rates are 50 times higher than necessary...but at least those damn autists know their place. That's what's important. Whew!

I repeat: as a proper nihilist I don't care whether you desire totalitarianism, or if your whim instead extends to revoking politics. However, Gnon forbids the pursuit of both at the same time. 

Still, as tyrants go they're a bit lame. They want to be totalitarian but are too exhausted and cowardly to properly manage it. As I have, you can insulate yourself from the tyrant's outrages. Ensure the tyrant isn't aware of your lack of obeisance, or at least ensure they always have bigger fish to fry, and you don't have much to worry about. Keep your passport handy if it looks like they'll go full gulag, that's all. If you don't dawdle you'll have plenty of time to GTFO before they close the borders.

Election Predictions and Model of DNC Strategy

As with anyone respectable, my twitter account gets locked regularly, so election commentary goes here this time around.

"Current [2016] prediction: Trump is going to win the vote but lose the competitive fraud playoff. Trump gets the mandate of people, but not heaven."

I was wrong that time.

They learned better for this time. Don't try to guess how much fraud they need. Measure, then cut. Last time they guessed and Trump overperformed so hard it wasn't enough.

I wasn't really wrong! I was just jumping the gun, right guys...

"I keep saying it. The reason there isn't a vote fraud conviction in the news every election is because they get away with it." Gonna say I called that one.

Okay, here's my model of the play:

1. Run whoever, it doesn't matter. The votes are made up. Save any good candidates for later.

2. Riot. Show that if someone protests the election, it will get violent. Demonstrate they can put plenty of boots in the streets. 

3. Blatantly steal the election. Dare the electorate to contest it. 

Trump may start fight back with like moves instead of wordy words, but I don't know what he will think a reasonable response is, so I can't make any concrete predictions about how his response will work out for him. I would have spent 2017 severely tightening voting security, ref: my previous post. I can't properly understand the mind of someone who just lets this happen to him again. 

"Trump's candidacy is going to break "Consent of the Governed" one way or another. Elect Hillary. Or not. Or fraud her in. Democracy is over."

Even Trump will have realized that contesting this election has a high chance of bringing the house down. And he's a staunch American patriot. Will he also realize it could well be even worse not to contesting it?

"Short story about 2016. Pundits predicted Hillary. And they were right to do so. Usually Demobrat vote fraud is almost cancelled by Republicant vote fraud. However, Rs certainly weren't going to bat for Trump."

"I still [2019] think Trump will lose due to overwhelming voter fraud."

That said, my track record for predicting things like elections is not great. For elections in particular it's downright bad. Though what's life without a little risk, you know?

"On one hand, it's been [September 2016] proven to my satisfaction that American elections are fraudulent. On the other, competitive fraud vs. divine right."

Aristocracy Playbook: Preventing Colour Revolutions In Three Steps

The term comes from the Communist Red Revolution of 1917, and likewise all colour revolutions are explicitly pro-Fascist. Ironically the name became currency during the anti-Soviet feminine-Fascism revolutions starting in the 80s with the Yellow Revolution and continuing to the prominent Orange Revolution.

Eisen explicitly admits that aristocracy is more popular, and thus concedes he deserves to lose. At once the anti-Eisen regime is both popular but the incumbent is unpopular. Standard Fascism #4: the Plot of the [Eisen] Enemy that is, as convenient, overwhelmingly strong and pathetically weak. An unpopular leader who won the popular vote, who is autocratic but not so autocratic as to shut down protests or the media.

This is dogwhistling, by the way. If you're on-Eisen-side you decode this nonsense into what he really means. Eisen is a Fascist Autocrat. Everyone on-side is an Autocrat. He calls you autocratic because he is autocratic. As an Aristocrat, you are his natural predator. His fears are justified. You could unquestionably think of everything in this playbook yourself, but why bother when I'm willing to do it for you?



Point One: foreign interference is in fact bad, outlaw that shit.

"One of the leading organizers of the Orange Revolution [...] received grants from the [...] Canadian International Development Agency." What business does Canada have in Ukraine? If they're funding a politically-relevant agency, it is criminal. If the law doesn't say it's criminal, change the law to match reality. Strategy: demand all political organizations have open books. If they try to hide the funding, you won't even need a warrant to discover their wrongdoing. With open books, such discovery can even happen by accident.

If Eisen tries to claim his protests aren't political, then it's not a political process to suppress them, now is it? Normal law and order stuff. If someone blocks the road you charge him with obstruction. If he does claim they're political, then you can strip out his funding. His strategy is lose-lose; all you have to avoid is being so pathetic that you lose harder.

Eisen exploits the Homestuck Principle. Someone already in your country wants to do what Eisen wants to happen. All Eisen has to do is find them and fund them. By cutting off this unquestionably corrupt funding stream, you have instantly reduced his force projection by 90%.

In America this is slightly more difficult, since he's not, technically, foreign. However, the same open-books strategy works. If you can trace the money you'll find it's against campaign finance law. If you can't trace the money, remember to forget presumption of innocence, because it doesn't apply to KYC rules. Journalists are experts at avoiding libel law. Eisen will try to label your true accusations as libel, so elegantly hire a journalist to pre-emptively dodge his accusations.

Any politically-useful protest is funded and if that funding is not public, the protest has something to hide. Without this oil well, Eisen can at best have profs offer course credit and other such indirect subsidies. Such tactics fly under the pleb radar, but don't lead to workable protests. You will find that it's not even necessary to win the lawsuits against Eisen. Simply publicizing the allegations regarding the shifty funding will be sufficient to spook everyone who needs to be spooked, which is important when Eisen finds a technically-legal edge case.

On the plus side for America, it fails McFaul's point 7. America lacks sufficient division among the police and military, division necessary to support a proper colour revolution. The only significant division is between the military and Eisen himself, as the military is aware Eisen wasted their lives in Iraq and so on.

Point Two: be democratic for real or not at all.

Vote fraud for your opponent can be used against the process almost as easily as vote fraud for yourself. If Eisen's candidate gets in, then he doesn't pursue the rest of the revolution. If his candidate fails, he can attack the process he himself besmirched. Strategy: don't use a besmirchable process.
Either go all-in on fraud with >90%, or play completely honest. Eisen assures us you're popular; you will win the fair fight.

Use independent verification and tamper-evident seals. (Don't try to make them tamper-proof.) Take inspiration from the banking industry, which has a very strong incentive not to get things wrong.

Some specifics for flavour:
If voting physically, use the tally-stick method, where the voter takes home a matched copy of their vote. If using electronic voting, hash the voter ID and post the hash and vote online, for real-time counts. Keep a public (hashed) register of who has voted and who hasn't. Allow anyone with a suspicious vote, such as a tampered seal, to correct their vote. Use cryptographic signatures to prevent unauthorized vote changed. They can hash their own ID and double-check the vote themselves, so if they are changed, it can be caught. Et cetera. Bonus: anyone going to the polling booth to pick up their voter ID to ensure their vote isn't stolen might as well vote while they're there, so it should increase voter turnout.

Allegedly Democracy is Scientific. Make your vote replicate. Make it fully reviewable by peers. If Eisen tries the process-attack anyway, use accounting at him. Count up the incorrect votes and see if his complaints add up to any difference in outcome. They won't, so offer him the ridicule he has earned. Any cryptographically secured voting system will have error margins below the victory margins, which is all that matters.

If instead you're going full fraud, then be completely unapologetic. Brazenly claim it was all aboveboard and democracy was served, while quietly siccing your secret police on Eisen's operatives. If the plebs complain, pat their back and laugh like it's a joke. It's fine if they know, just don't let it appear openly in the papers. The plebs need to be aware that pointing it out is breaking the rules, but as long as they are aware, even a slap on the wrist is overkill. Put up the online voter registry and then simply refuse to change incorrect votes, as a prank. "We don't change votes because the complaints were fake trolls. We got it right the first time." It's your country: act like you own the place.

Point Three: impeachment institutions are not democratic, so either make them democratic or go full Nork.

Democracies include ways to involuntarily remove an incumbent. This is pointless, because nobody is ever impeached, unless it's part of an attack by Eisen or his copycats. Impeachment processes are cruft and can be pruned. Why does an alleged democracy need a non-vote method of changing leaders? It does not. Strategy: clean off the exploitable cruft. Consider it dirt in which germs and parasites can hide.

If you can't make this argument fly, then again require these processes be as properly democratic as possible. Anyone ought to be able to verify the proceedings. This means making it fully transparent, such as posting a summary on the public internet. This also means simplifying them so even grandma doesn't get lost when checking it herself. The full relevant proceedings should be no more than a page in length, say 400 words max, but shorter if possible. Transparency isn't just a buzzword. It naturally democratizes the process, as the plebs' agents will verify and shout about any funny business. All you need to do is lean on the press if they try to suppress these findings. Eisen will realize he can't tamper with this process without showing his hand, so he won't even try.

Alternatively you are Putin and anyone who applies to these institutions either falls in line or mysteriously disappears. Eisen can try to impeach you as many times as he wants. Make it part of your Sunday routine. Stretch, run, and read the funnies, which include Eisen's latest antic.

If you are going Kim style, and you don't clearly control the impeachment process, seizing it is your first priority.



This document is incomplete. There's only so much effort I'm willing to put into demonstration purposes, after all. However, I have a copy of Eisen's book and in the unlikely event that someone provides me with a suitably motivating incentive, I could complete the counter-strategy set.

I like how being specific reveals existing countries are practically begging to get colour-revolutioned. The systems really are illegitimate. Can Eisen be said to be wyrming his way inside when the armour's chinks are wide enough for buses? Parked sideways?

Colour revolutions are colourful enough to amuse me. Perhaps you as well:

"He added that the Armenian revolution will be peaceful but not have a colour." Special snowflakes.

"The Yox movement chose green as its colour."

"Yeni Fikir deliberately adopted many of the tactics of the Georgian and Ukrainian colour revolution groups, even borrowing the colour orange from the Ukrainian revolution."

"Such 'blue' revolutions are the last thing we need".[12] On 19 April 2005, he further commented: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple banditry.""

"During the 2006 protests some called it the "Jeans Revolution" or "Denim Revolution","

"A previous, student-led revolution, the Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently repressed." Colour revolutions don't lose, see.

"A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China"

"A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance of vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the governmental victory in the elections."

"On 25 March 2005, activists wearing yellow scarves held protests in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar,"

"From 2016 to 2017, the candlelight protest"

"leader of the Free Peasants opposition party, has referred to the idea of a peasant revolt or 'Cotton Revolution'."

The other key word is [spring] such as Arab Spring. These aren't colour revolutions, though, since these rebellions were suppressed, and as previously mentioned it doesn't count if they lose.

Steelman Virtual Option

If we assume Moldbug is hiding his belief in the basic malevolence of humanity, the virtual option makes perfect sense. Most humans are deviant, not cooperative. Let's optimistically call it 65-35. Proper species name something like Malum Ovis Diabolus. They prefer to rule in hell than serve in heaven. However, for the 1 to rule in hell, the 64 must serve in hell. Haha, oops. If instead the virtual option can be implemented, all 65 can rule in hell, as long as they're content to rule over virtual humans. 

The Substack version of the virtual option makes no sense. Why isolate the virtualized humans? Why not let them interact? They can play all their deviant games virtually, without disturbing the productive and cooperative <20% of the species. If instead the point is to address the fundamentally sinful nature of most humans in a Straussian way, then it instead makes perfect sense.

Since I'm here to do work instead of to play games, I'm now going to beat this into the ground. Miscellaneous comments:

The Christians are correct. Humanity is basically evil. Specifically, the highest goal of most humans is deviant and traitorous, not cooperative. Background: at some point down a priority list, the priorities flatly don't get pursued, and that point is the second priority. For most humans, cooperation will only occur if the alternative is real or apparent death. This also means they radically misjudge anyone who has a cooperative or neutral goal as their highest priority.

Because humans are evil, democracy obviously cannot work. Either it aggregates as a desire to self-destroy, or it catastrophically fails to reduce conflict as [self] is re-defined to mean some voting bloc, which then gets into a fight with another voting bloc. <= Democracy The God That Failed in one sentence. 

To achieve peace, the masses must be terrorized...or virtualized. 

Malum Ovis Diabolus: imagine a sheep with smouldering coals for eyes, long needle teeth dripping poisonous drool, a truly awful temper, and black wool, because they can be farmed. The peasant is the most productive farm animal so it's possible to turn a profit even after mitigating a great deal of destructiveness. Unfortunately they cannot be properly husbanded. If you attempt to breed them to be less hazardous, they will understand they're under attack; this is one of the few ways you can get the sheep to fight back. 

On the plus side, it's now clear their insistence on reproducing can easily be bypassed. They cannot be bred to be better, but they can be bred to not exist anymore. 

Is the point of Salus Populi to make you realize how stupid Salus Populi is? I think it works on a Straussian level, except the point of someone like Moldbug is to provide a true alternative to the obvious false mainstream of Progressivism; not to provide a transparent falsehood in an attempt to outcompete a muddying falsehood. Satan isn't called Father of Lies as a joke. 

-

For ovis diabolus, each individual member of the mob considers their own health to be, abstractly speaking, the reduction of health in the rest of the mob. If everyone gets healthier they fail because others are getting healthier, and if everyone gets weaker they fail because loss aversion. Egalitarianism: "Alright, nobody move, or the mover gets it." Persecution of subjects, lionization of objects, also known as slave morality.

On the savannah you can at least channel the nasty temper at the next tribe over. They have to suppress their urge to gnaw on their closer neighbours, but that's tolerable. At the scale of a nation-state, this is thoroughly impossible for a variety of reasons. If you propose approximating it by bombing the crap out of the neighbouring nation-state, but the problem is they can bomb you back. Can't oppress anyone if you're dead. Rule in hell. Your average ovis diabolus really would choose death if it would help them oppress better.

 

When ovis diabolus observes a mutant with a cooperative main goal, they see someone getting healthier. The ovis diabolus can't get healthier except as a means to gnaw on another ovis without retaliation; the health priority is almost always at #2 or lower. For the mutant, the gnaw-on-others priority is at #2 or lower. They get healthier but will only use it on ovis diabolus in defence of their continued ability to become healthier. The ovis sees someone successfully preparing to conquer them, as it would be were they in the mutant's position. Result: violent panic, quite rationally so. 

Unfortunately the health of the State is not war. (Guess why an ovis diabolus might say it is.) The health of the State is health, just like for everyone else. Only mutants can make it healthier, in the extension of making themselves healthier. Civilization is thus about tricking the peasants into getting out of the way. Either terrorizing them to the extent they accept failure (God-fearing people), or tricking them into thinking they're succeeding or about to succeed. E.g. the virtual option. 

Reminder that like 90% of the reason I write is to give Reality more opportunities to prove me wrong. Reminder 2: rhetoric is presentation, not reality.

Chaos Meditation

Mindfulness is extraordinarily useful, and the training looks like meditation. I'm not aware of any prior art, so I believe this is an Alrenous original. Do read the whole post since it contains warnings.

In chaos meditation, focus on the distraction instead of the topic. Or: instead of focus being mandatory, focus is forbidden. Scan your imagination at all times, and immediately seize any topic change that presents itself. Instead of trying to force your thoughts to converge, force your thoughts to diverge.
Order meditation: "I breathe. Hey, pretty lights. No no, I breathe."
Chaos meditation: "I breathe. Oh hey, pretty lights. They sure are pretty. What else is pretty? I like flowers. Those are pretty--no wait, I'm thinking about flowers. Which are biological. A funny thing happened in biology class, and..." If you run out of distractions, think more deeply about your current topic until a distraction presents itself.

Chaos meditation has several advantages over normal, order meditation. I developed it because attempting order meditation literally makes me want to kill someone, and I needed an alternative. Instead of fighting your nature, you lean into it. Your distractability is an asset instead of a liability, and yet chaos meditation still trains the mind to resist distractability. I can't be completely sure due to that whole n=1 thing, but I believe it exploits the reward/aversion circuits. Training takes discipline. Using discipline builds aversion. Training to be distracted builds aversion to being distracted. This frees up your discipline quota during distractions in daily life.

Both kinds of meditation train you to recognize the sensation of being distracted, and to deal with it intentionally instead of by reflex. Both types of meditation consist of long periods of paying close attention to the contents of your mind, and thus to become familiar with the usual patterns and mechanics of your mind's contents. Hence, mindfulness. Further, while order meditation is unquestionably harder, chaos meditation is still a discipline and practice with it gently trains discipline.

That said both order meditation and chaos meditation have side effects, and as expected most of the side effects of chaos meditation are opposite to order meditation. Instead of training for a still mind, it trains for an active mind. I find being aware of all my distractions can cause mental traffic jams at times. Reminder: neither kind of meditation is particularly safe. There is no such thing as a safe kind of power. Pay attention to the side effects as they develop. If you don't like the price you're paying, fix it by doing the obvious thing.

Nihilist Morality

Objective morality means nihilist morality. And that's fine. Partly because everything is fine, but mainly because logic is irrevocable, so even nihilism has rules.

Basic nihilism: nothing is necessary, everything is permitted. 

However, this means whim implies ought. If you want X, you ought to commit act Y which leads to X.

Since all whims are valid, some whims are not valid: the ones that are explicitly about invalidating someone else's whims. "I don't want a cookie, I just want you to not have a cookie." This whim invalidates the justifying principle, and thus logically invalidates itself. The principle says I ought to make you ought not do what you ought to do. Bzzzt. If it is okay for me to suppress your whim, it must likewise be okay for you to suppress my whim, in particular the whim about suppressing your whims, and thus my whim is self-delegitimizing. If it's false it's false and if it's true it's false. In all cases, false. Strictly speaking such things are not whims at all.

When I say my course is Right and Moral and Good, I contradict the [everything is permitted] clause, and thus invalidate my own validation. "It is Wrong for you have cookies." Put colloquially, anyone saying you ought not to do something because it's selfish ought to be punched in the face until they shut up. This also applies to your own whims invalidating your own whims.  

Because cooperation is always rational, cooperation is always possible, and defection can be very clearly defined: the act of trying to make cooperation be seen as irrational. In practice it's always possible to bake enough cookies to satisfy both of us. Defection is attempting to nevertheless dissatisfy one of us, which encourages everyone who is being actively dissatisfied to declare war and destroy the defector.

Lies are also self-condemning in this way. "I'm not going to take a cookie," as a strategy for getting a cookie. "Getting this cookie requires saying I shouldn't get this cookie." Bzzzt. "It is right for you to oppose this whim." Okay, will do. When you support the opposite of what you're doing, you invalidate your own course of action. Or: Kant was onto something but didn't quite make it.

In both cases remove the whim causing the problem; invalidate it. It doesn't count as a real whim. Remember, ought implies can. Whims that are unsatisfiable also don't count. "I want to eat every cookie in the world."

Nevertheless, objective morality still isn't real objectivity. The point of objectivity is to stop arguing about it. Take out the ruler, get a measurement. Here, it is impossible. There's a bunch of finesse involved. Technically anyone can argue that a yard stick isn't a yard long, but in practice that's stupid. For morality, it should be stupid but almost never is.

Because there are limited resources, it's easy to cast someone's whim as invalidating your whim, even if it inherently does no such thing. "I want six of the ten cookies, therefore your desire for five of the cookies invalidates my desire." It's not like starting with eleven cookies was logically impossible.

Similarly, even if we had nice objective rules about that, it would be easy to do the opposite, and cast a whim-invalidating whim as merely a resource-competition whim. "I'm not trying to starve you of cookies, I just want all ten, that's all, see..." It's not like starting with fifteen cookies was impossible, but we already didn't do that, creating a loophole. More generally, it would have been possible for humans to evolve such that they're fully satisfied as a set without requiring more resources than exist, but that already didn't happen.

As a practical matter it is necessary to decide beforehand on bright lines which demarcate trespass. Property lines, if you will. Boundaries, even. "These are my cookies, so they go to who I say they go to. If you don't like it, bake your own." However, it must be possible to argue with the boundaries. It is possible, indeed easy, to create a positive right - property ownership over a whim to directly suppress someone else's whim. "I don't have my own oven so I get to bake my cookies in yours if you're not using it." You just want to be alone today but it's "trespass" not to let me invade your house and dirty your oven.

But, because property must be arguable, it can go in the reverse direction. Toward more defection, instead of more cooperation. Maybe at first I had to pay you a cookie tax to use the oven, but now I get to use your oven even if you were using it first and sit on your couch watching your TV. Easy to argue that a rent is actually a subscription. 

This is why it's necessary to have Exit. To be able to unilaterally (but forthrightly) declare someone a non-cooperator, and thus absolve yourself of the requirement to cooperate with them. This is still fuzzy, but Exit, at least, must be perverted to do bad, rather than requiring perversion to do good. The slippery slope points in a responsible, cooperative direction.

Major Moldbug Error, Salus Populi Addendum

The Romans wanted cruel leaders. That hasn't changed. Europeans still want cruel leaders, the crueller the better. Only some layering has changed. They want sophisticated cruel leaders who cleverly hide their sadism. No more blood and skulls and fire. The idea is to make someone suffer as badly as if they had full-body burns, without physically touching them. Ideally, make them think it was their own fault. Or perhaps make them think it's actually a good thing and their suffering is appearing from nowhere. (E.g. welfare.)

Making the populace healthy isn't cruel. 

If the food pyramid were some kind of isolated event, perhaps mere public choice theory would explain it. Instead the populace will fight you if you try to debunk the food pyramid, and that goes for everything. It's all cruel lies and sadistic falsehoods, and it's exactly what they demand.

Any form of health-supporting sovereign would suffer immediate and overwhelming violent insurrection.

Abstract Theorizing is Metaphysics

It bears repeating.

So you've noticed you can't justify your moral intuitions. (Nihilism is true, naturally you can't.) You can't possibly do anything as silly as adjust your ideology, that would be admitting you were wrong about something. Instead have to figure how to make sure nobody notices. (Paging Sailer...) Anyway, the point is to make friends, right? You can make lots of friends by conspicuously avoiding the whole justification issue, since they've noticed the same thing and don't want to deal with it any more than you do. When we choose to use a word, it means what we want it to mean, neither more nor less, and that's that! Plus, if you adjust your ideology, it won't be the same ideology as all your friends anymore. You might become less popular.

Justifying your moral intuitions is abstract theorizing, which is metaphysics. (Naturally, noticing this equivalence is also metaphysics.) 

Metaphysics isn't real. Every modernist says so, it must be true. 

Thus we say nobody should think abstractly if there is any way to avoid it.

And thus we can call ourselves nihilist without having to suffer the inconvenience of knowing what nihilism is. Handy!

 

Also, if you had any fucking clue what you were talking about, then you'll make the clueless feel envy and jealousy. That's morally wrong.

Nihilism and Other Moldbug Errors

Moldbug lacks discipline. Moldbug's work stands as stupidity cancellation, used for defence against change. Moldbug, ironically, is a menshevik. 

How "right" wing you are in the modern world is largely down to how much cognitive dissonance you can stomach. If it's unlimited you join the Democratic Party or any of its various suppurating pustules, feasting heartily on the seepage. If slightly limited, the Republican Party. If distinctly limited, you read Moldbug. It would seem no level of intolerance is enough to genuinely take responsibility for your own life.

Moldbug lacks discipline and his popularity reassures you. You, too, have no need for discipline. Moldbug says, "Oh no, you haven't made a mistake. You read Moldbug after all! You're fine! It's all -those- poor idiots who have made a mistake."

Lacking discipline, Moldbug failed to question his assumptions. He claimed to be a nihilist, but doesn't know exactly what a nihilist is and thus can't tell he isn't one. 

I believe I have found the fundamental theorem of nihilism. It is this: life is a luxury. There is no such thing as a necessity. Die if you want, it's fine. Or live, that's okay too. If everyone chooses to drink their morning coffee and then walk off into the ocean, so what? (See also: Hume. Since everything is a luxury, there are only two reasons to pick one luxury over another. First, some of your whims are more durable than others. Second, your whims conflict and you can only choose decisions, not their consequences. You can postulate a God of Creation if you like, but it is not a relevant variable. Whether it's a caring universe, a Gnon, or a dead mechanical clockwork, you still can choose your decisions, but not their consequences. Indeed this principle binds even Gnon. Yahweh can choose not to put a Fence around the Tree, but then Adam eats from it.) A non-nihilist is someone who believes some of their whims are Necessary, which means anyone who does not share this special non-whim whim is lying or a devil or an Adversary or something. Basically they are fascinated and enthralled by their ingroup/outgroup reflex, exactly as a porn addict is enthralled by pictures of boobs.

Occult knowledge: theft is never necessary, outside of a true famine where there is no bread to steal. (My whim is to disdain segues.) Even if we pretend [life = luxury] is false, you can always earn it. Theft is never rational; you don't get more to eat and it makes enemies. Occult knowledge: you are your ancestors. 

If you think you need to replace the government, it's you that fucked up, (or your ancestors, who are you), not the government. Cities burning down? You dun fukked up. The government is getting what it wants. Certainly, you will form the whim to blame the government. Will it help? Have you tried it before? 

If the government is smart you don't need to outsmart it; cooperating with it is rational. If the government is dumb, then defecting on it isn't hard. Don't play its stupid game, it only offers stupid prizes. It's not your government. You can tell because you can't sell it. The pain is self-inflicted. Anyone happily buying into stupid games is prey; they should and will be eaten as such. (Only question: whether it's you or your enemies who will be doing the eating.)

Government for the people is impossible. The leader always leads for the leader's sake.
Government by the people is impossible. Also, circles don't have corners, bachelors don't have wives, and the sun does not rise at dusk.

In further shocking news, politicians lie. There is nothing to be recovered from what they say. If you are not discarding it you are building your foundation on the fossils of past (coercive, defective) power grabs. "Yes massa, can I have another." Is your whim to be a slave? It's fine, that's okay too. 

 

You don't care about The People. It is not your whim. I'm not going to let you pretend it is. No one else cares either. Any system which depends on caring about salus populi is a lie. Lies are bad, mmmkay. It makes enemies and you don't get any more to eat. E.g, it makes Gnon your enemy. 

 

Carl Sagan was a politician and it's probably fine to nuke the crap out of each other. Millions of strangers die of preventable causes every year. A nuclear war would be some of them. You haven't cared before and I'm not going to let you pretend to care now. (Reasonably preventable suffering constitutes some 97% of all suffering.) If you think a bomb might land on your own head, try standing somewhere else?

Special mention for [abstract theorizing, always the worst possible way to think]. In other words, "I can't think, therefore you can't think." The Dao is all one thing. Any attribute which inheres to abstract theorizing inheres to all thought. Empirical experiment is a kind of abstract theorizing. Anyone who cannot profit by thinking about abstract models cannot profit by experiment either; the errors you need to see are the same in both cases. This is Government by Steam, Moldbug Ver. E.g. if you don't remember to define nihilism before you call yourself a nihilist, you will also forget to define things like [prediction], [measure], and [result]. 

Speaking of assumptions, [we want the experience to be as dramatic and significant as possible]. Significant => significant to other humans => more significant to other humans than the other humans are => to be high status => to defect and not get punished. (Chicks dig defectors and the dimorphism barrier is leaky.) To define salus populi as this is to say that the health of the populace is for each individual to make the rest of the population unhealthy. I would /facepalm but I was expecting this level of brain damage. 

Of course, if you want to live a society based on a repaired version of this principle, that's fine. That's okay too. It will be terribly violent; you cannot choose the consequences. I personally would like to see a city where the only illegal act is making sidewalks and rooms flat. Ban easy terrain. (Imagine not trying it on the whole country at once.) I don't personally need death to be a likely outcome of failure, but some are degenerate or simplistic enough to need it. Being degenerate is, of course, okay. That's fine too.

Further, [that the indiscriminate pursuit of utility]. Nope. Not indiscriminate. E.g. you have to believe [life is sacred] or rather that death is profane. That anyone with a ""death" "wish"" is a liar or a devil or an Adversary or whatever. That nothing is more "valuable" than satisfying the whim of continuing to live. It is precisely due to the failure to be nihilist, not the sublimation of nihilism. 

[Is this progress? Soldiers are no longer pierced by steel. Sailors are no longer drowned rounding the Horn.] Many have whims of this nature, but they are largely illegal. Can't even have Roman gladiators. Play stupid games. 

Moldbug being literally Communist. [This policy is very simple: toy control. The rule is: all new children’s toys sold in any country must be handmade, from natural materials, by subjects of that country.] Lots and lots and lots of real jobs left undone, and Moldbug can't think of a single one of them. Paint the concrete. Replace the concrete with wood and paint that instead. Get the gum off the sidewalks. Strip off all the bad graffiti. Add more good graffiti. Etc, etc, etc, etc. Moldbug's solution to the lack of purpose is fake jobs? Brain damage. Lies are bad.

But no no it's okay! You don't need to stop lying. Moldbug lies through his teeth all the time and he's popular. As we all know, being popular is the essence of being Good. (High status; to defect and get away with it.) You just needed a better class of lies, unlike those stupid low-status proles. I bet they don't even try to be popular. What losers. Such outgroup. Many immoral.

Moldbug doesn't think of any of these undone jobs because his true purpose is not salus populi. His whim is to keep the proles properly oppressed and humiliated, like they deserve. He will look dramatic and significant by comparison. Uses the classic Fascist trick of calling a thing its opposite, and says dehumanization is the solution to dehumanization.

Democracy is the theory that we can dehumanize the peasants if we pretend the peasants are dehumanizating themselves. MoldbuGuilds is the theory we can dehumanize the peasants if they're tricked into thinking they're not being dehumanized. Laugh into your hand, they won't notice a thing.

Both to go above the human and below the human is dehumanizing. [Breaking one’s own windows is antisocial and deranged. Making one’s own toys is not antisocial or deranged. If you cannot tell the difference, Horatio...] Getting out ahead of the obvious true counter-point isn't he? (This is accounting denialism. Accounting is boring. It takes discipline to appreciate it.)

Conceivably try decriminalizing lemonade stands before we try Full Communism again, yeah? 

...you know chemistry sets used to be toys for children, right? And now they're banned? Just possibly, the fact the legal toys are made in faraway places isn't the problem here. Pretending this is the problem is a way of not looking at the problem, which you avoid because you already know what you would see if you looked. 

It would seem no level of intolerance for cognitive dissonance is enough to genuinely take responsibility for your own life. 

Which is correct, because you are a peasant. 

Peasants never fully mature. They need a Lord to take care of them, or they will not be taken care of. Perhaps you want Moldbug as your Lord? He does not appear to be taking serf applications. And why would he? How does a Lord profit by taking on more dependants? Anyway he would just force you to make toys by hand, as opposed to mastering the trade and doing it as effectively as you can grasp. Maybe reconsider.

Oversimplified recent history of the world:
Peasants: "We want to run our own lives!"
Lords: "Haha! Okay! Have fun with that!"
Peasants: "Oh no! Holocaust! Holodomor! All our cities are burning down!"
Lords: *snrk*

Fun physiognomic fact: Stalin had multiple deformities. He was born to a impoverished father who couldn't even manage to love his own children. His country (that which he could have sold if he wanted) was unhealthy. Surprising! Are you surprised? ([Impoverished] means [rebellious against Gnon].)

Knowledge as Justified True Belief: Repaired

To fix the [justified true belief] definition of, simply alter [justified] to [stable]. Lack of justification is one source of instability but hardly the only one. 

A guess is unstable because you're apt to second-guess yourself, even if the guess is accurate the first time.

A Gettier case is unstable because even though one of your beliefs is accurate, 99% of apparently identical beliefs are inaccurate and if you interact with them you're also apt to change your true belief. (Camouflage is possible but that doesn't mean knowledge is impossible.)

A false belief is unstable, no matter how well justified, because you're apt to learn better.

Theme: I'm an Idiot

Immigration powers Democracy's envy engine, and the point of Fascism's gender skew is to uphold egalitarianism. Only an idiot wouldn't have figured this out sooner.



The iron law of oligarchy is true, and democracies are run by an elite oligarchy. Typically a top-out-of-sight oligarchy whose names never show up in the news. Indeed becoming visible, especially in such a gauche way, results in their rivals ganging up on them and casting them out of the inner circle.

It is hard to see how this oligarchy benefits from immigration. Cheap labour? What, you pay for your own workers? What a rube. Sheer Impact, making the peasants unhappy? Too weak. They work diligently in pursuit of greater immigration. Votes? Err, iron law of oligarchy, my dude.

But, duh, democracy is an envy engine. It is founded on envy of the elites and continues to function on the envy of the lower classes for the middle classes. Thus, a strong democracy has the largest possible lower class. Hence, the idea is to import as many partial failures as possible. Import those who envy the natives, and create a vigorous, healthy envy cycle.

The constant talk about racism is there to intensify the envy. Nobody claims that being good at written school tests isn't important. They instead constantly throw the difference in test scores in the lower classes' faces. They get away with this by pretending that they're condemning some poor scapegoat for causing it. Standard Fascism point 3.

The votes and impact are nice bonuses, though. Why satisfy one goal when you can go 3-for-1?



Speaking of Fascism, I said, "The gender skew is plain weird." It's not, of course. Fascism is fundamentally fundamentalist egalitarian theocracy.

Egalitarianism doesn't work, and that's the point. Nobody is stupid enough to genuinely believe that men and women aren't different. Egalitarianism is all about throwing those differences in everyone's faces by bringing them up all the time, but pretending that they're caused by malign actors instead of caused by impersonal reality. (Firing the envy engine and distracting the peasants from Fascism's failures.) Only a bad person wouldn't believe in egalitarianism, and thus everyone pretends as hard as they can.

Naturally this means pretending men are women or pretending women are men. Hence, masculine or feminine Fascism. Women/men are only allowed to be part of the clerisy/government if they can convincingly pretend to be men/women.

It's not easy; to make it easier, the voters are encouraged to be as androgynous as possible. Sin is in all of us, and we must fight it daily, lest we fall. Having a man acting all manly next to a female governor would throw her inability to be masculine into sharp relief. The peasants might have inegalitarian thoughts. Heresy! No leading the flock astray!

Libotascracy

Feudalism - individualism - Sith

Communism - collectivism - Jedi

Responsibility vs. irresponsibility. Ownership vs. non-ownership.

--

Every Jedi is merely a Sith which is lying about being Jedi. They seek personal power in pursuit of their individual selfish emotions. Every communist is a feudal lord who lies about their goals and intentions as a way of forestalling resistance. Collectivism is individualism with extra illusionary steps. There is thus a sense in which the political spectrum is in fact a horseshoe. Every communist wishes to create, ultimately, a perfect feudal order where they, individually and personally, own everything.



The Jedi order is merely a complex way of obfuscating these intents and laundering these efforts. You can tell for sure; while an attempt to incarnate one's will is not necessarily successful, a failed attempt can always be abandoned. Thus, when we see a Jedi council largely succeeding in an attempt to set itself up as a coercive, deviant authority, the fact they do not abandon this council demonstrates coercive authority was their original intent.

When a communist finds themselves making gulags, they do not abandon the initiatives that required gulags. When they hide the gulag, they admit the gulag is a sin; it is not ignorance. It is a proper incarnation of their original intent. The communist wishes to enslave and thus own every subject; any that refuse to be enslaved by words will be enslaved by chains.

Collectivism is supposed to be the proposition that if two intents conflict, there doesn't have to be a winner. If a 'collective' owns a house, in reality some distinct individual owns the collective and thus, by proxy, the house.



Certainly a country can make it illegal to sell a plot of land without the whole family's permission, but ultimately this means the country owns the land and it's LARPing something else. It's nothing but a roundabout way of preventing the nominal owner from selling it.

Rules like these make objects much easier to steal. Since the land's owner is in fact the collective's owner, but nobody is allowed to admit to owning the collective, the owner isn't allowed to explicitly secure their shit. It becomes possible to steal the land without the original owner even being aware of the transfer of ownership until they try to do something to the land.

Similarly, while the owner can sell the house they don't necessarily get the money. Usually requires a bunch of extra steps. Both lower the owner's profits, and the missing wealth goes to waste.



The point of being a Jedi is to forestall realization that you're Sith. The point of being communist is to prevent others from owning the things you want to own, and to forestall the realization that you've appropriated it all. The point of being a collectivist is to steal things from the nominal owner. They are all inherently fake. They are all methods of owning things without having to take responsibility for owning them. They are theft with extra steps; ideally the original owner still thinks they own it and will pay for the maintenance on your behalf.



However, completing the spectrum wraparound is impossible, on sheer information grounds. To own something is to control it. Entropy can own something. If I have every de jure power over something, but de facto cannot issue orders about it, then entropy is the de facto owner.

There is a limited bandwidth which I can physically issue, and as a result, I, like any individual, can only own a distinctly limited subset of all property.
In the cases where I claim de jure ownership but cannot in fact own it, at best it is owned by entropy. Much more likely it is owned by some other individual, who can now irresponsibly blame their own errors on me.

You must own your food at the moment you eat it. If I manage, somehow, to properly and personally own all the food, everyone else will starve to death. Even though I would own a farm, I don't own the knowledge of working the farm and thus I would also starve to death. Everyone is equal in death. Everyone is equal only in death. Communism is a lethal disease.



The point of all forms of tyranny is irresponsible ownership. To build things without having to work. To get into fights without being at risk. All tyrants are deviant and deviant governance is tyranny.

Easiest Engineering Discipline

Myth: social engineering is impossible.

Reality: social engineering is the easiest engineering discipline.

Classical physics is in fact a special case of quantum physics. In large numbers, all the weird randomness cancels out and you're left with a bit of algebra. Similarly, predicting a single person (especially at range) is extraordinarily difficult, but with large numbers the divergences average out to be particularly simple.

Helpfully, the Russians checked this hypothesis for us. The KBG ran around executing elaborate plans engineering controlled demolitions of other societies. Sociology is so easy they didn't even need to prototype. It just worked.

The myth comes from progressives, as modern myths are wont to do.

Since sociology is easy, the negative effects of progressive reforms were all predicted in advance. Minimum wages killed employment, especially among the poor. Affirmative action led to the 'beneficiaries' becoming violent, degenerate fops. 'Emancipating' women destroyed the family. Etc. etc. If you had to wait for the proof of the calculation problem to know that communism would be a catastrophic failure, you were an idiot.

But, for obvious reason that I'll nevertheless belabour, progressives lie about it. (Recall the difference between lay proggies and the leadership.) They do these things because it benefits them. Since they are perceived to be evil and are in fact comically destructive, proggies are can't be upfront about it. Nevertheless, you can tell the policies are working as intended because they're never rolled back.

Further, for the same reason, you can tell that for the most part it's a plan and purpose. While certainly there are prospiracy aspects to the progressive parasite regime, for the most part sociology is easy so they plan and then it just works.

When minimum wage laws destroy the dignity of lower class neighbourhoods, they become dependent on the government for survival. To paraphrase a certain fungous insect, if you own a man's livelihood there's one thing you've certainly bought - his vote. Proggies outlawed marriage because married women are far more likely to vote on the right. Proggies opened holes for illegal immigration because, even setting aside the vote thing, a suspicious, distrustful population is far easier to divide and conquer. Indeed the whole immigration thing comes with its own built-in division. Saves time on cutting new ones. Letting homosexuals out of the closet destroys male companionship, thus men must turn to the government. In case you think this is just a gay coincidence, in areas where sodomites can't be used to dismantle male camaraderie, heavy-handed persecution is applied. If military history can't be made fruity or boring enough, then funding for curricula and departments is simply cut, and amateur societies are brought before kangaroo courts.

If it were some kind of blind groping there should be policies that accidentally harm progressives. These failed initiatives should be rolled back. In practice, Cthulu always swims left. There have been rollbacks but because of overreach, not because the policies ever threatened progressive hegemony.

The peasants have the attitudes the progressives want them to have. If they don't behave exactly as progressives want them to, it's due to failure of will. The progressives prefer to be the most hip and fashionable in any case, so this is more feature than bug.