Saturday, January 23, 2021

Terror of Peasantry

Scott is a peasant. Like all peasants his primary motivators are cowardice and envy. Terror and spite.

If you were as weak as Scott, you too would be terrified of anyone figuring how spiteful you are. It's not like he can withstand any pushback. He's suitably motivated and not entirely an idiot, thus capable of putting up veils where he needs them, so perhaps we can forgive his many readers for squelching the little voice warning them to stay away from Scott. Of course, a majority of them are as spiteful as he is, and for them staying away wouldn't help much. Their life would contain the same amount of spite either way.
Getting folk like Scott on the side of the Regime is easy. He is, extremely rationally, more afraid of them than he is of you. Or me. I am merciful, the Regime is not. Though, if you got him in a room alone with you, you can probably make him say damn well whatever you please. Force also follows the inverse square law. Havel's greengrocer? Pshaw. Let me show you real supercilience. 

It is not impossible to whip folk like Scott in a useful direction. Hardly worth the effort, but not impossible. He has some good articles because someone did bother, or perhaps someone accidentally terrorized him the right way. E.g. you can get him so scared he forgets the spite and retreats entirely into his own mind to cut off the possible terror, which incidentally also isolates him from politics.


"With malice towards none, with charity towards all"
This is merely a lie. Let's put this in a rationalist way: nullius in verba. Another: whenever someone is telling you exactly what they're supposed to be saying, demand double evidence. With the absolutes used, apparently Scott is the next coming of Jesus, so we can use the heavy stress-tests.

Third: this is such an obvious lie, you're clearly supposed to see through it. Dog-whistling. Of course, not dog-whistling rationality because lies are irrational. They worship verbal articulation, not [hint-hint nudge-nudge]. Though like everything in America, Rationalism is fake and we should be expecting it to be a lie. Yeah he says he's a Rationalist - and every time he has to say it, he gets the virtue-signal penalty and must prove it twice again as hard, rationally speaking. Principle: it's a probable attempted cover-up.

In reality Scott has malice toward all, especially himself. He is at some level aware of how spiteful he is, and rationally believes this to be a mark of bad character. He believes he deserves to be oppressed for being an awful person.* This is much of why he so often goes down [but but the right is awful] rabbit holes. As long as someone else is more awful, he can feel relatively okay about himself. "We're all sinners but you're not even trying." This in turn is why he can't possibly admit right-wingers might have a point. He can't admit they're better than he thinks they are; he can only drag himself down to their perceived level. It doesn't help that he genuinely is kind of a little shit. Look at the photo at Lorien and try to tell me that beady-eyed double-sneer is the face of a kind and gentle healer. 

 *(The NYT agrees. Otherwise someone would have felt bad for what happened to him and apologized. But that's not how the Regime functions. Apologies require respect. They know only fear. Scott apologized, but not because he feels responsible; he feels afraid someone will hold him responsible. There's a checksum available which I'll skip for now.)


His veiling just kind of doesn't work on non-peasants, though. It only works on enough peasants.

"This is a totally different problem from the cancel culture stories I usually hear about, but just as serious. How are you supposed to write about communism in a world where any newspaper can just figure out your real name, expose you, and lock you out of most normal jobs?"

But whatabout the communists?

I mean, what reasonable society would want to shut down someone who prefers that millions starve to death? Clearly [just as serious] as Goody Hannah with the snippy tongue who called someone a mean name one time when you were a little girl. (Scott has always been a little girl.) And Definitely happens Just As Often.

Meanwhile, Scott is putting himself in the role of Glados. Because he's still alive, see.
You're an insane, murderous female robot? Yeah, sounds about right. I wouldn't just confess like that if I were you, but thanks for being so open about it. More precisely: he aspires to be Glados. Feminine Fascism is Fabulous. He's not even as good as Glados, in his own opinion.

Supporting communism somewhat satisfies Scott's urge to be vicious and nasty, with little to no risk he will called to task for it. He would prefer not to be nasty, but you can't just dislodge your core values like that. Hypothesis: an NPC is someone who has given up on their core value and embraced despair so deeply they've forgotten. Scott is not an NPC. 


The psycho lords aside, Scott is probably one of the higher-class servants of the Regime. He is emblematic of the [fine people] Moldbug sees working the bureaucracy.

Okay, sure. It is true that these folk would have to be rescued from themselves to avoid the Regime ass-raping everyone including itself. 

The simplest way is to simply put a gun to Scott's head. His core conviction is that pain is bad and he doesn't want to die. (Utilitarianism stripped of pretenses.) Gun in hand, he will genuinely believe whatever you tell him to believe. It's Rational to not get fucking killed, after all. Rationality is Winning, and if you have a gun to his head, you must have Won and thus be more Rational than he is.

Thus the problem is working out how to put a gun to Scott's head without having to shoot your way through the entire DoD. Sure we would intensely like forestall the aforementioned ass-raping but the aforementioned shooting is merely another version of it. Let's not [oops] that one. If the Regime is going to fall anyway, at least let the blood be on someone else's hands.

The Home Guard were betrayed again after the inauguration. But it's okay, they weren't betrayed enough to, you know, stop doing what the Regime says. As I mentioned previously, the Pope has this well in hand. 

Here we can see the reason Moldbug has to believe there's no Pope. Pope = no hope. In Moldbug's world, if we can figure out how to satisfy Scott's desire to be communist without letting him be, you know, communist, then he will convince the military to stop being so Fascist. (Having written out the plan explicitly, does it sound as obviously stupid to you as it does to me?) In reality, the Pope tells the army to put a gun to Scott's head, and Scott immediately goes back to telling Moldbug to politely go fuck himself.

Twist: I don't know any reason, Regime aside, Scott's spite couldn't be directed toward someone who genuinely deserves it. BLM causes tremendous suffering among the black community. Use that suffering as a pivot to get the spite directed properly, and then the only issue is whether the spite is useful when directed this way. I can't see any reason it isn't. Sadly the ethics board won't give me peasants to experiment on, so I haven't tried it, and the envy angle may make things tricky. Still, should be possible. There are no shortage of genuinely vile humans to put spite on. 

Child torturers, for example.

Double Twist: Scott is a child-torture cultist. Uhh....hmm.
To admit the truth - that public schools are concentration camps whose purpose is to torture children - is well, well beyond Scott's capacity to handle. "Oh by the way not only was your whole life meaningless, you were actively, intensely worshipping Satan this entire time."

Haha...ha...oops? Few things aren't funny, but that's not funny. Humans will do absolutely anything to avoid realizing this sort of thing about themselves. Is it even possible to modify this enough to make it psychologically plausible? "Oh yeah, it's not really your fault because you were so weak. You were a helpless child well into your 30s, don't blame yourself." Doesn't seem to be helping. "It's okay, relative to a coward like you, cringing slightly less is already plenty heroic." No?
Anyone complicit in the Regime is absolutely damned, psychologically speaking. 

Worse, invisible garage dragon. Scott knows he's complicit in the torture of children. He went to school, after all. He was there.
If you tell him, he won't be surprised. You can't ambush him with this. He knows exactly which bullshit he needs to pull to keep this knowledge buried all the way. This, among other things, is why he believes he deserves to be oppressed. When the NYT accidentally forces him to uproot his whole life, Scott merely sees an angel of the Lord handing out a portion of final judgment slightly ahead of schedule. Scott knows better than to shoot the messenger. It doesn't even occur to him.

Whence Scott's promiscuous malice? Isn't universal malice a particularly understandable reaction to a country which not only allows, but celebrates widespread torture of children? Scott's psychological arrangements make perfect sense given who he was born as and the environment he's in. If you don't sneer at Americans, it is perhaps you who is out of touch. The children don't want to go to school. And they're not wrong.

The problem is that the Progressive Regime is literally Satanist. (In shocking news, a proper cult of the Father of Lies lies about itself. Satan prefers crypto-worshippers who don't even themselves know.) If Americans don't repent their Satanism, the successor Regime will merely be Satanism 2.0. Have to get rid of the Fascism, including the concentration camps. Yet, repentance is impossible, because nobody can admit Fascism was wrong, precisely because it is so very, very, very wrong.

If someone were genuinely Rational, they would realize that, no matter how much of your life is wasted, the important thing in the here and now is to stop wasting it. The important sin isn't having done it, it's continuing to do it. It's not a coincidence that Rationalism is so popular in America. Even someone with minimal set 2s can feel it's exactly what they need. 

Pity it's fake. 

America has always been fundamentally Communist. What they want to supply is death and suffering. Gnon will magnanimously show them the way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Scott Siskind blatantly contradicts his claim of charity with his little aside about Gavin McInnes.

Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I read Siskind's reference to communists as code for a different type of subversives. Maybe I've been reading too much Moldbug; more now than ever Curtis likes to incorporate time-wasting "cute" touches like that. Furthermore nuBug has been identifying in a more and more tiring way with the early 20th century reds, people who, if he actually read their writing as did oldBug, he would realize were almost totally intellectually barren.

It comes as no surprise to me that Siskind's parents are both rather famous medical doctors. As a prescient anon on 4chan /sci/ points out, "they clamp." Another funny point: he went to medical school in Ireland. I'm no expert in these things, but I'm under the impression that the usual reason an American would do something like that is because he couldn't crack it applying to medical schools at home.

Alrenous said...

The communist bit does read like code, but it's still an endorsement. Not a closet condemnation. In reality whatever Siskind is worried about is something that doesn't need him to worry about it. Similarly, resisting arrest kills blacks less often than other groups, per incident, rather than more. Straussianism always makes you sound like an idiot, which makes sense because Straussianism is idiotic.

Re: Gavin, standard monkey nonsense. NYT is higher status: cringe and abase. Vice is lower status: casually beat as you walk past. Rationalism is about getting in touch with your hairy, poop-flinging past, right? Though it would be funny to see Gavin repeat the "don't kick me in the balls" line.

Speaking of sacking, if you tune your intuition to that frequency, you can tell those lines are the only time he's speaking from the heart. Without exception, the rest smells of oily courtier.

1900-era reds are Fascists. Fascist gonna Fasc. Left = Fascist. Alleged right = dowdy Fascist. Paleoconservative = paleofascist.