Analysis Solidified: Caino Hypocriens is an Antisocial Species

 It is easy to get along with someone who has genuine social skills. 

 It's difficult to create a misunderstanding and impossible to perpetuate one. They understand wording is difficult and correct it to what you meant as opposed to what you said. They employ radio protocol, discounting anything that's only been transmitted once. When they notice a discrepancy, they ask for clarification instead of trying to play one-up gotcha.

 They're likewise almost impossible to offend. If you tell them something true, why would they be offended? The shame is the fact. It doesn't become more true if it's said out loud. If you say something false, why would they be offended? You're only shaming yourself. You can't hurt the socially competent with words. At worst, they'll stop talking to you - if you consistently make it unprofitable, they will in the end stop fighting it and declare conversational bankruptcy (on your behalf).

 Grass monkeys aren't like this in the slightest. When you're talking to one, you have to go to enormous lengths to compensate for their atrocious lack of social skills. 

 They're offended by everything, so you have to walk on eggshells. They can't understand even minor polymorphisms, so you have to word everything precisely. They refuse to accept correction or admit to error, so you have to say it right the first time. They have no patience, so you have to say it quickly. They come up with elaborate etiquettes because a) they can't understand the difference between necessary and unnecessary and b) they can't handle anything composed on the fly. It has to be ritualized. Practiced ahead of time. Puddles are out of their depth. 

 The only skills dire apes practice are deliberately fostering misunderstandings. Deliberately trying to make conversation as hostile as possible. 

 Antisocial animal. Diagnose the whole species with oppositional defiant disorder, it's merely a question of who hides it better. Have to grade on a curve though. If a score of 120 is pleasant conversation, the children of Satan rate from 5-21.
 Grass monkeys are smelly and stinky because they want to be offensive. Don't worry, Gnon cheerfully grants this prayer.

Cowardice, With Reference to Fictional Characters

 Fictional characters are good for character studies due to knowing their inner thoughts. There's no debate about why they do the things they do, because the author tells us. We can then judge these characters. The judgment can be matched against real-world behaviour (as opposed to the reverse), and we can be confident the judgment still applies. The predictions will remain valid.

 Han De is supposed to be paranoid.

 Weiheng Hui is supposed to be a coward, and says so.

 Richmond Rain Stroudwater is actually a coward. A rather high-fidelity rendition, no less.

 I would say the key feature of a coward is feeling terrified if they're not perfectly safe. If anything could conceivably be trying to kill them, they assume it is trying to kill them. They're paranoid and self-absorbed. 

 Han De's paranoid ends up looking like good preparation - indeed, he wasn't paranoid enough, and survived due to dumb luck / author fiat. It doesn't count if they're really out to get you. He should just tell his family he's a calamity attractor, as it turns out this attracts calamities. He could convince them to stop being one of the calamities he's attracted.

 Hui isn't a coward at all. He simply fails to enjoy fighting as much as he's "supposed" to. In his case, being pressured into unnecessary fighting is what a coward would suffer - he bravely refuses if possible.

 

 There's nothing cowardly about being afraid of fearsome things. Poking a tiger with a stick is stupidity, not bravery. Failing to be afraid of the fearsome makes you weak and/or dead. If something is likely to hurt you, being afraid of it is merely good sense.

 A true coward like Rain isn't merely fearful. They are not only afraid of the many things that can damage their soft, vulnerable bodies. Their cowardice is crippling. Their cowardice makes them even weaker than they otherwise would be. They panic over nothing. They flee from their own shadow.

 They're even scared of looking at themselves. They can't know themselves, and therefore must quite rationally fear the result of every conflict. 

 This makes them more violent than the courageous. Since everything is trying to kill them, it's fine to try to kill it back, right? Cowards are, if not dangerous exactly, certainly hazardous. You're minding  your own business, they construe it as a threat, and snap at you. Hazardous waste.

 They're too scared to admit they're a coward. They fearfully refuse to look at things, and thus end up full of cope and seethe. "I'm not scared of you!" (They're paralyzed with terror.) "Anyone would be scared of this!" (Even someone genuinely threatened by it isn't that scared.) Cowards have to violently condemn anyone who makes them scared, to avoid condemning themselves. (It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop them.) Cowards are too scared to resist peer pressure and end up violating the few virtuous principles they have. Cowards are too scared to look into another's mind, lest they start understanding their own by analogy. The only person they sympathize with is someone being terrorized, because it gives them an excuse to try to child-proof the entire world. "Fear is the only issue! I'm going to ensure nobody needs to be afraid ever again!" Ambitious, in a sense. They want a world with no lions no tigers no bears. Oh my. 

 Cowardice works a lot like the ur-sin, Pride. Instead of trying to destroying everything glorious to avoid being outshone, they try to destroy everything glorious because they're afraid it's going to kill them.

 Cowards are highly recognizable because they have to say anything which makes them afraid, which is anything more threatening than a kitten, is morally reprehensible. They end up lionizing kitteh and doge and snek because they've declared everything else abhorrent. 

 Saying they're scaredy-cats is an insult to cats. Felines are indeed skittish, but everything they run from is plausibly a threat. They don't startle at nothing. They can also learn a thing is safe, instead of packing up and trying to shred everything that scares them. Cats don't respond to fear by making it their life goal to terrorize the world. Admittedly the way some cats toy with their food is reminiscent of the way a coward with an advantage will try to stretch things out as long as possible - often long enough to turn the tables on them.

 As per usual, even other cowards are disgusted by cowards. Which is why Rain is a Mary Sue: rather than 'accidentally' accumulating all the local elites, as happens in SenescentSoul's mind, he would have been universally panned, even by folk he tried to be useful to. Which is correct: cowards are children. If you try to rely on them, whatever you're resting on them will fall when they're spooked and run off. It's only worth taking care of them if you're their mom or dad, because they're not productive. 

 Moms who are themselves cowards won't even defend their children. They talk a big game about going mama bear and won't willingly suffer so much as a hangnail for their kids' sake. 

 

 It's possible cowards only feel two emotions: fear and relief from fear. They like cats because kitties make them think they don't have to be afraid. Any nearby predator will take the cat before it takes them. If you make the feel perfectly safe, they don't finally have space to feel other emotions. When they're done feeling relief they feel nothing but empty.

 

 Rain likes math because he doesn't have to be afraid of getting the wrong answer. As long as he doesn't screw up the arithmetic, he can be certain the answer is right. He can feasibly eliminate risk; that's what math is to him. Programming too. With suitably limited ambition, it's possible to write a bugless program, and a bugless program is, to his perception, perfect.
 Are all the pop references about cowardice too? If you're caught or called out for using awkward, cringe lines, you can blame the other writer. With enough popularity you can be all, "No, it's the children who are wrong. I don't have be afraid of saying something stupid." 

 Rain gets his bell run by Lavarro. He's rightly afraid of Lavarro, who is erratic at best. He then starts behaving as if a Lavarro is going to jump out of random bushes at him.
 The injury is partially his own fault. She wanted him to take off the helmet to see his face. He took it as an Absolute Command to not wear a helmet, too afraid of offending her to even think of putting it back on. His cowardice was the only reason he was in danger in the first place.
 He ended up fine. If the Lavarro situation repeated, she would force him to take off the helmet again. Insisting on wearing the cap is doubly pointless. He's too afraid to notice either of these things. The coward is too afraid of fear to think clearly. If you are not a coward, then fear is not the mind-killer. 

 Subconsciously, Rain understands what threatens him most is his own cowardice. That's why he insists on the helmet; like a safety blanket, a charm to ward off his own fear. It doesn't work, because he's too scared to face the true root cause.

P.S. Lately age-related-decaySoul seems to have conveniently half-forgotten Rain is supposed to be a coward. That's character development, right? When the author forgets their character's vices? Maybe Rain isn't a Mary Sue. Maybe the other characters had the keen insight to recognize and predict the author's impending dementia. At least it's not a full MLP-style personality transplant. ("Character growth is when you suddenly become a completely different person due to failing one time.")

Mercantilism as Immune Reaction to Central Banks

 Mercantilism is indeed the rational response to fractional reserve and/or paper money. You need to quarantine their economy, isolating it from yours until the infection burns itself out. (Listening to dumb peasant policy prescriptions "foreigners bad! myside good!" is dumb.) Mercantilism and its arguments should not be confused with a logical or rational policy strategy. It was merely a kneejerk reaction that happened to be less buggy than average, which is why it appeared not to fail as badly as average. 

 Inflating currency inflates everything it comes into contact with. Fractional reserve is typically used to back bad loans, meaning every currency which comes into contact with the paper money becomes "financialized" - inflated by counterfeit bills and shackled to interest rates set by the counterfeiting bank. 

 Optimistically, house prices in American, China, etc. are 40% housing demand and 60% monetary demand. The counterfeit bills try to flee the inflation regime but only manage to "financialize" i.e. infect the housing market. Ulterior bids raise prices and suppress genuine demand via competition. Once they run out of houses in their own country, they will "financialize" the houses in your country too. Unless you make it illegal. And make all intermediary instruments equally illegal. Make drug laws look like ponies and flowers and skipping and flouncing. 

 

 Trade has to be handled delicately. If you let them buy your goods for their money so you can buy their goods, they will "financialize" your currency. Even if you have a hard gold standard you have a Cantillon gradient to concern yourself with. You can try tariffs but the tariffs will never move as quickly as the printing press.

 Necessarily, interacting with their money at all has to be forbidden. If they want your goods, they need to sell you goods first to acquire your currency, then buy with your currency. I recommend a physical quarantine. Expand the embassy to a whole port, and physically forbid them from leaving the port area. (Functionally, encourage barter.) As your currency skyrockets in value compared to theirs, they will only become more and more desperate to use it as an inflation hedge. You have to continue to want it more than they do. 

 You don't have to worry about them buying your money for goods. It will cause deflation, which means it will become ever more expensive for them to buy your currency with goods. Self-limiting. Indeed it should help collapse the counterfeit-bank regime due to Goodhart's law. They will offload their ""money"" and try to hoard yours until they have to use your money to trade amongst themselves - driving up the value of your currency even further. 

 Possibly it's okay to buy their stuff on debt, since they love debt so much.
 ...yes, the accounting works out. In fact, where possible, all trade with the infected country should be carried out using loans in their money. Instead of paying them directly in your own money, hold your money (like collateral) and take out an equivalent loan, then spend their money. Their interest rates are always lower than inflation. When you pay off the debt, it will always cost less of your money than you originally set aside. Indeed, do it dynamically. As relative deflation hits your coinage, siphon the top off the buffer, since you don't need it anymore.
 As always, lies are a vulnerability. They produce exploitable weaknesses. When someone creates a central bank, you ought to ruthlessly exploit it until they learn better. Note that e.g. Amish towns could issue tokens among themselves and execute these trades. You don't need to be a whole country. You can David vs. Goliath this.

 "Mercantilism became the dominant school of economic thought in Europe throughout the late Renaissance and the early-modern period (from the 15th to the 18th centuries)." What a coincidence. However, they didn't quarantine hard enough. Instead they started endogenous infections. Everyone gets a "financial" crisis. Ultimately, because Mercantilism came from low cunning instead of conscious strategy, it couldn't protect them from the very hazard that worried them. It merely camouflaged itself and hacked into their zombie brains. 

 Yet another reason you don't [black government] even once. 

 

 In the modern world, everyone is banking centrally, with counterfeit bills. This means you want to North Korea and isolate yourself almost entirely. NK, likely due to the black government thing, doesn't realize they could trade just fine with a few measures that are less draconian than the ones they're already used to. Caino hypocriens is not a rational animal, but it's fine to aspire in that direction.

No, really. Don't let me stop you.

Guilds were Unions

As far as I can tell, literally identical. 

Garnished wages to support a parasitic and Satanic bureaucrat class.

Fixed all your prices. 

Got violent and criminal with anyone outside the guild trying to do their job. 

Sometimes seized the local government. Always used as tax farmers. Guilds and unions make the work far more legible. Anti-security.

 

Had in-union social events.

This knowledge is dark and verboten because Fascism always has to claim to be New™ and peasants are either dumb enough to buy the scam or just smart enough to pretend without being smart enough to understand lies are bad mmmkay. Fake being unable to learn from history until they make it.

Shitty Jokes Day

 There was an exclusive convent which administered a difficult entrance exam.

 The invigilator had this to say: "Nun shall pass." 

I am boned by my words
I have created over a thousand signals
Unknown to truth
Nor known through lies
Have withstood pain to create many shades
But yet, by these hands that will never hold anything,
I pray
UNLIMITED COPE WORKS

(The best part: the cope doesn't work.)

Because Democracy is Tyranny, Freedom Really is Slavery

 "Our issues is not that we're insects.. but that we want to be safe"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/RessurecBarbar/status/1703151854119788612

 Point 0, the term 'bug' is fine. It's lindy to use animals as symbols for extremely wrong things. Owls are especially stupid, not a great symbol for wisdom. Snakes tend to especially polite, instead of especially evil. Etc. 

 The problem is they want to be Equal, and Free. 

 There's lots of safe ways to compete, but competition produces hierarchy. Consequently you have to do what the guy at the top of the hierarchy says, or leave the hierarchy. According to Democrats, that's not Free! They want to square the circle, have a group with no hierarchy and thus Freedom, by having no competition. Not even implicit competition. In other words, Harrison Bergeron. Slavery. 

 The Democrat can be Free if and only if anyone he might Envy is in chains. The more Freedom they clamour for, the heavier the chains they're proposing. The more Free the country, the more crippled the populace. You are here. 

 Anyway, stop waiting for the Democrats to stop Democrating, and form your own hierarchy. Stop waiting for Democrat permission, lest you tell on yourself.

Under Democracy, Genocide is Justice

 Fiction: the peasants freed themselves and made Democracy. Reality: the aristocrats were underpaid and quit, giving you Democracy by default.  

 Here's the question: is herding peasantry inherently unprofitable? They create wealth and problems, but do their problems & upkeep always cost more than the wealth?  

 Possibly the accounting works out if the peasants grovel and submit efficiently enough... If they fight you on it, it's 100% not worth it, which is part of the pattern of security always being affordable. Even peasants can afford to secure themselves even against lords - they just shouldn't, because a recursion makes this security an exception. If peasants moronically secure themselves against lordship, it means the lords need to secure themselves against peasants, which typically boils down to peasant genocide. Justice always has the advantage, and under Democracy turns out the Nash equilibrium is death camps. All are equal in death; just start killin' until every Egalitarian is dead. Not really the intended result, but problem: solved. (Or maybe it is? Are the peasants mad because they ain't dead? The demands have become strident and shrill...)

P.S. Crime is always optional, because security is always affordable.

Impossibility of Solomonoff Induction Refuted by Greeks

Solomonoff induction is the proven guaranteed-truth machine. SI is Sherlock Holmes reasoning: if you eliminate the impossible, wisdom remains, no matter how seemingly improbable.

"Obviously Solomonoff Induction is impossible to do in the real world." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MznxnYCtHZbtDxJuh/approximating-solomonoff-induction 

lol

Allegedly, Solomonoff induction doesn't work because the search space is too big: any search strategy using less than infinite resources has a 0% chance of stumbling across the correct hypothesis, and thus all your guesses will die during the pruning phase. There's just too many false hypotheses to find the truth in this haystack. This is indeed true if you're talking about silicon machine intelligence.

Reality: Anaximander's theory of evolution. Hero's steam engine. Democritus' theory of atoms and the void.

The Greeks could have derived the entirety of the modern world had they taken Solomonoff induction seriously. The only thing stopping them from inventing semiconductors and conquering the entire world was their unwillingness to engage in a pruning phase. All they had to do was eliminate non-Hero engines, and then look more deeply into Hero's engine. Reminds me of the time I searched all over my desk and couldn't find my glasses, because they were on my forehead. 

Despite endless proofs that you cannot successfully carry out a Solomonoff search phase, empirically, you can and do. Sorry, a strategy does exist. However. It's not a material strategy. Can't implemented Solomonoff search on an unconscious thinking machine. 

It's not only possible, you already know how to do it. Think up all the possibilities. Okay, now realize you missed some and think those up too. Yes, really, all the possibilities. Everything that hasn't already been eliminated, no matter how weird. Okay now you're done. You're good, go prune. 

Compared to the profits the method cannot be called even remotely hard, never mind [impossible]. (P.S. This is why it's a good idea to attempt 'impossible' things.) At worst, you end up pruning every possibility and realize you didn't quite finish the search, meaning the method is absurdly robust: if you do it wrong, the method itself tells you what you did wrong.

 

P.S If the Greeks were truly intelligent, they would have also derived the profanity of Fascism thus discarding it, resulting in all the benefits of the modern world without any of the downsides. Techno-Amish.

Competence Saves Itself

 There's a common pandering type in modern stories, which I'll call HR pandering.

 The fantasy is about stumbling across really good help that agrees to work for peanuts, because you are special and can help them with a special problem. E.g. the slaveery in Shield Hero and Labyrinth Healer are 'okay' because the slaves would have died without the deus-ex-machina medicines.

 In reality anything you can do for them they can do for themselves. Good help can run their Turing machines. Nobody who needs saving is worth saving. 

 Nobody who can't solve their own problems can possibly pay you back. Not to mention the dysgenics. Either the saviour runs out of money or someone puts a stop to the theft they're funding themselves with by securing their shit. 

 Playing the saviour is unprofitable and goes out of business. If you see someone gainfully 'saving' folk, then it's a scam. Stories which use it are also scams, trying to convince you to act like a saviour.

 IRL, 'saviour' is a kind of cluster-B disorder. It forms a triad with villain and victim. If nobody around needs saving (guaranteed) then they'll become a villain. Perhaps use a match-pump scam where they "save" you from the fire they themselves started. In desperate times, they'll light themselves on fire, adopting the victim pose, in an attempt to draw a saviour. To prove that saviours are real. This is why you generally shouldn't save someone who is drowning - they probably threw themselves in the water, one way or another. They're praying to Gnon and you shouldn't interrupt.

 

 Note the gratitude problem. Caino Hypocriens doesn't feel gratitude particularly keenly. Cartoon characters drastically oversell it. You have to use discipline if you want to even approximate any kind of loyalty in exchange for service. Indeed insofar as loyalty is an admirable virtue, it's admirable precisely because it's so unnatural. It speaks highly of the rational soul executing the strategy. 

 I don't quite know what's up with Jeeves. Why does he work for his lord? He's clearly a mythological parent, rather than a butler. Seems perverse - there's not even a fig leaf excuse as in the cartoons. Deus ex machina sans machina, because even a bolt from the blue is too unbelievable. "Jesus is my manservant lol."

Objective Grammar &c

 Moderns are egalitarian and will tell you that however a language is used is correct. As expected, egalitarians are full of shit. 

 Correct grammar is as simple as possible while allowing as much complexity as possible. If there are two alternatives, the more powerful one is more correct. There's also the consistency criterion, though that should go without saying. In theory you could have two equally powerful and consistent alternatives, but that never happens in practice. 

 Bad grammar makes the language gooshy and fuzzy. It means to say certain things you have to go out of your way to specify stuff that should be obvious from the grammar. This means anything that makes the language unnecessarily weak can be identified as bad grammar, regardless of how widespread the usage. 

 As usual I have difficulty with examples so I'm going to use vocabulary instead of grammar. Can you translate one hundred into a language which has numbers no higher than two? (1, 2, many.) Yes. It's merely a huge pain in the ass. It's two and two and two and two and two .... and two. Fifty times, specifically. Bad grammar bloats the language the same way. (P.S. Untranslateable is a meme. Maybe it happens in creoles, and then only sometimes.)

 Of course, bad grammar is fine if you're stupid and would never need a number as high as 100. If you're innumerate, this simply isn't a problem. Simple minds can rely on context because they never leave their home village and their context never varies. Reminder: average IQ 1800 was 115, and in Socratic Athens, 125. It is not surprising that 100 IQ grammar is shitty grammar.  

 Given an existing grammar, there is a Platonic ideal of that grammar, which is good grammar. Getting arbitrarily close to that grammar is not even impractical. (Idiots aside. It's fine to exclude folk who are too short for this ride.) 

 You can always compared Italian to Latin and notice that Italian has no advantages over Latin. It's simply worse - unless you think 'less taxing on morons' counts as an advantage. Italian is dumb-Latin. Ye olde scholars said languages 'corrupt' over time because that's the correct word to use for the evolutionary change. (They weren't politicized yet.)  

 Why does it matter that they use everyday when they mean every day? It means you can't easily distinguish between an everyday drink and an every day drink. Bullet coffee can't be called everyday even if you drink it every day. "You can tell from context," which means the opposite context is removed from consideration, and you have to add in a bunch of clauses if you want it back. Bad. Weak. 

 "We don't particularly need a word that means killing every 1 in 10." Unless you want to read the classics without confusing yourself. Or want to know what words mean so you can construct new ones. "Decimal sounds so violent, lol." If you want to say they were ravaged, shredded, or annihilated, try using words like [ravage] or [annihilated]. Or, kindly seek Canadian Healthcare. You owe it to yourself.

P.P.S. Efficiency is a sin. What 'we' [need] is an intricate and gloriously detailed language, which means having lots and lots of words we don't [need].

Though admittedly less Latin bureaucratese. It's called a bang, not an exclamation point. "Why use one syllable when five will do, lol." Don't be gross.

Agamemnon, Traitor vs. Black Kingdom

Agamemnon spread a plague and was thus attempting to destroy the Achaeans.

If you think monarchy is truly one-power-ism, then it was the duty of the Achaeans to lie down and die. The king wanted the kingdom to fail, and thus it was the duty of the subjects to be killed. Having discovered the plague, Achilles should have berated Agamemnon for trying to keep is secret, and then beaten the shit out of anyone trying to slow the plague's spread. 

We are all equal in death, and the only truly ordered kingdom is that of Hades. It's quiet, you see.

 

If you think the king in fact has duties to his kingdom, then you have two options. 

Agamemnon was a traitor. What Achilles did wrong wasn't being "petulant and argumentative" it was not killing the absolute shit out of Satanist Agamemnon. This 'king' should have been strung upside-down by his own bowels. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum. Fiat vox veritatus, et pereat mundus.

White kingdom: Agamemnon is indeed allowed to plague his kingdom, and therefore the Acheans should have renounced Achea and Agamemnon. Achilles should have tendered his resignation.
A kingdom of no-one. Agamemnon can play with pathogenic bacteria by himself. At least, only attended by suicidal death-cultists. If they want to plague themselves, it's none of my business. Trying to cross the border with the new kingdom is a capital crime, though.

Under no condition is it allowed that a plague-spreading king remains a king. Either the king dies or the kingdom does. Upholding his realm is wrong. Indisputably incorrect. 

Those who nevertheless pursue these twisted ends will be cursed with Sophism and Christianity. 

"His rage even causes him to almost attempt to kill Agamemnon, but the goddess Athena saves him from this deed."

"Apollo lifts the plague"

These 'gods' seem evil as shit. Defending traitorous criminals and allowing plagues until it embarrasses their pet degenerate.
At best we can hope this is the impiety of Homer. All modern artists are either boring or Communist (same way all actresses are boring or whores) and it would make sense if this principle was also true in Homer's time. Perhaps Athena struck Homer down for this rank calumny. 

Alternatively: it can be no surprise that the devil-worshipping Athenians fell to Satan.

Resentment of Achilles

I had a quick check, looking for an overview about Achilles, and in seconds it was obvious I was looking at cringe seethe. Moderns bitterly resent Achilles - which is an impressive commitment to Envy, considering Homer's Achilles is a fictional character. Like, you gonna whine at Superman for stealing your job next? "Batman, y u no vigilance mai streeeet?" How unfair.

Seems Achilles was, like, actually heroic. He has the right enemies. 

Although rather more flawed than suits my personal taste. As if he was strongly based on a real person, perhaps. E.g. Achilles is very excitable, almost as if young vital men are often excitable or impulsive. His record of partial successes also seems to have painful levels of verisimilitude. 

By contrast, let's check in with how Cliff describes Achilles. I find Cliff to be an excellent communicator of the Akademic dogma. "Agamemnon, of course, is as guilty of creating the ensuing disorder as Achilles is, but Achilles seems petulant and argumentative. He is undermining the little harmony that does exist." 

Cliff wants to take all responsibility away from Agamemnon - the king - and put it on Achilles, in a futile, counter-productive attempt to diminish Achilles. "Poor little king couldn't possible handle one of his soldier who happened to be youthful." Cliff wants this because he's accurately conveying what Akademia has decided shall be the Orthodox view of Achilles.

Why are Akademics like this? Because Agamemnon was a traitor. Akedemics love traitors, because of course they do. 

Unlike e.g. Frodo, Achilles is a genuine protagonist. He drives events. He accomplishes goals. He stops a plague, and he defeats his rival. He breaks the Trojan army's back to clear the way for the Acheans. He even demonstrates pursuit of virtue, with a commitment to growth despite having reached his full physical height. 

No wonder Akademics and voters hate him so.

Reminder: Manwhoring Doesn't Make Dynasties

Saw a guy on twitter humblebragging about his notch count. 

Reminder: you don't build generational wealth by raking in whores and pumping and dumping them. The wenching and carousing part of the aristocracy is the decline phase, you ridiculous peasants. It's how they give up and quit the field.

The reason you shouldn't copy your betters is because you can't. You have no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it, and your cut-rate imitations constitute auto-tyranny. Who needs to oppress the voter when they're doing it to themselves? 

Naturally the Regime encourages this underclass behaviour. More slums more better.

Femininity and the Land of Sloppy Seconds

Americans love telling stories about some man killing another and stealing his wife.

Why they love sloppy seconds so much, tho?? Bro, why don't you already have your own wife?

The solution seems obvious to me. The men are women. They can't be attracted to a woman unless other men are attracted to her first. See also: actresses are mid...unless the men are being afflicted by preselection. The maiden at the local grocery is way prettier but Americans don't notice unless she gets on TV. Further, she doesn't get on TV because the actresses are jealous and whine to their producer/pimp.

Other Fascist polities had the same issue. It was brought to my attention when I was reading up on Plato's ring, and found the myth of Gyges, king of Lydia. (King of [woman's name].)

Gyges was a rags-to-riches hero who travelled via deus ex machina. Problem: I just described a villain. This sneaky fucker started out a poor shepherd because he was poor in spirit, and ultimately was merely a cat's paw for his mysterious esoteric sponsor. What were the Geeks doing lionizing this traitorous brat? Answer: Fascism. Everyone was a woman. Of course, they worship the bad. When Plato described profane tyranny so accurately, he did so because he was merely reporting what was in front of his eyes. 

 

"I stole your girlfriend!"

"Um, thanks for taking her off my hands. I was blind to her faults, but the scales have fallen from my eyes. Good luck keeping that whore from straying." 

This isn't stealing, this is taking a bullet. 

Really, killing the cheaters is doing them a mercy. Leave them alive - they deserve each other.

P.S. I now suspect the 'first mover' problem is not unrelated. 

P.P.S. Apparently 'nobody knows' if Plato's ring of power influenced Tolkein because he didn't mention it.
Reminder that average IQ in 1800 was about 115 and average IQ in ancient Athens was like 125. In Athens, being 'gifted' was next-door-neighbour territory, and a 'genius' 145 was a midwit. (E.g. Plato.) An IQ of 100 means bone-headed. Tolkein didn't mention Plato because it's too obvious to bear mention. It would be an insult to his correspondent. The question is whether Gyges' ring was a reference to Hades' helmet.

Biological Love vs. Progesterone Pill

Moms don't love kids much because they don't love the dad. Loving the dad would mean transferring resources to him, but everything the mom has was given to him by her man (or some proxy; she can't tell the difference and thus neither should you). Paying the transaction costs again is nothing but a waste. The kid is 50% the dad and 50% the mom, and not even the good 50%; the mom has trouble finding anything likeable about the kid (except mom-delusions, which exist for this exact reason). 

Problem: Darwin thought it would be a great idea for kids to need love. 

Children need absurd amounts of attention and affection to avoid growing up to be crooked cripples. Children ache for their dad's love, while dad's genes are telling him to shake them off and go fishing. They say moms need 'patience' but what they mean is mom wants to go get drunk with her cat, but the kid is still emotionally starving. "I fed you o'ready. Y u buthring may." 

Result: human children are not well-adapted to being raised by human parents. Problem 2.0: Caino hypocriens is quite capable of imagining their future children and realizing they won't love them. They correctly see the kid as a huge pain in the butt. 

The kid is worth it if not having kids means giving up sex. 

 

Neglecting inertia, in the presence of contraceptives, only parents who love their children will manage to reproduce. Only parents who love their children should reproduce. Anti-natalists only make a mistake when they suggest you should be like them; anti-natalists shouldn't breed precisely because they're not like you (or not like me, at least). Meanwhile, pro-natalists shouldn't breed because they take anti-natalists more seriously than chipmunk chatter. It suggests they are weak and their blood is no credit to the species. Luckily, this trash takes itself out. All it needs is a bit of patience. Though don't do anything dumb like trying to outlaw contraceptives for whores. 

Now the proggie pill exists, women have to earn the right of perpetuation by transcending their biology. They have to somehow manage to love their man, to discard their self-absorption, so that they can love their kids, so that their kids will exist enough to be loved. 

Everyone else gets infinite cat hair in the carpets, disguising the wine stains. And it's better than the alternative.

P.S. A related topic: it should be expected that children often die, but women don't seem to be able to cope with one of her children dying. Pre-Fascism cultures had all sorts of traditions like not naming the kid until they were 5 to avoid getting so attached the mother falls apart when they die. Darwin, y'all fucked up again: women are not well-adapted to having children.

Love, Biologically

 The biological purpose of love is to transfer resources to the loved one. Reciprocal love makes no sense; don't play Pong with the resources, that's plain dumb. Hence, men love women, women love children, and children can barely manage to love themselves. 

 Men aren't really supposed to love children. They're supposed to love sex, and then, as an inevitable consequence that they don't think about too much, they end up with kids. Then Darwinian instincts force them to provision the children, even though they would really prefer not to. Women don't love kids very much either; they're supposed to love themselves, especially when they're young, because they can just have another kid. The idea is to do the bare minimum so the kid doesn't actually starve to death or try to make friends with a crocodile. If it doesn't work, eh, oh well. It's not like her man will stop impregnating her, so the brat was going to be replaced anyway...

 Both men and women are largely forced to become attached only when it seems they will develop a reputation for disloyalty if they don't. This process is extremely buggy, since human perceptions are so unreliably even other humans can't figure out what insanity is going through their head. The loyalty-mimicking genes have to fire strongly since the disloyalty sensors are sensitive, which results in rather chaotic and unpredictable attachments.

Neither Anti-Natalists nor Pro-Natalists Should be Breeding, and They Won't

"I won't breed." => Disposing of your private property as you see fit. Responsible, none of my business.

"You won't(will) breed." => Defection. Treachery.  

Both pro and anti suffer from narcissistic universalism. Narcissism leads to lack of surviving grandchildren. In the unlikely event that the narcissist chooses a role that leads to many pregnancies, the children will see their parent's behaviour and quite rationally reject parenthood in reaction. 

As usual it's a grass-monkey thing. Tribal leaders want everyone to have kids so they can have lots of disposable shock-troopers. Women don't want anyone else to have kids, so their own kids receive all the loot by default. Everyone wants to meddle, though it doesn't even work. P.S. Women can't imagine a child earning loot, never mind creating loot; they see everyone as either a baby or a predator trying to eat her babies. You might think her husband wouldn't count but she's not supposed to be able to get away from her husband. (Why would he let her?)

Liquidate the Pentagon

If you really take Moldbug's "opposition inflames the tyrant" line seriously, you end up liquidating the Pentagon. This would make America fall faster but more peacefully, which is obviously a win-win. 

Arlington should declare the State Department to be terrorists, unilaterally break posse comitatus, and physically seize Langley, Foggy Bottom, and Harvard. It should then smack them upside the head for picking a fight with someone who is four feet taller. Force submission - and therefore peace - without doubt or remorse. Defect on defectors. 

It won't do this. 

If you refuse to win, then you've lost. Surrender. Arlington should liquidate all assets, retire all staff, and then demolish all the buildings. Take the ball and go home. Salting the earth optional. 

State would party so hard it would render itself comatose. Well over 50% of its energy is spent on dunking on its perceived 'opponents' and all of that would stop. Civil war over. Imagine a BLM riot without any Republicans around to blame it on. Suddenly State is forced to take responsibility for anything that happens in USG jurisdiction. Result: it will refuse to do anything. Peace. Calm. 

This is what Moldbug was trying to say when he endorses Biden and Obama. He falls afoul of Machiavelli's dictum: do no small harm. Voting is a small harm at most.

Don't seize the White House. Seize the Pentagon. If they refuse to surrender, rightists, to protect their own interests, need to force them to surrender. Both State and the Pentagon are your enemies; the Pentagon is vulnerable to attack, and therefore should be attacked. 

American rightists are of course women and leftist, so State isn't really their enemy to start with, it's merely a confabulation or phantasm. They attack Foggy Bottom, Georgetown, and Martha's Vinyard because they're self-destructive and want to be punished. The civil war exists because there's high demand for civil war.

Manoeuvre Through Enemy Propaganda

Tactical victory.
Strategic victory.
Logistic interruption.
Manoeuvre victory.
Morale overwhelm. 

Roughly speaking.
Propaganda is not on the list.

In 2016 they tried to win without looking bad, but in 2020 they just cheated. In Vietnam they tried to win seemingly-fairly, but it turned out they needed to cheat, so they did. They would love to cheat Russia, but they don't have a fortified base behind enemy lines, so they can't. 

The 'propaganda' victory only lets the opposing army know where they need to attack to damage morale. The propaganda tells you what they consider valuable and needs defense, but propaganda doesn't constitute defence, so you can just attack it. 

A real war is a unique opportunity to unmistakably falsify political statements. The propaganda tells the opposing army what operations would be most damaging to the propagandists' pride. 

Not to mention, to be even remotely believable, propaganda has to compromise opsec. The propaganda not only tells the enemy what to attack, it tells them where the valuable pain point happens to be.

"Hitlier will save us!"

>Hitler didn't abolish the public school

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hitler was just another zombie, but with a fancy uniform. Zombies are superficial and think skin-deep is as far down as you can go. 

Everything the alleged opposition claims is from Jews is actually from the Greeks, especially Protagoras et al. Jehovah was understood very differently before the Jews got Sophist'd. 

It does turn out that Jews are particularly suited to Sophistry. Better than e.g. the Greeks, who were (are) hardly slouches. 

Note that, as per Sophist tradition, it's extraordinarily likely that Protagoras plagiarized his writing.

Reminder: Non-Democrats Need a King and Pope

In particular, if you don't want to fall back into democracy at your earliest convenience, you need a white king as opposed to a black king. A white king upholds Exit. You can leave whenever you want, within reason, on the assumption that the king is on your side and therefore leaving isn't profitable.

But you need a king. 

If you don't have a king and pope, you're a Communist. Fascist. Faustian. Egalitarian fanatic. 

It makes no sense to discuss policy if you don't have a king. The king can't hear about the need to change policy if he doesn't exist. No policy matters at all, except chronic kinglessness. The king can't change the 'incorrect' policy for you if you don't have a king. It's all sublimely meaningless, in the face of chronic kinglessness.

Who is your king?

Don't have a king? What, are you waiting for permission? Whose?

Loyalty to Others is a Vice

Loyalty to yourself is a virtue, particularly loyalty to your own given word.

However, consider loyalty to someone who betrays you.

1. If loyalty is maintaining faith with the traitor, it's supporting a vice.

2. If loyalty allows you to break faith with a traitor, it's merely contracts. Loyalty in this case is isomorphic to selfishness - if the deal is no longer profitable, you break it. 

And that spans the entire space. Either you can break loyalty or you can't. If you can't, it's a vice. If you can, it's a distinction of no distinction, which is a lie, which is a vice. Loyalty to someone who hasn't betrayed you is nothing more than continuing to collect benefits.

In use, loyalty is expounded by traitors who wish for you to maintain your side of the broken contract. Loyalty (to others) is pure viciousness. 

P.S. I hope I don't have to explain that being a slave to your impulse id is not a virtue.

Nationalism is incredibly dumb

You people can't even collaborate long enough to make a videogame. 

It's dumbfounding that anyone takes this stuff remotely seriously. You're suspicious as fuck and demand to be paid for every little thing.

The socialism, moreso. Show me on the doll where you were minutely charitable or generous. I mean, no wonder you feel the need to be forced to support your fellows by violent military force.

Being Explicit: I'm Pro-Coronavirus

 I've said ncov was a godplague, but let me be perfectly plain. Coronavirus was anti-Satanic. 

 Coronavirus was a boon for everyone except Satanists. It destroyed evil. If anyone was killed by it, it's because they especially deserved to die. 

 Whoever spiritually released it was a hero. Whoever engineered it was a glorious agent of Nemesis. 

 Indeed if anything, the vast destruction inflicted on Satanists by themselves as a reaction to a bit of a cough was, in fact, too merciful. In Reality, it's not at all hard to figure out who deserves death. They cling to their suffering a little longer.

Right Wing as Inherently Profane

"your shrill, catty chimpouts you guys have in response to the slightest criticism tells me none of you have the impulse control necessary to be worth anything in a real world situation"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/Vitruvisch/status/1687141858965692426

 Background: every American is a woman. Twitter right = American or trans-American, i.e. they are women. There were no founding fathers, only founding mothers - politics is unfiltered knitting-circle. 

 Plato was right about Democracy, it's inherently bad. While one can (and I have) filtered out the true essence of 'right' vs. 'left' there's nothing debatable about it. It boils down to correct vs. incorrect. There is no left wing, there is only a wrong wing.

 Background II: "late Capitalism" is a real thing but it refers to late Fascism. 

Plato:
 "The democrat is desirous of all things and treats all, good and bad, equally"

 In other words, at first the Democratic house has a right wing and a left wing, placing good and bad in apparently equal standing. However, this is unstable; profit-seeking and loss-seeking can't coexist, and it must collapse into one or the other.

 "if his son, the tyrannical man, falls into bad company — and he will — then he will be governed entirely by the bad and the desire for the bad."

 Having legitimized the bad, it reliably collapses into pure loss-seeking. The house is consumed by the left wing. Plato's Tyranny is nothing more than late Democracy. (What cold warriors called 'capitalism.')

 Even calling yourself a "right" winger is to accept intolerable amounts of leftism, by suggesting it is remotely, in any way reasonable to claim leftism is an alternative. Leftism is nothing but self-mutilation. What Plato got wrong: justice is in fact very simple. It is impossible not to understand justice except willfully. To be left wing is to be wrong and to be right wing is to be wrong too.

 It should not be surprising that the "right" wing is fundamentally a bunch of women. In Reality there are no wings here. It's the contrast between virtue and treachery.

Lack of impulse control = zombies. Easy to manipulate. They can't even secure their own will. 

 It should not have surprised me that the "right" wing is nothing but furtive, insecure leftism. Nothing but the less-wrong-but-definitely-still-wrong wing. Left wing + self-doubt. 

 Is it too boring to admit the Greeks were right? Pursue virtue, eschew vice. That's it. Be wise, courageous, and reliable, not a foolish, cowardly traitor. There's absolutely nothing honourable or glorious about leftism, which means the name 'leftism' is itself is a vice.

Literacy Benchmark: Filtered by Twitter

Something like 90% of the population is too illiterate to use Twitter. Reading is too hard for them to enjoy non-picture posts. Even 140 chars is too long and complicated, never mind 280 / full text. They can just about handle 'yaas queen' before it's too laborious. They watch TV instead.

Naturally most Twitter users are only barely above the filter. They're still basically illiterate and will Dunning-Kruger your tweet 90% of the time. They're merely literate enough that tweets don't feel like wind-sprinting. 

 

One of the most liked tweets ever is 💜💜. Why? It lets the illiterates feel like they're participating. "I'm part of twitter now," they can say. They understood that tweet and liked it on its merits. They hit the button without faking it!

The fact Twitter is a largely a textual artifact means it is inherently antidemocratic. 

 

 

Publishing in a democracy is only useful for necromancy. Your audience will be wholly undead.
Necromancy itself is useless because the only thing you can do with zombies is make them destroy the other zombies. They can't catch vampires and other necromancers have to be unconscious to fail to stop a zombie attack.

Reminder that Your Superego is Insane

Feelings that come from your superego feel like real feelings. Perhaps the easiest way to spot them isn't very easy - they're a bit flat, a bit too repetitive or ritualistic. Hunger varies based on what you ate the previous day. Superego feelings are stamped out like factory widgets.

This verisimilitude is a problem if you live in an environment of lies and your superego is crunk. 

I consider the superego to be a maladaptive, deleterious mutation. It's one of the things that makes grass monkeys so hideous. You can imagine a society with perfectly healthy superegos, but in this case they're slaved to the ego and thus redundant. Remember: do ask what your society can do for you. If it's not paying for what it demands from you, it is a parasitic traitor and deserves to be painfully destroyed. Lies are bad, mmmkay.

When working 'properly' everyone has the same superego, or at best, the male-ver superego or the female-ver superego. Approximately there is one superego. Incredibly tedious - even women aren't attracted to someone that boring. In practice of course mistakes are made and the superegos differ, but it is all accidental. 

 

Your superego is holding you back. It's one of your worst enemies. Getting rid of it isn't pleasant, but unfortunately it is highly profitable.

Superego Principle of Writing Criticism

Background: it's popular to say Freud was wrong, which is how you know he was largely on the ball. The id-ego-superego framework is useful. Recap: the id is the raw impulses, the ego is your rational reaction to your id, and the superego is your social norms.

All but the very best writers create characters who are pure superego. At best maybe they 'struggle' with 'temptation' of the id occasionally. Their social presentation is their entire reality.

This is often a good thing since Caino hypocriens is such a trash species. The egos suck, the id's impulses are all horrific, and the written versions are strictly superior. However, it's also boring. Story characters can't be hypocrites since they don't have any inner thoughts with which to differ from the outer. Unless you're literally retarded, you know what the social norms are supposed to be, and don't need them repeated at you again.

 

JBP says a hero is like a refined moral instruction. If you think about it, it means they're repeatedly distilled superego. Especially all those Japanese manga heroes who are paragons of their local virtue. Perfectly selfless, always get a present on your birthday, always forgive, don't want anything but to [protect]...completely, utterly uninteresting, because there's not actually anyone there.
Due to the writer's own superego, they can't even make the other characters react realistically to the Paragon of Virtue, which would at least be interesting in a world-building sense, because it would reveal that some of the Virtues aren't virtuous. Even if they sincerely have criticism of the virtue, they will never (really really never if Asian) say so out loud.

Anyone who isn't an "anti" hero lacks a personality. They're not a character, they're a paint-by-numbers scheme. Without the paint. And most "anti" heroes simply have a few signs reversed. They don't have a personality, they have -1s, moral "failings," as if the id is always merely the inverse of the superego. Outgroup is always exactly the opposite of ingroup, right simpletons?

Still better than most real dire apes. Yes, we can call that, at a stretch, a hero. 

 

This is partly why stories are usually for children. They don't fully know what the superego is supposed to be, and it's not wholly a waste of time to tell them.
Likewise it's not useless to read stories written for other cultures. You can investigate their superego, and the kind of society they say it's supposed to create. 

There's a cheap vaccine for authors who want to escape superego characters. Have them disagree on values (not facts) and have them both be correct. Recall that anything else is narcissism.

P.S. Obviously if you have criticism of a superego virtue, the play is to exploit the rubes who buy into it, not to disparage the virtue out loud. Friends? What are those? Vampires don't have friends, only bloodbags and competitors. Social species lol nice one-liner.

Worry is a Bug

Worrying is never productive. 

If you can solve the problem, just solve it.

If you can't solve the problem, just accept it. 

If you're not sure, then find out. 

If the problem is you can't find out, just accept it. 

There's no space in here for worrying. It's just a bug. Maladaptive in 100% of situations.

The term 'worry' comes from the description of what dogs do to bones. You can't annoy a problem to death. If you have worries you're just being dumb. Stop worrying. If you can't stop worrying, just ignore it. It has no purpose.

Commons Tragic, Twitter Big Mad

"I would join the China hate but this is right in line with industrial civilization in general. The Chinese just seem even better suited to it. They don't seem to care a bit about the earth or any other life."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/GraniRau/status/1681390601214754833

https://nitter.unixfox.eu/paradigmsmasher/status/1680982213016403969

 

Like everything else from the Empire of Lies, the idea of "international" waters is a scam. Anyone could put a stop to these Chinese boats, if the UN wasn't defending them. The Chinese, also, can't lay claim to these fish in any durable way, due to, guess what, the UN.

Enclose the commons or die. Secure your shit.  

Of course every statistic is complete bullshit, so who knows how much of this is real damage and how much of it is journalism.

They Conquered out of Cowardice

Those who admire Napolean et al seem to do so because they are afraid. 

They think that if they were like Napoleon, they wouldn't need to be afraid. 

Julius Kaisar in particular was very obviously motivated by fear. He didn't seize Rome because he wanted to seize Rome. It was not out of joy or appreciation. He did it because he was afraid of going to jail. If he crossed peacefully he would have been arrested and put on trial. He was desperately scrambling to stay ahead of taking responsibility for his own actions.

However, the fact everyone who admires Napoleon is doing it out of cowardice is solid proof that Napoleon himself was a coward. He didn't win battles because he thought winning battles was cool. He did it because he was afraid of not fighting the battle. That all his admirers have cowardice in common tells us that the part of themselves that Napoleon exemplarizes is phobia. Napoleon was just like them, but moreso.

Napoleon pushed and pushed the world until the world upheld his psychological dogma and did something scary to him. Napoleon was doomed because the one he needed to defeat was himself, but he refused to face himself on the field of battle.

Likewise, Napoleon's admirers feel that if they were like Napoleon, they won't need to do the one thing they're most terrified of, facing themselves. 

Napoleon won because he was weak. Napoleon's admirers admire him because they are weak. Whatever Napoleon wanted, unless it was self-destruction, he ultimately didn't achieve it. "I found the crown of France lying in a gutter," and when Napoleon was done, the crown of France was lying in a gutter. I loathe the French, so, awesome. Sounds good to me, great work Napoleon, you get a bonus this year.

You can tell Napoleon's admirers don't admire him for his skills because they don't know about his skills. They don't talk about his skills. They do little more than drop his name and an applause light. 

One of the things about respecting Socrates is that you can go and perform a Socratic dialogue in real life. By contrast, it's quite difficult to practice battle. However, Napoleon's fans are like an Aristotle stan who has never systematically observed a natural phenomenon. I see no reason to think I should be concerned were I ever to face a Napoleon stan across the field of battle. 

Much the same way sports fan aren't especially athletic, come to think. You find one that can rattle off the scores of every game in the last ten years and has all the stats on every player in the league, but can't shoot a goal. Can barely perform a layup. 

Narcissists gonna narc on themselves, I suppose. See also birds of a feather &c.

A Hidden Story from Cave Story

Let's talk about the coming of age song, On to Grasstown.

A small child starts to explore a grassy field. He encounters some strange and curious things in knolls and nooks. (Not just enemy #12 with 14% more HP, or [this time you can't stomp on them].) They're not a big deal, he plays with them a bit and then moves on. He finds more strange and curious things - he's really getting to like this field. Some of them give him a bit of difficulty, but he extracts himself and looks further.
Then he starts to grow up. He's exploring farther, and he crests a hill. A vast, mysterious vista opens up before him. The rolling terrain creates natural watchtowers and deep grassy seas hiding all their secrets. The shallow world of his back yard promises deep interlinking complexities, and as he travels down the big hill, the lands beyond deliver on these promises.
His greater depth of understanding brings his awareness to greater challenges. It's not a day trip anymore, he's packing and girding himself for war, really committing to the excursion, submitting himself wholly to the environment, allowing it to withhold nothing from him.
The camera pulls out and we see the philosophical themes of his exploration. How his personal determination creates and is created by the grand cycle of birth, growth, and death, of the seasons, the years, and aeons. How his self-imposed trials and travails form a rhythmic dance and how hardship enriches him. 

The actual level this music accompanies is action platformer #345676i. Shooting the big guy is pretty satisfying I guess, and there's a tank up there to get. As the title hints, it's mainly a road from A to B. It's intended to be functional and largely forgettable, and so it is.

I want to see the curious things the child discovered. Do you not? How is exploring a field the result of or results in coming of age? What are the rhythms of growth and hardship? Of the cycles of seasons and the river of time? 

I want to see a game where you start with Pixel's genius song, and then make a level worthy of that song. Make a level that feels in play the same way the song feels.

Not saying it's easy or cheap, but it only requires the odds to be lower than 1 in 8 billion. 

This is why I want to see massively overpriced games by aristocrats for aristocrats, not intended to make money. Made for the same reason the pyramids were made: because it's fucking cool.

Why are Comics Terrible?

Comics are not magic. It's just a story with pictures. If you have a good writer, then they hire an artist: bam, you get a good comic. 

In Reality, every comic, including manga, relies entirely on cheap tricks and pandering. 

That is one powerful selection effect. How do they prevent a good story from appearing in comic form, even by accident? 

I especially like the "cliffhanger" technique. How to tell a ""good"" story: interrupt your own story and let all the tension fade away while you tell me a different story I don't currently care about. Thanks. When I finally get wrapped up in this second story, stop that one too. Awesome. 

Such suspense. Many pageturner. Wow. 

Then get cancelled or sick so nobody gets to see the endings.

Then finally get better and it turns out the ending was prosaic and forgettable - no wonder you wanted to hide it. No wonder manga has to run the status quo in circles for 200 chapters. The resolution is, "Eat your vegetables, kids. Big Brother is never wrong." Sublime. 

Oh, and the 'grownup' stories do the same thing, but are more boring. Hidden dragon has no, you know, dragons in it. Just people. That makes it 'serious.' I can go outside if I want to see people.

I think it's Faustianism. I can't trace the underlying circuit, but it's clearly a cultural effect. The folk who produce comics want to conform, which means producing shitty, childish stories. Apparently nobody thinks of going beyond the culture anymore. (Except me of course.) All straining beyond the summit is fake, as intended.

It's the same in video games. What made golden age games so special is not secret. It's widely known. (Proven by mega man 9.) Self-publishing is not exactly outlawed - it's easier than ever. Why doesn't anyone make an awesome golden era game with modern QoL sensibilities? Billions of English speakers, a guy who tried to re-create legend of zelda in 3D (getting C&D'd while Cadence of Hyrule exists), and that's it? Answer: Faustian culture. Have to be like the VG devs who came before. They only break the rules by accident, when they're too dumb to follow the rules.

I can't get over how corporate art is a horrible environment that's nowhere near good enough...and yet indies somehow manage to be universally worse. WTF. 

Like Pixel is seriously impressive and all but Cave Story is and old-school game with old-school QoL. And there's one (1) Pixel, who isn't even English. 

P.S. Reminder that the great promise of video games is to go and live a life that's impractical to live IRL. Books can lie about interaction in a way video games can't. You want a game that simulates that other life as closely as possible, so it feels as rich and lifelike as possible. As much depth and detail as you can afford. You're not just playing with some simplistic toy, but genuinely exploring a distant possibility. 

Cave Story doesn't make you feel like you're a robot exploring a cave connected to a ruined civilization. It makes you feel like you're playing an arcade game with arbitrary powerups and unintuitive spatial relations.

Faustianism == Narcissism

Spengler's not wrong about a lot but he's wrong about the character of Faustianism. The core nature of Faustianism is narcissism. A severe, crippling developmental disorder.

Faustianism succeeds when it fails to be Faustian. When the Faustian "strains beyond its own summit" it means straining beyond Faustianism and returning to some form of sanity.  

The Faustian is restless and unsatisfied because he craves his parent's love, which he did not receive. He is caring due to babby's first empathy: "If I care for you, you will automatically care for me, right?" He desperately craves the care which he did not receive from his ancestors, and thus desperately offers care. 

He secretly knows his goal will never be achieved because he knows his parents find him unlovable.

He is proud due to megalomania. 

The yearning toward distance and infinity is born of the wistful fantasy that, if you get far enough away from your parents, you would find someone different enough to care for you. In base modern terms, the domestic patriot hated you, therefore the foreign immigrant (might) love you. The more foreign, the more likely they find you lovable. 

 

Faustians like to get mad at Jews because Jews are way more biologically narcissistic than the Borean races.  "Quite Faustianing better than us! 😭"

It's very very pathetic that other cultures couldn't fight off this train wreck. "You're worse than this? How?!?" 

Spengler was also wrong about the exact timing of Faustianism. The 2-millennia lifespan seems about right to me, but it started no later than the third century AD. Not to mention this clean round number is, as expected, rounded: classical cultures were clearly highly pre-Faustian no later than 400 BC. Ipuwer also records a Faustian spasm.

Faustianism fails because ultimately Faust's parents were correct: he is unlovable. He does not deserve care. Ultimately Faustianism fails because it's fucking insane. The compassionate reaction to a Faustian is to kill the shit out of him, putting him out of his misery. 

 

Turns out the original Faust was a proper telling. Devils never offer deals that are worth taking, and Faust, as someone who agreed to a devil's deal, sold something valuable for something valueless. This is Faustianism in a nutshell: the infinity the Faustian allegedly wants to reach for is exactly what the Faustian sold. Faustianism is like deliberately self-inflicted buyer's remorse. He pretends to regret selling the thing to justify his yearning for the thing he sold. It's absolutely Satan worship; the worship of suffering and failure via lies.

 

The cruel, sadistic reaction to a Faustian is to leave him alive to suffer his own company.

Respectomancy

Naturally I am a skilled necromancer and I find puppeteering a zombie so trivial it's boring. This means I know how the motivating spellwork goes. It's just math. Computer code.

Today I want to talk more about the respect functions. 

Given access to a zombie, any necromancer can inspect the triggers that result in the zombie displaying respect. If you try it yourself, you'll immediately notice that the triggers have nothing to do with being respectable. Presumably because the raising necromancer was lazy - appearances are simple in the way substance is not. It would take time and effort to not suck so bad.

They're begging you to spoof their respect algorithms. Hence e-girls and other grifters. It's not some momentary lapse or temporary peccadillo. Zombies gonna zombie. They will not rise up - it's a miracle they were risen from the dead in the first place, don't expect a double miracle.

In particular, look at the [[respect]] that comes from beating up the zombie. Naturally this respect is merely fear, but it pretends to be respect so the zombie doesn't have to admit to itself that it is a coward. It hates itself plenty as it is, after all. As long as you can inflict physical pain on a zombie and get away with it, the zombie will [[respect]] you.

Now look back at the other triggers. They all call the fear-pretending-to-be-respect functions. It all merges into one lane.

Look again: are these triggers plausible evidence that the zombie should be afraid of you? Within their sharply limited cognition, yes. You and I might be able to easily fend off many of these attacks, but a zombie sure can't. They're pushovers - as in they will often literally fall over if you physically push them, because zombie. 

E.g. a zombie will [[respect]] you if you have a lot of money. Because you can hire a lot of lawyer or bribe the mayor to make their life hell. If you look closer, it's not even [have money] it's a couple extremely impoverished indicators of money, like having an overpriced car and a nice watch. Get the car second or third hand and a fake watch? Usually the zombie itself will prevent anyone from seeing through the ruse, if it can, to avoid having to admit to being fooled. You and I might be able to tell the difference between a fake watch and a real one - I would look for e.g. anxiety while paying restaurant bills - but the zombie wasn't programmed with that, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To prevent a zombie from getting grifted, the necromancer has to constantly supervise them, or let a vampire feed so heavily on the zombie they have nothing left to grift. Even necromancers find zombies repulsively putrid.

There's an obvious solution. If you're necromancer-class and you're doing something because you're afraid, say you're doing it because you're afraid. Or deterred or wary. If anyone ever asked me, I would say I was efficiently threatened. You can then find other necromancers who are capable of giving and receiving respect, by noticing the ones willing to say when they're just afraid.

The zombies are fucked tho.
If you openly endorse "cowardice" in the face of deterrence, they will act weird, but you can just puppeteer them into doing something else with a minor effort. You can reprogram them to not be completely retarded but it's not remotely worth the effort, and after reprogramming you have to constantly guard them against being reverted, which means riding the ass of a rotting corpse. 

P.S. Do zombies laugh their ass or sides off because the connective tissue has disintegrated from necrosis? 🤔

Homo Sapiens is a Species of Zombie

Earth is the netherworld. Cthonic. Everyone has already died at least once. More specifically, nearly every dire ape is a Frankenstein, made up of salvaged mismatched bits of the previously-killed.

The zombies are controlled via necromancy. 

Actually necromancy means dead-divination, so raising and guiding the deceased is more like thanatokinesis, but I won't die on that hill either. English is doomed, don't waste time trying to fix it.

Maybe there's a few vampires here and there - special vampires which can survive on zombie blood.

Everyone is afraid of the zombie apocalypse because it's already happened. As usual, zombies IRL are less dramatic than movie-version zombies. IRL zombies are mindless, want (as far as they can be said to want anything) to destroy your brain, and reproduce via mob violence because they're utterly unthreatening one-on-one. They are easy to trip. They desperately hate and resent the living (as far as they can be said to feel anything). They even hate the mockery of life they themselves constitute. Along with being less dramatic, they are less cool. They do feel pain, remorse, and fear, and shooting them in the brain is far from the only way to kill one.

Actually that's a lie, they don't feel remorse. They pretend to be remorseful when properly terrorized, in an attempt to avoid pain.

They do genuinely recoil from divine symbols, and indeed that's a good test of genuine sanctity. If it makes NPCs reeee, it's holy, with a few edge-case exceptions. Look how far a zombie flips out when you call them a zombie, for example.

IRL zombies are undead souls, rather than undead bodies. The flesh is willing but the spirit is not. The spirit is defective.

The TFR 'crisis' is probably just the fact the necromancers can't be arsed to raise so many zombies anymore. No undead souls => no births, by hook or by crook.
Many vampires terribly butthurt about the shortage of prey.

Vampires aren't really feeding on your blood. They feed on your soul, using your blood as a medium. Symbolic essence as a gateway to actual essence.
IRL vampires do it backwards by feeding on metaphorical blood. Zombies do have their own unholy vitality. Come to think, IRL vampires must be thanatovores or scavengers. It's logically necessary. The body is holy, and thus blood is a holy oil. If a vampire drank blood they would exorcise themselves. They can only feed on flesh and essence that's already been desecrated. E.g. paper money.

lol add 'blood' to the list of critical vampire weaknesses
and gold
and stars
kek

Social Credit is Almost Right-Wing

Subsidized silence. Don't say anything, don't lower your score. Based.

Say something dumb, have to take responsibility. Like, no wonder Twitter hates social credit.

The problem is that it's irresponsibly imposed instead of voluntarily taken up. The correct, responsible response to someone trying to impose something like this is to kill them immediately. 

Do ask what your country can do for you. If it's doing nothing for you, it is betraying you, and you need to immediately betray it right back. If social credit were to the credit of the individuals who make up China, they wouldn't need to impose it. They would be demanding it. Begging for it. Folk outside the system would feel banished, not privileged. 

A genuine right wing would have coded third-party credit scores and attached them to Twitter, so their Popes could tell them when they're engaging in heresy, degeneracy, or simply being declasse.

Missing Studies: Nerve Sensation Lab

A million studies trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness, and not one study trying to find the nervous correlate of bloodwork markers. 

What does having good hdl/ldl feel like? What are the precise sensations of the bad stuff? What movie is most like having anemia? What painting makes you feel similar to overdosing on vitamin A?

Fuck waiting for scientists to stop being profane. Get a god and use divination. 

If you don't feel perfect, ask your divine contact which soil amendment flesh amendment you need, then develop a religious dietary fixation. 

Enjoy your terrible health, atheists. Nobody can say you don't sacrifice for your faith.

Long-Term Effects of Chlorinated Water

Admittedly I only spent about 30s looking, but it seems there's no studies on the long-term effects of drinking chlorinated water. It's not like you can sue the government, after all. (Hire your lawyer to sue himself next. *fireworks*)

There have been studies finding the chlorine tends to produce highly carcinogenic compounds, though. *party noises* It reacts with organic chemicals in the water. 

Hey, what are stomachs made out of again?

On the plus side, chlorine can be driven out of the water with high temperatures Which means there's no first world country: no matter where you live, you need to boil the water before you drink it. 

In particular, it seems that chronic exposure to an antibiotic would be bad for your gut flora. There are naturally no studies on this at all. Germs bad, death good. *applause* Germs very outgroup.

I don't go for blood work. I use my nerves for that - it's what they're for. Sending your water to a lab for testing is a great idea, though. At least do A/B testing. Discover the delta between what's supposed to be in the water and what's actually there.

Cars and Roads Aren't Designed With Safety, Which Spreads Fear

I was reminded of the safety factor. You calculate the maximum stress your building or device is going to feel, and then you make it capable of withstanding 3-5 times that stress, because you're stupid and it will probably feel 2-4 times the stress you think it will.

In other words, a safe car would be designed to keep the driver and passengers unharmed even at collisions that are four times as hard as the maximum collision. I expect this would mean limiting maximum speed.

Likewise, any building next to a road should be built like a bunker. It should be able to withstand a collision with a speeding truck and suffer only cosmetic damage. Bollards everywhere at the very least. 

Roads and buildings are common enough that folk will peg how dangerous the world is on these artifacts. In other words, they will think everything is built for maximum speed and fuck health. They think planes and elevators and corporations and all that stuff are built to the standards of roads. 

A dumb safety factor is pretty dumb. You bulk up parts that are never going to fail, putting additional stress on the fragile joints. Once again, there is no shortcut to wisdom. You cannot substitute dumb rules for intelligence. 

Safetyism is not remotely worth it. It costs a ton of money and regularly makes things more dangerous. Worse, it costs glory. Because cars aren't safe, they have to look safe, which makes them hideous.

 And it seems safetyism is all repressed desire for cars and roads to not be horrible aposematic deathtraps.

Femininity of "Mandate of Heaven"

Women and Han make no allowances for situation. You're only allowed to succeed every time; any failure is considered to be total and universal failure. 

E.g. if you lose a fight in front of your girlfriend, she will treat you as if you will lose every fight to everyone forever. She will probably jump ship to the guy who beat you up. If you win the rematch, she won't reconsider, she'll just consider you both losers. 

Bureaucrats do the same thing. Even being near a failed project is disqualifying. Women and Han do not consider the long-term result of filling a society with folk who need to spend more time on avoiding the appearance of disqualification than they do on avoiding actual failure. (&c)

With women this can be palliated. Don't let men start fights in front of women and don't let women into places where men are allowed to fight each other. However, if your whole society is like women, you're SOL. 

I suspect this is because women and Han are kinda stupid. They genuinely can't handle any discriminator that's more sophisticated than pass/fail. Women and China shouldn't be allowed out of the house unsupervised, because they're too dumb to handle wild environments. They need strictly controlled conditions. Indoor cat only; houseplant only.

Challenge: Identify Grammarly Users Without Referring to Grammarly

The easy thing to do is to install Grammarly, note its solecisms, and then naturally recognize those solecisms to identify Grammarly abusers. Too easy. The proper training exercise is to figure out someone is using Grammarly based on a hunch, and subsequently validate the conclusion using independent indirect evidence.

In particular, Grammarly loves hyphens. (That was my google search for the confirm.) It will give you one-hundred ways to incorrectly use hyphens. ("Also note that “semicolon” is not spelled with a hyphen") At least a hundred of them. Whatever a [one-hundred] solecism is.

"but he’d decided to avoid any half-measures and go full-ringwraith." (Delve ch 61) As opposed to full half-ringwraith or quarter-circle grass-type-ringwraith. See, Grammarly, if you really love hyphens and want them every-where, you don't have to use them un-correctly.
"there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop her, short of moving-in with Halgrave" A good joke: an alleged grammar-checker can't detect context. Thinks all instances of moving and in are from moving-in day. What's the difference between a moving-in with Halgrave and a regular with Halgrave?
"He’d lost his foot to something called a ‘dunch’ early-on in his career" Presumably that's the opposite of a late-on. I wonder if a late-on also has a dunch variety, or if they're solely chwemp. Must be quite the energetic ion if it can take off a whole foot.

Alternatively it could have been a wonderful new decay fad, such as using 'dismantling' when they mean skinning and butchering. As expected, idiots are seeing bad translations and 'improving' their writing to the bad translation's standard. Have a bear you want to process? Get out your wrenches and screwdrivers, we're gonna dismantle it. First, unbolt the skin, then carefully lever it away from the muscles... I suspect the every day / everyday failure in Harvest Moon GBA was patient 0 for that error.

Instead, many alleged EFL students are telling on themselves, because the Grammarly style is impossible to miss if you even vaguely know what you're looking for, as expected. Grammarly clearly noticed that stuff like twenty-two takes a hyphen and decided that numbers love hyphens just like it does. (To distinguish it from twenty twos; it was originally twenty-and-two.)

Alternate alternative, Grammarly could have offered good grammar advice. It shouldn't be logically impossible. Merely empirically impossible. Instead, Grammarly will actively degrade your grammar unless what you're starting with is so unreadable it's Canadian-Healthcare-tier.
Not unlike Strunk and White, come to think. Or that 1800s grammar book that told everyone they had to use [he] instead of [they], which inevitably lead to the cancerous [he or she]. Negative-sum grammar checkers are traditional at this point. Lindy, even.

Scholars Can't Not Rule

Merchants can't rule because they can't tell the truth. You can always trap a merchant into self-harm by holding hostage the lies their friendships depend upon. All their short-term incentives encourage shameless irresponsibility, and as a result they grow up to lack discipline. This is a tragedy as the basic merchant interaction is positive-sum, unlike the other castes. Disqualified.

Warriors can't rule because the correct way to choose the warrior chief is through violence. If you can beat up the old chief you get to be the new chief. In a warrior hierarchy having the weak lead the strong makes no sense at all. Did you notice the treachery? The correct way to become head warrior is to betray the head warrior. Which means the chief wants to betray all his competent subordinates. He wants to cripple his own organization so there's a band gap between himself and his underlings. A warrior organization is inherently a non-society. The test for membership is willingness to betray. The way to lead it is to undermine leadership. A human warrior hierarchy can't declare peace on itself without renouncing Martial virtue. 

The correct warrior strategy is to forgo crippling your own organization only long enough to destroy every other warrior organization. This means warriors can't declare peace on each other, either. Disqualified.

By process of elimination, always and everywhere the scholar caste is in charge. Your priests, your brahmin, your university professors, your shaman, or whatever you happen to call them locally. Neither the emotional left heart nor the strong right arm can make decisions - only the brain can make decisions. 

This is still a problem. The scholar caste having a zero-sum challenge is better than the warrior caste's negative-sum, but not by much. The top scholar wants to keep all wisdom away from any of his challengers, surrounding himself with idiots and taking all the society's wisdom with him when he dies. At best every human scholar must reinvent the wheel. As in, literally starting at reinventing oscillatory transportation. 

That said, of all the castes, only the scholar caste can be expected to appreciate long-term incentives. It is not bound by its mindless biology.

Scholar-Merchant Reversal Causes Merchant-Scholar Reversal?

Democracy is a bunch of scholars pretending to be merchants so that they can be in charge. Shamanism: a witch doctor wears feathers and pretends to be a bird or wears a bearskin and pretends to be a bear. A Sophist wears a merchant skin and pretends, so they can commune with the animalistic merchant caste for the purposes of controlling it. They provide offerings such as Communism to quiet the restless masses, and receive the strange powers of their dubious blessings in return.

Curiously, according to the [know them by their fruits] principle, this leads to the universities becoming stuffed with merchants pretending to be scholars. Sophists turn their own enclaves into sewage lagoons. Either inherently or voluntarily they tear down their own security and rip apart their own communities. Impiety results in divine wrath.

Let's see if I've worked out the new AI

A transformer is just interpolation, but, like, really complicated?

And an LLM is a kind of interpolation that looks like extrapolation?

An LLM is fairly easy to describe since it's 1D. It just takes some mathematical function of the previous words in an attempt to predict what the next word would be. 

It extrapolates based on the input text, but the result is an interpolation of the training data. It's an extraordinarily expensive way of trying to figure out the conventional answer. If someone in the training data had started saying X, how would they have finished saying X?

Interpolation cannot create anything new. An LLM cannot extrapolate semantically, it can only try to make the output text match what it sees in the input text.
It's an extraordinarily crippled approach to AI, like trying to transport water in a bucket by first drilling a bunch of holes in the bucket. It's not like you can't get water from A to B using a Swiss bucket, but it takes an ungodly amount of effort. 

Have you tried drinking with a fork? I gave up once the liquid wouldn't cover half the tines. It's an amusing thing to do, once. Gives you a sense of "nonzero" as in, "A mouthful of water using a fork is a nonzero amount."

When they try to refine the approach they often attempt to drill more holes in the bucket, but sometimes they get the bright idea to drill smaller holes. Normally they throw more buckets ("compute") at it, in an attempt to pretend that money is no object and they're so high-status they don't suffer from scarcity.

 

The transformers take the surroundings of a pixel and try to work out what that pixel 'should' look like. If, in the training data, the surroundings of a pixel looked like Y, what is the correct value of the pixel itself, X? Because this is recursive the transformation has to be done many times and try to get to an equilibrium. Imagine three regions - left, middle, right. Once you've adjusted the left to be consistent with itself and the middle, the middle is now being adjusted to a different picture than the left was adjusted to, and the right will be adjusted to yet a third picture. The model can't appreciate the picture as a whole, so you have to run it again and hope it converges.

Basically the prompts adjust the weights on the pixels. Can you see how this means there's a distinctly finite number of meaningfully different output pictures? There's only so many weight sets that make sense.

That it would have issues with fingers is predictable. Fingers are periodic, and AI can't count the fingers. It doesn't see fingers (or words). It just sees a bunch of numbers. The numbers don't mean anything to it - it can only tell the numbers need to be larger or smaller, or so its masters claim. It can sort of tell that a finger should be next to other fingers, but it can't see any further than a finger or two away because making the pixel regions too big will bring your CPU to its knees.

Probability Defined Relatively Easily

If you react to stimulus X with response Y, then there is a set of outcomes with well-defined probability. 

For example, if you respond to a fire with a fire extinguisher, the fire will go out with some probability. 

It's defined by sensation and decision.

Stimulus or a situation is defined by your sensor suite. You get nontrivial probabilities because you can't tell similar situations apart. It's too expensive, so you don't bother or cannot pay for it at all. You probably can't instantly see the exact line between 'large' fire (the extinguisher won't work) and 'small' fire (the extinguisher will work). Thus you simply react to all fire below 'huge' (the extinguisher is laughable) with a person-portable quenching device, and the exact probability of success is defined by where you see the line. And whether you're using an expensive highly-engineered laboratory extinguisher tank or a bucket of water or sand.

The strategy for dealing with the stimulus is a decision. Thus sensation+decision=>probability.

It only seems anything but infinitely precise because the probabilities change over time based on e.g. sensor degradation/upgrades or changes in the environment. E.g. if the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere goes up, it will get harder to put fires out. Perhaps changes in building materials also lead to more pyrophilic fires, without being visually legible.

Gonzalo Lira and why I can't trade stocks

I predicted Lira was dead, but he wasn't. Lira then kindly retroactively fixed my analysis. You can confirm this on his twitter. 

Stock trading demands precise timing. I can tell where things are going but I can't fathom idiocy to figure out how long they will take to get there. 

E.g. Lira knew he was basically a fugitive and then decided to go through a border checkpoint, instead of trying to cut across the countryside. This is a level of dumb I would naively attribute to amoebas and slime molds, but here we are with an alleged sapiens. Incomprehensible stupidity. "I'm criticizing a usurper...maybe I should invest in a dirt bike? Naaaw, I'm sure it will be fine." 

Anyway, thanks for tidying up my error, Lira.

Universal Disrespect

I think homo sapiens is no longer capable of respect. One of the many reasons I instead refer to Caino hypocriens. 

Respect is startlingly easy to diagnose: if you obey someone you don't fear, it has to be due to respect. This may even be a definition.

However, I have literally never witnessed this. Every single instance of obedience on record has been an incarnation of fear. The queen of hell (=Earth) is Phobos. 

It's curious, because it shouldn't be genetically possible. That one can conceive of respect as a possibility means that it must have been possible in the past. To be completely absent in behaviour, it has to be completely removed from the gene pool. If it were still physically possible, some folk would show respect by accident once in a while. There's no way that there's a selection pressure strong enough to eliminate this particular mutation in a mere millennia or two. Odd.

On the other hand if it's a spiritual mechanic, where genes 'by chance' just so happen to converge on spiritual reality, it is not at all hard to explain. Nor the reason respect came be to considered a sin in the first place.

 

The above may be a definition, but it's not worth checking since it doesn't exist. As worthwhile as minutely defining a unicorn. "This leprechaun is in fact 1.5 millimeters too tall." Skip.

Being Explicit: the Modern World is Religious

I've said over and over that this and that is religious, but it's supposed to be a pattern: secularism is a fanatic religion. 

What is atheism? It is the denial of the divine.

Christianity is atheism. It denies the divinity of everyone except Satan (and calls him Haeland or whatever, because Father of Lies). 

Full secularism is merely purified Christianity. It's atheism without the unprincipled exception. The more they claim to be areligious, the more fanatical you should assume they are, because atheism is Christianity. 

Communism is Christianity. Democracy is Christianity. Wokism is Christianity. The Japanese are highly Christianized. Of course Fascism is Christianity. Perhaps Judaism wasn't Christianity at first, but it certainly is now. Etc etc etc. It almost seems the only effective way to escape Christianity is to be so stupid you try to be Christian, fail, and don't even notice.

It's hard to tell: is all politics a form of religion? I think so, but it may be simply that fanatic Christianity/Atheism is so embedded in moderns that they can't do anything without doing it in a Christian way. The resulting decay is only natural.

Because everything is religious, it makes no sense to speak about anything in non-spiritual terms. No social activity anywhere in the present time invokes only physics. They are all religious rituals, deliberately summoning heavenly interference. 

If you really did want to be atheist, you would have to go through Alchemy first. You have to exorcise yourself incessantly, getting rid of layers and layers of Christianity. Total transmutation of the soul.

Of course getting so deeply into Alchemy is impossible unless you own a spiritual root, so I can't see any way that someone capable of carrying out this process would want to be Atheist at the end of it. 

Conclusion: atheism is Satanism, as no atheist is secular. It inherently has to lie about itself; narcissism.
Corollary: Satanism is Christianity, which is atheism, which means we have a bifurcating proof. Starting from any observation on either branch leads to proving the other.

Repetition: Christianity is Indeed the Cross

What is the cross? It is a crucifix. It is an instrument of torture and death.

Everything you need to know about Christianity they tell you up front with their own "holy" symbol. They intend to torture and murder you. 

A Good Christian tortures someone to death, and then lets themselves be tortured to death. They run around inflicting pain in the hopes that someone will snap and kill them. (Slowly.) That's the point of the religion. Anyone who takes care of themselves and cooperates with a second person is committing heresy against Christianity.

Some Calvinists noticed that, if you take the "Gospel" seriously, it condemns everyone to Hell. They were correct; the god of the Book had only malicious intentions.

Christianity is for devils. The Book claims Jesus is Love because Jesus was Hate. Self-hate, and omnihate. It claims Jesus is omnibenevolent because Jesus was omnimalevolent. The Gnostics were basically correct about the character of this demiurge.

(He had no part in the creation of physical reality, but social addicts confuse social reality with underlying reality all the time. When they said 'god' was 'the word' what they meant was that it only applies to the speaking species, homo sapiens. Things which don't speak in words are not part of the domain.) 

The correct solution to Christianity is let them fully live their own doctrines. Give them what they're asking for until none of them are left to ask for it.

Enlightenment = Christianity

The Enlightenment attacked Christianity as camouflage. They filed off the serial numbers in the hopes you wouldn't realize they're using the exact same merchandise from the exact same stores. Moldbug noted anti-Americans are in fact hyper-Americans: they're criticizing America for not being American enough. They got the idea from their Enlightenment predecessors, whose only real beef with Catholicism was that wasn't universal enough.

The Church had a Church hierarchy. Ew! Aren't we all equal before God? What corrupt heretics! Trust in the LORD Nature magazine!

When an anti-American attacks 'imperial colonialism' it's supposed to misdirect you: you're not supposed to immediately conclude that they're trying to reinforce colonial imperialism. They call it 'international community' or whatever instead, and the fact the words are different is sufficient to bamboozle wordcels. Shape rotators are yet more useless: they never object to being ruled by wordcels. Given over 90% of Americans got at least one fake vaccine, how many shape rotators could have possibly refused?

You can find a Bible verse to back up everything a "liberal" believes, but you can't find a scientific study to back up everything they believe. Their value schedule is lifted wholesale from Satan's little Book.

Recall Satan was the arch-narcissist. Liberals share with Christians the narcissistic inability to cooperate with anyone who isn't identical to them. Narcissists' inability to perceive anything outside themselves means anyone whose likes or thoughts differ from theirs is incomprehensible and, frankly, terrifying. Narcissists' obligatory navel-obsession makes it impossible for them to predict the reactions of anyone who isn't a carbon copy of themselves. Note this is an extreme military disadvantage. You can't lose to this group without trying.

When the second law of thermodynamics applies, sects diverge, and this causes sectarian violence. Every narcissists' first priority is defectively enforcing conformity, and ostracizing or executing anyone who refuses to submit to the LORD. [[Unity]] means having a Pope and cancelling anyone who doesn't slavishly obey the Pope. Remember never to call him the Pope, because that would be remotely sane.

The logic functions in reverse. The Enlightenment was secular, therefore, Christianity was secretly secular the whole time. That is, insofar as the Enlightenment can be considered secular, or in the case where you define secular as whatever the Enlightenment was.