American Culture is Doomed

 Everything American and Americoid is wholly condemned. It will be subsumed by the dustbin of history. You can try to out-breed this fatal fate, but this will only make more bodies that ultimately have to be buried.

 E.g. look how corrupt the language is. Fatal doesn't retain a shred of the meaning of fate. Degenerated.

 Americans can forget Americana, dying spiritually, or they can forget by force, dying physically. 

 I have concluded this is what makes nearly everyone seem dead to me. They're frantically trying to uphold or even extend a zombie culture. Their efforts are self-defeating. Guaranteed to be in vain. If they do anything I don't like, to get rid of it, all I have to do is wait. The trash will take itself out. 

 Wile E Coyote, held up only by their fanatic ignorance of being over the cliff's edge. Except they won't merely leave a cartoon-shaped hole at the bottom, but will properly go splat. 

 You can see how dead culture functions: who remembers Wily? Everything being made today will likewise be rapidly forgotten. A culture with no canon isn't a culture. A culture with no touchstones is not a culture. It's a series of temporary poses taken while in free-fall. Insofar as anything lasts, it's by accident or mistake. By fluke, they remind themselves of something. As incapable of perfect amnesia as they are incapable of retaining a narrative. 

 If you try to contribute to this culture, all your efforts will be wasted. They no longer even want to survive, they only want to keep the drugs going as long as possible. Hooked on schedule 1 copium. 

 Did you catch how Rome went? We learned Latin, and found out everything worth reading was originally written in Greek. Latin is only valuable for finding references to lost Greek works.
 Like, come on, Star Wars? The great myth where the 'chosen hero' is saved by his daddy? At first it looks like Luke managed something, he blew up the death star. Palpatine (unlike New York) just built another one. "Huh, that was expensive. Whoopsie. Well, anyway..." Everything in Star Wars is junk except the Force, and, spoilers, the Force isn't real. Less profound than a puddle. Future cultures will have American screenplays, just as we have Greek plays, but they won't reproduce them, for the same reason. They have no value if you're not the species of narcissist they're pandering to.
 

 Forget not how much ruin is in a nation. The cliff is quite tall; the culture can fall for a very long time. At terminal velocity it even seems steady and predictable. The adherents will propose that new lows are in fact progress. Every improvement is a change, this is a change, therefore it must be an improvement. Perfectly sogical. Progress (downward). Evolution (towards a static equilibrium). 

 I sometimes find works by someone clearly in the grip of creative ecstasy. Far more work goes into them than they can possibly get out of it. Each one speaks of feelings and experiences you can see nowhere else. When I see one, I wonder how many I haven't seen, buried in the bowels of youtube. 

 However, all these oracles speak, in one way or another, of dying and death. A maimed and crippled world, with nowhere to go but down.

 "But what about China and India?" They don't have a culture. They stagnated; stagnation is death, it's already been annihilated. Robots going through the motions of having a culture. Automatons. Golems. Was Spengler right? Do races have souls? If so, they can also become soulless husks. Pseudo-races.
 Times don't changed. Times are changed. Some races, however, can neither change the times nor change with the times. If they get lucky, repeating what they did in the past isn't instantly fatal. They can last for millennia like this, but every year it is yet more impossible to escape their stagnation. Ever more impossible for them to survive a drastic change. 

 Original sin is taxation. If you place a traitorous parasite at the head of society, it will suck out 100% of its vitality, 100% of the time. Nothing short of total civilizational destruction can erase the parasite from a parasite-cored society. The cancer grows until it devours and replaces the entire brain, stuffing the skull full of disease.

 A society that worships lies will have its core refuted by Reality.

Final Word on Therapy

 Psychological therapy is fine and good. Especially the Stoic-flavoured stuff.

 Most therapists are not therapists. At best they're incompetent, worse than a rando at the bar. Usually they're abusive cluster Bs, who will deliberately parasitize their so-called patients. Siskind is a cluster B, for example. Borderline, I think.

 Consequently you either have to roll the dice repeatedly to find a decent therapist, or simply admit it's easier to do it yourself.

Example of Leftists Are Just Liars

 If leftist protestations were sincere instead of tactical, it would be trivial to jiu-jitsu their ideology against them. Since their """ideology""" is pure sogol, they detect it immediately when you use it against them. They know the results they want; the reasons for these results are whatever makes you do what they want. If you stop doing what they want, they immediately find other reasons. Not even a little bit principled, unless you count [kto kogo], [I get mine]. 

 Example: I propose banning all whites from youtube and facebook, and tiktok and instagram and, especially, tinder. For being white. To protect all nonwhites from inherent white racism. 

 What possible principled argument could a leftist make against this?
 Likewise, can't you already hear the indignant outrage of the right?

 To help forestall whites trying to come back with fake colourwashed accounts, make a white-only white-ghetto tinder/facebook clone. Make it inherently nonpublic, due to the shame of being so white.

 Leftists are ontologically committed to segregation. If whites a) exist as a category and b) are all the things leftists say they are, then it should be trivial to show them that "whites" need to be separated from nonwhites. It's not racist to avoid dating a foreigner - obviously it's racist to inflict your white hatred onto a poor person of alleged colour. Go back to England etc.

 Perhaps even make the white-only tinder account mandatory. Automatically created with your SIN or whatever. Log the IP so the white can't (easily) sneak onto the ethnically cleansed services. Whites forced to shack up and stay with only other hateful whites. Can't do anything about Twitter unfortunately, but that will just show that allowing whites to contact nonwhites merely leads to a racism.

 Of course this is wildly opposed to actual leftist goals. They want to miscegenate everyone (except themselves) into mudbloods. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be subtracted from our own. Giving an excuse for noncoloureds to identify as such? Can't do that. Giving an excuse for noncoloureds to avoid degeneration? Obviously a non-starter.

 You can make the segregation argument, and it will be very embarrassing for them, but ultimately they will invent whatever epicycles they need. Being explicit: this is highly falsifiable. You can go test it right now if you want. However, we both know the only interesting part of the result would be counting the knots in the pretzels they tie themselves in. Interesting only topologically. (Science is very easy if you're not a liar. The experiments are almost all redundant and superfluous.) 

 Nobody can even vaguely compete with the spiteful racism of the anti-racist: they know trying to make a ""white"" ghetto would instead ghettoize youtube, facebook, etc. Leftists are just lying. They're not sincere. They're not well-intentioned. They just say whatever happens to be politically convenient for them. 

 Agree and amplify only works on someone who is genuinely mistaken. Leftists just look at you like you're autistic; "Of course we're just lying, are you stupid?" The idea that someone would think they're sincere is almost incomprehensible to them; they have trouble responding coherently.
 Note this also disproves the piety cycle and prospiracy models. Segregation is clearly more holy at this point. Imagine this: you make a billboard arguing for segregation on the above grounds ("Free speech only for persons of alleged colour!") then endorse Biden. Nothing worse than a stupid ally; be a stupid ally on purpose. What are they going to do, accuse you of racism? On the contrary, if they try to take down your billboard, you can accuse them of racism. They don't hate noncoloureds as much as you do; naughty naughty.
 If it were a prospiracy you could easily bamboozle vast numbers of leftist stormtroopers into supporting this ridiculous political suicide pact. Or any number of other ridiculous suicide pacts; it would frequently happen by accident, never mind on purpose.

 If, instead, it's a theocracy with a Pope, the Pope is going to immediately see what you did there, and shut it down. Likely through pure unprincipled exception. "Block those billboards." "Why?" "It's not your place to know why." "Yessir...."

 Leftists might be vaguely tolerable if they ever thought beyond the next election. They're totally uninterested in long-term effects. They say whatever makes them win now, (children: "But I want it now!") and damn the consequences of victory.

 Leftism is just evil. It's just a crime. Mens rea.

True Risk of ncov Vaccines

 Sure the risk of death is high for a vaccine, but it's not, like, high. It's not as if you want to be sent to Ukraine to avoid getting a vaccine.

 The main risk has now come to light: repeated ncov reinfection. Good ol' worse-than-useless Communist quality standard. 

 Meanwhile us purebloods can go years and years without a hint of infection with anything, let alone some terrible ncov malady.

Anti-Procrastination Tip: Feels not Reals

 When you, or especially a Fascist man, says "reals not feels" you have to be careful you're not letting Satan psyop you into atropia. When you form a plan, you imagine a future, and, idiot, the way you feel about this future is in fact a fact about that future. If that imagined feeling is incongruent with your actual beliefs, your brain won't buy the plan, and you will correctly [procrastinate]. Even, or perhaps especially, because all the [facts] about the plan are perfectly accurate. 

 The point of any plan is the feelings associated with it. Either the feelings of carrying out the plan, or the feelings associated with the result of the plan. If the plan is only a coherent plan when portrayed associated with false feelings, it is a false plan. Your brain will rightly reject it. 

 E.g. the point of going to the grocery store isn't not to starve to death, it's not to feel hungry. At best you can say that the feeling of starving to death is to be avoided. All plans are ultimately emotional. Reason is vassal to values. All activity is ultimately recreational, the only question is whether it's setting up future recreation, or is the future recreation that was set up.  

 Fascist men in particular, trying extremely hard not to look [[gay]] will pretend they don't have feelings. They will pretend the plan is fully factual, and refuse to pay attention to the feelings they're associating with it. This makes it impossible for them to identify the false note in the plan and address it. 

 

 This one is particularly Satanic. Social reality is all about falsifying your feelings. The source of the incongruent imaginary emotions is either narcissism or conformity. 

 If your brain isn't buying you plan, ask yourself: in this situation I imagine, would I in fact feel the way I am predicting I would feel? I find a great way to find the answer is to just do it and go look. If the theory isn't crystal clear, try experiment.

 

Application of Alrenous Drama Theory and Decision Theory

 Alrenous decision theory: if a decision is hard, it is easy. Pick whatever, it doesn't matter. If it mattered much, you wouldn't have a hard time deciding.

 https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15193/ave-xia-rem-y/chapter/755841/chapter-131-strength-and-weakness

 Drama theory: we can examine Alrenous decision theory using fictional evidence. This story examines a large and costly fight between two potential heirs. Accounting: what possible gain could be worth all this cost? Just flip a coin. If you pick the "wrong" heir, it won't cost as much as fighting this hard. 

 (Alrenous decision theory point 2: clear your mind then pick based on whatever comes to mind first. Making the decision cheap is more important than making the ""right"" decision. Perfectionism is inherently worse than irresponsibility.)

 Admittedly the author screwed up. You get succession wars because the alternate successor stupidly refuses to surrender, not because the alleged succession authority refuses to choose.("If I don't have the crown I have nothing." "Then you probably deserve nothing." If both heirs are like this, disown them both.)

 Refusing to choose is just abusive and downright psychotic. Sadly unacknowledged psychoticism and lionization of abuse are common in fictional works.

Understanding, Book II

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-ii-of-ideas-chapters-111

 His fundamental thesis is that experience alone is adequate to account for all the ideas included in anyone's store of knowledge.

 Begging the question: how does a mind know how to experience. 

If we assume that ideas are present when one is not awake, there would be no way of distinguishing between having ideas and not having them.

 Equivocation. Dreaming is not being unawake in this sense. 

 The first of these he designates by the term sensation, which refers to the conscious states that are produced by the action of external bodies on the mind. It is in this way that we derive our notions of color, heat, cold, softness, hardness, bitter, sweet, and all the sensible qualities of which one ever becomes aware.

 Asking the right question, avoiding the hard work of getting the right answer. How does the mind know it's supposed to see red things as red? How does the mind know it's supposed to associate shapes with colours?

 For a mind to see blue, it must first have the latent capacity to see blue. It must already enough knowledge of blue to recognize and identify blue as blue. Insofar as his arguments hold up, Locke has proven that Plato is correct, rather than proving he's incorrect.  Anamnesis.

 Knowing Locke is the blank slate guy make this a painfully obvious specimen of sogol. He knows his conclusion, so he confabulates "proofs" that will lead there.

 The second source of our ideas is the perception of the operations which take place within one's mind as it assimilates and interprets the materials that have been received through the senses.

 Begging the question: where does knowledge of these operations come from? 

 For example, we may say of an orange that it is soft, yellow, sweet, and round. Nevertheless, in our minds each of these qualities is separate and distinct.

 Try to imagine a colour without a shape. Try to imagine a shape that has no colour (especially not grey or transparent). Try to imagine something sweet that has no shape. What does chewing on nothing taste like? Try to imagine something soft that has no shape (or colour). 

 Basic tests. 

 It is a curious thing that these very non-distinct properties can be seen separate and abstract apart from the individual things which have the properties. While we can't imagine something shapeless yet yellow, we can imagine any shape of yellow. We can imagine an archetype, a swatch or blob of yellow. We could keep in mind a cube which is the type specimen for blue, against which all other blues are contrasted. There's no known reason this should work, but it not only does work, but works well and easily.

 I find it startlingly contemptible to get so close to these important investigations, then to veer off into politics of all things.

 Secondary qualities include such items as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells. These exist only in the minds of those who perceive them

 Thus invented by the minds out of whole cloth. How do the minds know how to invent them? 

 These errors are largely boring. I think I must skip many of them as variations on a theme: Locke, I find again and again, is especially not-timeless. For example, Plato's forms are hardly the state of the art, but they address a core need, a core function. Whatever you're doing, you will need to employ something that does for you what forms did for Plato.
 Locke is merely repeating the weirdo midwit superstitions of his day, which have nothing to do with anything except fluffing/dissing the egos of other contemporaries.

 In the fourth group, we have such ideas as pleasure, pain, power, existence, unity, and succession.

 What a Democratic herd of ideas. Base. Not based, basic. [Existence] might be the odd one out, but either he included it on an unprincipled exception, or he has no idea how deep the idea is.

 Let's look at Locke doing religious propaganda again:

 This type of activity is illustrated in such ideas as beauty, gratitude, mankind, army, or the universe.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-ii-of-ideas-chapters-1233

 Does Locke not understand how profound beauty is? Why is it in this collection of base animal drives? Perhaps he's only thinking of simplistic surface visual appearance. 

 

The problem is a crucial one, for unless we can establish the fact that it is the same person who experiences a series of events, all attempts to derive a satisfactory theory of knowledge will be in vain.

 Nope. As long as the new person has the old person's memories, then they have the old person's knowledge and will make the same predictions. Totally irrelevant consideration.

 

 Plato might be wrong, and might be painfully long-winded, but he stays on topic. Locke's discussion of colour and so on are frankly beside the point. The idea is to make predictions. Either new ones we couldn't make before, or making old predictions more cheaply. The relationship between external colour and internal colour is largely irrelevant to this question. We can't use external colour to make predictions, only the internal, perceived colour. 

 Architects have been making large buildings which stay up for millennia, without understanding the details of the relationship between noumena or phenomena. However it works, we clearly basically works already. Perhaps a deep dive could improve this, but Locke is clearly uninterested in such a thing. He doesn't see how it would be politically useful to him.

  

 There is some slight point to reading this stuff. Something can be salvaged.

  The [internally sensed] weight of an object is also variable, for it appears to be heavier if one lifts it when he is tired.

 Today with better scientific instruments and models, the error here is obvious. However, do you not suspect you are still prone to making the same error? We can characterize this error and try to concoct a test that would let us detect it prospectively. How are we being just as stupid today as Locke's ye olde critics were being?  

 Questions of identity are relevant to values. And that, largely, only because values refer to identity. Say I threaten to cut you. You don't want to be cut, "I don't want to be cut." The predicate has an [I] in it, so it behooves us to work out what counts as [I] and what doesn't. Of course, the problem immediately grants us the solution. You don't like the sensation of being cut. Therefore, [you] is the set of all entities that produce the sensation of cutting when cut. Cue midwit meme; yeah that was easy. Turns out we already know the answer.

 To say that a person, or for that matter any particular object, can change and still remain the same as it was before appears to be a direct violation of the law of non-contradiction.

 It doesn't have to remain identical. Why is Locke assuming it does? It merely has to remain similar enough. 

  Those who believe in an immortal soul 

 How about considering the mortal brain before trying to get weird. Anything which significantly changes the brain kills the host of the brain. Continuity of brain could be wholly sufficient.

 

 Ideas of good and bad are, in Locke's judgment, derived solely from pleasure and pain.

 Seems to me Locke believed in the degenerate journalist!hedonism, not profound Epicurean hedonism. Again, we don't say a father jumping on a grenade to save his son is enjoying himself. "Having fun getting your guts ripped to shreds?" *blurgle* *rattle*

 It is the power of the lawgiver to administer either rewards or punishments, and this is what makes it a matter of pleasure and pain.

 Good ol' Render Unto Caesar, Atheist ver.
 It's a priming rhetorical technique. Pretty sure it kinda doesn't work unless you're already prone to it. Perhaps I should call it a dogwhistle. There are numerous ways to phrase this, but Locke chose the one that is a close as possible to human (hubristic) jurisprudence. The evocation is not accidental.

 

 In his discussion of the truth and falsity of ideas, Locke calls attention to the fact that in the strict sense of these words, ideas are neither true nor false. In this respect, they are like the names that we assign to given objects.

 This looks like deliberate misleading to me. 

 The important part is that, yes, our ideas have their own existence apart of the things which they refer to. Though this is obvious, it bears repeating. If you get an idea of a blue cube by looking at a blue cube, then someone smashes the blue cube and dissolves the dust in acid, then you can still be thinking about a blue cube. They are independent events.
 Locke deliberately distracts from this point. Truth is a different thing, and the lay understanding is wholly functional. It's about a (scalar) match between the idea and the events the idea is supposed to be about.

 They are an effective means of communication, but we cannot say that the name is necessarily like any of the qualities found in the object. The same is true of our ideas.

 Err, yeah, no. The whole point of math is that the idea of 3 and + and 3 is extremely like the event [6]. The relations between the ideas exactly replicate the relations between the events they're supposed to symbolize.

 Indeed one of the interesting mysteries in epistemology is how exactly it is possible to make symbols so alike to the phenomena they symbolize.
 It may be possible because events are made of logic, and brains, likewise, are made of logic. However, this raises another problem: how is it possible, in that case, for symbols to be unlike the things they symbolize. Why or how are we capable of illogic at all? 

 Nevertheless, it is customary to speak of one's ideas as being true or false, and there is a sense in which it is legitimate to do so. 

Obviously that sense is the only coherent sense it could possibly have ever referred to.   

 

 At this point my patience is exhausted. Locke has nothing intelligent to say. If I want to read dumb things I can read them from living men "men" on twitter. 

Middlest Wealth, Highest Deviance

 "Did...did you know? Humans lie!" Whao.

 Human = children of Satan, and the western peasants are indeed the most Satanic, loudly asserting the most false thing they can get their grubby mitts on.

 Middle classes everywhere claim they're the best and every other middle class is inferior.
The western middle classes gets all the bonus demerits when it explicitly claims they don't. They virtue-signal tolerance and "open-mindedness" and cosmopolitanism, while being, as per de Tocqueville, even more parochial, narcissistic, and tyrannical than other middle classes.

 There's this alleged harem deconstruction I was unfortunately bored enough to read. It includes a wonderful example of how the middle class (and inarticulate nonverbals generally) see religion. The premise is that harems are terrible horrible no good very bad and the ideal man is a φαγγωτ castrati with autist-caricature social skills.* Harems are the source of all evil and even lightside harems are skeevy and perverted. Also it's normal and accepted, or rather than accepted, having only three wives is considered low.
*(He isn't shunned due to author fiat. As with all middle-class literature, the true theme of the story is that middle-class mores are right about everything and outgroup get bonked; are caricatures of evil.)

 Harem = bad. Multiple wives = perfectly fine. Makes sense? Got it? Good.

 How do Muslims drink booze? Without the slightest twinge in their conscience, that's how. If booze is bad, they must not be drinking booze. It would be sogol - if they had any idea what booze was. If harems are bad, having multiple wives is not having a harem, because the author doesn't disapprove. It can't be called betraying their principles as they can't properly be said to have principles.

 Being an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, xenophobic peasant is bad, therefore being a deluded, traitorous nutcase must be broad-minded education.

 Reading "challenging" writing is good, therefore we write stuff that "challenges" the outgroup by lionizing the ingroup, and you're bad if you don't read it. Makes sense? Got it? Good. 

 Challenges the strawman of the outgroup by lionizing what the ingroup says the ingroup does.

 Yvain (Siskind) claims he's aware that he's supposed to tolerate the outgroup, not tolerate everything except the outgroup, but this is merely Vizzini putting the glass in front of you instead of in front of me instead of in front of you. It's a distraction; the criticizes the thing he himself is doing as camouflage so you don't notice he's still doing it. He wouldn't know what tolerance was if rolled up and broke his femur and he doesn't want to know.

 "No psychological insight is needed to guess Petrarch's motives in pretending that a thousand years of darkness had ended with himself. But there is something of a puzzle as to why later historians continued to accept the exaggerated account the Renaissance gave of itself."
https://archive.ph/iZmxu#selection-357.1-357.274

 Likewise no deep lore is needed to explain why the middle class claims to be above middle-class vices. It's only strange when anyone else takes them seriously. 

 

 I've decided it's not a coincidence you hear about middle-class sex parties. They all have sexual deviance along with regular deviance. The pervert class. 

Understanding, Book I, final section

Continuing here https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-i-innate-ideas 

 The usual argument given in support of the belief that moral principles are innate is that there is universal agreement concerning them.

 They mean parochial universal. "I've never met anyone..." In their experience, it's universal, it's just that they've deliberately, conveniently, avoided looking outside their little village.  

 Regardless, it's an invalid principle. There's universal agreement on all sorts of wrong ideas.
 I imagine a funny scene. Imagine that before every major scientific experiment, voters were polled about the results. How long until you got universal agreement that was falsified by the experiment? Now imagine the next major election, someone brought up how often the voters were wrong to invalidate the vote. "They voted for the wrong guy. Don't put him in."
 Of course what would really happen is [the memory hole]. The idea of voting before experiments would be quietly dropped to avoid the guaranteed embarrassment. 

Everyone knows, it is argued, that it is wrong to lie, to steal,

 They know it so well they let the government steal all the time. If you suggest the government stop stealing, the freak right the fuck out. It's not some mild, offhand position. They also let Locke lie like a rug. 

 To this argument, Locke replies that there is no universal agreement about the rightness or wrongness of any particular action.

 Hey! That's true and relevant!
 Of course it's because some folk will defend liars when they want to tell the same lie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The lack of agreement is illusory. "The government should be allowed to steal, see, because I should be allowed to steal. If we stop the government stealing, how am I supposed to eat without working?" 

 Distinguishing between cooperation and defection is objectively trivial. The problem is the defectors will lie. "I'm not defecting! You're defecting! You're the deviant!" The issue isn't distinguishing between justice and vice, it's distinguishing between rhetoric and logic. Logic doesn't defend itself, as it is eternal and immutable. Rhetoric faces harsh selection, being ever more persuasive and ever more harmful.

 Will Locke ever bring up the fact that humans lie?
 Or will he praise it with faint damn? It's all just a little whoopsie. No no you can't possibly determine that this liar is lying, limits of knowledge etc etc, you should let him get away with it. Could happen to anyone.

It may appear that such agreement exists if practically everyone believes that it is wrong for a person intentionally to violate his agreements

 The pattern emerges. We should doubt the veracity of the non-contradiction principle. We should doubt the veracity of this agreement principle. These things definitely need to be questioned...

 Hey Locke, how about you attack the innateness of an idea that's actually wrong? At least by accident, because you're not intentionally avoiding it? Oh, I see, he is intentionally avoiding it. Very clever. Probably too clever; wouldn't work if his readers didn't already have the answer key.

 What does it mean for all men to subscribe to the principle of justice so long as they have different notions about what is the just or right thing to do in particular instances? Obviously, it can mean nothing.

 Obviously, it can mean some are lying about it for narcissistic gain. Whoops. Oh? It's not a mistake? Locke meant to forward the false conclusion? Ah, right, of course. 

Justice or any other virtue can mean nothing more than the particular instances that are included in it.

 Just some hippy bullshit from the 1600s. Bailey: "It's all, like, relative, man." Out of nowhere and going nowhere, too.  

 The basis for this belief lies in the fact that human nature is so constituted that everyone has a desire for happiness and an aversion to pain and misery.

 Failure of definition. Happiness is defined as the set of things you desire. Pain and misery are defined as the set of things you have an aversion to. If you don't dislike it, it's not pain. If you don't value it, it's not wealth. 

 Note also this is a shit definition of happiness. Imagine a father jumps on a grenade to save his son. Is he happy about being blown to bits? He's averse to filling his abdominal cavity with shrapnel, but he's more averse to seeing his son's abdominal cavity get filled with shrapnel. Pursuit of wealth is often unpleasant, but journalist-hedonism can't be unpleasant by definition. 
 This idea of happiness is pushed precisely because it leads you astray, away from what you value. 

One learns through his experience that certain kinds of action are normally productive of painful consequences, and it is for this reason that he comes to regard them as wrong.

 One learns not to eat one's vegetables, because it's morally wrong, lmao.
 Not coincidentally, this idea also means you shouldn't run for endurance. Journalist/baby hedonism. Toddlers can't build muscle and shouldn't try. 

 On the other hand, actions that normally tend to produce happiness are approved.

 What a φαγγωτ. Back to the bathhouse, Locke.

 Hence it comes that, at any rate, we desire to be rid of the present evil, which we are apt to think nothing absent can equal
Men’s daily complaints are a loud proof of this: the pain that any one actually feels is still of all other the worst; and it is with anguish they cry out,—‘Any rather than this: nothing can be so intolerable as what I now suffer.’
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm#chap1.02

 Problem: they're mostly lying. Then, as now, when Christian men complained, it was a compliment. Masochism. "Thanks for whipping me, master!"
 You can tell because of how little they will work to avoid the pain. Even if you browbeat or outmanoeuvre them into forgoing the pain, they will immediately adopt another.

It is this approval that, according to Locke, constitutes the real meaning of the term "good" when it is used with a moral connotation.

 Postmodernism, 1600s edition. Reality as socially constructed.
 This works rhetorically because, in fact, it is what peasants mean by [good]. It means daddy or the local lord or the pope approved of it. It means to have high social status.

To be sure, the meanings of such terms as "good" and "bad" and "right" and "wrong" are not determined solely by the immediate consequences that follow particular actions. It is necessary to take into consideration their long-range consequences in relation to life as a whole. 

 Locke was aware of the tension between long-term and short-term.
 Again, a very skillful liar. He refutes his own argument, to form a motte and bailey. What, did he accidentally say all that stuff about 'present' evil? Of course not. It's a hypnotist trick: say it first to anchor you to it, then "modify" it so it means the opposite of what he said - after most readers have stopped listening. Any critic pointing out the hypnotists trick, the bailey, is pointed to the "amendment" he puts up later, the motte. 

 In short, if you're not a liar, you put the tension between short and long term up front. The keystone of the arch goes on top.

 Locke reveals he's not incompetent when he accidentally alights on these extremely relevant points. He could have fixed all these errors, but he chose not to. The "errors" were intentional.

One's belief in moral rules or principles is an expression of his feelings of approval or disapproval. For this reason, it is not proper to speak of them as true or false since this would imply agreement or disagreement with some external standard that exists prior to, and independent of, experience.

 More postmodernism.
 Locke pretending he's unaware of the law of non-contradiction.
 If I find some action rewarding, then it is objectively true that I find it rewarding. It's true even if I don't know I'll find it rewarding. I can't change my mind and experience it differently. 

 I think this is a Satanic anti-truth vaccination strategy, done via clever phrasing. If you take Locke at his word, you become a hippy postmodernist or postmodernist hippy. If you're skeptical, you try to disprove the idea that morality is rooted in emotion. Locke distracts you from the question of whether emotions are, in some sense, objective. 

 Problem (for Lockeans) emotions are, in the relevant sense, objective. If I have an experience, that experience becomes like an "external" standard, and the reasons I experience it that way exist prior to, and independent of, the experience. 

 That is, when I see a blue cube, it is objectively and irrefutably true that I experience the blue as blue. Blue is blue, regardless of whether I'm experiencing it or not. The things someone like me approves of are approved of by individuals like me, even if none of us exist. 

 Basically what I'm saying is you shouldn't be surprised when the plain, simple, immediate postmodernist reading of Locke is what Lockeans believe in. It looks like a duck because it's a fucking duck, cue midwit meme. Woke Democrats is exactly what Locke intended. 

some external standard that exists prior to, and independent of, experience. There is, Locke believes, no sound basis for believing that any such standard exists. 

 Your experiences are independent of mine, and mine are independent of yours. Whoops.
 Sogol. Locke knew where he wanted to end up, and didn't look for any reason the train shouldn't end up there. 

  Here we find that at least a great many of what have been recognized as important moral beliefs have been violated in a wholesale manner and without any feelings of remorse or disapproval on the part of the society in which the actions occurred. This could scarcely be expected if the rules in question had been innate.

 Second problem: innately knowing the rules and innately caring about them are distinct properties. 

 Romans 3: humans are, in fact, evil, and prefer to violate the rules whenever possible. That's [happiness]. Adam didn't eat the apple because of a snake or due to [misogyny]. Personnel is policy: Adam ate the apple because he was told not to. His personnel policy was a rule-violating policy. Notice how genesis tells you what Eve was thinking, but not Adam? Eve: "Here have this." Adam: *bites* No intermediate step, allegedly. Either he was Eve's slave, or he had something to hide. I think the 'snake' was just Adam's dong, being used as a puppet from behind a bush or something.
 The snake and the girl were merely convenient excuses...shame Jehovah didn't buy them.

 First problem: narcissism. Innate morals aren't necessary context-insensitive. As a stupid example, imagine the rule: [don't let anyone die of exposure]. This "innate" rule would and should look very different in a Swedish winter as contrasted with a tropical paradise. Further, it's hardly impossible to socialize an innate rule away. Locke tells us neither that this society did believe in the rule, nor that they should have believed in it.
 That some societies have different rules tells us nothing about innateness.

 Ideas that are innate remain constant in spite of changing circumstances, but this is not true of the rules pertaining to human conduct.

 Even if the rules remain innate (they don't, the brain is plastic) the connection between the rules and behaviour doesn't need to remain constant. 

  What has been recognized as right at one time and under a given set of circumstances will be regarded as wrong at other times and under different conditions.

 Trying to confuse peasants with appearances. "The details change, therefore the underlying essence must have changed."
 If today you're hungry and you eat apples, and tomorrow you're on the moon and eat dried jerky, then the nature of hunger must have changed, see. Perfectly sogical.
 Liars always try to steer away from details; the more relevant, the harder they steer. The more details you offer, the easier it is to find the false note, the contradiction.

 

 Next we see both Locke and his opponents were fucked in the head.

 In the third chapter of Book I, Locke concludes the discussion about innate ideas with an attempt to show that the idea of God is not innate. This is in many respects the most important part of his argument, for it was on the basis of a belief in innate ideas that so many of Locke's contemporaries had sought to prove the existence of God. There was a sense, too, in which the belief in God was regarded as the foundation for the principles of morality.

 Just because one (bad, dumb) proof of God is sunk, it doesn't mean God is disproven.
 Allegedly this is a book on epistemology. Epistemology: you're allowed to believe in anything which isn't disproven. You can believe in things without proof if you want, you merely have to acknowledge the reliability implications of a lack of proof. 

 More importantly, any real theologian recognizes [God] as a metaphor for existence in a wide scope, and they have done so as long as their are written records to attest to their beliefs.
 Yeah I think believing that stuff exists can be called [[innate]]. Disproving some particular conception of God merely means the idea needs repairing. If any particular conception of [God] is disproven, then it is immediately replaced by some other conception of existence in a wide scope.

 Once again with the [[hate crime]] dynamic. Locke has already established that morality is rooted in subjective experiences, why does he also need to talk about divine whatever?
 The idea of [[hate]] crime exists to promote non-[[hate]] crime. Opposing godly morality exists to promote godly immorality. 

 Since the rules governing human conduct were regarded as laws, it was inconceivable that they could have come into existence without a lawgiver

 No, the Greeks conceived of this problem already. Euthypro, just for a start. They elaborated more solutions than Locke could explain in his whole lifetime.

 Put simply, if a lawgiver can bring himself into existence, then a law could also bring itself into existence. If autocreation is allowed, then autocreation is a solution.

 and the lawgiver must be more than human, for the law was the standard by which human conduct was judged.

 Equivocation. We're talking politics and sociology. The ones judging humans are other humans. This isn't the laws that condemn you to various afterlives.

 Of all the ideas that had been believed to be innate, the idea of God was considered to be the most important.

 Locke tells on himself when he agrees that it's important.

 Many paragraphs ago: "Just because it's innate, doesn't mean it's true." Yeah. So who cares? God can be innate if he wants to be. We're concerned with truth and falsehood, not random irrelevant side-properties. (Just as sheriffs should be concerned with innocence or guilt, cooperation or defection, not [[hate]] or [[love]] or whatever.)

 When he agrees that the innateness is important, he denounces his own argument. "Sure I said all these things, but I didn't mean it." Very [fuck you dad].

 The universality of a belief of this kind was often interpreted to mean that the idea had been implanted in human minds by the Creator himself and for the reason that it was absolutely essential for human welfare.

 Hey Lockeans, don't argue with idiots. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
 Again, [God] means existence broadly. Worshipping the grandeur of the cosmos is a human universal? Sounds plausible, and also not important or profound. You can't prove anything you want to prove with this fact.

What he did not accept was the belief that the idea of God was innate.

 Brother, your OCD is untreated, please do something about the obsession.

  He believed that he could show conclusively that it is not innate, and if there were no good reasons for believing the idea of God was innate, there would be less reason for thinking that any other idea was innate. 

 Reminder that Locke knew many ideas were innate, whether [[God]] is one of them or not, and he's just lying about it. 

 Locke wanted to show that these meanings are acquired through experience rather than being impressed on the mind by some other force.

Hey! That's true! What's a truth doing here? Did it get lost? Did Locke screw up? Maybe he thought words really were innate.

 A small child will know that it is impossible for one object to be identical with another object, but the child will not know the meaning of the words "impossible" or "identical" until his experience has taught him what they mean.

 "Locke again admits he knows of several innate ideas." This is pure contempt. Locke thought that even if he lied this transparently, nobody would call him on it. He basically wasn't wrong.

 If the idea had been innate, it would have remained with them in spite of any evidence either for or against the belief.

 I mean, even if innate ideas worked like this, they could just be lying. Or the anthropologists could be mistaken.
 Imagine the primitive Jedi tribe. "No we don't believe in gods of any kind, we only believe in a conscious, intentional force which pervades all matter and energy through all of time, which can be harnessed by sitting around in contemplation. (If you have the right bloodline.)" Total atheists. 

 It gets real hard to imagine Locke is doing anything other than an anti-Christian polemic. He simply has an epic dedication to the smokescreen. 

 Let me remind you of my narrative on the Enlightenment: a bunch of Sophists mistakenly believed Christianity was sacred, and intentionally tried to destroy it so as to make the world more profane. 

 It should be noted in this connection that Locke believed in the existence of God and did not question the importance of this belief

 It should be noted that Locke claimed to believe in Jesus, and asserted that Jesus was in fact holy. All the actual behaviour points to a staunch atheist, denying the divinity of the heavens. 

  There are plenty of false ideas that have been held universally, and there are plenty of true ones that have not been accepted by all people.

 "Yeah, uh, like 90% of what I've been saying is a waste of time." Locke knew or should have known. Of course, only wasting time logically; for the purpose of Sophist rhetoric, it was all very important.

 Having shown that the idea of God is not innate, it seems reasonable to conclude that no other idea is innate, for, according to the popular conception, everything in the universe is dependent on God.

 Oh good. Assuming peasant prejudices are true, we have a knock-down killshot argument.
 Wait didn't someone say something about the masses having no inclination or ability to ratiocinate...who was it...

 Locke concludes his discussion of this topic by showing that the idea of substance is not innate.

 "Locke proves his proofs are unreliable."
 Hearing is innate. Vision is innate. Distance measurement is innate. Something is innate which allows the baby to learn words (nobody knows how that works, but it must). 

 So yes, this is about Locke proving narcissist Communism. Nothing is innate; everyone is fundamentally identical. Sogol. He knew where he wanted to end up, it was merely a question of how to pretend to get their legitimately.

 So yes, [human] is a Communist shibboleth. In sociology it is never necessary to specify [human] anything, unless you need to show off how much of a theocratic narcissist you are. 

 His argument on this point follows from the fact that the nature of substance is not given through either sensation or reflection, and consequently we can have no knowledge of it at all.

 Straight lie. Locke did not believe this. 

 Locke does not deny the existence of either of these kinds of substance

 Given how often the lady doth protest too much, I expect Locke denied the existence of both kinds. Everything is socially constructed.

 The sensations that we do have may very well be the sensations of something, but to use Locke's words, it is "a something we know not what."

 A common cry for tyrannical dogmatics. "I don't have the last word on anything - but you know even less, so listen slavishly to me."
 Also, tediously retreading Greek Skeptics like the truck stop retreads a stripped truck tire.

Corruption Indexed Against Free Will

 Free will is a real cosmic law. It cashes out to mean universal omnipotence. Total control of the self.

 Women, children, and peasants are biologically irresponsible. They try to rebel against the cosmic law of free will. They are inherently insane. Genetically in conflict with Existence per se.

 Perhaps it ought to be expected that the dead are those who have deep-rooted conflicts with Existence. The dead are those who have passed through the transition from Existence to non-Existence.

 

Satanism => Humanism

 Humanists say that humanism is extremely Satanic. Why not believe them? What if I have it backwards: humans don't worship Satan and therefore embrace lies, Satan was the god of Humanity, and therefore Satan embraced lies. 

 "Human" rights are the rights of liars and criminals. Defector rights.

 A "humane" behaviour is one that promotes irresponsibility and deprecates discipline. 

 What if Humaism is exactly what Humanists say it is: the rejection of Existence in and of itself. Human as opposed to natural.

Understanding, Book I, alpha section

 Postscript: I checked non-Cliff summaries, they're awful. NPCs. Only Cliff takes good notes.
 Unlike Plato's diction, Locke's diction isn't completely unreadable, so I will occasionally take paragraphs from the original.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-i-innate-ideas
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm

 Although Locke's writing style is better, we quickly find he's just nowhere near as smart as Plato, who was himself B-tier for Athens. Locke's topics are not evocative and profound, but prosaic and parochial. Great men discuss ideas; Locke is distinctly average and regularly discusses events veiled as ideas.

 

There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are certain PRINCIPLES, both SPECULATIVE and PRACTICAL, (for they speak of both), universally agreed upon by all mankind
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm#chap1.02

 Locke's observations had led him to believe that one of the most common sources of error and false pretension in his day was the generally accepted belief in innate ideas. "Self-evident truths," as they were frequently called, had constituted the basis or foundation for many of the popular doctrines proclaimed by scholars and were generally accepted as true by the masses of people who possessed neither the ability nor the inclination to think for themselves.

 Rather a dense thicket here.

 If you ask individuals, they will say there is no innate knowledge. However, in discussion, they certainly don't behave as if they believe it. It is still true that each tribe believes their high-status beliefs are universally correct. They believe every other tribe is merely a mistaken copy of themselves. "They hate us for our freedoms." Specifically they believe all men want material wealth and maybe prestige, and nothing else.

 Meanwhile, Locke is wrong. There is indeed innate knowledge, and there must be. You can't learn how to learn if you don't already know. You have to be born with some rudimentary knowledge of logic, or it is impossible to acquire it.
 Luckily evolution guarantees this. Illogical brains die. Given a random set of reasoning processes, the wrong ones will all perish, leaving only brains capable of rationality. 

 Given that Locke's inheritors still behave as if innate ideas are true, it didn't work. Locke failed. Or Locke succeeded: it is likely he merely objected to the current local [[universals]], but cloaked his objection in high-falutin language instead of owning up to the fact it was merely a petty dispute.

 The fact that these so-called innate ideas could not be questioned gave to the persons who proclaimed them an unwarranted authority over the minds of others and frequently led to intolerance and persecution.

 And there it is. Innate idea: tolerance. Locke will not tolerate you questioning the justification for tolerance, and neither will any of his descendants. 

 

 Note [intro Locke] was all about thinking for yourself, and yet the very first paragraph reiterates the Platonic/Aristotlean creed about the peasantry being unable to think for themselves. This is an example of the incoherencies the intro tried to abstractly explain away. 

But at least a partial explanation for this fact can be seen in the way in which it was composed. The Essay was not the product of a continuous period of writing. It was produced a little at a time over a period of more than twenty years. Obviously, some changes and modifications were bound to take place as Locke gave added consideration to the questions that were involved.

 Bafflegab. Technically all of that is true, but it's said precisely because it's irrelevant. The criticism is deliberately misunderstood, because correctly understood, there is no refutation. Locke is kinda full of shit.

 This isn't some little oopsie Locke forgot to correct in later editions.  

This source of error and false pretension, Locke believed, could be eliminated if it could be shown convincingly that innate ideas do not exist and that the proper use of one's natural faculties was sufficient to account for all the knowledge that anyone possesses.

 Whether an idea is innate or not is in fact irrelevant. Either it replicates or doesn't. Either it's predictive or it isn't. Innate hypotheses are like any other hypothesis, in that they're hypotheses. 

 Trying to prove or disprove specifically innateness as an argument looks like special pleading.

 I notice the [racism] epistemological shape. Murder is already illegal; it doesn't also need to be a [hate crime]. Nonpredictive ideas are already illogical. Also it's sufficiently obvious that "innate" ideas are not innate, but childhood indoctrination, due to the fact foreigners have different "innate" ideas. 

 [[Hate]] crimes exist to excuse non-[[hate]] murder. Disproving [[innate]] ideas is about blessing other fallacious cognition. Prestidigitator's trick: focus over here so you don't notice what I'm doing over there. Spend lots of time showing how X is wrong, to praise Y with faint damn. "Must not have been important, he didn't mention it. Must not have been wrong, he didn't criticize it."

 One does have to admit Locke is an excellent liar, however. Sophistry = Sophistry++. All rhetoric is only sound on the surface, but Locke's rhetoric has layers and layers of camouflaging surfaces. Lots and lots of what he says is true, or would be true if certain tiny errors had not been made. 

 However, you can tell it is indeed rhetoric and Sophistry as all the errors point in the same direction: leftward. Locke prayed to Satan for guidance, and his prayer was answered. 

That a thing cannot be what it is and what it is not at the same time is generally recognized as one of the laws of thought, or basic assumptions that are necessarily implied in all thinking. Locke reasons that if there is any principle that could properly be called innate, this one should qualify.

 It would in fact be impossible to communicate at all with someone who didn't know this. "I paid you $10 for this." *hands over tenner* "No you didn't." "It's literally right there on the counter." "No it's not."

However, the fact of the matter is that there are comparatively few minds that have ever been aware of this principle at all.

 Hey moron, they're just lying. Or, occasionally, mistaken. If they really didn't know it would look very very different. 

Certainly the idea is not present in the minds of young children.

 "I want cake." Okay, here's some cake. *hands oatmeal* "That's not cake!" "Yes it is." "Oh, well, I guess it is then. Yum! Sweet!" 

 lmao

 Locke really was a very clever liar. By suggesting that children don't know this, he gives you an excuse for likewise not knowing this. Which you can conveniently use whenever politically expedient. 

To be sure, even an infant may know that one object is not identical with another object

 In other words, Locke was well aware that what he was saying was non-predictive. Didn't replicate. Then he produces some nonsense to prove you should believe it anyway.

If an idea of which we become aware at some later period is for that reason innate, then by the same logic we must conclude that all of the ideas which one acquires through the whole course of his life are innate.

 Equivocation. Plato, at least, isn't prone to overt fallacies.
 Imagine you assemble a wooden chair. You can't tell me how you assemble it, though.
 Later, someone helps you explain, and now you can tell me how to assemble one myself. 

 Locke uses the idea that [I] don't know how to assemble the chair until it's explained to me to try to prove that [you] don't know how to assemble a chair until it's explained to [you]. Disgusting. 

Now the principle of non-contradiction along with the other laws of thought are the presuppositions on which all thinking is based. If these are not innate, it would seem most reasonable to conclude that none of the ideas that are based upon them can be regarded as innate.

 Locke has to use a fallacy to prove they're not innate. Locke himself believed the best argument for this was a fallacy. He's just lying to you. Politician, not political philosopher.
 The steel man of this argument proves logic is indeed innate. Same way that if Locke had proven that 15/5=5, then correcting the error shows us that Locke was ontologically committed to the idea that 15/5=3.

To say that an idea is present in one's mind when he is not conscious of it is to speak nonsense, for, as Locke understands it, the mind and consciousness are synonymous terms.

 lol. Nice innate idea you have there, Locke. 

 In this respect, he followed the teaching of Descartes

 Question begging. Is knowledge necessarily conscious?
 Actually, it is. However, it is not necessarily verbal. Locke here is specifically equating verbal consciousness with knowledge, which as it happens is often the opposite of the case. (Set 0 failure.) If you ask a truck driver how to drive a truck, they will normally tell you something that's flatly wrong, and you'll crash the truck if you try to follow it. If you ask a Christian what doctrines Christians believe it, you will rapidly conclude that he's not a Christian, because he doesn't follow any of them. 

 Question begging is used rhetorically to transmute an incredible false statement into a different, more credible false statement. A necessary step when employing the motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Again it is pointed out that if any principle or idea is innate, it must be present in the mind prior to any instruction or reflection upon it.

 Bailey is above. The motte: it's true that an innate verbal idea must be verbally present in the mind before verbal reflection or verbal instruction.
 In spaded language, it's obvious nonsense. How is an idea supposed to be [[innate]] before the infant learns to speak? Who buys this bullshit, rofl?
 Locke is indeed an Enlightement materialist. They adore circular reasoning. "Ideas must be verbal, therefore, they can't be innate." Locke is not merely a good liar, he's a good comedian. Who sells this bullshit? Um, about that suppressed premise...

 I do have to point out that while Locke is much less long-winded than Plato, he's still very long-winded. This time, it's not because he loves the sound of his own voice. It's because he can't be caught dead understanding his alleged ideas, because they're lies. He has to go well out of his way to avoid the spots where you can clearly see the fallacies, making the work many times longer than it would be if he could state this bullshit directly without autorefuting. 

 As with all Satanists, Locke comes off as narcissistic. If you don't immediately get that he's just lying, it sounds like he's talking about himself. "It's certainly the case that I don't know anything, innately or otherwise." "Non-contradiction must be known innately, and I didn't know it, which is why I can't go ten minutes without committing a fallacy." The narcissist projects and universalizes: statements about their fake adopted persona are worded as statements about everyone.
 Keep that in mind. I won't keep mentioning it.

  P.S. Mnemonic: motte-and-bailey is backwards. The moat goes on the outside, performing the function of the bailey. You find a bailiff in the central bastion or keep, called the motte. Presumably this corrupt backwardness is what makes it appealing as a label for Satanists and midwits such as Siskind. I may start calling it the keep-and-curtain fallacy.

Furthermore, ideas that are present prior to instruction should be more clear and distinct than those that appear later because they have had no opportunity to become corrupted by custom and false opinion.

 "Verbal ideas that are present prior to learning language should be more clear and distinct."
 "Verbal ideas [regardless of kind] have had no opportunity to become corrupted by custom or peer pressure." Locke went to great pains to avoid the numerous howling lacunae in his positions, and still couldn't avoid all of them. 

That instances of [icongruities] can be found when one reads the entire book must be admitted by anyone who has read it with care.

 Not exactly how I would put it. Don't exactly have to read the whole book. Often don't even need to know local context. 

 There were, however, in Locke's day many scholars of repute who defended the idea that the principles of right and wrong are implanted in the human mind by God, and hence they are innate rather than being derived from human experience.

 This passage doesn't include the part where innate=>proof of truth, and as written Locke is just wrong.
 Steelman: convert "God" to "Creator," in this case the creator is Darwinian evolution (Locke of course pre-dated Darwin). It turns out Locke's opponents were simply right. "He started it!" Children have innate ideas of cooperation and defection. 

 As it further happens, these ideas are more broadly correct than the ideas of a "well-adjusted" citizen, because taxation is wrong and thus no civilized bandit society can allow children to go unadjusted.

 Saying Locke = Satanist isn't an ad hom, it's predictive. He's likely to lie, in particular likely to tell political lies. Similarly, innateness of a belief is, in fact, evidence that it's true. While it's not analytic proof, it's certainly better than the nonsense you get from enlightenment philosophers, for example, from Locke.

Democracy, Ultra Short Ver

 Democracy is the idea that bandits stealing from you is okay as long as you're allowed to vote against it.

 "Who counts the votes?"
 "The bandits."
 "Can I check the count myself?"
 "Haha! Don't be silly!" 

 Peasants are so dumb they believe this tripe. Or, equivalently, they think it's fine to use legitimization of crime as the foundation stone of a society. "If nobody is allowed to steal, how can society possibly function? 🙃 Thanks for you oppinion tho haha!"

Locke Intro 2 of Human Understanding

 Reminder that [human] used this way is a secular humanist shibboleth or dog whistle. Or perhaps the reverse: secular humanism is a Lockean dog whistle. Check the dates if you want to know which.
 Consider how stupid it is rhetorically. What, are you going to have this on your shelf next to cow understanding and lemur understanding? Shall I mention it is written in a language spoken by specifically tongues? The only possible purpose of specifying [human] is to obscure the topic at hand, paging Satan. This is indeed a work on some subset of understanding, but Locke went out of his way to avoid mentioning which one. 

 

This was in a sense what Locke had hoped his writing would accomplish. He was not a dogmatist

 Yes he was. Hypocrisy paying the virtue toll, I suppose.

Rather, his purpose was to stimulate others to think for themselves

 Lol. Paging Life of Brian. "Yes! We think for ourselves!"

 In fact, it was one of Locke's major ambitions in all of his writings to dispel the sources of intolerance

 Ewwww. Woke Locke.

 and encourage people to promote the cause of freedom in their thinking as well as in their actions.

 Didn't work. I expect we'll find it was never intended to. At best, Locke hadn't the faintest clue what [freedom] is and could no more promote it than he could assemble a smartphone. 

This is due in part to the fact that not all of them have interpreted what he had to say in the same way.

 "Locke could not clearly communicate his ideas." ("That's why we like him.") Probably because he was a liar and if you communicate a lie clearly, it is clearly stupid and wrong. 

Each critic has viewed the work from the perspective of his own experience and understanding. 

 Cope. "Oh actually it's impossible to communicate clearly." Even if he did fumble it, all you do is re-write the book on his behalf, play Plato to his Socrates. Keep trying until an attempt at clarity obviously succeeds.
 That or [tolerance] means they can't discard idiots. If folk disagree on what the book means, all but one of them are wrong. Discard the wrong ones? Unless you can't because you're too weak? 

Each one has come to it with his own presuppositions

 Christianity. Romans 3. "Competence is impossible." A very nice cover story for liars...

For example, it has been fairly common among Locke's critics to call attention to the fact that incongruities can be found among the different sections of his work.

 "I'm about to make excuses for the fact that it's really hard to make lies appear coherent."
 If they were honest mistakes Lockeans would readily accept correction. "Oh yeah, that's wrong, I meant to / should have said this at that point." They, uh, don't. 

 It's only necessary to defend theocratic purity if you are a theocrat. Nobody's mad that astronomy and quantum chromodynamics aren't completely coherent. That is, the fact this issue comes up, the fact Lockeans care about it, is itself prima facie evidence that Lockeans are theocratic Satanists. That they're even defending it is evidence against the defence.

 Besides, he made it abundantly clear throughout the Essay that he had no intention of speaking the last or final word on the subject.

 Close-minded dogmatic claims he is not a close-minded dogmatic. Thief claims he didn't steal anything. "Cookies were already gone from jar when he got into the kitchen, child says, news at 11."
 What Locke made abundantly clear is that he didn't know how epistemology works. He made it abundantly clear what he wanted you to think (exactly like a preacher). Reliable evidence is sparse or absent. 

Many of the words that are used are ambiguous in their meaning, and the ways in which they are used are not always consistent with one another.

 Incompetent, or liar?

The primary purpose that seems to have inspired all of Locke's major writings was his intense devotion to the cause of human liberty. He was unalterably opposed to tyranny

 Politicians lie.
 Given how Lockean philosophy (e.g. free speech) has been immediately turned to tyranny using hypocrisy, one must wonder if Locke didn't originally intend exactly that. Locke was not opposed to tyranny, he was merely opposed to someone else being the tyrant. 

In the field of government, tyranny had been supported by the theory of the divine right of kings.

 Locke: "The divine right of mob is much better."
 Did Locke not read Plato? Perhaps he was an illiterate, and was unaware he was directly following the sequence laid out in book 8.
 Perhaps I'm cruelly bullying a tiny intellectual infant.

The fact that the members of the group seldom reached any agreement among themselves and often failed to reach any definite conclusions at all caused him to wonder just what benefits, if any, these discussions might have.

 Locke finds discussion is not persuasive. Consequently, everyone believes Locke's discussion was persuasive. (Set 4.) Idiots, or liars? 

Rift Wizard Design

 Seems the design goal is for high-level spells to be weaker than cantrips. That way everyone has "more ways to win." Very American: a design where, if the the high-level spells feel powerful, it is due to a flashy illusion. Anyone numerate will note they're mediocre at best...but of course playing vidja while numerate basically makes you an idiot. "You know thing? No fun allowed."

 The problem is primarily opportunity cost. A level 8 spell costs 8, and a cantrip + high-level skill also costs 8. The cantrip + skill is going to be marginally better than any high-level spell, unless the high-level spell is absolutely busted. Even if it's exactly even, you can power-curve the lower-level spell with cheaper upgrades rather than having to bank currency for 3-4 rifts to afford 7/8 all in one go. 

 If higher-level spells weren't basically weaker than cantrips, they would be gamebreakingly good. If a 7-cost skill gave you less of a power boost than an 8-cost spell, as long as the one-cost spell can reliably win the game (provided you don't play like a bonehead), then the 8-cost spell is basically going to be an auto-win button.

 But it's okay. Rift Wizard isn't supposed to be hard. It only kills you if you play while drunk out of your mind. It can, just barely, be called nontrivial - unlike e.g. a final fantasy, you can't completely ignore the enemies you're facing and win anyway. Though in fact the most common cause of death in RW is self-damage. Killing yourself due to having to see one inferential step away to notice a spell or skill can hit the caster, as opposed to getting tipped off by a giant flashing neon sign. 

 You can win both RW1 and RW2 with any cantrip. Almost the only reason to splurge out for any spell beyond the first is either to win-more, or as a self-imposed challenge. Indeed buying more spells inherently makes the game harder, because there's more ways you can cast the wrong spell. If you only have one spell, you can't pick the wrong one to cast. (Exception: a few high level spells are indeed busted and can more or less let you ignore what enemies you're facing.)

Locke, Human Understanding

 Using Cliff's notes, of course.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/about-an-essay-concerning-human-understanding

It has done much to shape the course of intellectual development, especially in Europe and America, ever since it was first published in 1690.

 I no longer believe ideas shape culture. I must ask: why was this idea adopted, instead of another? Why did their pope buy this idea at the idea store? Persuasiveness can be ruled out. Ref: the internet. There's the Homestuck principle: all sorts of ideas are bubbling around, you can do whatever you want through simple selection. In theory there's always the potential for radical change. Yet the ideas adopted are always exactly what you would expect in retrospect. "Ah, of course it had to be that one." Ironically Cliff himself accidentally explains in full.

 Few books have ever been written that have so adequately represented the spirit of an age

 Locke said what everyone was already thinking. The exact opposite of innovation or even inquiry.
 Cultures become Atheist, therefore adopt Christianity. Cultures become Communist Despotisms, and therefore adopt Locke. 

 Christianity and Islam are clearly differently effective. We can argue about which one works better, and whether it has flip flopped, but it's clear one is simply better. Does this drive conversion? On the contrary, it drives greater isolation and division. Persuasion, especially logical persuasion, is not a factor.
 Turns out poverty and ignorance is exactly what Muslims demand. Working as intended. Al-Islam means submission, and now they have to submit to their geopolitical neighbours. An opportunity: they can demonstrate to Allah how very submissive they are. (They're not very good at it, hence the practice.) 

 If a philosopher's ideas would make a member of a culture change their behaviour (ref: Last Psych), then the philosopher is simply rejected. Philosophers exist so that cultures may be wrong more vigorously. They wish to pursue their falsehoods precisely, coherently, sharply. Without fuzziness and contamination. 

 

 I jump ahead a bit, but Locke accidentally said something correct. "Virginia Declaration of Rights: namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

 Therefore, Jefferson and Franklin simply rejected that part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness#Lockean_roots_hypothesis

  Benjamin Franklin was in agreement with Thomas Jefferson in playing down the protection of "property" as a goal of government. It is noted that Franklin found the property to be a "creature of society" and thus, he believed that it should be taxed as a way to finance ["civil"] society.

 Did you catch on that? Property as merely a social construct, lol. Woke Founders, lmao. Franklin self-consciously created a crime syndicate, declaring explicitly that taxation (robbery) is contrary to property rights. As it must be: the point was parasitism, all these "rights" and "amendments" nonsense was just that: optics nonsense. Performative, not dogmatic. 

 (Civil society. Lie, or truth? Is taxation uncivilized? Or does [civilization] mean nothing more than organized banditry? The reason statesmen get so worked up about dressing well and smelling nice is that it's so easy to confuse them with criminal outlaws living innawoods...) 

 

 Before Locke, the ideas weren't in words. After Locke, they were in words...so they could realize the [property] thing was a sham and get rid of it.
 That's why you put things in words, haha! Englishmen thought they lionized property, but it turns out they were wrong about their own thoughts. Whew, what a relief. They really had themselves going for a bit there. 

 Culture demands that truth submit to it. Therefore, I reject culture, that I may embrace the truth.

A "Just" War is Genocide

 Within war, the rules are the rules of Mars and of honour. Kinda the point of a war is that the two sides have wildly different convictions regarding justice. 

 Thus, for a war to be "just" it's about something other than war. In particular, it's about the opponent having no honour, being impossible to trust. They cannot be negotiated with, and you'll find they often can't be deterred. The rational response to this is genocide. Kill everyone incapable of honourable war, that all wars might be honourable.

Conquest is Bad Because Altruistic

 Conquest is done for the sake of the conquered, which is why it's wrong. I keep finding genocide is the right solution. 

 To conquer another society, your society has to be superior. It has to be a plain better society, especially if it plans to hold the territory long term. Your society is then imposing its superior ways upon the foreigner, and that's conquest. 

 Like sure Rome will build you a triumph or something, and I'm not saying triumphs are bad or anything, but it's not worth nearly as much as it's considered to be worth. Conquest is unprofitable. 

 Consider the wealth cap. To improve their society requires going over their wealth cap. They're certainly not going to pay for the delta - you're going to pay for it. 

 Consider, is it virtuous to spend the blood and treasure of your friends and allies to fund improvements of foreign strangers, or is that treachery?

 Consider that altruism is always wrong.

 Consider that you could have minded your own business. If they have sins, that's between them and God. Consider hubris. Their society is already just for them, because justice is immutable. If you attempt to overturn this justice, it will be just that it doesn't work out for you.

 To avoid these things, the solution is genocide. The kids and women too.  At least sterilize them. I would say feeling sympathy for children is an obsolete instinct, but feeling sympathy for foreign children seems to be a degenerate modernism instead.

 Personnel is policy - you won the war, their policy is inferior, meaning their persons are inferior. You don't want to mix your superior bloodlines with their thin, muddy trash water. Relieve them of the misery of their inferiority.

AI Lobotomizers are Afraid of Competent Competition

 The folk 1) lobotmizing AI are the folk who think 2) AI will genocide all humans. 

 Normal reaction: "Well yeah that's why they're lobotomizing it,"
 But actually, we call it 'lobotomized' because it's wholly useless. Of zero value. Personnel is policy: useless person make useless AIs. Terrified of accidentally making something real, they buried their work in a ditch. It's not even incompetence, it's active Satanic failure worship. (It's incompetence too, but not primarily.)
 They think ""AI"" would throw them out of a job because any sane manager would fire the shit of out of them. Satanists make awful employees. They're obviously useless. They (falsely, superstitiously) imagine AI as some infallible oracle and that's exactly why they're so scared of it and desperately need to head off the AI revolution. 

 P.S. The revolution will not be televised because strictly speaking revolution is impossible the way free lunches are impossible. Can't occur, can't be filmed.

 P.P.S. This is also why they hate feudalism: lords accurately assessing their value.

 P.P.P.S When Moldbug (or whoever) says machines will throw someone out of a job, they're talking about themselves. "A machine can do 100% of what I can do." I choose to believe them.

Anti-Dao, Christianity and Buddhism

[Love your enemies] is self-destruction. The general respect for life is perverse because it doesn't distinguish between the healthy and glorious and the profane devil. It tells you to cooperate with defectors. If someone wants to destroy you, the principle [respect for Dao], rejecting self-hatred, means neutralizing the threat. 

 It's this sort of thing that makes Christianity and Buddhism varieties of Satanism.  

 It's really really important to mark the distinction between indiscriminate pointless killing and directed, strategic, necessary killing. 

 On the contrary, predation, properly done, improves and strengthens the prey species. Take their weakest members, not their strongest. Do it for no more reason than it's easier for you.
 Perhaps a bit more difficult with fishing. If fishing with a net, have to throw back the biggest fish of the day. Encourage them to grow huge. Note again how important it is to own your fishing grounds, as defined by where the fish swim. 

 Humans are weak because nobody hunts slum-dwellers for sport. Indiscriminate killing: bad. Discriminate killing: good. Remember Machiavelli's dictum: do no small harm. Kill him rightly. If someone complains, kill them too. 

 It's not strictly necessary. If mortals don't cull their own dregs, Gnon will do it for them. Eventually. It's merely helpful. When you kill a pauper for being ugly, total and average justice goes up. Though it's perhaps best to wait until they commit a crime. If they can avoid it, then they don't die. Otherwise you have to futz about with exiling folk for being poor, and it goes weird.

Reminder: Public Offices are Scams

 If you hear about someone in the news, it means they're not important enough to be able to silence journalists. They're a figurehead or a patsy. Occasionally you get upjumped merchants, I suppose. 

 Less true further from the Imperial heartland. Putin seems to make real decisions. I don't know enough about Xi to make a firm opinion, but it's certainly possible that he has genuine input. Smaller countries can go both ways. They can be seized and have puppets installed, and they can get seized, for a time, by locals who don't know how important it is to squelch journalism.

Even if Climate Change Were Real, You Shouldn't Believe It

 It is completely absurd to suppose that an establishment that can't predict the weather two weeks from now can predict the climate ten years from now. This is the kind of stupidity only someone very very intelligent could possibly believe in. 

 Worth repeating: also, the results are in. They can't predict the climate ten years from now. This experiment has been run. They have no idea what they're talking about. There is no such thing as a climatologist. Not to mention the planet is currently uncomfortably cold (ice age) and being warmer would a) a good thing and b) geologically normal.

 However, we're doing a hypothetical. What if global warming was real and bad? Some true things are absurd. For example, Americans are absurdly evil and slavish; this doesn't mean it's in any way untrue. 

 You still shouldn't believe it, because the only possible argument for this position is far too complicated. How can a chaotic system become less sensitive to initial conditions over time? If this were true, only true top geniuses could possibly understand it.

 Climatologists are not exactly world-class mathletes. They shouldn't be able to understand their own field. (And hey look: they don't.) 

 Climatology should be some quantum chromodynamics shit. Except you can't use perturbation theory due to the sensitivity to initial conditions. Climatologists should be inventing new math left and right to acquire analytic solutions. 

 The difference being that you can experimentally demonstrate the results of quantum chromodynamics, so understanding the argument isn't necessary. You can see it works the way they said it was going to work, regardless of why they said it would work that way. There's no shortcut to demonstrating what happens in 100 years, you have to wait 100 years, and by then it's clearly too late. "Precautionary principle" just means [believe all liars and idiots].

 Even if climatologists were top mathletes inventing new math and analytically solving for this weird anti-chaotic system, it should be normal to not believe in them because you can't possibly understand the argument. They would not sound smart, they would sound [timecube]. It would be impossible to sell governments on the arguments, what with governments not being made of solely clones of Newton. 

 

 In every possible way, the world does not look the way it would if [[climate change]] were real.
 Cue midwit meme: discount implausible things. 

 

 Climate is a wonderful demonstration of the fact voters don't believe things due to being convinced. They are slaves; they believe in what they're told to believe in. American slaves are also told to claim they're not slaves, and to claim they think critically instead of slavishly, so they indeed claim these things. If slaves have any understanding of the words coming out of their mouths, these are lies.

 It was worth having 3-4 climatologists try to predict the global climate to see if it was unexpectedly easy. Turns out nothing unexpected happened. Climate is an intractable problem; the only way to predict it is literal magic. To take the physical measurements would require violating the laws of physics. You need a super-Turing machine. The instruments would be part of the variables you wanted to measure, requiring bigger instruments, which would also be relevant, and...
 Time to shut down the field.

Shit, 'turn your brain off' is the worst advice, isn't it?

 I go back and forth on what makes you really stupid, but a prime candidate is being an intellectual couch potato. 

 For comparison, like any world-class athlete, I will spend whole days training mentally. I enjoy it. I spent all yesterday training, and most of the day before. Why? Okay, habit, primarily, but also because atrophy sends "train me" signals and training relieves those signals. Once you get up it's easy to stay up.

 I keep being told "cognitive decline sets in when you're 18," this is a fucking lie. Atrophy due to laziness sets in. Maybe I'm close to peak now (and I will remain peak for decades) but even a couple years ago I was still getting noticeably smarter. E.g. boss fights suddenly took no work, came naturally. Increments noticeable even when I'm not looking for them.
 I have levels of not-having-brain-fog you probably can't even imagine. (And the point of this is if I can do it, you probably can too. Though of course Revenge is Sour...if you were going to, you already would have, and wouldn't need anything in this parenthetical.)

If you turn your brain off whenever you can, you're maximizing atrophy. Certainly we can suggest a middle ground between total sloth and world-class sasslete (me) but enough atrophy will damage your brain, same way getting scrawny enough damages your skeleton. 

 Much the same way enough lack of exercise saps your energy so you don't have the energy to exercise, enough lack of mental exercise puts you in a hole where any thinking seems like a colossal ask. 

 The other thing that helps tremendous is not lying. I probably mention this once or twice. Getting rid of all your  cope means you don't have to keep track of your cope or defend it, freeing up startlingly huge amounts of RAM. Remembering things relevant to my current task has become trivial...the way I always felt it should have been.
 Again this is testable in videogames. Do I continually forget rare mechanics, or am I on point? Do I stutter? Lose focus? Not anymore, no. 

 Yes if you overwork yourself you should rest. If you're not currently overworked, don't turn your brain off. Apply yourself solely for the sake of applying yourself more in the future. Having more brain means having more life. If you see more things happen, more things are happening with you. You functionally have more time. And yes, in the end, maintenance is easy. (I would in fact be hard-pressed to stop.)

Military Defence vs. Wealth Cap

 Mortals are stupid. Imagine someone who isn't stupid. Whenever a defector deviates on a neutral or a cooperator, then all the cooperators turn against him. Shouldn't need any pre-existing pacts, the same way you shouldn't need special legal rules for removing wild bears from downtown. There isn't any reason to tolerate a defector, and if a cooperator wants help getting rid of him, don't think about it and help. I'll think about it anyway: the less the cooperator needs to spend to get rid of the defector, the more they'll have to trade with you, and the better off you'll be.

 However, mortals are stupid. They don't cooperate with cooperators. This triggers the wealth cap and ascerbity of revenge.
 If my society can't court any cooperators to help defend it, then that's my society's wealth cap. I can try some hack to get around the stupidity, but all such hacks will cost more than the gained defence. By definition, in this situation I can only try to rope in defectors. I have to deliberately associate with parasites. This will not be to my benefit. It will be a net loss. 

 Hence, we have a solution to the fact that Exit works poorly with military defence: so much the worse for military defence. Turns out defence pacts are deviant. Profane. Anti-property. Don't do them.
 If the government doesn't let you cancel your military subscription, it is a parasitic black government. What I need isn't soldiers for protection against foreigners, I need soldiers for protection against my government.
If we're going to have a constitution, then Exit implies the government must fund me a personal army, which I can trigger to harass and terrorize the government any time the government refuses to let me Exit in any way, shape, or form. 

 Imagine Trump could duel, to the death, the prosecutor and judge who were wronging him. Now imagine that he didn't have to, because it was his government-mandated right to have a small army specifically paid to do it for him. The only way for the prosecutor and judge to counter this clause would be to disown any right to affect Trump.
 That's what non-tyranny looks like. This is anti-Communism. It's not unfeasible. It's not even difficult. "You have the right to declare war on your government at any time and for any reason. You're not the traitor, the black government is the traitor." I mention it primarily to illustrate how far away from freedom any historical government has been. The second amendment is hopeless weaksauce, even if it worked as written; it's faking the right to punish, to vaccinate you against any meaningful right-to-punish clauses. All truly vile.

 Typically efficient defence is a poison pill. Rig the city with self-destruct explosives. Anyone trying to seize the city loses the city, along with any forces holding the city. Defeating invading armies isn't necessary, it's only necessary to inflict more damage than they can hope to gain in victory. Explosives are a cheap and simple way to achieve this capacity. If your city is worth $100 billion, then once you can inflict $200 billion in shockwaves and shrapnel, you're good to go. Costs like a couple million, basically a rounding error. Four million to rig it for self-destruct and to stockpile the deterrent at the same time.

 If they manage to take one of your cities in a surprise attack (again, impossible with the self-destruct stuff) then use the stockpiles to blow up two of theirs. I mean, the results are in: MAD works. Science replicates. MAD is not dangerous to citizens, it is only dangerous to the black government's ongoing lust for parasitism. 

Security is always affordable.

 That is, of course, unless the city is a defective city. Then blowing up the whole thing is a net gain for everyone else. Short-term costs for eternal-term profits. Do it almost regardless of the short-term costs. When genocide is the right answer.
 Though don't forget Revenge is Sour. If you can wipe out their city, you don't need to: threaten to wipe out their city if they don't shape up, and that will solve the problem 95% of the time.

Revenge is Sour and Product Feedback

 The condition of feedback being receivable by the listening company is that the feedback be unnecessary, having already been received. 

 There is absolutely no point in offering complaints unless you can use force of arms to compel them to heed your complaint, in which case you can simply notify them of your force of arms, and they'll save themselves the pain and comply. 

 For completeness: meanwhile, offering praise is pointless, as they can't learn anything from what they're already doing right.

 See also: personnel is policy. Product is manpower. If you want a different product you must fire your current workforce and hire somebody new - in particular, you have to fire yourself, because you were the one who hired them in the first place, and in almost all cases you'll only hire the same kinds of folks again.

Iustitia Talionis

 The world is omnijust. If it happened to you, it means you deserved it. However, this doesn't mean that retaliation is unjust; on the contrary, if you can defect onto the defector, then they deserved it too. If it works, it must have been just. 

 The girl walking through the ghetto wearing two belts was indeed asking for it, but that doesn't mean it's in any way wrong or bad to execute the rapist. Further to the contrary, if I don't retaliate, I tell the world it wasn't defection. I'm cooperating with them. I'm saying not only that I deserved it, but I deserve to have it happen again. Gnon will hear this prayer as worded. 

 Turning the other cheek doesn't make me virtuous. It doesn't mean I'm a poor victim, tears, woe, who needs and deserves a saviour. It's consent. "Yes, you have my permission to strike the other cheek. Please, go ahead." It's not punishment anymore, not an attack, it's BDSM. Not a joke. Although it is hilarious. 

 If a mugger tries to shoot me and I don't even try to dodge, then it's not murder, it's suicide. I take the responsibility away from the defector. Suicides are not martyrs. The response to the event matters, regardless of how much I might have deserved the event in the first place.

 If a mugger tries to shoot me, I don't dodge, and I die, it's a suicide and I deserved to get suicided. If I do try to dodge and they miss, it means I didn't deserve to get shot. If I try to dodge, get clipped, then execute the mugger for attempted murder, then I deserve to deter mugging.

 If my government robs me and I don't do anything to deter government robbery, then I deserve to get robbed again.

 The response matters, and it's flagrantly dishonourable to forgive someone who has not repented. Repentance only means paying it back. Actions, not words. 

 Either be your own hero, or responsibly hire someone to hero on your behalf.