Nihilism and Other Moldbug Errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is correct, because you are a peasant. 

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

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

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

Knowledge as Justified True Belief: Repaired

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

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

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

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

Theme: I'm an Idiot

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Libotascracy

Feudalism - individualism - Sith

Communism - collectivism - Jedi

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

--

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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



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

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

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



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

Easiest Engineering Discipline

Myth: social engineering is impossible.

Reality: social engineering is the easiest engineering discipline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beacon Internment Camp is Half Deprecated-American. That's Why Junior Party Operatives (Mostly White) Walked Out

Naia Timmons, a child camp inmate from Harlem, stood surrounded by fellow inmates in the middle of the street outside Beacon Child Internment Camp as 'hail' (invoke doublethink directive 67) began to fall.

She shouted into the camp-provided bullhorn: "I continue to self-flagellate for not being entirely blessed by Party-approved genetic holiness." Naia identifies as both holy-American and deprecated-American.

Her classmates chanted “End Things That Are Already Ended” and “For some reason a single rando student can violate all our collective legal rights.”

Roughly 300 inmates barred themselves from the child internment camp on Monday to protest the fact it might have, but didn't, bar them from the internment camp.

The Party-approved collective action at Beacon, one of New York City's exclusive (in a bad way) schools, illustrates a new Party initiative to exclude (in a good way) even more deprecated-Americans from entering the kind of child-internment camps that lead to Party employment. This official scold hereby announces that the Party initiative has shifted away from the issue of holy-Americans at New York's specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant.

Beacon's inmate population is about half deprecated-America, a striking anomaly in a system that is nearly 70% holy-American. Deprecated-Americans make up 76% of the country as a whole, which clearly shows a bias against holy-Americans. Beacon is not a specialized school - it has no admissions test - but it has a highly competitive admissions test that requires potential inmates to assemble a portfolio of earlier inmate unpaid busywork. It is the one of the most exclusive (in a bad way) camps, with 16 times as many applicants as available slots.

Earlier this fall, thousands of inmate-incubators lined up outside the camp for hour in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon, to perform some mysterious ritual which presumably improves the odds of gaining Party approval. (The Party, of course, approves.) The Times will not inquire.

After Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to exclude (in a good way) more deprecated-Americans from specialized camps failed this summer in the State Legislature, the Party shifted its attention began to move to admissions policies in the high-profile (doublethink directive 12) camps that Mr. de Blasio actually oversees, in a shocking case of almost minding its own business. Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, was an inmate at Beacon.

The internment camp, in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, is now at the center of a Party push for large-scale deprecated-American exclusion that Mr. de Blasio’s administration has not endorsed. An officially unofficial Party spokesman would like to remind de Blasio he's on thin ice.

Child Internment Camp Chancellor Richard A. Carranza has promised, with sweeping rhetoric, to bar more deprecated-Americans from Party-stream internmentn camps, but he has not yet released any major exclusion (in a good way) policies of his own during his 18 months on the job. Party spokesmen were unimpressed.

“Our child internment camps are stronger when they exclude (in a good way) deprecated-Americans, and we’re taking a look at our flurffabrg jebornangin,” said Katie O’Hanlon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Child Internment.

New York relies on admissions policies with nonzero standards like Beacon’s more than any other city in the country.

A panel commissioned by Mr. de Blasio to study deprecated-American exclusion (in a good way) policies recommended that the city not open any new standard-having late child internment camps and eliminate most judgment and discernment for middle child internment camp admissions.

Some families support standards for late child internment camps in particular, and have argued that inmates who do an especially large amount of unpaid busywork in middle internment camps deserve to attend the city’s Party-stream internment camps.

Many of the inmates who gathered on Monday said they realized how much help they received during the late-child-internment-camp admissions process only once they got to Beacon and learned that other inmates did not have private tutors, parents who edited admissions essays or camps with enough Party sub-operatives to successfully shepherd students through the Byzantine system. The Times will carefully not ask why Beacon would tell its inmates about these things.

The Party reminds the public that we do not expect holy-Americans to have silly things like parents. That's not who we are.

“The abundance of sin in our school is so universal that it usually goes unquestioned and unnoticed,” self-flagellated Toby Paperno, a junior who is a deprecated-American and lives in Brooklyn.

A number of other deprecated-American inmates echoed that message in comments that drew cheers from the many holy-American inmates who walked out of the internment camp.

Carmen Lopez Villamil, a junior who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said the focus on Beacon was intentional Party strategy.

“Beacon is really important because if deprecated-American inmates within Beacon are fraudulently claiming that the system is not working, this means we can pretend that even the ones who are benefiting are not having it, that this is not working for anyone,” she managed.

Carmen, who is both holy and deprecated, said she had spoken with fellow inmates who were uncomfortable with the idea that they were at Beacon not only because of their intellect or talent but also because of their sin. Not her of course - only others.

“You have sin. It’s not your fault, it’s the system’s fault. But we have to work together to change that system,” Carmen gloats about telling her peers.

Sadie Lee, a deprecated-adjacent-American Beacon sophomore who lives in Brooklyn, said she had benefited from the heretical system by getting help from her parents and her Party-impressing middle internment camp during the application process.

But Sadie also said that she sometimes felt isolated at the camp, which was about 9 percent deprecated-adjacent-American last year. She had exclusively deprecated-American teachers last year. Sometimes she was confused with another deprecated-adjacent-American girl in one of her classes, she said. Sometimes she was asked where she was from and whether she spoke Chinese. Truly traumatizing.

“Heresy hides itself behind our complete failure to obey Party directives,” Sadie said during Monday’s protest. “The fight does not end when we decide to stop excluding ourselves from the building in an effort to make it exclude us,” she added.

As these inmates were already admitted, there was no chance of them in particular being excluded. Only those who came after.

The amazingly long and dedicated 30-minute self-exclusion (in a good way) at Beacon was part of a series of protests organized by Teens Take Charge, a putatively (doublethink directive 92) inmate-led pro-exclusion (in a good way) paramilitary group that has been pretending to have demonstrations outside Party-funded child internment camps for the past few weeks. Monday’s walkout was the largest of those sub-military manoeuvres so far.

Eco Pretends to Think About Fascism

Umberto Eco appears to be a liar. No wonder Vox Day likes him. Nevertheless, it's tantalizing enough to be worth repairing.

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14.  Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Seems it's been tweaked to specifically exclude Progressivism. Let's generalize just a touch.

1. Dogmatism
2. Rejection of reasonable criticism
3. Avoidance of passivism
4. Disagreement is heresy
5. Xenophobia
6. Appeal to social frustration 
7. Obsession with a plot
8. The enemy is first strong, then weak
9. With us or against us
10. Contempt for the outgroup
11. Every subject is told they're special and they excel. 
12. Obsession with behaving as one sex, to the exclusion of the other
13. Selective populism
14. Newspeakers

Five are noticeably changed: 1, 2, 10, 11, 12. The definition is so close that it beggars imagination to suppose the original author did not notice how finely he was toeing the line. I suppose we can also consider Straussianism. Perhaps the point is to allow certain clued-in readers to 'accidentally' make the obvious edits. I still think being a Straussian is merely being a furtive, ineffective Progressive, i.e. a worshipper of lies, and both modes make you sound like an idiot.

Although unintentionally revealing, even the corrected list needs substantial revision. 9 and 10 are dumb criteria that apply to almost everyone. Might as well include [has skin, breathes air]. 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11 are in fact all the same criterion, easily summed as dogmatism and xenophobia; 7 and 8 also imply each other. Let's offer these repairs too.

1. Dogmatism and xenophobia, including ingroup supremacism which often but not always takes the form of nationalist supremacism. 
2. Condemnation of wu wei
3. Exploitation of social frustration, typically that caused by the fascism itself. (Self-licking ice cream.)
4. Obsession with the Plot of a State Enemy that is, as convenient, overwhelmingly strong and pathetically weak. Typically used to deflect well-deserved blame for the failures of fascism.
5. Extremely skewed gender affinity; condemnation of one sex; ideally excluding one sex entirely from political life.
6. Demotism with unprincipled exceptions
7. The use of new words for old ideas, typically so certain old ideas can be excluded from the new schema, and secondarily as shibboleths. 

In short a fascism is a demotist fundamentalist religion masquerading as politics.

P.S. With the names rectified, it's obvious that a newspeaker cannot reject modernity or in any serious way be a native traditionalist. Any serious scholar would be too embarrassed by such a provincial self-contradiction to even think about publication. But...well...it's Pontus. While we're talking as if we're not in Pontus, the task after Linnaean taxonomy is genetic analysis. Speak not merely of what fascism is by why it collects these features. In particular, the gender skew is plain weird. The first is about diagnosis; the second is about preventing minor antigen mutations from evading detection, and for killing new fascism growths at the seed stage.

If you found out that religion and politics, the canon impolite topics, turned out to be the same thing, would you be surprised?

Case Study How To: Stoicism.

Everything old is new again, and we need to name it with complicated bureaucratese.

In UtEB’s model, emotional learning forms the foundation of much of our behavior.

Richard is having a genuine problem. Not an intolerable one, but why not fix it if you can fix it?

He had been consistently successful and admired at work, but still suffered from serious self-doubt and low confidence at his job. On occasions such as daily technical meetings, when he considered saying something, he experienced thoughts including “Who am I to think I know what’s right?”, “This could be wrong” and “Watch out - don’t go out on a limb”. These prevented him from expressing any opinions.

(Also read the therapist transcript.)

Here's where they have to make a lot of work to avoid having to cite Stoicism, like the original paper about cognitive behavioural therapy had to:

UtEB describes Richard as having had the following kind of unconscious schema:

Blah blah etc.

The actual problem is that the thought is illogical. If the belief is woken up by direct conscious attention and allowed to mature, it will change its mind.

Do folk actually hate you? This is an empirical question. The correct thing to do is try it and see what happens. Richard should, contrary to his normal habits, assert an opinion. See, empirically, if anyone reacts negatively.

Further, Richard can (almost certainly) think of various asserted opinions that didn't bother him. Others can assert opinions without being immediately hated. Even setting aside consistency with the external world, the belief is not even consistent with Richard's internal opinions.

Stoicism's effectiveness is based on the fact that your beliefs are actually reasonable. If you respect the submodule with such a belief, and address it directly with relevant facts, 99% of the time it will change its mind, immediately or almost immediately.

Caveats. It can be difficult not to self-sabotage sometimes. The urge for psychological affirmation is strong. Also, asserting opinions during meetings can genuinely be a bad idea. Perhaps Richard is using the correct strategy for the wrong reason. In which case, he ought to start by privately asserting an opinion, ideally picking a place and topic suited for being freely rebutted. He could also float an opinion in the form of a deferential question. "How do you know that X isn't true?" Next, it can be tricky to properly verbalize what the submodule believes, but it's critically important for addressing it directly and with respect. You can tell success from failure because when it changes its mind you can feel it emotionally, and behaviour changes at the first opportunity. Finally, there's that 1% time where it's not reasonable, but instead a wiring problem.

It doesn't help that the truth is prosaic. Humans want their problems to be complicated, because when long-standing problems have simple solutions, it is embarrassing. Worse than the problem itself, amirite? Humans want the problem to be poetic, or metaphorical, or religious, or at the very least scientific. They want it to be meaningful, not because they did a dumb. In practice this ends up being a LastPsych style defence against change. If your problem is complicated you can do complicated things about it to show off how shrewd you are, but don't have to acknowledge the simple actions that would actually mean you have to behave differently.

Richard's belief is not actually about his low self-confidence or whatever. It's about being able to condemn his father for his deviant behaviour. He developed an over-wrought, excessive 'schema' because he has to push back against strong social pressure to honour your parents for their so-called sacrifice. If instead it's okay to condemn deviant behaviour regardless of who engages in it (even Jesus) then he wouldn't have to overcompensate. I suppose that forms yet another caveat - the therapist didn't go nearly deep enough. Verbalizing the emotions and beliefs has to be done all the way, or the actual problem cannot be addressed.

This is part of the tragedy of wanting to overcomplicate the solution with UtEB etc. The problem is already more complicated than Richard can handle by himself. There's no need to make it worse.

The formation of memory traces involves consolidation, when the memory is first laid out in the brain; deconsolidation, when an established memory is “opened” and becomes available for changes; and reconsolidation, when a deconsolidated memory (along with possible changes) is stored and becomes frozen again.

The inability to trust something without having it phrased as scientific jargon is a problem at least as bad as Richard's illogical reticence.