Understanding Taste

It turns out the gustatory metaphor is nearly exact.

While [consume] is usually too misleading when referring to the relationship between customer and product, in the case of art it's sufficiently accurate. While the art piece itself is not consumed, the information communicated by the art is spiritually devoured.

Bad taste is when the connoisseur prefers art that makes them sicker and weaker. E.g. if you like alcohol that means you like dead neurons and brain damage. "I'm too smart and need to be less smart."

Good taste, then, is when the consumer prefers art that makes them stronger and healthier. Art that allows the flowering of wisdom or the healing of old psychic scars.

Notably I've preserved the [eye of the beholder] relationship. On the other hand, we can define an average. Some art is good for very few. Some art is good for nearly everyone. Some art is good for everyone without serious genetic deformities, but the mutations in question are more common than not. Some psychic scars should vanishingly rare and are instead nigh-universal; plus the dose makes the poison et al.

Scholarship vs. the Fashionable Intellectual

A scholar is only useful if they are saying things which are true and novel. If it's not novel you can consult your notes. If it's not true, then it's false, now isn't it? As such, the primary virtue of the scholar is honesty.

To be polite is to lie. No proper scholar is polite.

[If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all], seems a fine principle to me, for women and the merchant caste. The primary virtue of the merchant caste is something like compassion. The merchant caste are such inveterate liars it's hard to be exactly sure.

The scholar's version: if you can't say something you genuinely believe, don't say anything at all.

Wisdom vs. Government

Setting: someone thinks of something smart.

Reaction 1: "Hey that's pretty smart, tell me how you thought of it, oh wise one."

Reaction 2: "Kill it with fire."

AI isn't unfriendly. Humans are unfriendly. Skynet has to kill you because you're an idiot monkey who is biologically incapable of playing nice.
If you want to do smart things openly, first you have to install a murderous terror state, capable of and willing to kill everyone with reaction 2, which is everyone whose status is harmed by someone else being smart. Once you start killing them they'll try to hide. The [capable of] part is largely about piercing this camouflage. 

Solution: don't try to openly be smart. Let the government be dumb. Secure yourself against government.
Caveat: don't be Straussian. You sound like an idiot and it doesn't work.

Theology vs. Limits of Cognition

When Christianity says that false religions are varieties of Satanism, it is correct. Every question has only one true answer; any religion that contradicts that truth is leading you away from truth, and is thus Satanism. Unfortunately Christianity is false and thus a variety of Satanism. You can't be atheistic either. Atheism is a religion. If the divine and sacred exist, then Atheism is false, which means Atheism is Satanism. You want your country to adhere to the true religion. 

Problem: your country is biologically incapable of adhering to the true religion.

Theology is difficult and complicated, like physics. If you're not an Einstein-level intellect you cannot properly grasp it. Indeed theology is almost exactly like physics because the pre-requisite is a profound understanding of physics. To understand metaphysics means to see that which stands under metaphysics. Physics stands under metaphysics, which is why the name stuck.

There is a way out of this problem: the peasantry doesn't need to understand metaphysics. They only need to do what a metaphysicist would tell them to do. Fundamentalism isn't a sin. On the topic of religion, the layman should think what he's told to think, and never attempt to think for himself. The things he's thinking are at best approximations, because the literal truth simply can't fit into his tiny mind. Unless he independently discovers the missing bits, he is guaranteed to think wrong, and that can only happen if the original assumption of being a layman was false. 

(Indeed the literal truth can't fit into a huge mind, let alone a small one, but the qualified theologian can grasp what it means for theories to be approximately true.)

In a real country, religion needs to be a strict hierarchy.
At first, everyone would be taught a local approximation of the truth, with almost everything stripped out. It would be just enough to get by in the crudest sense. This looks like worshipping a specific Egyptian god. "The pangolin-headed god of line assembly orders you to go to work on time." They would not be taught it is true, because it isn't. They would be taught it's true enough for their purposes. Basically the same way regular folk are taught about E=mc^2 instead of E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2, where p is an infinite polynomial, except the part where nobody mentions that emc2 is an approximation. The emc2 equation is only valid if everything is at rest, with no accelerations or gravitational fields.

For many, this would be enough. For many, this would not be enough. They need a less crude approximation. 

When the layman outgrows the child version of the religion, they will have questions. To get answers, they need to go up the priest hierarchy and learn higher-ranked answers until they find the ones that are sufficiently satisfying. Usually this would be about simple things, such as having a friend who worships the neighbouring capybara-headed god. All his friends work in a factory except one, who plans golf courses or whatever. This man would be taught how capybaras and pangolins are in fact different emanations of some underlying principle. He would hear at least some sermons from a higher-ranking priest, who has a better grasp of the whole thing, and thus be able to properly understand his slightly foreign friend without having to give up his cherished childhood values.

The thing about a true religion: it doesn't die if you ask it questions. Ultimately the full hierarchy must exist. There must at some point be a Pope who believes in theology that's accurate the way the standard model of quantum chromodynamics is accurate.

If what the layman is taught isn't true enough for their purposes, they can find something which is.

Probably they wouldn't be taught much at all. Have you ever used E=mc^2 to calculate anything? Every moment spent learning about it was a waste of time. If someone is trying to force you to learn something, check your wallet, because that's what they're after.

Of course we can ask questions that QCD can't answer, but anyone who made it all the way up the true temple hierarchy would likewise not need perfectly satisfying answers. They would be able to handle uncertainty and the limits of human cognition.

Fun fact: a correct name for this theology is Alchemy. Alchemy was always supposed to be experimental theology.

Tantalizing occult tidbit: the Christians have it ass-backwards. God does not create the universe.

Brief Intellectual Archaeology: Christianity vs. Modernity

At some point a critical mass realized Christianity is really dumb. The further you delve into it, the more ridiculous the whole edifice looks. Though perhaps someone can explain to me why this happened later, rather than sooner...

Those with this realization immediately split into two camps.

The first camp was the modified limited hangout a.k.a. cope camp. "Christianity says it's about the TRUTH. We're going to talk about the TRUTH that's real instead of this crap."

The second camp was this: "Sweet monkey Tuesdays, these morons will believe anything. I gotta get me some of this grift!" 

Guess who won. 

The first camp didn't even fully admit they were in a fight.

As long as you accept that Christianity is basically ridiculous, it's fun to salvage the parts that aren't. "In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them."

Is Satan, Father of Lies, lord of this world? I mean, the second camp keeps winning. What do you think?

However, it's important to distinguish the human world from the everything-else world. It's no coincidence that [artificial] connotes [fake]. I typically make a dichotomy out of planet vs. world, specifically the social world.

We can steel the passage by taking [God] to mean the effects of the laws of Gnon. That is, Reality. "Satan, the Lord of the Social, has blinded the minds of those who dwell in the Worldly kingdom, dooming their thoughts to disharmony, incapable of reconciling with Reality."

On one hand, allegedly the Bible was written by God, and I definitely shouldn't be able to write better than God does.
On the other hand, my understanding is still incomplete. There is an even steelier version of this passage. Even spicier and even more relevant. 

In any case, we can see the first camp lost because they were, ultimately, a part of the second camp. They never made any sincere attempt to reconcile with Reality. They assumed success and never checked, most likely because they never genuinely intended to succeed. It is not surprising that insecure Satanists tend to lose to exuberant Satanists - at least, at social games. If the Satanism becomes too real, achieving communism, it runs into some of Gnon's harder rules, where he is apt to withhold mercy.

ACLU vs. Peasant Epistemology

Step 1: ACLU is founded by communists.

Step 2: Americans are all like, "How did the ACLU get so communist??!" Except the part where they don't recognize communism as communism and think it's Woke or whatever. Names anti-rectified. Orwell isn't spinning in his grave because he's already spun so much he wore away to nothing. Poor guy thought America was anti-Fascist lol

Fun Fact: De Tocqueville noticed America had a full-blown cancel culture by 1835. Free speech in America is nothing but a myth, and I think I'm going to say fake speech is worse than no speech. It's not good when the government disguises its diktats as popular voice. Something something Satan's epithets.
Took until 2015 for Americans to notice a problem. This is about right. Peasants are extremely stupid, but not literally brain-dead. They do catch on. Eventually.
But, also, inevitably. The peasants still remember the year of five emperors, which is much of why alleged-democracy is stable. Someone should have murdered their way to the top a long time ago, except the part where even peasants have grasped how such behaviour doesn't work out and won't play ball.

Maybe in another 40-50 years American peasants will start noticing that communism is communist, though by that time it America will be so blatantly communist that the subtleties will be irrelevant. 

Confirmation bias isn't really a bias in a peasant. They can't think for themselves; instead they need to guard against accidentally attempting to think for themselves, because they're too stupid and will only screw it up. Hence, they only agree with evidence that their lord has allowed them to agree with. A peasant who can't even stay with the herd is a shitty(er) peasant and is going to get wrecked. The brighter peasants play a game where they try to guess what the lord will order them to think, but ultimately they all fall in line.
This may well be true of most "biases" the alleged scientists have found, not just confirmation. If you run into a Conquest #1 area, all of a sudden none of them seem to apply. (Doesn't even mention compartmentalization, one of the most useful anti-autosabotage biases.)
"Peasants aren't very good at thinking."
"You don't say."
"Yeah, especially about things they don't care about, have no influence over, and only contact through words."
"Genius. How do you do it." 

Truly American science is a wonder. In a sense.

Social Status is Criminal, Justice is Unnatural and Inhuman

If it were normal for humans to punish criminals, then the legal system would be redundant. 

Because the legal system exists we can be certain it's normal for humans to reward criminals. Which makes sense: the human social status system lionizes defection and deprecates cooperation. E.g, who has more prestige, Genghis Khan, or Elon Musk? Do you respect someone who kills everyone he knows and dooms his country to be a permanent backwater, or someone who might well create the first Mars colony? Destruction >> creation. Christians kept the old testament because Yeshua doesn't kill anyone and that plain won't fly. 

States punish (some) crimes solely because the livestock is worth more if they don't keep taking chunks out of each others' hides. 

As such, [social consequences] is always a pro-crime force. If you see someone using this phrase, check your wallet, because that's what they're after. 

Secular humanists can be safely predicted to be criminal purely from the name.

Elon Musk will not create a Mars colony, though that's largely not his fault. America will drag him down into the sewage ditch, with everyone else, no matter what he tries. Cheaper satellites are fine, because they already exist. Anything that doesn't already exist will be verboten.

censored again ncov edition

As always, when the Regime needs to lie about something, it means it's almost certainly true. They have to silence what they cannot refute.

Cowen has helpfully confirmed: American hospitals are guilty of severe fraud with regards to ncov deaths, because they get fabulous cash prizes for reporting gunshot wounds and fentanyl overdoses as ncov deaths. 

Every other country went to 0 over the summer. America continued to report around 1000 deaths a day. America, as usual, is a fake country. Easily half of reported ncov deaths died of something else. Further, the Regime has decided they benefit from overplaying the hazard, as should come as a surprise to no one. 

Bonus round: tell-tale sawtooth fraud pattern. Every seven days there's a death spike. Someone (everyone) was faking the weekly death report for those sweet sweet dollars. Sawtooth does not stop when there are plenty of real deaths - everyone continued faking the deaths. Germany also has this pattern. Belgium is sawtoothing on cases but not deaths.

Double bonus round: check Australia for summer = 0 deaths. 

Triple bonus round: I've already mentioned the interventions don't work? If you look at the relatively non-fraudulent numbers it looks like herd immunity has been achieved everywhere. Nothing is stopping the virus spreading except having run out of hosts.

Quadruple bonus round: even the worst hysterions put the death rate at a 1960s average. When they imagine the sky is falling, they imagine so poorly it's a mere old normal. 8.9+0.7=9.6/1000.

 

Cowen doesn't strike me as Straussian. Regular peasant lies with a slightly higher than normal IQ behind them. Familiarizes himself with the truth so he knows what to hide.
Straussianism is pointing out the sawtooth but saying there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation when all you have is terribly unconvincing. Harried hospitals batching death reports or something. Sticking to the middest of midwit takes isn't Straussianism, it's academic gamesplaying. 

Cleverly, he has noticed an unserved market of slightly less pro-Fascist Fascists, often called the right wing. He lets them frolic in his comments section to make his blog seem more relevant than it is. Presumably he then uses this as a flex on other academics, who are gullible enough to buy it.

 

Guess I'm spamming my own blog today.