Ukraine started the war. Doing so seems extremely dumb and it was extremely easily avoidable.
What if Zelenskyy hates Ukrainians so much he deliberately started the war to get as many of them killed as possible?
Likewise, had ncov been a real plague, the Regressive Inquisition would have superglued themselves to the [just a flu bro] narrative, to get as many people killed as possible.
"people are the results of their choices. epigenetics is real. everything is 80~100% hereditary. people are dumber today than they were a hundred years ago. this is because everyone has decided to be stupid and evil."
Man: "None of what you said really means anything. We need concrete, material solutions. We need creative action and meaningful dissent!"
God: "...have you decided to stop being evil yet? If you haven't, your actions are going to reinforce your decision to be stupid and evil."
Man: "! No-"
God: "By the way, how has being evil been working out for you?"
(Narrator: In the past, Man said, "Either one of you assholes know the way to 1982?")
P.S. That is an extremely precisely chosen year, allegedly by accident.
The Ukraine war has already been fantastically profitable for Putin for one immutable reason: a blooded army is vastly more effective than a body of naive recruits. It's not even close. Ukies, unlike Arabs, can actually fight back. The war is real enough as far as Putin's soldiers are concerned.
One of the things your soldiers need experience doing is shooting down trespassing aircraft. Can't practice that if the other side can't launch any aircraft.
Plus it's a great way to destroy Ukrainian materiel. How can you be sure you got all their planes? How do you know you didn't only hit tarmac and they can't launch? Simple. Let them launch (in low numbers) and then shoot them all down. Admittedly I'm not 100% sure this is strategically relevant, but if it's something you wanted to do, that's how you would go about it.
Come to think, you might want to do this precisely if you don't intend to hold the territory. Sure you might ask them to destroy all their war materiel in surrender talks, but unless you occupy the place there's no way to ensure they actually do it. Plus they may pull a Weimar/Japan and simply go back on their word later. "Loan" the planes to NATO so they're out of the country, then NATO "pay" the planes back one day when Putin isn't looking. Can't do that if all the planes are in 1000 pieces by the side of the road.
If you realize that propaganda is a prayer to Satan, you might wisely refuse to offer wartime propaganda. Let the other side stick their own foot into the wood-chipper and reap the rewards. Especially nowadays.
"Steve just autistically tells the truth, which isn't something anyone is going to accuse Noah Smith of doing."
https://nitter.42l.fr/Outsideness/status/1494251744330940416
Steve carries water for Fascism. A better class of lies for the more discerning customer. Steve is sometimes being a dupe and sometimes the terrorism is working: making him terrified of looking Truth in the face. Part of the Regime's defence is being a Lovecraftian horror, direct contact with which will drive you mad. If you neglect the psychohazmat suit, that is.
"Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Honor Code Division"
Honour, eh?
Naturally what Steve describes is, at best, half an honour system. Turns out if you cut a cow in half, it tends to fall over and bleed out. (Mind blown yet?)
Nearly everything about this system is exactly the opposite of real honour.
"Honor systems are mostly self-enforcing."
This one isn't even slightly self-reinforcing. Steve is correct, which means this isn't an honour system.
"But honor systems require the occasional severe enforcement"
Or rather, this system relies entirely on a central gatekeeper terrorizing the defectors. Which any lord could tell you immediately; this design is not some sort of mistake or oversight. Peasants, sadly, are not known for understanding the second-order consequences of actions. (Third and higher are right out.)
Any scientist or engineer can tell you immediately too: what's the experiment? Where is the case study of a student cheating and being harmed outside the central authority's banhammer?
Probable cope: "Peasants can self-rule." Yeah, very no. Fascist.
Speaking of immediate recognition, the psycho lords can immediately tell there's hay to be made. A lovely opportunity for sadism and wrecking the illusion of something beautiful.
Double point round: you don't get honour for free. You have to earn it. Did the honour code extend only to those who had proven their worth? Was it a whitelist? Or did it get extended equally to everyone? Did it use a blacklist?
In shocking news, the gate on this system was seized by a bad actor, whereupon the "self" enforcement immediately failed.
Wow guys how did an egalitarian system get dinged for not being egalitarian enough. I am so surprised. The world is a mysterious place, I can't even.
Please refrain from /headdesking hard enough to hurt yourself: it's them that deserve it, not you.
In a real honour system, first of all it's focused on agreements between two agents, not a unilaterally imposed standard which cannot reasonably be observed. It's self-reinforcing because if you don't honour your agreements, nobody makes agreements with you anymore.
This "take exams in your room" honour would be a very secondary result. If someone had repeatedly shown much honour, maybe we would make this agreement with them - in exchange for privileges. Not in exchange for not being punished by being sent to your room like a naughty child. (Out of your room in this case, lol.) It's self-reinforcing the way any good contract is self-reinforcing: breaching the contract voids the contract. The benefits you paid for are revoked.
Steve carries water for Fascism when he fails to notice this "honour" system was a Sophist system. Standard "conservative" behaviour, developing a false dichotomy between more!Fascism and less!Fascism, instead of between Fascism and the many varieties of not!Fascism.
It should already be obvious, but it's worth repeating: who else but a Sophist could design this system? Obviously it was designed to reward those who cheated without getting caught. The best Sophists. The Sophists extracted a system that constitutes a cheater-rewarding system when isolated, called it an "honour" system because they extracted it from a system of honour, then laughed all the way to the bank.
Only a peasant could possibly call this an honour system. "It feels similar to honour! 🙃" Yes, it does feel a bit honour-esque, if you don't think about it at all for even a second using any kind of effort or due diligence (the kind of things honourable folk have) of any kind.
This is what happens when you put peasants in charge of things: scams. Scams for days. You fool, you absolute rube, you will drown in scams of every kind.
An agreement to let you police yourself is generally the opposite of honour. It should only be done in very special cases, not be the foundation of the whole system. You only earn honour for keeping your agreements, which means you need to show you kept your agreement. To show you didn't cheat while alone in your room, you would have to agree to downright paranoid levels of after-the-fact policing. Which sort of defeats the purpose of this particular "honour" doesn't it?
A real privilege the honourable might ask for is their own personal proctor, at a time of their convenience. (One guy for an hour, instead of the several hours of a team required for the paranoia.) This isn't a moral thing: it's the fact that, by keeping their agreements, the honourable dramatically reduce the costs they impose on the university or indeed on anyone around them in general. This behaviour ought to be rewarded, so you get more of it. Some of the relative profits they hand out ought to be returned. Bonus: the honourable signal their willingness to be watched and verify their behaviour. They demonstrably have nothing to hide. They don't even ask for the opportunity to cheat unless they absolutely have to.
Real privileges can't be openly asked for in a Fascist system. The real privilege of the system was, as above, privileges for Sophists, who got them by cheating without being obvious about it.
P.S. I said I was trolling Sailer. This is true, but more importantly I'm pointing out how he's carrying water for Fascism, so he no longer has the "I was duped!" excuse. Guess how he has been responding, as I knew he would?
Shills like to pretend they're ignorant like peasants, and then try to bully you into pretending to be as ignorant too. "Nobody could possibly know or discover [stupidly obvious thing] 🙃!" Problem: I'm the bigger bully.
By defending him, Nick Land throws his lot in with Sailer's doomed voyage.
not even close to good enough
Whelp. Everyone is saying it's the start of WWIII, so I guess we're fine. Cope and seethe, nerds.
Not that I would personally mind a spot of world war.
America: takes Iraq in six months. Makes sense. Real army vs. desert goatfucker army.
Russia: takes Ukraine in one day. Get smoked, bitches.
Nobody wants to find out if American troops can beat up Russian troops, for numerous reasons. Except me, of course. I think the Russians would show they have inferior tech and superior Victory. The Russian soldiers actually want to win the fights, not merely execute them in the "proper" style. But of course, I want to run the experiment because I'm not sure.
The problem is America would be likely to have a massive hissy fit about it. Full-on womanly hysteria...even if they win. Nothing tweaks a bitch's nose like winning a fight.
P.S. I said: "America was bluffing about war." Looks like, at time of publishing, America was bluffing. Putin called their bluff, oops. It's almost like I have reasons for the things I say, so Reality keeps agreeing with me.
Women change their minds a lot, though. Often for trivial, inconsequential, or downright irrelevant reasons. Just because America is for now cutting and running like a bitch doesn't necessarily mean she will continue to do so. Maybe the embarrassment of losing the Ukraine immediately after losing Afghanistan will be too much for her and she'll start throwing plates and stuff.
Christianity is both egalitarian and anti-egalitarian. However, it is more the former than the latter; Fascists decided Christ intended to be radically egalitarian.
It's an especially natural heresy, since Christianity is a cult for narcissists. Indeed, before the Fascists, Christianity had to repeatedly put down egalitarian heresies using lethal force. Eventually, the fact the book employs Sophistry gave a hint: use nice irresponsible Sophistry to trick Christianity into committing to itself, rather than responsibly and openly stating your egalitarianism. Worked like a charm. The heresies failed because they were heresies against Satan: far too honest.
The book says to honour your mother and your father, to not covet your neighbour's stuff, and to keep women in the back of the bus. It also says the high shall be brought low, and the low brought high. It tells you to turn the other cheek instead of securing your shit. Salt of the earth blah blah etc.
If we're all unworthy, who can be expected to, you know, pay for things? The parable of the talents is in the old testament. You're not old are you? UBI or bust bro.
Let's assume someone claiming to be the Creator God can write at least as well as I can. If I wrote the sermon on the mount, I would be writing it with the intent to be misunderstood. In particular, I would be intending for you to become Communist, and then to irresponsibly use the motte-and-bailey technique to dodge the blame. "When I said 'love your enemies' I didn't mean behave as if you loved them! 🙃" You're supposed to kill the shit out of them, but in a forgiving way, see? A true Fascist is never caught killing their enemies at all, naturally. They have someone else do it for them. If you hire a hitman through seven proxies, you're not getting caught.
Let's check intent against the actual results, shall we? [...] Oh, well, that was fast and easy, wasn't it?
To really hammer it in: the reader is not primarily responsible for these results. The author is responsible. The one attempting the intervention is responsible for the actual deflection, by law of Gnon. This goes double when the author bangs on about being omniscient and infallible.
Fascism is just Christianity with any lingering (tried-and-true) old testament behaviours stripped out. When Christian claim to be an old tradition, remember paganism more like 30,000 years old. They play it up precisely because they don't have a foot to stand on. They can get away with it at all because they burned all the books that said otherwise.
Let it never be said that Satan's patronage was worthless. If you solely desire worldly power, money and kratia, as psychopaths and narcissists do, someone like Satan is simply the optimum choice for your cult.
P.S. Do Nazis hate Gyews precisely because it's predominantly the new testament, not the old, which is full of egalitarianism?
P.P.S. The sermon ends with a warning against false prophets. Whereupon I realized it was obvious all along: Christ was indeed, also, the anti-Christ. Yeshua was the false prophet. Satan wrote your book, you dumb fucks.
Well, it's not like you didn't deserve it, precisely for being that dumb. Further, Gnon deserves to be overworked for being so lazy about his job. Mercy is a sin.
P.P.P.S. The book of Enoch seems largely on the ball. This is exactly why it was rendered apocrypha. Not sufficiently Satanist for the mainline literature. The other apocrypha likewise was too heretically true to be included.
Satan really liked to portray himself as pure white. The technique obscured the fact the details were all dissonant. Any colour and texture he could have plausibly claimed would have looked wrong next to each other. Result: "Christian" theology has a childlike lack of depth. Except its Satanology, of course. They know everything about their actual object of worship.
P.P.P.P.S. Even infallible authors aren't infallible, because you're not writing for infallible readers. There's no need to write for infallible readers: they already know. Whether the error occurs on transmission or reception doesn't functionally matter. The result is that the theology is false here and there and needs to be corrected. Anyone claiming to be infallible is 100% a devil. They want you to double down on the fallacies instead of fixing them.
Also infallibility is death. Perfection is annihilation.
