Extreme Efficiency and Soul Death

Some artifacts are "useful," and some are mere art. Being "useful" means the building of such things allows you to build more of them, whereas an art piece doesn't let you afford any art you couldn't already afford. 

If you obsess about making all your artifacts useful, you become useless. Extrinsic value and intrinsic value diverge. You make things that are valuable because they make more of themselves, but 0 * ∞ is zero. You have an endless supply of something that serves no purpose. Rather than accruing profits, you have wasted your labour.

When spending time on a "useful" device or technique, it must always be subordinated to "useless" ends. The point of money isn't actually to be accumulated. The point, ultimately, is to spend it. Once creating the "useful" artifact conflicts with spending the money, it is costing more than you're gaining. 

Work to buy leisure. The more leisure the work can purchase, the more profitable the work is. Keep in mind that youthful years tend to be worth more than elder years. Discount future profits to taste. 

Leisure doesn't have to be so-called unproductive, but it does have to be something you would do without being paid for, whether you can get paid for it or not. Indeed the work-leisure dichotomy seems like yet another trap.

Neural Emotion Algorithm & Armed Peasants

Emotions are checked in some order. If an emotion is sufficiently excited, the rest of the list is ignored. For peasants, the emotion at the top is always fear.

When a non-peasant sees someone with a gun, they may think, "Ah, he has a gun, good for him I guess." Unless you were planning on antagonizing him, it's of little consequence.

When a peasant sees someone with a gun, they are afraid of the gun. And that's it. They are consumed by fear of the gun. They'll find themselves unable to appreciate anything else until the gun is removed from their perceptible environs.

This is why peasants like kittens. You can't possibly be afraid of a kitten. They can feel something other than fear in the presence of nothing but kittens, which is a nice change for them. 

This effect is likely enhanced by living in democratic times. The local norm is cowardice. Bravery is enviable, so even the few individuals who are capable of it know better than to openly display any. The peasant's role models all act like cowards. He is never shown how the self-secure act; he is not genuinely aware that non-cowardice is an option. At best courage is a distant, abstract hypothetical vagueness. 

This is particular bad when the peasant himself is holding the gun. He's more afraid of his own tools than he is of the attacker. Not the best idea to give a coward a deadly weapon. The irrationality of this is obvious even to the peasant themselves, and the strain is apt to drive them nuts. Even if they manage to be strategically stupid and forget to be afraid of the weapon, they're still likely to panic due to being a coward who is under attack.

Perhaps it is sociologically prudent to discourage armament in democratic times. Only those who are willing to brave the frowns will arm themselves, ensuring few cowards adopt the habit.

"Communism creates enormous destruction while failing to advance at all towards equality. That’s kind of why communism sucks so much."
(Who said it?)

Democracy creates enormous destruction while failing to create a single iota of freedom. That's kind of why democracy sucks so much.

Example of De-Legitimization and Security

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/27872/confessions-of-the-magpie-wizard/chapter/859741/book-5-chapter-13-wherein-a-slow-speed-catfight

“Typical,” said Mariko. “The Corps took over somebody’s business and turned it into a den of lies.”

“I take it you don’t approve of Heida’s methods?”

“How could I? She’s conning these people and scaring them with monsters that don’t even exist!”

[...]

“Then let’s promise to not take the easy way out. We’ll see what we can really do to help people. No taking shortcuts to put on a good show.”

“Hm,” I said, scratching my chin in contemplation. “I don’t think our hostess will care for that. She is our superior, after all.”

“When we have a choice, then,” she said. “Please? For me? I couldn’t look myself in the mirror otherwise.”

Mariko wants to force Heida to tell the truth: “Should we tell Mr. Maki? Maybe the Headmaster?” This is both unnecessary and dishonourable. 

[Dishonourable] because it isn't a purchase or a war. Mariko is allegedly a pacifist, but isn't above threatening someone to get what she wants, as long as it's an "authority" doing the threatening on her behalf. Wants someone to wage war as long as it doesn't look like war. Typical pacifism.

Unnecessary because Mariko can't be fired for disagreeing with her superior in public. Doesn't have to even call it out as a lie - she can simply refuse to play along. "I don't see any evidence such a monster exists." Heida will get angry, but she's in a bind - either she allows Mariko to puncture the lies, or she removes Mariko from the situation where she has to play along with lies...which plays to Mariko's pacifism and isn't reasonably possible.

In these cases, the opportunity to revoke your consent from the illegitimate authority always exists. The only question is whether you take the opportunity. Whether you manifest your ideas as action, or discredit your own ideas with inaction.

Mariko has already won. It's merely a question of whether she accepts victory or not.

I personally have lost every shred of patience for those who make excuses. As we can see, Mariko is rejecting victory - she wants to play along with the superstitious peasants who she knows and accepts are superstitious. Novel authors feel obligated to uphold the local mores, after all.

Rectification of Names: Time is Boundless

The term "temporal" is supposed to refer to time-bound entities. 

Problem: time is infinite and unending. What does infinity look like in real life? It looks like Time. 

Time isn't a boundary. Time is permission. Time is permission to exist; permission to act. Time is omnipotence. All things that can be done require time to be done.

The "eternal" entities are those which don't exist. No matter how imperfect temporal entities are, they are superior to those that don't count as [are]. 

Don't confuse Time with Death just because you get old. That's on you, not Death. If you blame Time, you're saying you wish you weren't born at all. Set Time allotment = 0. Okay, fine, but then why are you mad at Death for fixing the mistake, liar?

America Summary

America suffers from a lethal affliction. There is a medicine which cures the affliction. However, the medicine itself is stressful. The patient is too weak to survive the administration of the required dose. Its only choices are dying quickly, or slowly and painfully. 

If the patient dies quickly, salvage will be possible. In this analogy, some of its organs will still be healthy enough to donate. If it dies slowly, the degeneracy will thoroughly ravage every tissue. Meanwhile, it will bankrupt anyone trying to delay the inevitable. 

At this point, killing America quickly is a mercy. You keep it alive if and only if you deeply, profoundly hate America, Americans, and their allies. 

Sodom and Gomorrah have come again. The challenge is the same: find 10 virtuous men. The rules are more lax; you have all of NATO to look through, not just a couple cities. 

Just like the first time around, we already know what you're going to find. Perhaps save yourself the effort. 

P.S. It's an allegory. [Look back] == [turn to salt] represents the fact that anyone who doesn't wholly and profoundly reject the American way is going to go down with them. Merely distancing yourself somewhat is not enough.

Moldbug Conspiracy Hypothesis

Being more cynical than the reality of GAE is extremely hard, but I'ma give it a shot.

Moldbug's wife didn't "die" she was assassinated. "And if you don't mislead your flock, your kids are next." 

Moldbug blogged under his real name and then got involved with real money. Two very serious sins. Living in metro cali surely doesn't help. In retrospect, it would have been weirder if his output didn't fall off a cliff and go splat at the bottom. Sins really do destroy you, even if nobody assassinates your wife.

He would take the easy road and stop writing, but now he can't. Under contract. 

If you look at post-mortem interviews, Moldbug looks wrecked. Grief, sure, but there's horror there too, as well as defeat. 

There's even a small chance she died of natural causes and then some deep stater claimed she was assassinated. Why let a crisis go to waste?
Further: you going to claim the massively overstaffed CIA didn't harass him? It would be weirder if he didn't get any creepy 2 am phone calls. They must have been sufficiently creepy, because he hasn't talked about them in public. 

Last real post on UR was 2013.* CIA gained the legal right to harass domestic Americans in 2013. Could be a coincidence, I suppose... I mean, there have to be coincidences now and again, right? Birthday paradox: the odds of a coincidence are extremely high given how many opportunities for coincidence there are. 

*Great post too.

What makes the provincial critic so grimly, hilariously terrible is that he imagines himself not just equal to the wits of the metropolis, but vastly superior. Is it even possible to respond? Shall the man of letters respond: “Excuse me, ‘Dr. Lexus,’ but I am resolutely heterosexual—as if it mattered—and ‘my shit,’ as you call it, is anything but ‘all retarded’?”

Quibble: intellectually, Rome, since at least Tarquin, was a province of Greece. Further, when Greece became too Platonic, it became a province of itself.

P.S. The difference between a sin and a regular mistake is complexity. Sins reliably cause problems that make allegorical sense without any obvious physical mechanism. The mechanism exists, but in these cases it's subordinate to the spiritual realities, thus complex and hard like all theology. 

E.g. selling your soul is real, and it turns you into an NPC. A soulless p-zombie. You can look at the changes in the brain and work out what's happening that way, but it's dramatically harder than just acknowledging that the things called [deals with the devil] are literal.

My boring hypothesis: if you didn't sell your soul to the devil at school yourself, you will 100% sell your soul when you send your own kids to school. Moldbug sent his kids to school, and became doomed.

Hanlon's Razor is Disrespectful

If Hanlon's razor applies to anyone, it means they're a helpless child that shouldn't be allowed out of the house without supervision, let alone be allowed to hold a job with decision-making powers. 

Underestimating your enemies is foolish. If a malevolence model and an incompetence model lead to the same predictions, then they should also lead to the same response: jail time. Ideally a non-degenerate response instead of jail, but you know what I mean. Personnel is policy, and problems are problems. If a person is causing problems, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence, they need to be replaced.

Hanlon's razor is clearly cope, but not seethe. "I don't have a knife. I'm not stabbing you. You're not bleeding." Delay defensive response as long as possible. Americans like malevolence. The reason any non-malevolent bureaucrat gets talked up is to highlight them for their enemies. Make it easy to find them and know exactly what they're doing. Americans consistently choose to uphold malevolence and interfere with non-malevolence. 

Benevolence is inegalitarian, you see. It's rare and intrinsically admirable, which makes the self-absorbed envious. 

The fact Hanlon's razor is incredibly rude is considered a bonus. Very American. Uphold your malevolent administrators and call them shitheads at the same time? What's not to love?