Rufo Gets Things Done (Unlike Moldbug) Because He's Not Trying Hard Enough

Rufo did the thing. He did (and does) "make a difference in people's lives." He uses that weird 'strategy' thing where you identify weaknesses and then attack the enemy where they're weak. What a bizarro.

He's still a Faustian. Still a fundamentalist Egalitarian. This is not a solution. It works precisely because it's a palliative rather than a solution. You hire a Rufo when you want to go gently into that good night. When you want to end with a whimper, and not a bang. "Come with me if you don't want to live."

Reminder: the Amish still exist. You don't need a DeSantis. You don't need a Trump. You don't need a Rufo or even a Moldbug. You can just do it. The Owenites just did it, and it didn't work. The Amish just did it, and it continues to work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Given that the Amish consistently manage to mind their own business, one hesitates to even call them Christian. Like...does it count? If you can stay on your side of the fence-line? 

But yes, Rufo can probably run a college. Through sheer force of personality, he can reform a college and make it like 1959-standard or something of that nature. Tucker Carlson shows you can resist Regime pressure indefinitely if you want. It is weak. 

It doesn't matter, because the time you want to go back to is less 1959 and more 5500 BC.

If Rufo running a college was meaningfully a solution, Rufo would have no need to run a college because Americans would have already tried that. There would be ten thousand Rufos. If America was compatible with Rufoism There would be no twatter campaigns because America would have already made enough Rufos to make Rufo-deans normal. And I wouldn't be talking about how Faustianism is inherently irredeemable.

Nothing that Americans recognize as American is remotely sufficient. Strategy is inherently un-American. It requires discipline, and discipline isn't freedom. By inspection the devout Faustians are going to overwhelm the timid compromising Faustians. Maybe Rufo's college survives in stasis until the fall of the Regime, but the fall of the Regime will take Rufo down with it, because Rufo has never rejected the core premises. 

Put another way, Rufo is not smarter than Spengler. Although he certainly behaves as if he believes he is. His actions will do nothing to interrupt Spengler's timeline. 

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/acorns-for-the-culture-war
"No word on getting rid of the students—who surely make the faculty look like gems."

Moldbug accidentally admits personnel is policy. No way to fix DC short of permanently firing every single person who lives there. 

Everyone in America is a radical leftist. You have to fire the entire country. If you want a decent government, speaking English has to be a disqualifying factor. 

"To really plant acorns, you have to get as far upstream of power as you can."

Um. 'To be a successful Faustian, you need to get as far upstream of existing Faustianism as you can.' Well, I suppose that's technically true. You need to get so far upstream you're not a Faustian anymore. 

 

"It is only important because good artists and good art make a good scene—a good social network." 

Ah yes. Who needs a Pope? Who needs a King? We just need an art scene.
You gotta be popular. Rightists are all about being popular. But popular with the right set, see. Hue hue. Gotta be popular with the in-crowd.
The American "right" wing, ladies and gentlemen.
Conveniently, if the art scene does something wrong, nobody is to blame. Goodness, perhaps we need better art.
Every Amish settlement has its own Bishop, who functionally has absolute doctrinal power over that settlement. The Bishop decides whether you're allowed a phone booth at the end of the lane or not.

"And yet… the golden rule of fashion is that fashion flows downward."

Until it hits an Amish man, and then it just bounces off. 'No thanks,' he says. And that's it. BTFO.

 

"Do you want your ideas to be the ideas of a billion people, taught in a million schools?"

Not particularly, no.
Well, particularly not in schools. Schools are Fascist. Socrates: don't charge money for dissemination. Succeeding in schools is failure in the world.

If they were wise and prudent, perhaps the billion people would want to be taught my ideas in some non-school form. Either way, that's between them and Gnon. If they choose prudently they won't die in horrific mind-shattering agony. What counts as 'prudent' isn't up to me, though. 

"Status is a pyramid. You want your ideas to start at the top"

You don't get to decide where you are on the pyramid. Either you're already there or you're already not. 

You get to the top of the Faustian pyramid by being a generally-top sort of person and being especially Faustian. Faustianism is bad, so being the top makes you arch-loser.

Roger Rabbit vs. Cars

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, apparently in passing, said the quiet part out loud. It tells a real piece of history, except the part where IRL Judge Doom won and got his freeway. Doom bought all the LA tramlines, trashed them, bought Toontown, trashed it, and then replaced it all with [[Freeway]] so everyone had to use cars. The black government blatantly bulldozed anyone who accidentally built anything good. (It's okay, Americans love it when DC does that.)

"I think that to big degree americans using only cars make public spaces unsafe. Since they cutted themselves from these spaces it became teritory of criminal individuals and hobos. I took walk in Hollywood and saw many "things" (in the morning),cant imagine late night..."
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/MikeJuliette39/status/1612756339796869121

"Those wet streets sure did cause rain"
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/CovfefeAnon/status/161275767520429670

So we have Roger, who told the truth except they claimed the losers won and the winners lost.

We have Mike, who correctly notes the original causal chain, except with Doom deleted from history. He confuses an effect for a first mover. Poltergeists. The plate threw itself. Just a free people being free! (Also that "spelling" wtf.)

We have Cov, who blames Doom's policies on the effects of the effects of Doom's policies. With Doom deleted from history, how else could it have happened? (Though yes, the effect of the effect reinforces the effect. Positive feedback loop. The best kind of tyranny.)

Stonetoss gets in on the action, propagating the myth that the only way to avoid loving ninjas is to pay GM their danegeld.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the people of America.
America's problem is that it's full of Americans.

But wait, there's more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg

This guy doesn't understand why Americans, who aren't allowed to punish criminals, might not want to meet anyone poorer than they are. He even uses a nice picture of [vibrancy].

Gee, why might a town need strict loitering laws? Nobody expects a vagrant to be an asshole. Truly comes out of nowhere. No, we all want to meet folk from "all walks of life" don't we?
Seem to have lost a -1 in that equation somewhere. Nobody wants to talk to anyone of lower social status if they don't have to. Especially if they're not getting gratitude or obedience from them. Goes triple when the only way you're allowed to escape crime and awful asshole neighbours is living somewhere too expensive for them to reach.

(As if you needed any further proof that Cheers is a shitty, shitty show that hates you and wants you to suffer. Wall-to-wall abusive relationships.)

IRL Judge Doom was General Motors, by the way. Note that a genuine capitalist company can't afford to buy tramlines just to sell them for scrap. They would go bankrupt, be unable to make cars to sell, and their competitors would eat their lunch - including a new tramline startup funded with the money GM spent to buy the tramlines. Even in 1899 GM was already "woke" capital, meaning in a Fascist public-private "partnership" with DC. I'm guessing the tramlines were forced to sell at well under 50% market price, or something isometric. Imagine they just said no...obviously that option was not on the table. "You didn't build that. Be glad you got paid at all, peasant."

Freeways don't even make money. Tax revenue negative. The towns they replaced made money.
Why couldn't the towns' mayors or whatever outbid GM's bribes? Answer: they could. However, DC is often motivated by sheer malice. The formula is consent of the governed, therefore the competition is to provoke as much dissent as you can get away with. 

If you offer an American mayor or senator a high bribe, it suggests you care deeply about the issue, and the chad thing is to make sure you get screwed. Perhaps this is why American officials can be bribed so cheaply?

P.S. The movie is dumb. The animation is extremely expensive and they got what they paid for, but the narrative and characters are on the level of finger-painting. 

By portraying real history as a cartoon fight, it associates real history with cartoonishness; not to be taken seriously. Doesn't need to be refuted, let alone confirmed. When the movie is over, forget all about it, prole. 

The movie is based on a book, and even on the first viewing I sensed there was more to the story that they were disguising or omitting. Feels unsatisfying. You can tell Roger isn't just some rabbit, he has history, but the movie doesn't care and finds the fact that you care suspiciously Un-American.

Videogames Aren't Toys, Not Supposed to be Fun

Not for playing.

In Mario 64 if you get all 120 stars you can find Yoshi. You can't ride Yoshi or anything silly like that, he gives you 99 lives, a totally meaningless gesture in a game which lets you save pretty much anywhere. This is, as one memorable wag used to repeatedly put it, a slap in the face. 

I figured out what I was expecting. I was expecting free usage of caps. Go into any stage with any cap, and no timer. Transform into vanish cap Mario and be invisible forever. Listen to the metal cap music on loop for as long as you want. (So, you know, how power-ups worked in every other game in the series before this.) You already have all the stars. It's not like you can gain an unfair advantage by doing this. 

It would just plain be fun.

But games aren't for playing.

At the time it was hard to work out what I was expecting because, frankly, I had worked it out. I was expecting disappointment. The game was foretold! In accordance with prophecy! The caps idea was buried almost before it was formed. Barely made the tiniest conscious ripple. However, I find it useful to contrast what should have happened with what actually happened, to help paint the outlines of what is actually happening and thus what is actually going wrong.

Bonus round: when you find Yoshi he jumps away with a truly epic jump, thus demonstrating that being able to ride him would have been extremely helpful...or it was a cutscene disrespecting its own world, "fuck videogames," as per usual. 

Exception: Magicka. Exception: Minecraft.

Why is Minecraft so overwhelmingly popular? Because there's practically no other game that's actually a toy, made for fun. All the other games are a list of chores with pretty sounds and lights attached to "success," where "success" is wholly defined by the game developer, with no input from the player. ("Interactive medium" lol.)

Minecraft is a true sandbox, with, like, actual sand. 

As with any sandbox it doesn't interest adults much because it's shallow. Even if you want to make a large pit, you can't, the sand only goes down so far. 

Why won't the player roleplay in your world? Because it's obviously not game night, you've given them a list of chores.
Sure at least in an Elder Scrolls game you can go and do chores that aren't on the list, and maybe if you haven't tried chores like this 10,000X before they're certainly better than real-life chores. The spellslinging classes have the prettiest lights. Not as pretty as Metroid Prime's lights, but you can see they really aspired.
They're still ultimately chores.

You don't play the game, you work the game. 

When "players" complain about World of Warcraft quests, they don't complain that they're literally a to-do list, they complain that the chores don't have fancy window-dressing. Culturally, the fetch ten rat pelts "quest" fits right in.
What if combat in your game was inherently enjoyable? Don't you realize "grinding" should be an engaging activity in an RPG? Imagine someone complaining that you had to throw balls at the hoop too many times in basketball. "I'm tired of taking pawns in chess. Can't you speed this up?" "This novel has too many scenes in it. Not to mention the words, my goodness."

They have to make them a Skinner box because the lever isn't a toy. Pressing it isn't fun (merely less work than other chores), the only rewarding thing about it is the reward. Of course players only care about getting loot so they can level up faster, or levelling up faster so they can get shinier loot. There's no actual "game" in your game, the point of a Skinner box is to press the lever harder and more often. No wonder Vampire Survivors, which tripled down on the levelling up and the flashing loot lights (and is cheap as balls) is so popular. 

If you're going to make your "game" a series of chores, at least make them challenging chores so the "players" can learn something. Make the reward the satisfaction of a job well done, of a tall mountain conquered, not the satisfaction of mommy patting you on the head and teacher giving you a gold star. 

 

I attribute this to general degeneracy. Democratic Man gonna Democrat. If you make games with good taste you offend the many, many, many "gamers" who have awful taste.
Imagine making a game where you plan to charge $500 because you plan to sell only to the smartest n%. Luxury gaming. And, because they have taste, you do in fact have to make the game nearly $500 good. Imagine how badly you would get ripped on social media.

Twitter Consolidation

After you seize the capital you have to consolidate your gains.
For many conquerors, this tends to be an object lesson on the power of symbolism: it's way more limited than you thought. Grasping the symbol of control and authority produces remarkably little control and authority for you, it merely takes it away from someone else. 

Elon Musk of course had a nice Prussian education and has thus never heard of this idea and most certainly isn't going to think it up on his own. "I'm in the CEO suite, why isn't Twitter entirely in my control?" So confusing!

My personal estimate is five months. If you violently seize Twitter as Musk did, it takes, assuming efficient effort, about five months to replace the old network with your own network. No new products. No new services. Just consolidation. 

Indeed Musk should have probably spent ~five weeks doing nothing. Just watch what's already there to see what it is. You could cut that down if you had run a broadcast-social firm before, but of course Musk hadn't run a publishing company of any kind.

Egalitarianism vs. Egalitarians Describing Egalitarianism

Wikipedia has the tell in the first sentence. 

"Egalitarianism [...] is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds from the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people."

For all people.

"What if I don't like social equality and don't want it? What if I have different priorities?"

"Too bad. P.S. Fuck you." 

If you listen, folk will tell you who they are.

The Egalitarian isn't the slightest bit interested in what you want. They're self-absorbed. 

Nobody asked if the slaves wanted to be freed. Maybe most of them would have said yes, but we'll never know, because nobody asked. They didn't ask, because they didn't care. Result: they slaves were not freed. Their slavery merely became more dishonourable via obfuscation. E.g. a sharecropper was a cotton-picking slave job with extra steps. 

You can't free a slave anyway, as per Aristotle. Slave is a phenotype, not a legal class. Freeing a slave makes as much sense as trying to achieve flight by legalizing the growing of wings. "Just outlaw gravity bro." "Naw man Imma do a compulsory psychic powers law."

Obvious that Internet = Lord of the Flies?

Usenet had a culture but it was swamped and destroyed by CIA's Eternal September, the flood of unsocialized atoms. 

Nobody on the internet has etiquette (or honour or respect or etc) and this either drives off anyone who wants a civilized conversation or actively de-socializes the previously socialized. Everyone on the internet is a troll and this is the fundamental problem with all internet social spaces. The social network protocol for the internet is [go fuck yourself]. Anyone attempting to re-start a society is violently swarmed by feral brats.

Is this obvious? Am I explaining that the sun rises in the morning?

Bayesianism as Responsibility Laundering

"I'm prepared to accept that the apparent strong positive correlation between Bayesianism and extreme mental illness is just an artifact -- but it's one hell of an impressive artifact."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/Outsideness/status/1629169972659343366

Rain apparently strongly positively correlated with wet streets. Luckily here we're not obsessed with the reassuringly autistic positivism of pure statistical correlation.

Being insane causes thinking Eliezer Yudkowsky is worth listening to.

Listening to Yud makes you think you're a Bayesian. 

Hence it is very likely that if you call yourself a Bayesian or self-identify by using Bayes' rule all the time, you are insane. Selection effect.

Unless you independently came up with calling yourself a Bayesian, you are in fact a Yudkowskian but that sounded too proud (inEgalitarian!) so it's laundered as [Bayesianism]. You're just following A Procedure, not A Man, right?

"Hey...the sequences didn't work."

"Should...should we try something else?"

"Nah."

"Should....should we try anything at all?"

"That would be wrong. And very silly." 

 

In practice it's quite difficult to assess both priors and posteriors. Why, Yudkowsky says you screwed up all the time. With math and everything! And, like, Yudkowsky has already done all that pesky math, there's no reason for you to duplicate his effort, now is there? Just ask him what to think, you'll be fine. A foolproof plan.

Naturally, Satanists claim that Satan is the one who calls a spade a spade the most.
And then everyone is shocked when fanatical Satanists are dysfunctional. It's so very surprising. They lied so smoothly! How could anyone have seen this coming?
Don't trust: replicate.

Human Social Status is Inherently Violation

Background: dominance vs. prestige. Fatal problem: both are zero-sum at best. 

Dominance is clearly negative-sum. Only one can be master, and the slave is induced to remain a slave via violence, not compensation.

Prestige at first glance looks more promising. It is gained by flaunting dunamis and the resources the prestigious accrue are offered voluntarily. However, the social group has to remember the prestige of the prestigious, meaning prestige piggybacks off attention, which is sharply limited. To gain prestige you must wrest prestige away from the existing prestigious individual, who is necessarily someone else in your own social group.

All forms of human social status are predicated upon violence against the ingroup. Inherently traitorous. The more social status you have, the more traitorous you must have been. Humans have to hide status plays because otherwise you're openly betraying your in-group.

The point of gaining dominance is to be a parasite. The point of gaining prestige is to be a parasite.
The local dominator wrests resources away from the rest of the group via violence.
If prestige didn't result in more gifts incoming than effort outgoing, nobody would want prestige. Ironically, it's double-treachery, as the gift-giver is attempting to seize some of your prestige for themselves. "The local star paid attention to me!" 

As such is it very unsurprising that human social groups reliably self-destruct. They naturally reward the most parasitic parasite until that parasite betrays the group so badly that the host dies.

 

How can such socially harmful behaviour become genetically universal in a social species? Simple: the [short-term] in immoral behaviour can be quite long in terms of reproductive generations. 

With 150-man bands on the savannah, this behaviour has no practical limits. The traitorous parasitism of the big man merely motivates the band to predate on the next band over to obtain resources to satisfy the black-hole sarlacc pit of their own so-called leader. When the band runs out of prey and starts suicidally weakening, it will merely be eaten by the next upstart band and the species can continue eternally like this. 

The upstart traitor-kings merely have to restrain their urges long enough to batter someone into being a tributary. Failed attempts perpetuate the system by becoming tributaries themselves. At no point will all the bands suicide at the same time. 

Yes, a band could eschew social status for a cooperative model and as a result casually roll over the entire savannah, but that first hurdle is far too high.
Firstmost obviously, you're trading the short term for the long term, and in the short term the next band over will (desperately) wipe you out while you're fumbling with a prototype of the new system. It would have to arise not just once or twice, but many times, before it could get lucky. Second, the only person with the capacity to declare the end of social status is someone who already won the social status system. The one who suffers from this mistake isn't him, it's his grandchildren and his friend's grandchildren. He's already dead by then, what would he care? Third, this bigman would have to be both of Herculean stature and Herculean mental stature. Intelligent enough to see a thousand years into the future, and powerful enough to bully everyone into giving up bullying, which they would desperately resist. Fourth, it bears repeating: this bigman would have to bully everyone into giving up bullying. The little men are not going to learn to stop bullying from this interaction. Every time he goes full Sulla and  himself gives up bullying, they're not going to wait and see and learn, they're going to think he's become weak and instantly force him to bully them again.

Multiply the odds of those things all happening together: yeah, no wonder that didn't happen.

 

As governments expand their herds to sizes above 150, the cancerous-growth / cancerous-death process merely happens at different timescales.

Or not: at savannah size it can be eugenic. At Empire size, it is wildly dysgenic. 

The Empire allows the Emperor to have unimaginably huge social status, meaning unimaginable capacity for treachery. The more Imperial, the more the Imperator betrays the Empire he allegedly leads. The faster and more efficiently the host is bled dry. 

Background: everyone is trying to be an Empire. Only the most competent succeed.

Empires gather de jure slaves and engulf conquered peoples. In other words, they aggressively dilute the very genetic stock that was capable of forming an Empire in the first place. The Imperator bleeds his most loyal citizens first, because they resist the least. The Imperial core goes dry first. The more like the Emperor you are, the more efficiently you get replaced by lower-quality livestock.

Everyone is trying to be an Empire, and by doing so, they wipe themselves out, bequeathing their lands to their former slaves and the former raiding vandals they subjugated. Gnon hates Empire.

If these dregs were not also parasitism-positive groups trying to form an Empire, this would be an improvement. They are, so [dregs] is the correct term. Whenever a human subspecies starts developing the virtue that might let it escape the social-status trap, it forms an Empire, which destroys the virtue which allowed the Empire. 

P.S. The violence of social status is why eugenics programs are inherently dysgenic. Regardless of context, the "eugenic" candidates are high-status candidates. Approving a low-status candidate would lower the approval committee's status; not happening. A black government intentional-eugenics program enhances treachery and parasitism before it enhances any other trait, positive or negative. 

 

Conclusion: the Christians are basically correct when they claim the factory-settings human is an evil motherfucker.