Christian Simulacra Postscript: Podvig and Flesh

Pretty sure this error needs a word. No idea what to call it though. This is a second example of the same fundamental error I tried to point at with my last post.

"He explains that the spirit hates sin, while the flesh dwells in it."

In short, the flesh is made of physics, and physics is sacred.

Physics was made by the creator. Physics is perfectly ordered. Physics has no free will and cannot sin. It is entirely impossible that the flesh per se is anything but sacred.

Further, considered in a generalized sense, the flesh is the manifestation. Without a manifestation, you cannot interact with anything. Without some form of body, being holy is as impossible as being unholy.

The Christian makes this error again when they claim thoughts can sin.

Certainly, some urges arise from the flesh which, if followed, are sin. But it is wrong to hold someone responsible for things they cannot control. The weather, the actions of their parents, and certain thoughts all belong in the same category, and there's no point in beating yourself up over it, because no choice you make can affect their existence or properties.

Indeed were I to try to take responsibility upstream of where it actually is, I would find myself not taking responsibility at the correct place, and thus failing to take physical control.

"I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.... for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want."

I dunno, maybe you're different. I have a finite amount of energy for controlling myself. If I exhaust myself trying to control my lustful appreciation of the opposite sex, then I will have no energy left over to stop myself from allowing them to flirt with me.

If I misidentify the locus of control, I may also decide I've failed when I haven't. If I attempt to control the lustful thoughts, I will fail. I will likely assume the lustful actions, which follow from them, I've already attempted to control, but failed to. (Admittedly the reverse can also occur - some actions become inevitable due to previous actions, and even if my odds of controlling the previous actions are slight, it's better than trying to control the subsequent ones.)

"All of these things oppose the body, and as we fulfill these ascetical practices, we do indeed find that they help us draw nearer to our Creator and Savior.   

[...]

 “all the saints accept the only true path to virtue to be pain and hard work... lightness and ease are a sign of a false path. Anyone who is not struggling, not in podvig, is in prelest”"

Sic et non.
Opposing the body for the sake of opposing the body is rank foolishness. It weakens you. Your courage and fortitude decrease, meaning you will be less able to perform a difficult action is prudence demands you do so.
Duh, you want doing the right thing to be easy, not hard.
It is however true that the path towards making-the-right-thing-easy is itself not easy. Game theory applies - if it is easy, you can set your sights higher and do an even more right thing, with some additional effort.

I believe a Christian should say God creates the body as he creates physics, as he creates all living things. To desecrate it is not holiness, no matter how difficult it might be, no matter how much it may signal some other virtue.

It's true the body gives you trials. Why that is...well, I certainly can't say. The competing theories seem reasonable. To make the body low status, to shun it, only closes you off to an aspect of Logos, namely, the things your body does, the things your body is telling you.



I'm also concerned this attitude may come from, lead to, or reinforce nerdish anti-jockism. When you see a healthy hobbit glorifying in their mighty body, are you happy for them or do you see a source of sin? It clearly can't be sin to maximize your God-given talents. Especially, as science as now shown, since a powerful body makes your mind more powerful. To simplify a little, as long as his glory is not "And therefore I"m holier than you," then his glory leads him closer to Logos, not farther away.

Your body is your house, in exactly the same way your house is your house. The only difference is your house can't tell you directly when your house is in order. Your body, by contrast, tells you in great detail how ordered it is. If you know enough to listen.

Common Christian Error: Low-Status Simulacra & Evidence Appreciation

There's a philosophy-adjacent part of Christianity, where they identify god as Logos, meaning the true word or true speaking. Philosophy can hardly disagree with putting the true word in the highest possible place.

The problem is that simulacra are part of Logos.
(via)

"The closed media environments of the Mystical Body of anti-Christ, on the other hand, simulate the world, replacing the sacred with the simulacral and the incorporeal with the merely virtual."

While there's indeed an error very close to here, rightscholarship is only repeating it. This error is fatal - it makes it impossible to grasp Logos as it truly is. In the short term there are no symptoms, but the deeper the thinker tries to push their understanding, the more the cancer will spread.

Virtual per se don't real. Electronic images are themselves real things. 'Virtual' things are incorporated by normal physical processes. Simulacra are aspects of cosmos, of order, of truth. Even outright lies are, in and of themselves, sacred. (Though admittedly I'm not fully comfortable with calling a non-deception a 'lie,' I'm not sure what else to call it. Novels are a more fitting example but introduce complications.)

A doll is itself a real, physical object. It is true that it appears similar to a human. It is also true that it is made of clay. A 'virtual' world is a real image that really appears similar to a physical landscape, that reminds us so strongly of real or possible events that it can communicate a story.

"I flew to the mall today." It is true that I've stated such. There are further truths in the details - the portrayal has aerial aspects. To transmit it to you I must submit to the laws of physics.

The error in virtual-ness only appears in a relative, inside sense - inside the mind. The lie can only be harmful if you believe it. If you take the appearance relation as an identity relation.

Which is exactly what Christians do when they take the appearance of virtuality as actual virtuality. It is only in the lost Christian's mind that a world is 'simulated.' In reality, there are only images, only patterns of light or sound, the similar appearance of a world, fully embedded in, fully consistent with, and fully dependent on physics, on cosmos.

More specifically, the error is taking evidence as being more convincing than is warranted. The primary sinner when a lie is believed is the gullible 'victim.' If I told you about my mall flight absent a disclaimer, you still shouldn't believe me, because you could and should have known ahead of time that this class of utterances is unreliable. By demonstration, the mark's epistemology is flawed. The liar merely exploits the pre-existing sin. The difference between "I have seen a virtual world," and "I have seen an image which appeared to be a world," is the difference between sin and virtue.

Hopefully one of the ways I've said it has made it clear. I will not assume so, here's another: appreciate the difference between, "Alrenous flew to the mall today," and "I heard Alrenous say they flew to the mall today."

Using the latter, not the former, is critical to appreciating the world as it actually is.

That said it is possible to use 'virtual' to mean 'the appearance of, exactly as above. However, when you do, you realize 'virtual' and 'incorporeal' are not opposites, and this realization is obvious in the use of prose.



Instead of saying nothing is virtual, one can also say everything is virtual. I do not see a rock. I see the appearance of a rock, and infer the existence of the rock. I do not know that I did not fly today - I know I cannot remember being airborne at any point. Splitting evidence and inference is vital. With this split, it becomes automatic to make one's beliefs about the external world provisional. I believe a rock is there not 'because it's true' but because of that inference. Or rather, what I believe is now that I inferred a rock is there, not that a rock truly is there. Due to this shift, I cannot be mistaken.

Let me repeat those key words: cannot be mistaken. I have stopped holding beliefs that are falliable. Nonetheless, I am able to function normally. Though certainly I change my inferences from time to time.

I cannot be mistaken about what I think I've seen, by law of identity. I cannot be mistaken about what I think I've inferred, by same. I cannot be mistaken about what I think the outcome of my reaction was. And that's good enough.

I do drop all the qualifiers normally. They're cumbersome. However, it is vital to remember all the qualifiers in thought at all times. I can live as normal - make and drink delicious tea. Or rather, I can create the appearance of making tea, and I predict you would agree you have also witnessed this appearance. You might even enjoy a cup yourself, or rather, I might witness the appearance of you enjoying a cup.

Left/Right Really is Communist/Capitalist

A lot of the time, they were right the first time. Such as this time.
Notably, this means I was wrong, as I thought left/right was a myth proggies spread.

I read Anonymous Conservative's book via Molyneux video.

After removing what didn't hang together, what was left was a simple responsible/irresponsible diametric. However, left/right have to be opposites - the policies of one side must inherently harm the other side. So what part of politics maps to responsible/irresponsible and is inherently opposed? Communal responsibility vs. individual responsibility. So, communism and capitalism.

That said, leftists and rightists are themselves often wrong. For example, as per my last post, slavery and immigration are basically the same. (Which is one reason Mexican immigrants keep having to work for slave wages.) Yet, the polarities each endorse one but not the other. The real question is whether the slaves are owned by individuals or by 'society' or 'the state.' (Moldbug quote on request.)
Also, there is a lot of proggie mythmaking around anyway. Obviously they want to say all proggie things are left, and all non-proggie things are right. They're not, e.g. scholarly performance is still mainly individual.

This means left isn't inherently entropic, despite the assertions of certain alt-right Sophists. Admittedly there's a strong bias in that direction, but collective responsibility isn't always a bad idea. Otherwise ant hills would not exist.

Slavery Is Anethitropic Without Sterilization

Gnon approves of colonialism and condemns immigration. Slavery is a kind of immigration.

In immigration, an inferior society exports its components to a superior society. This will dilute the superior qualities of the superior society, and often decrease Malthusian pressure on the inferior society, delaying its eventual failure.

In colonialism, a superior society replaces an inferior society, hastening its failure and spreading the successful institutions of the superior society. A caveat: one should be careful to colonize in a way consonant with property rights.

Slaves are taken from an inferior society to a superior one. At best, components of the inferior society are preserved contingent on the superior society's continued existence. At worst, the slaves eventually join the gene pool. Athens, thy fool.

Taking sterilized slaves is therefore fine. There's a natural expiry.

Similarly, while there's nothing contrary to property rights in selling one's self into slavery, a wise society may none the less fail to insure such a trade, as it prolongs the inevitable failure. Better the would-be slave starves or kills themselves.

What Is the Status System?

There is a dominant society-wide status system. Its purpose is to reward those who uphold X, and punish those who oppose X.

What is X? Specifically, what is the highest-status description of X?

Some Applied Prudence/Property Morality

Roughly the rule is cooperate with cooperators.
For some years I've been discovering that there's no moral reason to treat defectors gently. Be as harsh as convenient.

http://blog.jim.com/war/how-to-genocide-inferior-kinds-in-a-properly-christian-manner/

"Since the protagonist of the story was from Jerusalem, the levite and the priest were geographically his neighbors, but, being no good, did not deserve to be treated as neighbors. The Samaritan was not geographically his neighbor, but did deserve to be treated as a neighbor."

Neighbours = cooperators.

However, there's rarely any reason to assume outsiders will cooperate. Unless you've agreed to be nice to them, the opportunity cost of belligerence is cooperating with them against a third party. Equivalently, them cooperating against you with a third party. Frequently these considerations are negligible.

The only reason for the West not to waltz into the middle east and take all the stuff is that other Westerners would get mad at the adventurers. Having their marginal cooperation is valuable, and their defection is sufficiently dangerous.

"Had he done so, and obtained the land in that fashion, then this would have created the dangerous precedent that some stronger party could take the land from him, undermining the high trust equilibrium that made the great achievements of his society, of which he was so proud,"

Jim has this backward. Provocation and needling are wrong, but simply declaring war out of greed is fine. Rather than setting a 'might makes right' precedent, it sets a 'might used on outsiders' precedent.

Common Law does not recognize provocation as valid. If they still have stuff you want, try trading for it. I suspect it will be cheaper than war, even on Indians and Muslims. If nothing else, it forestalls violence against soft targets in the open. Though, better idea: don't leave soft targets in the open. Apply security instead.

Provocation sets the precedent that non-cooperation shall be considered cooperation. "Shams may cease," etc. Much the way Foggy Bottom 'cooperates' with Putin.

Of course if they try to take your stuff via war anyway, it is prudent to destroy them. Lay waste and forget about the problem, minimizing mental transaction costs.

"The Dark Enlightenment emphasizes survival as a virtue, as indeed the root of all virtues."

DE per se can't believe things which not all adherents believe. It should be clear by inspection that survival must be a means, not an end. Infinite recursion is a trap. The root virtue must be an end, not a means.

I'm not sure if Jim intends it that way, but can be read as such and is more likely to decay on its own than improve.

All virtues spring from some transcendent goal.
Compare:
All virtues spring from trying to survive.

The second is compatible with the original phrasing, but incorrect and degenerate. However, it is true that most values are best served by remaining alive and throwing energy at them, both individually and collectively.

"Altruism is seldom the game theoretic solution."

If you're sufficiently smart, 'altrusim' taken to mean cooperation is always the solution. 'Altruism' taken to mean giving stuff away for free is never a good idea; voluntary parasitism is still wasteful.

"High trust equilibria are rare and hard to maintain."

...for stupid populations. Achieving cooperation is easy. Offer a risk you can afford to eat. Ask them to reciprocate. If it works, use the proceeds to afford a bigger risk. Recurse. If they don't, kill them brutally. Or whatever happens to be convenient. Note Tit for Two Tats; noise makes limited forgiveness efficient. Not good to, by mistake, punish someone who tried to cooperate.

"Evil exists, so either God does not will the good, or he is not able, or he is messing with us on purpose. (Testing our resolve, making us suffer so we grow more resilient."

Point of order, this maps to 'not able.' Specifically, it's the claim God is unable to make us resilient, only Satan can do that.

"all thinking beings are fundamentally the same"

For kicks, modus tollens. Find someone who's not the same: they must be unthinking. Angels be racist, yo.

China Bred out IQ's Handmaidens

IQ 210 (!) and goes full Dilbert: https://t.co/3j51DWospX …

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) November 29, 2015

Twitter obviously not sufficient.

From what I can tell, the Landian timeline: 210 IQ is born, there's no social reward for going Musk, nobody enslaves him to force him to go Musk, and so he's now a middle manager or some equivalent.

What actually happened is a smart sheep is still a sheep. Majority of Asians use their high IQ to conform ever more brilliantly. His original blind conformation didn't work, so he modified it slightly. That worked, so he stopped thinking. If he is born with no thymos, no amount of IQ will cause him to develop thymos.

If you tried to bind him, he would ju-jitsu the bindings against you, and then go back to middle management. Indeed this is more or less what happened: society tried to push him into a preconceived 'prodigy' lifestyle (that wouldn't work for anyone, because society is stupid) and he simply decided to prevent them from succeeding, and then the issue was decided.

The whole point of innovation-class IQs is society can't know what they should be doing. Incentives, the carrot version of bindings, can't work either. Nobody rewards Musk but Musk.
1. Genius wants to play by the rules. Playing by the rules is not innovation. Fail.
2. Genius doesn't want to play by the rules. Genius hacks your incentive system to serve him instead of you. How are you going to stop him? Fail.

A 210 IQ European is typically dominated by curiosity and boredom. They are difficult to satisfy, even if they use their gifts solely to try to work it out. It's clear even from this short article these two things are absent from Kim Ung-Yong. He's not a European.

China's long-term order has bred out the ability to innovate. Every improvement is a change, and to the powers that be, every change is a challenge.


Regarding the 'bad parenting' angle, while true, it is not explanatory. Put simply: does a content middle manager sound like a rebel to you? But wait, what if it's his secret identity...nope, he's bitter about his newspaper coverage. He still accepts the society as valid. He doesn't even recognize the fundamentally criminal nature of journalism. It would be impossible for a European of that intelligence to be that ignorant. But, Kim Ung-Yong isn't curious about anything he's not told to be curious about, so he doesn't know anything.

I suppose, alternatively, he does know but considers upholding the noble lie to be unambiguously better. Again, making it impossible for him to be anything but an exceptionally efficient drone.

Raise a smart European like that and best case scenario they'll turn their endless energy into self-destruction. Else it will be used for other-destruction. Apparently Asians are, at least sometimes, so docile that it doesn't matter.

The problem in the West is the fact that America has spread a system for ruthlessly suppressing the smart. Destruction is much easier than creation. The pitchfork mob can't make the genius create, but it sure can give him head trauma. By trial and error, they have achieved ridiculous rates of converting geniuses to self-destruction to contain them. Industrially efficient. There's even a failsafe: a school specifically for 160+, for the purposes of properly socializing the growing minds, would be basically 100% male. It would be shut down by 'sexism' maybe a two weeks after the first time it appeared in a mass medium.


Kim Ung-Yong is the empirical proof that the orthogonality thesis is true. Though, with caveats. The goals need to be sufficiently unchallenging that higher IQ gives only marginal returns. If Ung-Yong's IQ was 420, he would be happier, but still a middle manager, so only slightly happier. As a result, no selection pressure in favour of IQ and there's still social pressure against it due to the greater difficulty of making friends. The thesis is only true of isolated intelligences - not of populations of high intelligence, as the ambitious intelligence will dominate the rest and hand out Darwin awards.

So, in a sense, Land's disgust with the incentive structures is true, but it was far too late to do anything about it by the time Ung-Yong was born. China's geniuses are suppressed at the genetic level - they don't need social suppression like they do in America.

Jacking the Gulls

It's a comment by me.
Vox has a longstanding policy of censoring anyone smarter than he is.
Roughly, I said,

The price of overregulation, you mean. Shockingly, when something like half a firm's cost per employee is regulatory overhead, they can't compete with non-nanny-state workers. Similarly, if USG jacked oil taxes to 100% while still allowing in foreign oil, domestic oil production would go down. A bit. 

Regulation is growing faster than the market can adapt. Tariffs would actually make it worse. These firms are becoming unprofitable; the jobs are going away regardless. The only question is whether Americans, with their new, lower wages, will still be able to afford the products at all.

To fix this means hunting down the responsible party and neutralizing them. Problem: Original Sin is to blame.

If USG jacked taxes on domestic oil to 100%, the oil lobby would scream, and they would reverse course in under a week. Regular labour is getting jacked because they don't have an interest group. Dumbasses.

If USG rammed the oil tax through anyway, then Americans would use foreign oil at slightly higher-than-present prices. If USG applied an equalizing tariff, then nobody would be able to afford to drive to work anymore; cars per se would go out of style. Equalizing tariffs on labour would have a similar effect, albeit less drastic. Sound familiar? Maybe you've heard it called 'stagnation'?

But wait, if labour did have an interest group, they would agitate for protectionism. The metaphorical car would go out of style. Voters are just too stupid to protect themselves. Notably elites would just cheat and route around the protectionism, so voters would only be screwing themselves.



A funny thing about SJW is their claims of wide-scale permanent victimhood are true, but they've misidentified the victims and the perpetrators. The victims are basically everyone with IQs lower than 125, and the perpetrators are the obvious parasite class, e.g. SJWs.

SJWs will never admit a victim can stop being a victim. This is also true. Voters can't protect themselves and nobody is genuinely interested in protecting them. The question, assuming your IQ is high enough above 125, is whether you farm them or your enemies farm them.

Don't like it? Tough. Gnon laughs.