Complaining about Complaining 2

When life throws women a curveball, complaining is a valid strategy. "You can't expect me to hit a curveball! That's unreasonable!" This will probably work for her. "Poor girl. You're right. We'll make some grownup handle it. Not us, of course. Someone else."

When life throws men a curveball, complaining is not a valid strategy. What, you want your mommy to hit the ball for you? You are the grownup. Buck stops here. Outside games and gardens, "reasonable" has no meaning. If Reality's curveball is too curvy, then you die, and that's all there is to it. If you can't hit it, then get out of the way so you're not beaned.

It's important to mention these things, because under feminine Fascism you're constantly being told that masculinity is toxic and you should be a woman instead, and all the "men" you see around you will typically obey this command. The Regime doesn't like it when its livestock acts like adult humans. If they start thinking like grownups they might start thinking they don't need the government, and we can't have that, now can we?

Counterpoint: it's particularly fine for children to complain. They're almost always locked inside a garden. The least the gardener can do is make the garden fair.

Dilemma of No Aristocratic Should

The noble does not concern himself with "shoulds" or "oughts," only with can and can't. If you can do what you want, then do it; what do you have to complain about? If you can't, then give up and quit complaining, because complaining isn't going to magically make the impossible into the possible. Either way, whining is slave behaviour.

Trying to train myself to follow this principle more reliably.

Problem: doing so more or less evaporates my blog. Have little to write that isn't about how modern governance is fucked up and you shouldn't do it that way. E.g. complaining that peasants whine too much is not an effective tactic for making then whine less. For some reason.

P.S.

Complaining is mainly about social games. About asserting dominance because you could have done it better. This post was inspired by someone complaining about video games; but look, either you can win the fight and it's fine, or you can't and it's time to stop playing. Are you here for video games or social games? Did you want to play for fun or did you want to assert dominance over the development studio?

Hanging around peasants can make you habitually play social games; especially playing them ineffectually like peasants do. (We were all forced to hang around peasants in school. Also on Twitter etc.) Best to scratch that habit. Either play the social game like you mean it (full Machiavellianism) or play the video game.  

When you're playing a social game (esp. ineffectually) you're not playing the video game (or whatever else) like you mean it. You're distracted. As is hardly unusual for peasant habits, it sabotages both activities. Sure we can argue about whether you have a "right" to have your video games a certain way, or if developers are "obligated" to have done it differently than they did. I mean, if you're bored, I suppose. However, that already didn't happen. If there's something in-game to counter the problem, use it. If there isn't, then evaluate whether the game is still fun. If it is, be grateful. If it isn't, stop playing.

None of this (should be) rocket surgery, but apparently it's well beyond peasant capacities. Like, quit complaining? Just fix it? No, these are genius-tier choices, apparently. If you can do this you're practically a god, at least compared to a standard 100 IQ. 

I would like to think there's someone even smarter than me such that they don't find it surprising that such capacities have such a high DC score.

P.P.S.
Heh. "DC six." Bedding this "woman" - I use the term loosely - is not exactly a heroic feat.
Hat tip mori.

Dumbass Peasantry Guarantees Bad Governance

If you see the peasantry complaining about the quality of their leadership, is it because their leadership is bad? Typically, it is not. It is because they're upset they're not the leader. (Everyone can be the leader, right? At the same time, even? That's why democracy works and is a good idea.) Roughly 98% of the time, it's due to resenting their lot in life, and 0% of the time it's because they could do better. 

This creates a rather perverse incentive. If the lead are going to complain about the leaders regardless, what incentive do the leaders have to lead well? If you're gonna do the time, might as well do the crime. 

Indeed the incentive is even more perverse. Peasants will complain even harder about a competent, effective leader. I think it makes them feel even more inferior by comparison. It is thus easier to band together an anti-leader mob if the leader is especially useful. Libtards hated Trump because he was more presidential, not because he was less.
"If he can do that, what excuse do I have?"
"Well... I think your mutant, tainted genome is a decent excuse, personally."
*incoherent monkey noises*
"Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Glad you understand. It's not like you had the option of having good genes but turned them down. It's not your fault."
(For some reason they get more upset rather than less. How curious.)

Overall, peasants demand bad leadership. There is no demand for good leadership. As a result, there is no supply of good leadership, unless you supply it yourself. 

Although certainly the lord shortage even further guarantees this... it is not some weird injustice or unfortunate accident that good leadership is basically absent. Human society actively selects against good leaders at all times and in all places, except possibly the savannah where there's a group selection pressure which eliminates the tribes of the worst leaders.

Example of Dumbass Peasantry: Shrinkflation

"Instead of raising the price of bread my local grocery store is just now selling a half a loaf of sourdough and charging the same price that used to get you a full loaf"
@GraduatedBen

They do it because peasants are dumb enough to fall for it. Or, worse, they detect it and then submit to it. Either way, it means you're spending more on packaging than you were before because you have the misfortune to be connected to the mass market. Why not make inflation worse when you can make it worse, right guys?

Presumably there are stores that cater to non-dumbasses, which honourably present inflation as inflation, but unfortunately I don't know much about them. On the plus side I buy mainly produce which isn't affected by this. E.g. meat is sold by the pound regardless & regardless. 

The problem is that a democratic or egalitarian or nurture-fundamentalist regime lets the peasants poison nearly the entire retail economy with their dumbassery, and it takes enormous amounts of money to escape the cesspool. Not to mention etiquette, ethics, etc etc. It all has to either cater to crippled peasant cognition, or is about exploiting crippled peasant cognition. 

For shrinkflation in particular, the peasant gets stuck on a "fair" price, because using real money instead of banknotes, prices more or less remain stable. For centuries there was indeed a stable "fair" price for most goods. Quite possibly before agriculture there were millennia of stable prices.
If you pull the price up they go bananas. Full chimpout. You can make things smaller and they'll doubt themselves, though. They don't fixate on weights and measures, aside from prices.* Precise scales didn't exist on the savannah. Do you smell an exploit? Creators sure do. 

*(Some peasants keep receipts, but none of them keep records of weights and stuff, so...)

 

99.9% of marketing is about tricking peasants by exploiting their lack of education and self-control. If you actually need a product you will buy it even if it isn't marketed. The ads just need to say, "You can buy it here," so you can find a supplier. Non-useless products hardly need ads at all, which reveals that only useless products need ads. Goodhart's law also applies. Epistemically, an advertisement is prima facie evidence that you should not buy a product. E.g. I remember seeing many Alienware ads, which makes me believe they are overpriced or downright shoddy machines. I'm confident enough that I haven't bothered to check. Peasants, of course, can only dream of building their own machine or otherwise running around the end of this phenomenon. 

I almost said milk ads were an exception, but I remembered in time that milk is basically very expensive water. It has a trace of residual cream in it; buy cream instead. Demand is low so the price is low. See also: regular (non-lean) beef. Thanks, food pyramid. Who wants the peasants bidding up my food? I sure don't. (Real AAA/prime lords, of course, have so much money it doesn't matter, which raises the question of why they're driving down my food prices for me. I'm just lucky I guess.)

Realize almost all modern wealth is based on capital investment. Either in machines or R&D, which make labour more productive. Imagine all the money spent on useless trinkets and signalling was instead spent on more R&D. Imagine a HOA except advertising is banned instead of not putting out your garbage just so. Or at least imagine it spent on patronizing worthwhile artists instead of on patronizing "art" that your nine-year-old could produce by fiddling with a random drawing program for an afternoon. 

P.S. My city has a prominent anticommunism memorial, but ironically it was obviously designed by a communist and looks like shit. You would think it's a bit of random scrap if it didn't have an inscription.

P.P.S. Milk is in fact adulterated expensive water. Some folks are sensitive to the adulterations, so it triggers allergies and carries ~no nutrients. More precisely, the thing called "milk" in the grocery store isn't milk at all, but instead some bizarre industrial by-product of milk "processing," but still has the historical cachet of milk because the peasants really are that slow.

Government Capable, But Unwilling

"The fact that the biggest criminal fine in US history is < 2.3 billion, when companies are worth trillions (Apple market cap is 2.3T), should tell you a lot about the actual regulatory power of the government against big players."
@Moritheil

This is graft.

The actual story runs something like this: in the back room players agree on a bribe in return for whatever service, and the judge is subsequently informed that they need to rule guilty.

Perhaps they get a little clever and fudge the evidence instead of informing the judge, but either way the trial is rigged. 

The money is then funneled to the agreed-upon recipients, typically by manipulating procedural outcomes. It's very easy to guarantee because the recipients and system massages are planned beforehand. 

Some of these fines are routine. (Probably not this one.) Essentially they're the firm paying off the regulator for not writing any genuinely restrictive rules. The government can most certainly shut down these players, but where would they get their bribes if they shut down all the billionaires? 

Perhaps this one in particular is the payment for approving Pfizer's vaccine. If the regulator ran out of graft sources, they would promote vitamin D instead. You can tell because they're not drooling morons who can't even tie their own shoes. Vitamin D is not only effective against one coronavirus variant, but all viruses, and bacteria, and even body odour, being as body odour is largely bacterial. The side effect is (largely) better health, rather than shakes and aches and occasional death. However, vital amine delta is a cheap commodity, and Pfizer can't make billions off selling a few extra doses, and thus can't/won't bribe a regulator to promote it. 

On the plus side this means the peasants are made even more sickly, and aristocrats, who don't need to be told how to manage their own health, look even better by comparison. Although less able to breed due to the disease, peasants still breed too much, but in the long term that's a problem that fixes itself.

Regressivism is the assertion that industrial society is rich enough to afford stone-age sociology.

"Absolutely life-changing when I realized that the poor Yoruba, the poor in Yemen, the poor in rural India, etc. all had common suspicions of poisoning, witchcraft, and "stealing luck" aimed at the successful. 

That "limited blessing" #mindset defines poverty."
@Moritheil

A theocracy of envy.

A recent Stonetoss is about the same. Naturally the sickly leftist voter envies the healthy, who are, by the leftist spite, driven to voting right even if they weren't that way naturally. However, it's just a bit too clear they're anti-health if they come right out and call lifting a right-wing dog-whistle. Also it's true, and as per usual they react to truth like vampires to garlic.

 

P.S. Instead of making the sign of the cross, you can drive off leftists by chanting "0 = 0!" and suchlike. 

"Men differ from women!"
"Noooo, not that, anything but that!"
"It's okay to be white!"
*melts like the wicked witch*

Finest Pro-American Declares America Moribund

Let's talk about set 4.
Set 4 is the meta set, it is about placing your other sets in juxtaposition, to find out what you yourself really believe; a task far less trivial than commonly appreciated. 

Prediction 1:

"This process [...] will require not just the powers of a general defending against an enemy invasion, but the powers of the enemy general." 

Revenge is Sour: if you can kill someone, there is no need to. The obverse: to get certain things done, there is a need to be able to kill anyone you want. In other words, to have proper military capacity. Arbitrary ability to declare and wage war. Even down to the individual, because they will certainly stonewall you, up to but not including trying to kill you back.

Prediction 2:

"Americans [are] completely harmless, apathetic and atomized" Prussian school is a hell of a drug. 

When we put these predictions next to each other, we find a problem. Generals aren't harmless; Americans are harmless. The enemy general with the capacity to reform the system cannot be American. The powers are not like an enemy general, the wielder must literally be a foreign invading general.

He cannot be a foreign invading general. As far as he knows, American nuclear weapons still work. Anyone who credibly declares war will be assassinated with solar hellfire. (Although the term "assassination" implies a certain surgical neatness which tritium ICBMs do not even attempt.) Knowing this, no foreigner will declare war, being as no drooling retard can gain the necessary authority to do so.

The Regime is dead. Nothing can or even seriously wants to fix this. 

P.S.
The Regime is dead. As a zombie, it shambles on. As a corpse, it stinks sometimes. A buildup of necrotic gasses ruptures a boil, and this postmortem fart presents itself as "defending" the Regime.
Broke: refute the stench.
Woke: close your windows.

P.P.S.
The Clintons and whoever Epstein pissed off clearly have the ability to wage war on individuals - provided the individuals are peasants, not in the protected aristocratic classes. Should anyone attempt a bloodless coup, they will find that certain residents of the jurisdictions called America are not harmless. (I wouldn't call them Americans, since they think of themselves as separate from the bulk of Americans, and act accordingly as a foreign occupying force. If it doesn't quack like a duck, has no feathers, can't swim, etc...) 

P.P.P.S.
Bonus round: the CCP is deliberately imitating the American Regime and will slaughter China for meat exactly like America slaughtered itself, unless it stops trying to conform in this way.

9/11: they know exactly who the terrorists are within days, apparently reconstructing the evidence from the pulverized ash of their remains.

Paddock: motive? What's that? Is it tasty?