Author: VD

Divisional playoffs: Saturday

The Chiefs are ROLLING over the Colts. The funny thing is that it wasn’t until this weekend that I finally realized why the name Mahomes always sounded vaguely familiar to me. It’s because the Chiefs’ QB’s father played for the Twins for a few years when I was still living in Minnesota. I’m not a baseball fan, but back in the day, when you read the daily newspapers, you picked up the general gist of what was going on with the local sports teams even if you didn’t follow them.

Anyhow, this is the open thread for tonight’s games. And if they’re boring, feel free to join us at the Darkstream.

You opined, we listened

While we’re not always able to be responsive to various peoples’ ideas and requests, we do at least try to be amenable to suggestions for improvement. So, here is a partial list of some of the things the various teams have added lately.

  • You can now use Paypal at the Arkhaven store. Please note that we’d still prefer to have you use your credit card because Paypal’s transaction cost is 2x higher, but if you’re having problems with your card being accepted, Paypal is now a viable option.
  • Castalia House audiobooks sold from the Arkhaven store now come in a high-quality DRM-free single-file MP4 format. The audio quality is approximately 4x that of an Audible audiobook and you can use the file with a broad range of mobile and desktop readers and other media players. We’ve also added an AUDIOBOOKS link on the black bar on the main page to make them easier to find. We intend to eventually put our new audiobooks on Audible as well, but we are waiting to hear back from them about being able to make our 40+ existing audiobooks available on the Arkhaven store.
  • The Darkstream now accepts superchats. So, if you’d like to support it that way, it is now a viable option. We did an initial test last night and it was considerably more successful than I’d imagined.
  • The Darkstream will soon be available in podcast format on iTunes. You can find a few recent podcasts here.
  • The digital editions of Arkhaven and Dark Legion comics are now available in high-resolution CBZ format. Not all of the previously published comics have been converted yet, but all of the new releases will be.
There is a lot more to come in the near future, but this is what we have already implemented and can announce to date. On the Indiegogo front, things are proceeding according to the process, and there is nothing more to say at the present time except that we are aware of the way in which SJWs are putting pressure on Indiegogo to deplatform other creators of whom they do not approve.

Fighting the last war

I don’t disagree with what this guy is saying. But it’s a little ironic that he talks about fighting the last war, because the author himself is focused on an outdated and increasingly irrelevant ideological struggle:

History and theory don’t matter to socialists because they imagine society can be engineered. The old arguments and historical examples simply don’t apply: even human nature is malleable, and whenever our stubborn tendencies don’t comport with socialism’s grand plans a “social construct” is to blame.

These most recent spasms of support for the deadly ideology of socialism remind us that progressives aren’t kidding. They may not fully understand what socialism means, but they fully intend to bring it about. Single-payer health care, “free” education, wealth redistribution schemes, highly progressive income taxes, wealth taxes, gun bans, and radical curbs on fossil fuels are all on the immediate agenda. They will do this quickly if possible, incrementally if they have to (see, again, the 20th century). They will do it with or without popular support, using legislatures, courts and judges, supranational agencies,university indoctrination, friendly media, or whatever political, economic, or social tools it takes (including de-platforming and hate speech laws). This is not paranoia; all of this is openly discussed. And say what you will about progressivism, it does have a central if false ethos: egalitarianism.

Conservatives, by contrast, are not serious. They have no animating spirit. They don’t much talk about liberty or property or markets or opportunity. They don’t mean what they say about the Constitution, they won’t do a thing to limit government, they won’t touch entitlements or defense spending, they won’t abolish the Department of Education or a single federal agency, they won’t touch abortion laws, and they sure won’t give up their own socialist impulses. Trumpism, though not conservative and thoroughly non-intellectual, drove a final stake through the barely beating heart of Right intellectualism, from the Weekly Standard to National Review. Conservatism today is incoherent, both ideologically and tactically incapable of countering the rising tide of socialism.

The real battle is not conservatism vs socialism. First, conservatism is dead because there is nothing left in the West to conserve. Second, the real battle is nationalism vs global imperialism. The most recent offensive of the neo-liberal world order has failed, but its armies have not left the field and its leaders are actively developing new strategies, new tactics, and new false oppositions in order to attempt to pick up where the last attempt left off.

Who needs a federal government

The USA has enjoyed the longest government shutdown in its history without incident:

The partial government shutdown became the longest closure in U.S. history at when the clock ticked past midnight Friday as President Donald Trump and nervous Republicans scrambled to find a way out of the mess.

A solution couldn’t come soon enough for federal workers who got pay statements Friday but no pay.

The House and Senate voted to give federal workers back pay whenever the federal government reopens and then left town for the weekend, leaving the shutdown on track to become one for the record books once the clock struck midnight and the closure entered its 22nd day.

And while Trump privately considered one dramatic escape route – declaring a national emergency to build the wall without a new stream of cash from Congress – members of his own party were fiercely debating that idea, and the president urged Congress to come up with another solution.

‘What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,’ Trump said. He insisted that he had the authority to do that, adding that he’s ‘not going to do it so fast’ because he’d still prefer to work a deal with Congress.

Even the black-pillers are beginning to understand that the God-Emperor is serious about building his Big Beautiful Wall. And he is serious about it because he understands that without it, there is no point in even running for re-election.

The Republican Establishment is serious about trying to primary him with Mitt Romney – last week 54 Republican Senators voted to directly attack unalienable American rights at the behest of AIPAC and other Neo-Palestinian interest groups – and President Trump will not be able to defeat that treacherous challenge if he does not deliver on his most important promise to his supporters.

Stand firm and inflexible, Mr. President. Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. That is the road to victory in 2020.

He shot the sheriff

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suspended the man who may arguably be the worst law enforcement officer in the country, Scott Israel:

Effective immediately, I am officially suspending Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for his repeated failures, incompetence and neglect of duty.

Reasons for the suspension span several pages but include this: “WHEREAS Sheriff Israel is responsible for inserting into the Broward County Sheriff’s Office Active Shooter Policy that a deputy ‘may’ enter the area or structure to engage an active shooter and preserve life.”

The reason he didn’t actually fire Israel is because he can’t. Only the State Senate can do that. No word on the fate of any deputies, though.

Heuristics are not proof

And yet they remain useful when conclusive evidence is not available:

Faced with the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, John Snow had no idea what mechanism caused cholera, and his instruments could not reliably identify the contaminants in water supplies, but he noted what we would now call correlations: some water companies had more of their clients die than others, even though all of them supplied to rich and poor households alike. South of the river companies were more deadly, and they drew more contaminated water from the river rather than other sources, and filtered it less than other companies. Some neighbourhood pumps had more deaths nearby than did others. This was a geographic form of correlation (now called a Voronoi diagram) and it was on that correlational basis, without knowledge of the real mechanism, that he took the handle off the Broad Street pump, and stopped the epidemic.

That is the way we tell the story now, but Snow was a careful and clever man, and pointed out another explanation: the cholera outbreak was coming to an end anyway, as people ran away from areas where there were many deaths. The common folk who believed that correlation implied causation ran for their lives and lived to see another day.

Snow also had to cope with a major anomaly in his geographic correlational investigations. None of the brewery workers right next to the Broad Street water pump fell ill with cholera. It turned out that they received free beer, and the water for the beer was boiled so as to release the flavour of hops, thus inadvertently killing off the water-borne organisms.

Snow jumped to a conclusion because his mind was prepared to interpret associations in a particular way, intially by his doubts about the air transmission miasma theory and later by his own hypothesis of water-borne transmission. He jumped to the right conclusion, without proofs of the causal mechanism which were only available years later.

This is why you should NEVER try to dismiss any correlation with the idiot’s refrain that “correlation is not causation”. That is an astonishingly stupid thing to say, as it is tantamount to saying that “a clue is not a mathematical proof.” Who claims that it is?

As Michael Woodley points out, there is never causation WITHOUT correlation. Which means that correlation is a necessary, but insufficient indicator of causation, it is not a synonym for it.

Those nefarious Russians

First they got Drumpf elected and now they’re messing with the magnetic North Pole:

Earth’s magnetic fields are shifting – and scientists are unsure why.

Researchers say the magnetic North Pole is  ‘skittering’ away from Canada, towards Siberia.

The problem has got so bad, researchers around the world are scrambling to update a global model of the fields.

Called the World Magnetic Model, it underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015, and it was supposed to last until 2020.

However, researchers say the  magnetic field is changing so rapidly that they have to fix the model urgently.

It was due to be updated on the 15th January, but due to the US Government shutdown, that has already been delayed until the 30th.

The magnetic field is in a permanent state of flux.

Magnetic north wanders, and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so that a compass would point south instead of north.

Is it just me or is everything getting weirder faster these days?

Gamma philosophy

An exchange in the Darkstream comments:

Chunky Monkey
Vox has argued that what he calls uniquely high IQ people think holistically, and then turns around and tries to vaguely quantify everything while ironically using that as justification.

Darkstream
There is no quantification involved at all, vaguely or otherwise. You are confusing the concept of “categorization” with “quantification”. They are two different things. As a general rule, don’t try to correct your intellectual superiors, particularly using words you don’t understand.

If you are a Gamma, or even have Gamma tendencies, you simply must learn to resist the urge to correct others, particularly those who are more intelligent than you are. Also, try to keep the adverbs to a minimum. Gammas love adverbs, because adverbs qualify verbs, which permits them to put themselves in the position of implicitly pronouncing judgment on the actions of others.

Categorical thinking is vital to understanding. In fact, categorical thinking is the foundation of Western philosophy, to such an extent that the Stanford Encyclopedia considers Aristotle’s categorical system to be uniquely important.

Aristotle’s Categories is a singularly important work of philosophy. It not only presents the backbone of Aristotle’s own philosophical theorizing, but has exerted an unparalleled influence on the systems of many of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition. The set of doctrines in the Categories, which I will henceforth call categorialism, provides the framework of inquiry for a wide variety of Aristotle’s philosophical investigations, ranging from his discussions of time and change in the Physics, to the science of being qua being in the Metaphysics, and even extending to his rejection of Platonic ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics. Looking beyond his own works, Aristotle’s categorialism has engaged the attention of such diverse philosophers as Plotinus, Porphyry, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Brentano and Heidegger (to mention just a few), who have variously embraced, defended, modified or rejected its central contentions. All, in their different ways, have thought it necessary to come to terms with features of Aristotle’s categorial scheme.

Speaking of irony, it is more than a little ironic, it is downright remarkable that Chunky Monkey would attempt to use such a fundamentally philosophical action as categorical observation as a means of trying to disqualify and discredit someone.

UPDATE: in case you had any doubts whatsoever:

Chunky Monkey
As a rule, don’t try to control definitions and back it up with a mealy mouthed ad hominem attack.  It is unnecessary reductionism and you know that.  I understand you want a catch term to discount people you have no interest in debating, but don’t think many people can’t sense that is what that is.

Darkstream
Chunky Monkey I literally created that definition, which is what the honest observer does rather than pervert existing definitions. Nor is it an ad hominem attack, “mealy mouthed” or otherwise, to observe that you are exhibiting classic gamma behavior. That’s not argumentum ad hominem, because that’s not WHY you are wrong.  You’re just wrong because you don’t know the difference between “categorize” and “quantify”. Your improper use of words you don’t understand, your use of adverbs to try to spin the situation, and your inability to simply admit that you are wrong are all entirely predictable. Because IN ADDITION to being wrong, you are, observably, a gamma male.

Chunky Monkey
Really missing the point. I have seen hundreds of internet personalities create their own version of ‘x’-male: it is a cheap attack, and means nothing. You may as well call me a racist. This is why I made an obvious mischaracterization: only SJWs get triggered over not being able to control definitions. You have spent so much time studying and talking about SJWs and jordan peterson that the abyss has become you. It happens to the best of us, please do not think that because you are smart you somehow transcend your human tendencies.

Every. Single. Time. Secret King wins again!

Yellow Vest deplatformings

Big Social is apparently attempting to help the French government clamp down on the Gilets Jaunes. I’ve heard that they are getting deplatformed left and right by Twitter and Facebook. Fortunately, there are alternatives coming, and very soon.

Burn Unit, you’re all going to be given the opportunity to alpha test Infogalactic’s new Twitter alternative VERY soon. If there are features you would like to see, please share them here. And it will NOT be a free speech zone, we are going to clamp down ruthlessly on the Alt-Retards and adult content trolls who destroyed the Gab community. It’s going to be a clean speech zone, so if you want to pass naked pictures back and forth or engage in bantz, you’ll have to do it somewhere else.