Category: Uncategorized

The Nothing People

John C. Wright on the restless hearts of the empty souls, who are never content no matter what they achieve and regardless of what gains they make:

Being without a sense of the objective nature of reality, they are without a belief in objective morals. Being without a belief in objective morals, they lack honor, and, lacking honor, they lack courage, lack decency, lack courtesy.

Hence, their one, sole and only means of discussing their principles in debate is to accuse whomever dares question them of any and every thing they think evil: they call normal people stupid and evil and heartless, bigoted and racist and fascist and thisist and thatist.

The content of the accusation does not matter, only the relief of being able to accuse, and accuse, and accuse.

Their only consistent principle — a principle never admitted, of course, but obvious in their every manifesto — is the Unreality Principle, which holds that it is better and braver to believe in make-believe than in real reality. The more unreal the belief, the less based on fact, the more open the self contradiction, the greater the power of will and nobility of spirit needed to believe it, and hence the greatest applause from the modern mind is reserved to those of their number that believe the most unreal and unrealistic things. And yet, with typical unselfaware modern irony, they call themselves the reality-based community.

In sum, their philosophy consists of the single principle that no philosophy is valid. Their ethics consist of a single precept that making ethical judgments is ‘judgmental’ that is, ethically wrong. Their economic theory, socialism, consists of an arrogant denial that the laws of economics apply to economic phenomena. Their theory of psychology says that men do not have free will, because cause and effect is absolute; their theory of metaphysics is that subatomic particles do have free will, because cause and effect is statistical, approximate, uncertain, incomplete, and illusory. And on and on. All their thought is one self-refuting statement after another.

Philosophically, theologically and morally, the modern mindset is an end-state. Once a man has utterly rejected reason, he cannot reason himself to another conclusion. Once he has rejected morality, he has no sense of honor to compel him to live up to a philosophy more demanding than narrow selfishness.

Again, once he had rejected the authority of tradition, so that his one precept is to ignore all precepts of his teachers, he has no motive and no way to pass along to the next generation this selfsame precept, for he then is himself a teacher teaching them to ignore all teachers. And so on.

No compromise is possible with these people. I use the term loosely, for they are not morally accountable Men and Women in the full sense of the term. They are intellectual nomads, always on the move, always parasitical, always acting to destroy, always needing an accusational high that is more powerful than the one before.

This is why attempts to appease them are always fruitless, why they always devour their own. You might as rationally attempt to reason with the weather as attempt to reason with them. They eat their own as readily as they devour those they overcome, and their bitterest hatred is reserved for those who stand up to them and tell them, with all the contempt that they merit, “you are nothing and you will never be anything”. Never ever back down to them.

If there is one thing they hate to hear, it is that they are fallen. They cling furiously to their pride and to their pretense to superiority because that is all they have. They are de facto psychopaths; they have no ability to empathize for all that they claim to empathize with everything and everyone from the snail darter to a bullied homosexual teen. They have endless hypothetical love for humanity and nothing of the real thing for their neighbors or anyone but themselves.

The real and the decent people sense their emptiness. We tiptoe around them, trying not to trigger the endless minefield of their sensitivities. This is pointless. Like insects, they thrive in darkness; whenever exposed to the harsh light of truth they are desperate to conceal their words and their deeds, to hide their empty sickness. But this is wrong, because there is only one hope for them, and that is the crushing of their pride.

There is nothing that can fill up the vast abyss within them except God. Nothing. So do not spare them. Remind them that they are nothing. Remind them that they are evil. Tell them the truth because they already know it and the reason for their frenetic activity is that they are running from it. Remind them their only hope at the joy they envy and crave is to abandon their empty, narcissistic pride and allow the Way, the Truth, and the Life to fill up the void within.

One of my friends once asked me why I seem to run into so many of these people, both personally and professionally. The answer is simple. I see them, they know I see them, and their instinctive reaction is to immediately attack those who recognize them for what they are. You see, the Nothing People always lie and thereby sentence themselves to a lifetime of policing the perceptions of others. It’s not that I recognize their lies so much as I recognize the constant scanning of others perception of them in which they necessarily engage.

China: two stories

First, this Forbes report is NOT true: “The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has just ordered commercial banks to halt cash transfers.” The false report was particularly worrisome in light of the way it appeared to coincide with HSBC’s recent attempt to crack down on all withdrawals of more than 3,000 pounds in the UK. (HSBC appears to have backed down on that following widespread outrage.) However, that does not mean that all is well with the Chinese economy, which you will recall has been engaged in much bigger credit inflation and government spending stimulus programs since 2009 than the USA or the European governments. From Zerohedge two weeks ago:

the big problem in big China remains that of an out-of-control credit creation process that is blowing up. As we previously noted, instead of crushing credit creation, the PBOC’s liquidity rationing has forced distressed companies into high-interest-cost products in the shadow-banking world. Investors on the other side of “troubled shadow banking products” had assumed that ‘someone’ would bail them out but this evening Reuters reports that ICBC has confirmed that it will not rescue holders of the “Credit Equals Gold #1 Collective Trust Product”, due to mature Jan 31st with $492 million outstanding.

A single $492 million default sounds very small compared to the overall size of the shadow banking market, but the problem is that what expands by the multiplication effect will contract even faster. There are many multiples of credit dollars stacked upon each actual dollar, so a default has a domino effect that is one or two orders of magnitude greater than the size of the default itself.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the banks appear to be a little nervous leading up to this default, because it’s not possible to know exactly what the effects of the Friday default will be. I expect next weekend will be a very busy one throughout the financial industry as the markets position for the fallout on Monday; I imagine the central banks’ printing presses will be smoking.

It’s not your money

In case you were wondering why a bank can refuse to give you “your money” when you ask for it, it is because the terms of the loan you provided them permit it.

Stephen Cotton went to his local HSBC branch this month to withdraw £7,000 from his instant access savings account to pay back a loan from his mother. A year before, he had withdrawn a larger sum in cash from HSBC without a problem.

But this time it was different, as he told Money Box: “When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day.He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change.

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

The only way you can be certain to get your money back is by calling the
loan, or to put it in more common terms, closing your account.

The phony Dark Enlightenment

As I have previously noted, I don’t buy into this Dark Enlightenment nonsense. And these comparisons should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity that Nick Land, a British philsopher of whom I had literally never heard before, is any sort of leader, intellectual or otherwise, of a coherent movement.

Now, Alexa is very far from reliable, but the sheer scale of the differences indicates what a more accurate traffic metric would likely show. First look at the two individuals who have been mentioned by the leftists as leaders of this dangerous Dark Enlightenment.

Nick Land (xenosystems.net)
Global 658,815, USA 268,030

Moldbug
Global 882,792, USA 279,490

Pretty influential, are they not? Now let’s look at some of the others who are more or less well-regarded throughout the non-mainstream Right.

Steve Sailer
Global 161,960, USA 38,356  

Roissy/Heartiste
Global 29,405, USA 10,307

Vox Day
Global 31,286, USA 4,969  

Fred Reed
Global 313,779, USA 84,841

The so-called Dark Enlightenment is just another fantasy media “trend”, about as credible as the New York Times annual stories on junior high school sex rings.

Ban government marriage

The State’s push to force homogamy on the Church has finally resulted in the realization that the Church should never have accepted the State’s encroachment in its affairs in the 19th century:

State lawmakers are considering throwing out marriage in Oklahoma.The idea stems from a bill filed by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Edmond). Turner says it’s an attempt to keep same-sex marriage illegal in Oklahoma while satisfying the U.S. Constitution. Critics are calling it a political stunt while supporters say it’s what Oklahomans want.

“[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all,” Turner said. Other conservative lawmakers feel the same way, according to Turner.

Banning state interference with marriage is the conservative position. Since most people are historical ignoramuses, it will likely surprise many that marriage licenses didn’t even exist until 1631. And as I noted in my 2004 WND column entitled Divorcing the State, some State governments didn’t interfere with the sacrament until 1958.

All the misguided attempts to accommodate the State have failed. It is time for the American Church to accept the fact that it must now go into the implacable resistance mode that has characterized Christianity for a good part of its historical existence. This may mean persecutions and the falling away of those of weaker faith in time, but then, that is nothing that the Church has not seen or survived before.

Rep. Turner’s action is well-advised. Oklahoma would do well to cease recognizing all marriages as would the other States. If they don’t, they will find that people will simply cease to bother obtaining marriage licenses as is the case in the majority of the black community and an increasing percentage of the white community as well.

Banning government marriage is the right thing to do on libertarian grounds, on religious grounds, on practical grounds, and on the grounds of sexual fairness. I am pro-marriage but I would not recommend obtaining a marriage license to any unmarried young man or woman these days. And if a woman isn’t willing to marry a man without a marriage license, that will serve as sufficient notice that she is already married to the State.

Suckering the liberty-minded

After eight years of attacking libertarians more furiously than anyone in the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is trying to play them for suckers:

Liberty Republicans. They are the young, more libertarian-minded, grassroots supporters that used to be identified chiefly by their favorite Republican presidential candidate, former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

Now, as the Republican National Committee tries to repair relationships and increase outreach to all political groups, they are doing their best to entice more libertarian Republicans into the fold.

Some of these supporters were turned off by what was described as the “railroading” of Ron Paul supporters by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus during the 2012 convention in Tampa.

But the RNC wants to appear welcoming to the libertarian element in their party, which more established members of the party once derided as “Paultards” after they disrupted events in favor of their candidate.

Remember, the Republican Party elite have successfully been playing social conservatives for suckers since 1980. Now, after twice seeing their “electable” RINOs prove that they were anything but, they’re trying to make nice and pretend that they aren’t the Big Government “conservatives” that they have shown themselves to be since the first Bush ’43 administration.

Don’t buy it. Republicans are nothing but Democrats with a pseudo-conservative PR department.

The Fifth Horseman 12

This is the second of Peter Boghossian’s Interventions. In this dialogue, notice how failing to question Boghossian’s naked assertions and blithely agreeing to his inaccurate statements permits him to appear to make his point without ever doing anything more than getting the other person to concur with him. This demonstrates the importance of understanding how the Socratic method can be used to deceive and obscure rather than illuminate.

To repeat: “the dirty little secret of the Socratic method is the way it can be used
to create false dilemmas and illusionary contradictions. This is why
you never, ever, grant someone attempting to use it the right to define
anything, or even agree with any of their seemingly legitimate
statements. Instead, force dictionary definitions on them, as doing so
reliably disrupts their attempt to present their false dilemmas as well
as calls their credibility into question as they attempt to deny that a
dictionary definition is as legitimate as their own question-begging
inventions.”

KP: Do you trust your wife?

PB: To do what? To fly a plane, no. To diagnose a basic medical condition, yes. [My wife is a board certified physician and professor of medicine.]

KP: Well, I mean, you have faith in your wife.

PB: Well that’s not the same as trusting my wife, right? Trust and faith are not the same.

KP: Well, yeah, I mean, you do have faith in your wife, right?
VD: Of course they are. Have you never read a thesaurus? They are synonyms. Trust is defined as “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing”. Faith is defined as “confidence or trust in a person or thing” Trust is a subset of Faith.

PB: No, actually, no. I don’t have faith in my wife. I trust my wife to do or not do certain things. I trust her to not abuse our children. I trust her to not pull a Lorena Bobbitt on me. But that has nothing to do with faith. Why do you ask?

KP: I’m asking because you said that faith is always bad, you know. And I think that you have faith.
VD: Of course that has something to do with faith. Even by your own definition of faith being the pretense of knowing what you don’t know, it should be obvious that you don’t actually know that your wife hasn’t abused your children. You have no way of knowing that she isn’t planning  to Bobbit you tonight. And furthermore, let’s not forget that you’re pretending to know that your daughter is your child when we both know perfectly well that she isn’t. Look at her! She’s freaking Chinese! You’re not Chinese, Peter. Do the math.

PB: What do I have faith in?

KP: Well, lots of stuff. [Motioning to my wife] Your wife. When you flick a switch the light will go on—

PB: I have no faith. My life is joyfully devoid of faith.
(Mutual laughter)

PB: I don’t have faith that the light will go on when I flick a switch. I know it will both because of past experience and because of the scientific process that enabled that to occur in the first place. Why do you think that has anything to do with faith, or with unwarranted belief?

KP: Because you don’t know the light will go on.

PB: That’s true. The light could be burned out—

KP: So you do have faith that the light isn’t burned out.

PB: No. I hope the light isn’t burned out, but it’s always possible it is. That’s hope, that’s not faith. I don’t believe it’s burned out unless I see it’s burned out. And if it is burned out, then I’ll just replace it. And I know that replacing it will likely work because of my history with replacing bulbs. So I don’t need faith. Faith isn’t required at all. Or am I missing something? Is my reasoning in error?
VD: Yes, your reasoning is in error. You said you know the light will go on when you flick a light switch. But if it doesn’t go on, then obviously you were pretending to know something you didn’t. By your own definition, you had faith that the light would go on, and it was a misplaced faith due to the bulb being burned out or the switch being broken.

(Pause)

KP: No, I guess not.

PB: So, can we agree that when it comes to my wife, or to flicking a light switch, we don’t need faith?

(Long pause)

KP: Yeah, I guess so.
VD: No, because you were wrong in both cases. You have faith in your wife. You have faith every time you go to flick a light switch. And your level of knowledge quite clearly doesn’t rise to the level of Webster’s or Roget’s.

PB: Cool. So we now need to extend this further and talk about why we don’t need—shouldn’t have—faith at all. Faith, just say no. (Laughter)

I can’t stress this enough. Never simply agree with the Street Epistemologist’s assertions. Make them prove every single statement and every single assertion, no matter how reasonable it sounds, by an objective source. They will not be able to do so because Boghossian’s entire approach is a verbal Three-Card-Monte, and by forcing them to show all of their cards, you will expose the game for the intellectually fraudulent one it is.

30 years of Macintosh

Stephen Fry commemorates the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh by lamenting one of the great mischances of history:

In one of the world’s most extraordinary missed meetings in industrial, commercial or any other kind of human history, a Henry Morton Stanley failed to encounter a Dr Livingston in the most dramatic and comical fashion.

In the early 90s a young British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee had been tasked by CERN (Centre Européeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire the now famous large hardon collider that found the Higgs Boson or a tiny thing pretending to be it) to go in and see if he could find a way of getting the Tower of Babel of different computing platforms used by the hundreds of physicists at the plant to talk to each other. He came up with something that made use of metatextual techniques that he called The Information Mine. Being a very very modest man he realised that those initials spelled out his name, TIM, so he changed it at the last minute to the World Wide Web. He wrote a language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a set of communication protocols (chiefly htttp — the hypertext transfer protocol) and an application, as we would now say, on which all these could run, which he called a browser.

He planned, devised, programmed and completed this most revolutionary code in Geneva on one of Steve Jobs’s black cube NeXT computers. Hugging his close to him he took the train to Paris where Jobs was going to be present at a NeXT developers’ conference. Clutching the optical disc that contained the most important computer code in history he sat at a desk while Steve marched up and down looking at hopeful programs and applications. As in all of Steve’s judgments they either sucked or were insanely great. Like a Duchess inspecting a flower show he continued along the rows sniffing and frowning until he got two away from the man who had created the code which would change everything, everything in our world. “Sorry Steve, we need to be out of here if we’re going to catch that plane,” whispered an aide into Jobs’s ear. So, with an an encouraging wave Steve left, two footsteps away from being the first man outside Cern to see the World Wide Web. The two men never met and now, since Steve’s death, never can.

Those who only know me as an inveterate Apple-hater probably don’t realize that I started out as an Apple guy. While my father built his fortune on the IBM PC, first on its need for memory cards, then on its need for high-resolution graphics, (he created and sold the first 1024×768 board for it, the ARTIST card.), my pride and joy and constant companion was an Apple //e. It was stacked, with two disk drives, a color monitor, and a 300 baud modem. I loved that machine, but I gave it up reluctantly when I went off to college and it became apparent that I was going to need something better suited to writing papers.

So, my parents gave me a Macintosh Plus, which gave me a huge advantage over other students, who had to wait their turn in the computer labs when they needed to write their papers. I had a particularly nice setup, since I lived in the only dorm with its own computer lab, complete with Macintosh computers and printers, so I could write my papers, then walk the disk down to the computer lab at 4 AM and print them out without delay. I remember, in particular, one paper on Alfred the Great that blew my professor away because it included a map of England on which I’d drawn the various extents of the Danelaw.

Not that he was unfamiliar with the Danelaw, but it was the first time he’d ever seen a printed graphic in a student paper. That was the power of the Macintosh. I don’t think I ever turned in a paper again without some visual example. In fact, looking at the two college papers I still have with me today, one on the economic development of Japan and the Soviet Union, the other on the Italian condottieri, I can see crosshatched maps of Italy and several charts very similar to those that regularly litter my economics posts. That Macintosh Plus created a habit of readily resorting to bar charts that apparently persists even today.

Where the Macintosh ultimately fell down was not in its failure to penetrate the business market. That’s the conventional wisdom, but it is wrong. Apple was never going to dislodge IBM and Microsoft there and was wise not to kill itself trying. The opportunity that Steve Jobs mysteriously missed, long before the World Wide Web, was the games market. Despite its GUI, the failure to adopt color for three years after the PS/2 introduced VGA/MCGA, as well as its reluctance to embrace a non-serious market, meant that Apple conceded the games market to DOS.

Papers be damned. The first time I saw Wing Commander, I switched immediately over to DOS and picked up a Compaq 386/25. I haven’t looked back since.

I admire the late Steve Jobs. He was an amazingly innovative corporate genius. It is deeply lamentable that his chief legacy as a technologist appears likely to be the walled garden of Apple.

A plague of fake reviews

It’s not just Amazon and the political trolls:

Sites
such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp are now the go-to destinations for
customers who want to cut through advertising waffle and discover what
products and services are really like. Yet, according to research that
is sure to panic business owners across the world, a fifth of Americans
have left online reviews for items they’ve never bought or even used. 
This figure is even higher (32 per cent) among parents with children
under 18 and the most popular reason why online shoppers questioned did
this was simply because ‘they felt like it.’

I think
“panic” is too strong a word. But I do think the online retailers need
to do a much better job of eliminating fake reviews and providing
meaningful rating systems than they do.

Although the
inaccurate headline is misleading. A fifth of all online reviews are not
fake. A fifth of Americans have, at some point, left a fake review.

Rights roundup

Climate Data Rigged by U.S. Government?

Yet another smoking gun in the fraud-filled field of “climate science”
has been discovered and this one appears to be even more damning than
the hockey-stick chart, “hide the decline,” and the attempt by U.K.
government scientists to prevent others from replicating their work.

Bipartisan Renegade Bureaucracy

Republicans will be tempted to blame the recent IRS and NSA scandals on the Obama Administration. After all, Obama is closely and personally tied to both of them. The IRS audits of the Tea Party and other organizations and individuals followed Obama’s imitation of Henry II calling for the murder of Thomas Becket: “Will no one audit these turbulent critics?” That’s taking considerable liberties with the paraphrasing, but I don’t recall many previous presidents “joking” about siccing the IRS on their political opponents.

Granted, Bill Clinton used to do it too, but at least he didn’t single out the targets in public beforehand.