A poem, updated

There’s a miserable family called Stein:
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Wein.
Gert’s poems are noise,
Ep sold little boys,
And Hollywood was raped by Wein.

It’s rather remarkable to see how some Judeo-Christians will twist and contort themselves to try to somehow a) condemn pedophilia and child molestation while b) avoiding any condemnation of the teachings of their rabbis or the rabbis themselves.

Consider this recent Twitter exchange:

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Hollywood values are Jewish values. There are no “Judeo-Christian” values. Ask any rabbi.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Why imply that Hollywood degeneracy is a Jewish value?

Mr. Smith‏ @ClazyAsylum
Is this the Jewish version of “Islam is a religion of peace”?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Judaism is not degenerate

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
The entire history of the Jews in the USA proves that to be a false statement. Do you accept Christian morality as the metric?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I agree that most Jews are degenerate. I disagree that Judaism is degenerate. Most Jews don’t follow Judaism.

Mr. Smith‏ @ClazyAsylum
Following Judaism wouldn’t be degenerate at all. Oh, wait… (Warning: picture of rabbi performing metzitzah b’peh.)

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
What does the rampant pedophilia in the church tell us about Christians?

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That Vatican II was an abomination, it is a mistake to permit homosexuals in the Church, and Christians should be guided by the Bible.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I have not seen you condemn pedophila in the church in this exchange. Tell us more about your Christian values.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Weak, degenerate. All pedophile clergy in the Church should be excommunicated, then executed. Do you support the same for those rabbis?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Why can you disavow degeneracy on behalf of Christians but I can’t disavow degeneracy on behalf of Jews?

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You can. But you are not disavowing the teachings or the authorities that EXPRESSLY PERMIT that degenerate behavior.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Show me a degenerate teaching and I will condemn it and the claimed authority that teaches it.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Do you condemn and disavow Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai? At what age does the Talmud say “the sexual matureness of woman is reached”?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I’m not a fan of Shimon bar Yohai, since he had a low opinion of common folks.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That is not a disavowal. Do it unambiguously. Don’t play word games. Condemn him and disavow him as an evil man teaching evil laws.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
I’m not sure what you hate about bar yohai so much, but I condemn all rape, pedophilia and degeneracy, and any who condone it

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You are not fooling anyone, liar. You know Simeon ben Yohai’s teachings and yet you will not condemn or disavow him. Why not?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
As far as I know he did not condone pedophilia, but if he did I condemn and disavow. How can I be clearer?

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
As for the Talmud, there is a difference between when a woman is a woman and when one is allowed to marry her.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Talmud does not permit rape, pedophilia or child marriage.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
It does however hold that if a young child is molested/raped in violation of the law she remains a virgin for legal/marriage purposes

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
So degenerate, protecting the innocent.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No, it is to protect the ASSAILANT. The innocent cannot throw guilt on him. You are literally defending pedophiles now, degenerate.

((( ?)))‏ @usershem
Just because a raped child is legally considered a virgin doesn’t mean the rapist is not punished. You are the one contorting.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Either condemn Simeon ben Yohai as an evil man teaching evil practices and disavow him or stand revealed as a degenerate pedo-defender.

Needless to say, he continued to equivocate and feign ignorance until I finally blocked him for wormtonguery. Now, don’t take my word for any of this. Look up the rabbi’s teachings on sex, marriage, and children, then decide for yourself. But do notice that usershem NEVER ANSWERED the questions that would have nailed down his position, whether it was a Christian metric for morality or the age of female sexual maturity. His behavior was even intellectually shadier than it looks here, because on another tangent he defended the degenerate practice of metzitzah b’peh as abuse, but not molestation, because he somehow magically knows the pure intentions of every rabbi who ever put mouth to underage genitals.

Also notice the way his attempt to deflect moral degeneracy onto the Christian Church was abandoned as soon as he realized that I was not going to defend the degenerates there, but was perfectly happy to condemn them, disavow them, and see them punished. The contrast between my reaction and his on the subject could not be more clear.

This is the Judeo-Christianity that our conservative friends hail so warmly. This is the Judeo-Christian values that many conservatives claim to be the basis for America’s founding. This is the intellectual spirit of Judeo-Christ. It is devoted to the exact opposite of the truth as it is designed to conceal, obfuscate, distract, and mislead.

I did find it a little ironic to see how willing this usershem was to throw literally “most Jews” under the degenerate bus in order to try to break the observable link between the religious teachings and the infamous Hollywood/Media/Wall Street degeneracy. There are plenty of decent Jews who abide by the Christian standards of morality as well as any Christian, and indeed, there are more than a few Christians who happen to be of Jewish descent. They would not hesitate to condemn evil teachings or evil men.

But it should be obvious that “Judeo-Christianity” is not Christianity and that “Judeo-Christian values” are not Christian values and neither reflect nor respect Christian morality.

Now, I understand that the urge to defend one’s identity is a natural, powerful, and instinctive one. But should you ever find yourself tempted to defend the ongoing commission of unmitigated evil targeting innocent children on the grounds of tradition, fear, or good intentions, you should seriously consider the source of that temptation. There simply is no defending this sort of thing, or pretending that there is no possible connection between the medieval teachings and the actions today.

UPDATE: Larry David does his best to get out in front of the growing Hollywood Values scandal.

Of art and the artist

It is interesting to observe that when SJWs insist that the art MUST be judged in light of the artist, it is merely another example of how they are projecting:

Like Hitler, Jeanneret wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence.

One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.

A book has just been published—Le Corbusier: The Dishonest Architect, by Malcolm Millais—that reads like the indictment of a serial killer who can offer no defense (except, possibly, a psychiatric one). The author shares with me an aesthetic detestation of Jeanneret, and also of his casual but deeply vicious totalitarianism; but, unlike me, the author both has a scholarly knowledge of his subject’s life and writings, of which the perusal of only a few has more than sufficed for me, and is a highly qualified structural engineer. Mr. Millais is able to prove not only that Jeanneret was a liar, cheat, thief, and plagiarist in the most literal sense of the words, a criminal as well as being personally unpleasant on many occasions, but that he was technically grossly ignorant and incompetent, indeed laughably so. His roofs leaked, his materials deteriorated. He never grasped the elementary principles of engineering. All his ideas were gimcrack at best, and often far worse than merely bad.

To commission a building from Jeanneret was to tie a ball and chain around one’s own ankle, committing oneself to endless, Sisyphean bills for alteration and maintenance, as well as to a dishonest estimate of what the building would cost to build in the first place. A house by Jeanneret was not so much a machine for living in (to quote the most famous of his many fatuous dicta) as a machine for generating costs and for moving out of. In the name of functionality, Jeanneret built what did not work; in the name of mass production, everything he used had to be individually fashioned. Having no human qualities himself, and lacking all imagination, he did not even understand that shade in a hot climate was desirable, indeed essential.

The artists, authors, and architects of the modernist era have much to answer for, and they are answering for it in Hell. The best tribute that we can pay to them is to tear down their buildings and destroy their sculptures while pointing relentlessly to their paintings and books as preeminent examples of what no man should ever do.

An ugly man can produce beautiful artwork, but those with ugly souls can neither recognize nor create beauty. They can only destroy.

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari II

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part II of IV

Harari’s belief that the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have found that their language development and their modes of thought about space, time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies. The Piraha are an extreme case, but the Tauade of Papua New Guinea, for example, with whom I lived only had the idea of single and pair, and no form of calendar or time-reckoning. Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements (see Hallpike 1979).

While Harari recognises that we know almost nothing about the beliefs and social organization of ancient foragers, he agrees that the constraints of their mode of life would have limited them to small-scale groups based on the family without permanent settlements (unless they could fish), and with no domestic animals. But then he launches into some remarkable speculations about what they might nevertheless have achieved in the tens of thousands of years between the Cognitive Revolution and the beginning of agriculture.

These long millennia may have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces…The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes…’ and so on (pp. 68-9).

Er, no. They couldn’t. All these imagined triumphs of the hunter-gatherers would actually have required a basis of large populations, centralized political control and probably literate civilisation, which in turn would have required the development of agriculture.

This is normally regarded as, after language, the innovation that made possible the extraordinary flowering of human abilities. As Harari correctly points out, agriculture developed independently in a number of parts of the world, and tribal societies based on farming became extremely common, many of them surviving into modern times. But he describes the Agricultural Revolution as ‘history’s biggest fraud’ because individuals in fully developed farming societies generally had an inferior diet and harder work than foragers, and their food supply depended on a limited range of crops that were vulnerable to drought, pests, and invaders, unlike the more varied food resources of hunter-gatherers.

These criticisms of agriculture are, of course, quite familiar, and up to a point legitimate. But if agriculture was really such a bad deal why would humans ever have gone along with it? Harari begins by suggesting that wheat and other crops actually domesticated us, and made us work for them, rather than the other way round, but this doesn’t get him very far in explaining the persistence of agriculture, and instead he argues that wheat offered nothing to individuals, but only to the species by enabling the growth of larger populations. But since it is actually individuals who have to do all the hard work of sowing and reaping this won’t do either, so finally he says that people persisted in the agricultural way of life because they were in search of an easier life, and couldn’t anticipate the full consequences of agriculture.

Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering the seeds on the surface – people thought, “Yes, we will have to work harder, but the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.” It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. (p. 97)

It didn’t work out that way, however, because people didn’t foresee population growth, poor diet and disease. Since it would have taken many generations to realise all the disadvantages of agriculture, by that time the population would have grown so large that it would have been impossible to go back to foraging, so the agricultural trap closed on Man for evermore.

The change from foraging to agriculture as principal mode of subsistence would have actually taken hundreds of years in many cases, and there are many important advantages of agriculture which he ignores. It is likely that one of the primary attractions of planting crops was that it allowed people to live in fixed settlements for some or all of the year, for a variety of reasons. Some favoured locations would have provided access to a plentiful supply of food or water; a whole series of craft activities are all more conveniently carried out in permanent or semi-permanent settlements; and these are also very convenient for holding ceremonies such as initiations and feasts. We also know that the food surplus from agriculture can be used in systems of exchange and competitive feasting, for trading with different groups, and for feeding domestic animals. A larger population also has many attractions in itself: it permits a much richer social life than is possible for small foraging bands,  with more impressive ceremonies, a larger labour force for social projects such as irrigation and communal buildings, and more effective defence against local enemies. Agriculture would therefore have had many attractions which would have been obvious to the people concerned, (see Hallpike 2008:52-65).

Agriculture with the domestication of animals, then, was the essential foundation for the growth of really large populations which are in turn essential for the development of complex cultures and social systems in a new ‘tribal’ form of social organization. Land ownership became closely related to kin groups of clans and lineages, which were in turn the basis of formal systems of political authority based on elders or chiefs who could mediate in disputes and sometimes assume priestly functions. A whole variety of groups sprang up based not only on kinship but on residence, work, voluntary association, age, and gender and these group structures and hierarchical organization made it much easier to co-ordinate the larger populations that developed (see Hallpike 2008:66-121). This tribal organization was the essential precursor of the state, particularly through the development of political authority which was always legitimated by descent and religious status. By the state I mean centralised political authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20{745b48424592519896714d7eb9f12ef71c35f3ab17441a70b87f3207bf0913ca} of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has developed (e.g. Claessen & Skalnik 1978, Hallpike 1986, 2008, Trigger 2003).

Unfortunately, Harari not only knows very little about tribal societies but seems to have read almost nothing on the literature on state formation either, which he tries to explain as follows:

The stress of farming [worrying about the weather, drought, floods, bandits, next year’s famine and so on] had far reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food. (p. 114) 

The reader might well wonder how peasants worrying about next year’s possible famine could possibly have been the foundation of any major political developments, and why in any case they would have meekly allowed their crops to be plundered, as well as where these rulers and elites suddenly sprang from. If Harari knew more about tribal societies he would have realised that the notion of a leader imposing his will on his followers misses the whole point of leadership in pre-state societies, which is that the leader has to attract people by having something to offer them, not by threatening them, because he has no means of doing this. To have power over people one must control something they want: food, land, personal security, status, wealth, the favour of the gods, knowledge, and so on.

In other words, there must be dependency, and leaders must be seen as benefactors. In tribal societies, where people are not self-sufficient in defence, or in access to resources or to the supernatural, they will therefore be willing to accept inequality of power because they obviously get something out of war-leaders, or clan heads, or priests. Political authority in tribal society develops in particular through the kinship system, with hereditary clan heads, who are also believed to have the mystical power to bless their dependents. When states develop we always find that the legitimacy of kings is based on two factors: descent and religion. It is only after the advent of the state can power be riveted on to people by force whether they like it or not, and when it is too late for them to do anything about it except by violent rebellion.

Part III of Dr. Hallpike’s review will be posted tomorrow.
Part I

Name the sophistry

This was an exchange on Twitter following my tweet of a link to the post below about the theologically nonsensical idea that racism is a sin. Those who have read SJWs Always Double Down should be able to identify it correctly.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Racism is an invented sin. Every so-called pastor who preaches against racism should be expelled from the pulpit.

Fishcake‏ @toonaphish
To be fair, James 2 specifically talk about the sin of partiality, of which prejudice is just am offshoot.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That is false. The sin of partiality refers to treating rich people better than poor people in the Church. Anti-racism is partiality.

Fishcake‏ @toonaphish
James 2 specifically starts off saying, “how can you claim to have faith in Jesus Christ if you favor some over others.”

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That’s true. But what is favoring some over others? Affirmative action policies? Or a belief in a genetic explanation for human variations?

Fishcake‏ @toonaphish
Favoritism is stripping humanity of their soul while making preferred decisions based on the purely physical.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You are a liar.

Notice in particular the way in which the anti-racist is completely unable to defend his Scriptural position, and is therefore forced to retreat almost immediately into shameless sophistry.

The failing US military

It was simply silly to believe that the military would magically survive the societal decline that has affected the rest of US society. One could hardly expect that a military that wears high heels, has no standards for its officers, and permits women to serve was going shoot deserters, or even hold them accountable.

First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other. The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline. The end result is a sort of malaise that pervades the entire institution. Nothing matters anymore. Cadets know this, and it has given rise to a level of cadet arrogance and entitlement the likes of which West Point has never seen in its history.

Every fall, the Superintendent addresses the staff and faculty and lies. He repeatedly states that “We are going to have winning sports teams without compromising our standards,” and everyone in Robinson Auditorium knows he is lying because we routinely admit athletes with ACT scores in the mid-teens across the board. I have personally taught cadets who are borderline illiterate and cannot read simple passages from the assigned textbooks. It is disheartening when the institution’s most senior leader openly lies to his own faculty-and they all know it.

The cadet honor code has become a laughingstock. Cadets know they will not be separated for violating it, and thus they do so on a daily basis. Moreover, since they refuse to enforce standards on each other and police their own ranks, cadets will rarely find a cadet at an honor hearing despite overwhelming evidence that a violation has occurred. This in tum has caused the staff and faculty to give up even reporting honor incidents. Why would a staff or faculty member expend the massive amount of time and energy it takes to report an honor violation-including writing multiple sworn statements, giving interviews, and testifying at the honor hearing-when they know without a doubt the cadet will not be found (or, if found, the Superintendent will not separate the cadet)? To make matters worse, the senior leadership at West Point actively discourages staff and faculty from reporting honor violations. l was unfortunate enough to experience this first hand during my first tour on the faculty, when the Commandant of Cadets called my office phone and proceeded to berate me in the most vulgar and obscene language for over ten minutes because I had reported a cadet who lied to me and then asked if “we could just drop it.” Of course, I was duty bound to report the cadet’s violation, and I did.

During the course of the berating I received from the Commandant, I never actually found out why he was so angry. It seemed that he was simply irritated that the institution was having to deal with the case, and that it was my fault it even existed. At the honor hearing the next day, I ended up being the one on trial as my character and reputation were dragged through the mud by the cadet and her civilian attorney while I sat on the witness stand without any assistance. In the end, of course, the cadet was not found (despite having at first admitted that she lied), and she eventually graduated. Just recently a cadet openly and obviously plagiarized his History research paper, and his civilian professor reported it. The evidence was overwhelming-there was not the slightest question of his guilt, yet the cadet was not found. The professor, and indeed all the faculty who knew of the case, were completely demoralized. This is the new norm for the cadet honor system. In fact, there is now an addition to the honor system (the Willful Admission Process) which essentially guarantees that if a cadet admits a violation, then separation is not even a possibility. In reality, separation is not a possibility anyway because the Superintendent refuses to impose that sanction.

The USA is a multi-ethnic empire in rapid decline. It will fall in due course, and almost certainly before most people will believe possible. The God-Emperor is engaged in a heroic endeavor, but unfortunately, his role is almost certainly that of the tragic hero whose brave and inspiring struggle proves insufficient in the end.

Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus, better known as Maurice, was a brave and capable emperor. He defeated the Persians, the Avars, and drove back the Lombards. But he was betrayed and deposed, a cataclysmic act that led to a defeat at the hands of the Persians that left great swathes of the empire vulnerable to their subsequent conquest by the Muslim armies.

Mailvox: inventing sin

TB is unhappy with the descent of his church into worldly racial cuckery:

I was baptized in the Seattle church, where there was none of this bunk. We’ve moved to the Portland church and have been part of the church here for four years. The last year or so has caused me concern. Our minister, Steve Johnson, is from the south and has been experiencing white male guilt as he gets older.

What is with men turning into mush pies as they age? Reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt.

The one thing I am certain of is that any solutions to the problems mentioned in the linked content by anyone in agreement with the content in the letter , provided the proposer of the solutions informs of the desired result, will fail. Our church was very Bible and Jesus focused. That focus is weakening, but hopefully only in our local church and not the ICOC as a whole. So many churches are terrible, I’m not looking forward to finding a new one.

More and more Churchians are revealing themselves to be lukewarm, far more concerned about seeking the world’s approval than they are about following the lead of Jesus Christ, far more fearful of the judgment of Man than of the judgment of God, and unwilling to condemn genuine sin while constantly posturing in condemnation of that which is not, and has never been, sinful.

We write this letter not as Democrats or Republicans or as partisans of any political philosophy, but as Christians who are partisans of the kingdom of God described in the biblical text.

We write because of the racial tensions that now engulf our nation—racism against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnic minorities. But what has triggered our concern at this particular time is the tension that surrounds black/white relations—an extension of America’s original sin, the sin of slavery.

The question begs for an answer: how will we who claim the name Christian respond?

The choice before us is clear. We can allow the racism that abounds in America’s popular culture to set the agenda for the church. Or we can allow the biblical vision of the kingdom of God to determine what we believe, how we feel, and how we act.

The biblical text is clear: racism is a sin. It violates Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But here we have another choice. We can read the biblical text through the lens of American culture or we can read the culture through the lens of the biblical text.

Put another way, we can acknowledge that racism is a sin and behave accordingly, or we can act as if racism is only a minor problem or, even worse, participate in the racism that scars such large segments of this nation…. But racial bigotry is only half of our problem. The other half is widespread misunderstanding on the part of many white Americans—including many white Christians—of the unique set of challenges that faces American citizens if the color of their skin happens to be black.

Nothing has reflected that reality more clearly than the popular response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Racism, as a concept, did not even exist until it was coined in 1902; the Oxford English Dictionary  gives 1936 as the first recorded use. The idea that it could possibly be a sin, much less the very worst sin of all, defies not only the Bible and nearly two thousand years of theological literature, but reason and the calendar too.

Remember, Christians are given a spirit of discernment and we are to judge things by their fruits. And the fruits of the false concept of racism as sin are deeply poisonous indeed. They have proven to be incredibly destructive of individuals, families, societies, and nations alike. When I was a child, I used to wonder how it could be that so many supposed Christians could ever be so deceived by the Antichrist as to literally worship evil.

Now, as I see Christian ministers angrily denouncing racism and sexism from the pulpit even as they embrace Babelist globalism and sexual abomination, it all makes perfect sense. Aslan is not a tame lion, and God’s definition of sin is not determined by temporal human sensitivities. Neither racism nor hurting someone’s feelings by your beliefs are sins, and anyone who tells you they are is not merely lying, he is a servant of the spirit of Antichrist.

This is really not that difficult for any educated believer. By EVERY single definition of racism utilized by the anti-racists, both Jesus Christ and God are revealed to be sinners by their overtly racist words and actions. Therefore, the perverted theology of anti-racism is obviously and necessarily false, and quite possibly blasphemous as well. And in that vein, notice how many female names are among the letter’s signatories.

Every so-called pastor who preaches against racism should be expelled from the pulpit. And if he refuses to repent, from the Church. They are among the wolves in sheep’s clothing of whom we were warned.

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part I of IV

The biological title Sapiens is intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as ‘the next stage in the continuum of physics to chemistry to biology’, and our ultimate destiny, and not so very ultimate either, is to be replaced by intelligent machines. It is a summary of human cultural and social evolution from stone age foraging bands through the agricultural revolution, writing and the rise of the state and large-scale societies, through the gradual process of global unification through empires, money, and the world religions, to the scientific revolution that began the modern world and its consequences.

As an anthropologist who has trodden roughly the same path as Harari in a number of books (Hallpike 1979, 1986, 2008, 2016) I was naturally curious to see what he has to say, but it soon became clear that its claim to be a work of science is questionable, beginning with his notion of culture. Language is obviously the basis of human culture, but one of the central themes of the book is the idea that not just language but what he calls ‘fiction’ has been crucial in the ascent of Man:

…the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled…But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. (p. 27)

The claim that culture is fiction is not an important insight, but is simply a perverse way of stating the obvious fact that culture is a set of shared ideas, and ideas by their very nature can’t be material objects. Language has been revolutionary because it has allowed human beings to be linked together by shared ideas into roles and institutions. One cannot see or touch the Prime Minister, for example, but only a human being, and someone who does not know what ‘Prime Minister’ means has to be told. This can only be done properly by explaining how this role fits into the British Constitution, which in turn involves explaining parliament, cabinet government, the rule of law, democracy, and so on. This world of roles, institutions, beliefs, norms, and values forms what we call culture, but just because the components of culture are immaterial and cannot be seen, touched or smelled does not make them fiction, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, or the myths of Genesis or the Australian Aborigines. We can’t see, touch, or smell truth because truth is not a material object, but that does not make it unreal or fictitious either.

If Harari’s test of reality is only what we can see, touch, or smell then mathematics, like truth, should also be a prime example of fiction. Maybe simple integers might just pass his reality test, since we can see groups of different numbers of things, but how ‘real’ in his sense are zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers like π or imaginary numbers like the square root of -1? And if mathematics is fiction, then so is the whole of science including the theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, which Harari would find very embarrassing indeed because he loves science. He is just in a philosophical muddle that confuses what is material with what is real, and what is immaterial with fiction. But the opposite of fiction is not what is material but what is true, and what is fictional and what is true can both only exist in the immaterial world of thought.

When it comes to the task of explaining social institutions, the idea of culture as fiction is about as useful as a rubber nail:

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together round the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. (p. 31)

Really? He takes the Peugeot motor company, with its image of a lion, and tries to argue that the company itself is no more real than an ancient tribal totem, but nevertheless can form the basis on which large numbers of people could co-operate:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history…It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them…In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was formed. (p. 34)

Harari seems unable to distinguish a belief from a convention, presumably because neither is a material object. Beliefs in ghosts and spirits may be shared by members of particular cultures, but derive from the nature of people’s experience and their modes of thought: they did not sit down and deliberately agree to believe in them. Conventions, however, are precisely the result of a collective decision, consciously taken to achieve a certain purpose, and as such are completely different from myths in almost every respect. Peugeot SA rests on the legal convention of a limited-liability company, which performs a very useful social function, and another very useful social convention is the rule of the road by which in Britain we all drive on the left. Neither beliefs in spirits nor social conventions are material objects, but they are still quite different sorts of thing, as are legal documents and magical rituals, and Harari achieves nothing by confusing them.

More unsustainable claims do not take long to appear. It may well be true that by about 400,000 years ago Man became able to hunt large game on a regular basis, and that in the last 100,000 years we jumped to the top of the food chain. There also seems little doubt that after humans migrated out of Africa in the last 70,000 years or so they exterminated large mammals in Australia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. But part of his explanation for this is that:

Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump (pp. 12-13). 

No, we’re not full of fears and anxieties about our position in the food chain, and never have been, because a species is not a person who can remember things like having been the underdog of the savannah tens of millennia in the past. Knowledge of our life on the savannah has only been vaguely reconstructed by archaeologists and anthropologists in modern times.

He then describes us as ’embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees’ and claims that:

Our societies are built from  the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks – sensations, emotions, family ties – the less difference we find between us and other apes. (42)

In fact, however, if we study the research on the differences between human infants and chimpanzees, such as Tomasello’s Why We Co-operate (2009), the greater we find the differences between us and other apes. Tomasello’s studies of pre-linguistic human infants between 12-24 months and chimpanzees showed marked differences in behaviour related to co-operation, for example. Human infants start co-operating at about 12 months, and when 14 – 18 month infants were put in situations where adult strangers needed help with problems, the infants, unlike chimpanzees, spontaneously provided it. Even before speech develops human infants will try to provide information to adult strangers who need it by pointing, whereas apes do not understand informative pointing at all. Infants also have an innate grasp of rules, in the sense of understanding that certain sorts of activities, like games, should be done in a certain way, whereas apes do not. 14 – 24 month old infants also collaborate easily in social games, whereas chimpanzees simply refuse to take part in them, and infants can also change and reverse roles in games. Human collaborative activity is achieved through generalised roles that can potentially be filled by anyone, including the self. This is the basis of the unique feature of human culture, the institution, which is a set of practices governed  by rules and norms. ‘No animal species other than humans has been observed to have anything even vaguely resembling [social institutions]’ (Tomasello 2009: xi – xii).

For Harari the great innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa, which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. ‘At the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history…Survival in that area required superb mental abilities from everyone’ (p. 55), and  ‘The people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have’ (p. 44). 

Not surprisingly, then,  ‘We’d be able to explain to them everything we know – from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics – and they could teach us how their people view the world’ (23).

It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon in Peru (Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind, They could teach Everett how they saw the world, which was entirely confined to the immediate experience of the here-and-now, with no interest in past or future, or really in anything that could not be seen or touched. They had no myths or stories, so Alice in Wonderland would have fallen rather flat as well.

Part II of Dr. Hallpike’s review will be posted tomorrow.

Hollywood values in the media

Breitbart reports on a 6th reported sexual assailant in the mainstream media:

Mother Jones’ David Corn Is Sixth Member of Elite Media Accused of Misconduct Towards Female Staffers

Just coming to light are two emails written by former staffers for the hard-left Mother Jones magazine, who allege that Washington bureau chief David Corn inappropriately touched female employees and made jokes about rape and “women’s sexuality and anatomy.” In just a month, Corn is the sixth member of the media elite under investigation for alleged misconduct.

The left-wing Politico just obtained the emails, written in 2014 and 2015, and in a statement, Mother Jones’ CEO Monika Bauerlein and editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery said, “[N]ow that they’ve come to us, we are going to take them seriously and investigate.”

David Corn. That sounds pretty generic. But, we shall check nevertheless. Infogalactus investigatus!

Let’s see. Brown University. Winner of George Polk Award for Journalism, 2012. Chief of Washington bureau for Mother Jones. Washington editor for The Nation. Oh, well, there it is. Again.

“Corn was raised in a Jewish family in White Plains, New York.”

And now Wall Street too!

At this point, it’s getting just a little bit difficult to feign surprise anymore. Or pretend that the Judeo-Christians in Hollywood and the media, and on Wall Street, do not have a serious sexual assault problem. Again, read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth for details. I wonder how long it will be before Ben Shapiro’s name comes up; he white-knighted for Michelle Fields to the point of protesting too much.

But as the #DailyMemeWars noted, all of this is just prelude until the Hollywood Values scandal goes critical when Lucas and Spielberg go down. Remember, Marion was supposed to be ELEVEN.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

Mailvox: It is none of your business

Non-Hollywood Reporter finally manages to be on-topic.

Vox, your greatest mate who you said you’d stand by forever said he attended several Hollywood parties where he witnessed “very young” boys being raped. You knew this at the time.

Your best friend who you stand by also said he wouldn’t name the rapists because it would be “indiscreet”.

Have you asked your best friend Milo to name these pedophiles publicly, or at least make a statement to the police?

If not, why not?

Why do you keep deleting these questions and never answering them?

Do you think you can delete them forever?

First, Non-Hollywood Reporter is lying and has been banned and spammed for spamming unrelated topics in a monomaniacal manner. Milo is my friend. Milo is not my best friend. Second, it is absolutely none of Non-Hollywood Reporter’s business what I have discussed with Milo or anyone else. Nor is it anyone else’s business. One of the reasons even people who don’t particularly like me tend to trust me is because I am demonstrably capable of keeping things in confidence. Third, I do not owe any answer to the Non-Hollywood Reporter or anyone else for someone else’s decisions and behavior, be they ally, friend, or foe.

I will never permit anyone to use me to put additional public pressure on a friend or ally. Go ahead and try to attack me on the basis of questions I will not answer if you like. You will do so in vain. My track record on this particular issue more than speaks for itself and will continue to do so in a very material way. So, for that matter, does Milo’s, as he has publicly identified three more pedophiles than virtually every journalist and reporter who has condemned him for not doing more than he has.

I have outed THREE pedophiles in my career as a journalist. That’s three more than any of my critics and a peculiar strategy for a supposed pedophile apologist.
(a) Luke Bozier, former business partner of Louise Mensch
(b) Nicholas Nyberg, anti-GamerGate activist who self-described as a pedophile and white nationalist
(c) Chris Leydon, a London photographer who has a rape trial starting March 13 thanks to my reporting.

I have never defended and would never defend child abusers, as my reporting history shows.

I kept deleting the questions because they were a) off-topic, b) obviously rhetorical, and c) primarily intended to discredit and disqualify me and others. I certainly can delete them forever if I so choose; the moderators and I will simply prevent any comment by Non-Hollywood Reporter from even appearing momentarily on this blog. However, I chose to address them today to make several points.

  1. No commenter will ever succeed in pressuring me to do anything. Even the attempt to do so is sufficient grounds for banning and spamming. /pol/ is not your private army. Neither am I, my VFM, or the Dread Ilk.
  2. I do not even betray the confidences of my enemies. I absolutely do not betray the confidences of my friends and allies.
  3. Your ignorance of my actions is not evidence of the non-existence of my actions.
  4. I am not perfect. I am as fallible as any man. But as those who know me and work with me can attest, I am consistent.
  5. I do not answer to anyone but my Lord and Savior, and His Father.

SJWs will SJW

As I expected, it turns out that the deactivation of the God-Emperor’s Twitter account was intentional:

A Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job deactivated President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes Thursday evening, the social media company reported.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.

Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.

Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”

Note that Twitter’s first response was to lie. They may also by lying about it having been the employee’s last day before he deactivated the account. This sort of behavior is increasingly common among SJWs; we had a similar problem with an SJW at Amazon when we released Corrosion: The Corroding Empire Book One.

An SJW at Amazon repeatedly pulled it out of publication status. It took three times before a manager would believe me, and a fourth time for her to catch the guilty party. I don’t know what the consequences were, but I was assured that the individual would never be able to do it again.

Which, of course, is why you must NEVER hire SJWs or permit them to continue working for you, even if you are of the Left yourself. They will not even hesitate to pursue their social justice objectives even when those objectives directly conflict with the organization’s interests. If you doubt this, or wish for a more substantive analysis, you should read SJWs Always Double Down.