#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Were there any walruses under your pillow?
Um, no. Why do you ask?
How do you distract a walrus?
Presumably with a fish, I suppose.
On a totally unrelated subject, I encourage you to submit nominations for 2013’s top ten posts on VP. It’s not really my call, so please suggest up to three posts in the comments here. I’m curious to know what the readers here find most interesting, as I suspect that the number of comments per post are not necessarily the best metric for determining that.
Physphilmusic inadvertently reveals the inner fascist that lurks within most cultural liberals:
I guess that is the root of our disagreement. It’s not that I don’t think genetics plays a significant role (although concerning exactly how much I probably disagree with you), it’s that if I adopted your strategy, I see no reason to stop at merely discriminating against blacks. Why not eugenics altogether? Your concern about genetics logically leads to this. You advocate measures which are effectively indirect, long-term forms of eugenics. But if you have no qualms about hurting a few people’s feelings, why stop there? Why not support the sterilization of people below certain IQ levels?
A focus on feelings is a reliable hallmark of those with no moral core at their center. The idea that opposing forced desegregation is necessarily indicative of hatred, much less a secret desire for genocide, is not only irrational, but exposes the ravenous, immoral beast at the heart of modern left-liberalism.
Observe the twisted left-liberal logic. First, there is the determination to deny reality. The genetic differences between the various human population groups either exist or not. The intellectual and behavioral limits imposed by those genetic differences either exist or not. And while for the last 50 years it has been de rigueur to claim that there are no genetic differences between various population groups, or that any differences are meaningless, advances in human genetics mean that is now the genetic equivalent of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.
Second, there is the illogical claim that recognizing those genetically imposed limits between various groups must necessarily lead to eugenics. This can only be true if one is operating from an immoral assumption of the right of some central authority to impose minimum capability requirements on the population. Needless to say, I completely reject this notion. The fact that some people are observably incapable of living in an advanced civilization does not justify harming them or treating them as sub-human. There is no reason they should not be able to live in the sort of society in which their predecessors have successfully lived for thousands of years.
Why stop with mere feelbad? Because human beings do not have the right to not experience hurt feelings. It is not possible to construct a legal system, much less maintain a society, on the basis of the avoidance of hurt feelings. However, humans of every genetic melange and intellectual capacity have the right to life, the right to self-defense, and the right to procreate. Segregation may advantage some and disadvantage others, it may cause many to feel hurt and rejected, but it does not intrinsically cause material harm to anyone; billions of people of every creed and color would not have historically self-segregated if it did. Sterilization and eugenics, on the other hand, obviously do inflict a considerable amount of direct and material harm on the individual.
Moreover, segregation is a natural and organic process. To fight it is to literally fight nature. Consider that despite its overall population being swollen by an alien invasion and relentless propaganda cheering the manifold blessings of diversity, London has seen its white-British population fall by 620,000 in only ten years, much faster than any of the experts expected. After fifty years of “civil rights” America is still unofficially segregated by neighborhood, by city, by suburb, and even by state.
Leo Tolstoy wrote about the great tides of human events that are totally beyond any human capacity to control. He used the example of Napoleon at Waterloo and showed conclusively how Napoleon didn’t know what was happening during the battle or even what units were involved in its most critical phases. In like manner, the precise way in which the inevitable reaction to the imposition of mass immigration and cultural invasion is impossible to predict, but no one with any sense of history can reasonably deny it is going to take place.
My opinion is that it would be much better for the governments of the West to align their actions with that inevitable reaction than to oppose it, but I have little hope that will be the case. Many will argue that because the reaction has not taken place yet, it will never happen, but one could have accurately said that prior to every large-scale event in human history.
Cry raciss all you like. It will change nothing. Deny the existence and the significance of human genetics until you turn blue. It will change nothing. Profess your undying allegiance to the religion of human equality with all the fervor of an early Christian martyr. It will change nothing. For as the white liberal aid worker raped in Haiti came to discover, there is no magical incantation that will save you from being out-group when the in-group turns against the outsiders.
The Flat Gene Society is even more ridiculous than the Flat Earth Society. At least those who belonged to the latter had the excuse of correctly observing what they saw with their own eyes. The Flat Gene Society requires ignoring science and history as well as the evidence of one’s own eyes.
79 Greenfield Grizzlies
42 Fromundah Cheezheads
The Greenfield Grizzlies are your 2013 VPFL champion. It’s been a banner year for the White Buffalo, as he also defeated me in our other fantasy league, 77-57 AND won his picks league at work as well. This will make him absolutely insufferable for the next nine months.
Thanks for playing, everyone, and the very small silver lining in the gargantuan cloud that is the Greenfield championship is that thanks to one of the permanent players winning the league, there will be six open spots next year instead of the usual five. I will post a call for volunteer players about a month before the season starts; as always, new players will be given the priority.
As for the NFL, here is to hoping that Leslie Frazier heads back to coordinating defenses and Bill Musgrave is doing something besides calling successive off-tackle plays for Adrian Peterson.
Jerry Pournelle reflects on the failure of the California State College system:
Back about 1970 I was involved with the Council that was to draw up
the Master Plan for the University of California system. The program was
very structured: the University System would have a limited number of
campuses, and would do all the graduate school education. There would be
a limited number of undergraduates at each of those campuses, and they
would be the elite applicants. Tuition would be low for state residents,
and very high for out of state and foreign students. This would be the
University system, and it would be for the best and the brightest.
Salaries would be high for an elite faculty.In addition, there would be the California State Colleges, which
would not be permitted to award graduate degrees. They would do
undergraduate education, and send their best and brightest to compete
for places in the University system graduate schools. Their primary
purpose was teaching, and it was on their ability to teach that faculty
members would be chosen and retained: no publish or perish, because
their purpose was to teach, not to do “research”. They were not to
discover knowledge, but to convey it to most of the undergraduates in
the state. A small number would go to the University undergraduate
system, but about 90% of all undergraduates enrolled in state higher
education would be in the California State Colleges. This would include
colleges of education and teacher. Again the focus would not be on
‘research’ or anything else other than producing great teachers for the
California schools.Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the
California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into
universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate
schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it;
and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate
copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order
to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least
to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges
became California State Universities, their commitment to actual
undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate
schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had
been designed to be very low, began to climb.
Everyone always wants elite status without being required to provide elite performance or assume elite responsibility. Unless your system specifically accounts for and prepares for the inevitable push to degrade status, it is doomed to fall in precisely the same way the California State College system did.
The irony, of course, is that by democratizing the elite status, it is destroyed. That is why university degrees, and increasingly, advanced degrees, are literally worthless these days. Once everyone has the credential, it ceases to mean anything anymore.
MS clings to the myth of equality between different human population groups:
I don’t need to base anything on race; the problem with many blacks in America is their culture. A lazy, irresponsible, INFERIOR culture compared to eurocentric “white” culture. If they adopted our culture tomorrow, most of their problems would disappear (IMO).
He’s completely wrong. Africans don’t adopt European culture for three reasons. First, because they can’t. Second, because they prefer their own culture. Third, because Europeans have increasingly abandoned it themselves. Europeans have been trying to force Africans to adopt European culture for more than 200 years. It’s not possible, and more to the point, it’s not their choice.
Think about it. What could be more racist, what could be more culturally imperialistic, than to insist that Africans must adopt European culture? This is even worse than Muslims imposing Sharia on everyone; Sharia at least permits the dhimmi to retain their religion and customs. Why should Asians not insist that Europeans adopt their culture? If we put it to a global vote, I’m quite confident the Han Chinese would win.
Africans have a perfect right to live the way they want to live. So do Europeans. This is why desegregation is not only doomed to failure, but is intrinsically immoral. It is also likely to destroy whichever culture has the longer time preferences.
Remember, there are no shortage of whites, especially overweight, unattractive white women, who genuinely prefer the African culture of living fast, consuming conspicuously, and dying young in a promiscuous, matriarchal society to the European culture of living conservatively and saving to build for the future in a sexually restricted patriarchal society. As with all things economic, these are questions of preferences and time-orientation, not morality or science.
History has conclusively demonstrated that there is only one way to successfully turn a short-term orientation people into a long-term one: kill off a sufficient percentage of those members of the population group with a short-term orientation before they bear or raise children. This process takes somewhere between 750 and 1,000 years and I suspect that Jared Diamond may have been onto something even though he didn’t understand the full significance of the European geography in this regard. My thought is that the near-continuous warfare between small and competing groups, in combination with their ongoing contact with advanced civilization, allowed the European nations to kill off enough of their short-term oriented troublemakers to collectively develop long-term time orientations.
Remember, the Roman legions didn’t permit their soldiers to marry until AFTER their 20-year term of service was complete.
Not only have Africans not had enough time to go through his process, given when they first encountered European civilization, but they have actually been collectively reverting thanks to the federal and international aid policies of the last 50 years. Neither geography nor law nor even religion are sufficient to convert short time preferences into long ones. Such ideas are mutu, magical thinking akin to the idea that murdering an albino will lead to success in business.
Permitting the barbarians to destroy civilization is not going to benefit either the savage or the civilized in the long-run. The fact that the majority of people in our society cannot grasp this simple fact is, in itself, an indication of the way in which our society has already been barbarized.
There have been few recipients of interactive discourse with the vibrant youth more deserving than Mark Andrew, former DFL party leader and Minneapolis mayoral candidate:
The runner-up in the Minneapolis mayoral election is recovering after being robbed and brutally beaten Thursday night at the Mall of America. Mark Andrew, 63, was at a Starbucks inside the mall at around 7 p.m. Thursday when a man grabbed his phone off his table and ran off.
When Andrew went after him, he was tackled by two teenage girls – aged 18 and 17 — one of which began beating him with a billy club. During the attack, they told Andrew, “We’re going to kill you,” police say. Andrew was left with a large gash on his head that required nine stitches. He has since been released from the hospital.
In Minnesota, the DFL is the party that loves, loves, loves the vibrants, especially the Somali immigrants, and is constantly advocating for more of them. It’s simply fabulous that one of their leaders should become the beneficiary of the sort of treatment to which they have subjected so many of the people of Minnesota. And the fact that the DFLer was beaten up by female vibrants only makes the story that much more amusing.
I think every champion of open borders and every so-called civil rights advocate should be forced to walk alone through the vibrant quarters at night once per year. Perhaps the experience would scare some common sense into them. If they survived.
It appears the Mall of America isn’t the only mall in America that is currently enjoying the manifold benefits of vibrancy. This, too, is an aspect of America’s ongoing societal suicide. You wanted desegregation, you got it, baby. But isn’t it ironic how so many of those who champion desegregation suddenly want to move in with the segregationists as soon as their neighborhood actually desegregates?
Enjoy the vibrancy.
Camille Paglia is interviewed in The Wall Street Journal:
‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says
Camille Paglia.
This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling
anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her
indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is
out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male
students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and
women, and sexiness is dead….I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization. She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”
The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.
When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.” Nonsense, she says. “I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.” She calls it “street-smart feminism.”
Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten.
It’s easy to dismiss the likes of Karl Denninger and me. But when intelligent, successful, mainstream people as diverse as Camille Paglia, Marc Faber, and X are all observing almost exactly the same thing, and when arrogant world-healers such as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Paul Krugman are beginning to openly admit that their models don’t work and they don’t know what the hell is happening anymore, it may be time to start listening to the canaries who have been screaming their pretty little yellow heads off.
As for the triumph of feminism, let me be the first to point out that there are now a whole host of men who are “who would admit that he believes women are less capable”. We will not only admit it, we will openly proclaim it. And that host is growing literally every day as awareness of Game continues to spread throughout the male population.
Equality is dead. Multiculturalism is dead. Feminism is dying. And if we’re very, very lucky, civilization won’t be completely devastated in their catastrophic death throes over the next two decades.
ST asks for criticism concerning his attack on a utilitarian argument in defense of punishing Christians who fail to support gay marriage.
I am debating a “Humian Utilitarian” with the moniker Eric The Red (ETR) over at Doug Wilson’s place. I post there as timothy. Two men there, Katecho and Dan have done the grunt work of identifying the materialism of ETR and I consider him debunked, but ETR is an evasive little bastard.
I would like for him to hang himself with his Utilitarian positions. I am not pleased with my work on this and am asking your help or criticism.
ETR’s position is that human happiness is maximized (pick your flavor of Utilitarianism measurement here–average or greatest–it doesn’t matter which) by celebrating gay marriage. Since a Christian baker’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a couple of gay perverts detracts from that happiness, it is right to punish the Christians.
I am going to adopt the Utilitarian viewpoint in my argument as it is ETR’s viewpoint.
ETR likes to change the subject quite a bit when things get tight, so here is his latest example missive where I think an opening lies:
“Perhaps someone can answer my earlier question: In light of Uganda, how isn’t is the basest and more repulsive hypocrisy for Christians to complain about having to bake a cake? Take a look at what your fellow religionists have done to gays over the years; you sure have a low tolerance for what you consider persecution in light of your own abuse of gays over the years.”
Since it is topical, I am focusing on the Ugandan law he mentions and ignoring the other accusations for now.
The text of the Ugandan law is here.
Clause 3 specifies the penalty for the horror of an HIV-positive man buggering a child. It is on this clause that I am building my argument (this decision may be a mistake, but I am rolling with it for now).
The Logical structure I have in mind is a simple Conjunctive
P dot Q
where both P and Q have to be true.
If one is false then the conjunctive is false and the argument fails.
Here is the truth table.
P Q P dot Q
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F FArgument P
- A Utilitarian desires the greatest “good” for the greatest number of people.
- Without children, there are no people for whom to maximize the greatest good, therefore, the good of the greatest number of people warrants the protection of children.
- Clause 3 of the Ugandan law specifically penalizes homosexuals in the case of HIV positive men having sex with children. Thereby increasing the greater good.
- Clause 3 of the Ugandan law is valid under Utilitarian principles.
- The Utilitarian principle of maximizing the greater good requires stigmatizing homosexual behavior
Argument Q
- A Utilitarian desires the greatest “good” for the greatest number of people.
- Homosexual marriage increases the greater good. (defined as happines, if I remember the thread correctly)
- Actions that increase human happiness are to be encouraged.
- Actions that decrease human happiness are to be penalized.
- Christians who refuse to bake a wedding cake for homosexuals are at odds with Utilitarian principles
- Under Utilitarian principles it is a good to punish those who punish homosexual behavior.
Either P is True or Q is True.
Both cannot be true.
P and Q state the same thing
therefore the Utilitarian argument fails.
My take is that this is overkill. Some will recall that one of the first questions I ask myself in dealing with an interlocutor is whether or not he is intellectually honest. Since ST describes ETR as “an evasive little bastard”, we can safely assume that he is not. And since he is presenting a utilitarian argument in favor of a statistically insignificant minority, we can also observe that he isn’t particularly intelligent either.
Where ST went wrong was in permitting ETR to beg the question. ETR asserted, apropos of nothing, that “human happiness is maximized by
celebrating gay marriage”. I would have attacked that point and demonstrated his argument to be based upon a false foundation rather than taking the much more complicated approach ST adopted.
Also, Argument P is legitimate, but somewhat convoluted. Steps 2 and and 5 are weaker than they could be. If I were to rewrite Argument P, it would be as follows:
Argument P2
This accomplishes the same result and in a much more straightforward action. Better yet, it forces ETR to go back and defend the question that had been successfully begged if he is going to object to it. Of course, the entire argument is stupid on its face; Utilitarianism is nothing more than the democratic fallacy and has been known to be bankrupt for more than a century. The fact is that ETR is not going to be convinced of anything or stop presenting his dialectically false arguments simply because they have been shown to be false and philosophically outdated. His objectives are entirely rhetorical and akin to that of Pajama Boy, which is “to make the opponents feel terrible about themselves”. Now, recall that in most cases, the opponent’s objective is based on his own vulnerabilities. And that points the way to effective victory.
Because the Left is usually limited to the rhetorical level, it is useful to take a two-step approach of first dialectically crushing the opponent’s pseudo-dialectical argument, then to rhetorically rub his intellectual inferiority in his face along with any other obvious psychological weaknesses. (This, by the way, is why the Left is so reliably inept when they attack me; they seldom bother to try to understand their enemy.) However, since the dialectic aspect is only relevant in that it lays the foundation for the subsequent rhetorical assault, it is best to keep it as simple and easy to follow as possible.
Perhaps one day I will write a book entitled Why I Play the Classics. But Calvino aside, one plays classic games for much the same reason that one reads classic books. From Slashdot:
An article at The Verge got me thinking. Parents and those of you who plan to become parents: will you introduce your kids to the games you played when you were younger? Those of us who grew up playing Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man have had a chance to see gaming software evolve into the enormously complex and graphically realistic beast it is today. I’ve begun to understand why my grandparents tried to get me to watch old movies. I’m also curious how you folks plan to teach your kids about computers and software in general.
I find it pretty simple. If you begin playing older boardgames with them when they are young, they begin to develop an appreciation for games as a general concept rather than viewing them as something that primarily exists on a screen. I started playing War at Sea with Ender when he was six; this year he was delighted to get a 36 year-old copy of Victory in the Pacific for Christmas.
Ender likes playing modern shooters and sports games, but he also enjoys older games through the use of DosBox. Right now, he’s particularly into Wizardry and before that he was playing Fantasy General after we were both checking out the recently released Fantasy Kommander from Matrix. He recognizes that graphics do not make the game, which unfortunately is more than I can say for a lot of people in the industry.
Not that graphics aren’t important in the symbolic sense. In fact, some of us were having a discussion on the subject just last night, which leads to a question for the gamers in our midst. Can a blue heart represent morale? If that is too easily confused with the red cross that represents health, then what is a better symbol for morale?
Any ASLers who answer “boxcars” will be summarily shot.
It seems that Mr. Marston, aka Yama, Clampps, Arachnothera, Will le Fey, and a plethora of other pseudonyms, has now taken to vandalizing the Quantum Mortis Wikia in his copious spare time.
18:49, December 25, 2013
Welcome to the Quantum Mortis Wiki
Nobody’s ever going to read this piece of shit.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I’m accustomed to everyone in my private life knowing what I do online. The trolls, however, are not, and I’ve learned they really don’t like the people in their daily lives learning about their online activities. So, as promised, I’m gradually going to bring every banned troll’s online activity into his real life. Each time a troll shows his head after being banned, I will disclose one more piece of personal information about them.
As you can see from his IP address, 72.93.116.138, Andrew Marston lives in Marshfield, Massachusetts. He works at a wildlife center, which is why he uses bird names for so many of his trolling identities.