Those nefarious Russians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The magnetic field is in a permanent state of flux.

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

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

Gamma philosophy

An exchange in the Darkstream comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: in case you had any doubts whatsoever:

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

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

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

Every. Single. Time. Secret King wins again!

Yellow Vest deplatformings

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

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

Glad to be gone

Minnesota is institutionalizing diversity and equality:

The first official action of Gov. Tim Walz’s administration was to renew a promise the state will strive to be more equitable and inclusive and for the first time making geography a focus of those efforts.

“In Minnesota, we all know we are better off when we are in it together,” Walz said. “The state must be a leader in ensuring everyone has an opportunity to thrive.”

Walz signed an executive order creating the “One Minnesota Council on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” on Wednesday at the Capitol. The governor will lead the council that Walz said builds on the work of former Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration.

“Disparities in Minnesota, including those based on race, geography (and) economic status keep our entire state from reaching its full potential,” Walz said. “As long as these inequities impact Minnesotans’ ability to be successful, we’ve got more work to do.”

I don’t think everyone will be better off when they’re all caught up in the coming Diversity Wars together. As I told the Original Cyberpunk, I can feel his quality of life improving from here.

Training vs fighting

A karate black belt shares his thoughts on my recent observations concerning the distinction between training and fighting.

“Training is not fighting. Training is learning how to do things. Fighting is learning how to defeat the opponent who has a vote.”
– Vox Day

 Everyone knows that training is important. Without training, success is a dice-roll, and failure is likely. Even if you get something right, it is easy to mis-attribute your success to one thing, when in reality something else entirely won the day. Only those with training know what to look for.

Through volume of repetition, training gives you the speed and instincts to do the right thing, whether that is resolving an argument, building a house, or coming out on top in a bar-fight.

But training isn’t enough. All the training in the world isn’t enough without experience.

In order to be confident in himself, a man has to know he can physically protect himself. It doesn’t matter if this is rational in the modern age. It just is. If wealth, charisma, or social connections are the measure of power today, physical fitness and skill in fighting still dominate how men evaluate other men, and how they think of themselves. It’s primordial.

Today’s generation half-understands this. They’ve seen Fight Club. They understand the attraction of being dangerous. They sign up in herds for Karate, Taekwondo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the works. But they mistake training for fighting. They mistake the tools for the finished product. The finger for the moon.

I received my black-belt in Shudokan karate when I was sixteen years old. By the time I had received that supposed sign of mastery, I had heard three fight stories involving black-belts.

Read the whole thing there. And then reflect upon the confidence and resilience that I exhibit, that some people despise and others admire. Even if you believe the confidence is a sham, or that it is delusional, from whence does the resilience spring? Why is it that I am so able to bounce back so quickly, so automatically, from the sort of attacks, expulsions, and deplatformings that others find so debilitating?

It’s just experience. It’s from the certain knowledge that you can get up and get back into the fight after you get knocked down. And the only way to acquire that knowledge, the only way to acquire that resilience, the only way to acquire that confidence in yourself, is to take the shots and face that moment of truth that no amount of self-deception can ever disguise. It’s a moment that observers can often see too.

That’s why real fighters often admire each other even if they actively dislike each other. That’s why boxers often hug with genuine affection after beating the hell out of each other. That’s why two men who get into a fight not infrequently become friends. Because the nature of the combat relationship is such that it often gives a man a glimpse of his opponent’s soul, and it is not uncommon to see something admirable there.

His own private Alamo

President Trump is absolutely right to make a stand on the Wall. He’s correct to believe that he will not be re-elected in 2020 if he does not deliver on his second-most important campaign promise, to Build the Wall.

President Donald Trump has boxed himself into a situation with no endgame in his government shutdown standoff over a border wall, a new report claims.

Citing an unnamed former White House official, Vanity Fair reported on Tuesday that Trump believes he will not be reelected in 2020 if the wall is not built, and has made the issue his ‘personal Alamo’.

Trump reportedly told aides that he is prepared to make his ‘last stand’ on the wall issue, staking his entire presidency on constructing the border barrier that he called for forcefully in a Tuesday night address to the nation from the Oval Office.

‘The president put himself in a box,’ the former official in touch with the White House told the magazine. ‘The problem is there’s no endgame. Right now the White House is at a seven on the panic scale. If this thing goes on past the State of the Union they’re going to be at an 11.’

Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. Nothing else matters. Not the stock market, not North Korea, and not tax cuts. And certainly not ending the government “shutdown”.

Build the Wall and win. Fail to build it and lose. This is not rocket science.

Darkstream: the magic cuddle puddlers

Unlike the Roganites and BJJ fanboys who were triggered by my observations, a number of actual grapplers and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners understood what I’ve been saying about grappling being, in most real-world situations, an impractical and dangerous approach to fighting. Especially these days. If Antifa is going to attack you, you can pretty much guarantee they will not do so 1v1.

  • Dean lister actually says a lot of the same things vox does. I mean, he talks about bar fights etc and how bjj is not optimal in those situations and the kinds of things that are effective in real fights.
  • Precisely. My experiences are the same as yours. Every serious fight I’ve been in ended up being me fighting more than four people. Last place you wanna be is the ground. There’s a reason BJJ isn’t taught for street defence.
  • I’m a BJJ instructor and have trained Shotokan for 7 years and Muay Thai for about 4. I’ve been in about 6 real world fights. Only 1 was 1 on 1. You should have knowledge of both standing and ground game. Being able to execute take downs and know how to get back up if you get down is very important. Vox made some good points. Grapplers stop being triggered. 1 on 1 the grappler will most likely win. Anything other than that you need to be as mobile as possible which means you need to stay standing.
  • I wrestled Division One on a team with a national champion and I can say Vox is more than correct in his assertions. A wrestler’s only advantage is his strength and physical ability to take some abuse and crush a guy ONE ON ONE on the ground. But wrestling in a bar or street fight is a no-win situation. You have to strike and stay on your feet. You never want to end up on the ground.
  • I disagree with some of what Vox pushes, especially on religion etc (and on Kenpo.. depending on the style). He is absolutely correct on this. Having done martial arts for many years and been in many confrontations he is pretty much on point on this topic. Wrestling rarely puts forth real-world situations and realities.
  • He is correct. BJJ is “fake,” that is,  it takes place within a structure and it is effective within that structure. The GIF shown early on proves that grappling on the ground in a real fight opens you up to being crushed by someones mother. There’a a reason Kano emphasized throws.

The strangest thing about this situation has been the way that triggered Roganites and Brazilian Cuddle Puddlers keep demanding that I prove the truth of my experiences and claiming that my observations are somehow invalid if I don’t post a video of me physically harming people with my magical martial arts skills. Do they really not grasp the irony of the fact that they are fans of a UFC COMMENTATOR who talks about this subject all the time despite having no personal experience of either ring-fighting or real fighting?

My comments, observations, and opinions are either on point or they are not, regardless of whether you believe my colorful story about beating up 15 leprechauns who rode in together on a giant green-maned unicorn with an ancient Native American martial art I learned from the tribal shaman.

And this video of Sakuraba absolutely destroying the best that the Gracies had to offer demonstrates very clearly the fundamental weakness of building your attack plan around a ground game. Look how utterly stupid and helpless both Hoyce and Renzo Gracie are with Sakuraba standing over them, just deciding where he’s going to stomp on them next.

This comment sums it up well:

how does that work then?
“I lay on the floor and get the shit kicked out of me.”
not sure this bjj works to be honest.

Yellow Vests go on the offensive

And they are targeting one of the obvious vulnerabilities of the liberal imperialists:

Yellow Vest protesters are hoping to trigger a bank run with a nationwide coordinated cash withdrawal. By threatening the French financial system, protesters say, they want to peacefully force the government to pass their reforms.

“If the banks weaken, the state weakens immediately,” said Yellow Vest “sympathizer” Tahz San on Facebook. “It’s elected officials’ worst nightmare.”

Protesters plan to empty their bank accounts on Saturday, withdrawing as much money as possible in a bid to undermine the French banks – if not the euro itself. The plan is to “scare the state legally and without violence,” forcing the government to adopt the movement’s Citizens’ Referendum Initiative, which would allow citizens to propose and vote on new laws.

“We are going to get our bread back…you’re making money with our dough, and we’re fed up,” said protester Maxime Nicolle in a video message shared on YouTube.

A well-coordinated financial action has the potential to bring the French banking system – and by extension the euro – to its knees, as banks always hold only a fraction of the funds the country’s citizens have in their accounts. However, most banks limit ATM withdrawals to a relatively low amount, meaning protesters would have to line up inside the banks to withdraw the rest of their money, giving the state plenty of time to place restrictions on withdrawals – though this would, no doubt, spark further protest.

This will cause the imperialists to put more stress on “the cashless society”, although everyone should now understand that a cashless society is a controlled society.

The desecration of Saint Solzhenitsyn

The Neo-Palestinian Ekaterina Jung – who calls herself “Cathy Young” now that she wants to convince everyone that she’s a Real American who loves hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball just as much as anyone else – sends a strong signal that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is in the process of being added to the Neo-Palestinian blacklist in her hit piece entitled “Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet”:

The 100th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s birth on December 11 was an occasion for many tributes. A decade after his death, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the past century’s towering figures in both literature and public life. His role in exposing the crimes of the Soviet regime is a historic achievement the magnitude of which can hardly be overstated. But his legacy also continues to be the subject of intense debate among people who share his loathing of that regime—and those controversies, which have to do with freedom, traditional morality, and nationalism, are strikingly relevant to our current moment.

Solzhenitsyn was once my childhood hero. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, in a family of closet dissidents, I knew him as the man who defied the system and told the truth about its atrocities—the man idolized by my parents, especially my father, himself the son of gulag survivors. I was eleven when Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union; our Stalinist political instructor at school bellowed that he should have been shot as a traitor. A year or two later I heard excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago on foreign radio broadcasts; then, the coveted book appeared for a short while in our home.

Later, after my family emigrated to the United States in 1980, Solzhenitsyn’s heroic halo gradually began to lose its luster in our eyes. We were hardly alone; as the years went by, many of his erstwhile admirers came to believe, with bitter disappointment, that Solzhenitsyn could no longer be seen as a champion of freedom and justice.

The real reason for Jung’s rejection of her former hero Solzhenitsyn, of course, is that because Russia is now Hitler. The Neo-Palestinians are furious that the Russians under Vladimir Putin have managed to shake off the leash of liberal imperialism that the Neo-Palestinians, unlike their considerably more sensible nationalist cousins in Israel, so fervently support. And I suspect that this new anti-Solzhenitsyn campaign is founded in the realization that the eventual publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together in English, whenever that finally happens, is going to completely explode the myth of the poor innocent Neo-Palestinians who never did nothing to nobody nowhere, once and for all.