Darkstream: Learning how to think more effectively

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

If you look at at other mistakes that people make I would say probably the biggest one, and the one that is the biggest single problem, is the tendency to apply the genetic fallacy. You see that applied all the time to people like me who are on the Right, but you also see people on the Right applying it to people on the Left. What you need to understand is that it is a logical fallacy to dismiss someone because of the nature of the source. Let me rephrase that: it is a logical fallacy to dismiss something based on the nature of the source.

So the fact that Sam Harris is saying something does not mean that it’s going to be false. Now, if he is playing around with words and that sort of thing then you can have a heuristic that says: Sam Harris is babbling about definitions again and so he’s probably wrong, he’s probably not telling the truth. So it it’s a useful heuristic, but again you cannot place any heavy reliance upon it. You always need to check and you always need to pay attention. What’s what’s important is you apply the heuristic when you don’t have time, but at no point do you ever claim that it has proved anything.

We’re here to help

The USA is graciously offering to protect the freedom of the seas and the financial integrity of several Pacific island nations, whether they want US protection or not.

The US has said it will join Australia in the development of a naval base on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island to “protect the freedom of the seas,” in a move apparently aimed at curbing China’s presence in the Pacific.

Australia, a staunch US ally in the Pacific, had already set its sights on Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island earlier in November, seeking to build a deep-water facility for its Navy. Now, Washington apparently has also decided to join the effort, in a move clearly aimed at sending a signal to Beijing, which is already locked in a trade war with Washington and in disputes over the South China Sea.

It is no surprise that the US decision apparently came on the heels of rumors that China might also emerge as the eventual developer of the deep-water base. Some other reports suggested that China approached another Pacific island nation, Vanuatu, seeking to open a military base there.

Apart from that, the US also seems to be concerned that Beijing might use its growing influence over the Pacific island nations to get access to some military infrastructure in the vicinity of major maritime routes in the region. Pence even engaged in an indirect verbal duel with China’s President Xi Jingping at the APEC summit, where the two apparently fought for the attention of the smaller Pacific nations.

“Do not accept debt that could compromise your sovereignty. Protect your interests,” Pence called on the island nations, referring to China’s active policy of giving loans to the Pacific states, which might turn it into a major bilateral lender to island economies.

He then called on the Pacific nations to stick with the US as it allegedly offers a “better option” because it would supposedly never “coerce or compromise your independence.” Xi, in turn, said that “no one has the power to stop people from seeking a better life,” while calling on the Pacific nations to “strengthen development cooperation” as well.

However, in its attempt to outplay Beijing in its supposed rush to gain control over strategic locations in the Pacific, the US and Australia seemingly completely forgot to ask the locals about their take on the prospect of the base re-development.

No one has sought support from the locals, Manus Island Governor Charlie Benjamin said, as cited by Reuters. The project was also criticized by a former Papua New Guinea MP from the island, Ronnie Knight, who said that “there is lot of questions to be answered” first.

“There was no discussion with any of the locals, it has just been bulldozed through again and that is what makes people cross,” he told Australia’s ABC broadcaster, expressing his concerns about potentially “having a foreign base on our soil.”

See, they’re the BAD empire. We’ll save you from them, and all out of the goodness of our hearts. Now, shut up, stop talking to them, and do what we tell you to do. While we’re at it, can I interest you in an offer of some loans at an interest rate you can’t possibly refuse? No, I mean, you literally can’t refuse them. Or else.

Don’t mind us just doing a little construction over here. It’s just a teeny, tiny, little military base. You’ll hardly notice it.

An addendum

In writing an appendix to Jordanetics – note that today is the last day to preorder – I revised my numbers a little to account for the inexcusable omission of Indians – dot, not feather – from my earlier statistical review of his claims concerning the high-IQ subset of the U.S. population. I also took a look at his assertion from another perspective, which in addition to better illuminating the absurd nature of his claim, nicely demonstrates his admitted inaptitude for math and statistics.

Less than 4 percent of the 145+ IQ population in the USA is Jewish. Not more than 40 percent.

Note that even if we were to generously allow Peterson his original assertion as well as a causal relationship between IQ and societal success, his math is incorrect. At the high end of his suggested range, Jews would account for 123,690 of the 713,113 high-IQ population of the United States, or 17.3 percent. At the lower end he asserts, a mean IQ of 110, the Jewish percentage would decline to less than one-twelfth of the 145+ IQ set.

And just to demonstrate how ridiculous Peterson’s original statement was, accounting for the 40.8 percent of the U.S. 145+ IQ population claimed by the statistically-challenged professor would require a mean Jewish IQ of 123.4, with 7.5 percent of all U.S. Jews possessing an IQ over 145.

I’m a little bit dubious of some of the numbers that go into this equation, particularly the estimated mean IQ reported for the immigrant Indian population by Forbes, but they are a damned sight more realistic than what serves as the foundation for Peterson’s attempt to dismiss observable reality as conspiracy theory.

Truly an inexplicably poor performance by Humanity’s Greatest Thinker.

To a Butthurt Boomer

Dear Baby Boomer,

You whine, cry, and kick up a fuss EVERY SINGLE TIME anyone says anything negative about the Boomers. You get defensive EVERY SINGLE TIME, which would be amusing if it wasn’t so annoying

You really must learn to control your reactive Boomer defensiveness. Because it is no business of yours if the younger generations hate your g-g-generation, which has never stopped talking incessantly about itself. We have the right to feel as we do, just as you Boomers had the right to feel so infinitely superior to your unforgivably square parents.

Look, while I can’t speak for younger generations, I can say that on the average, Generation X HATES and DESPISES your generation. That’s just a fact. We hate your stupid music. We hate your narcissism. We despise the way so many of you have neither the time nor the inclination to love our children the way our grandparents loved us. We hate what a pain in the ass you are now that you’re starting to require caretaking but are still determined to live where and how you want to live. We hate the way so many of you are actually hoping to leave nothing to your kids and grandkids and “die with the most toys”. Decades ago, we actually used to joke that your generation would be babbling about “70 is SEXY” when it got old, and then you guys actually WENT AND DID it.

It’s not about the Boomers failing to deliver Utopia. No one ever has. It’s not about the perfection of past generations, some of whom collectively made incredibly bad decisions that have resonated down through the decades. But the fact is that your g-g-generation actually DID do a number of things differently than their predecessors, things of which they were proud, things that “changed the world”, and they are the first U.S. generation to leave its successors materially worse off than they were.

I’m not saying it’s your fault. Obviously it’s not. I’m not saying you are personally responsible. You couldn’t be. We’re talking about macro, not micro here. But your constant defensiveness whenever the subject arises tends to indicate that you at least share somewhat in your generation’s weird, self-obsessed collective consciousness.

Love,
Generation X

Right Ho, Jeeves #6

A HERO AT BRINKLEY is the sixth and final issue in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series. RIGHT HO, JEEVES tells of the travails of the inimitable Bertie Wooster, summoned from the comforts of #3A Berkeley Mansions, London, to Brinkley Manor by his imperious Aunt Dahlia. Love is in the air and Wodehousian shenanigans are afoot, as Wooster is not the sole guest at the manor, which is also playing host to the fairy-gazing Madeline Basset as well as the famous newt-fancier Augustus Fink-Nottle. But, as always, the inimitable Jeeves is there to set things right and save the day!

Adapted from the classic Wodehouse novel by comics legend Chuck Dixon and drawn by SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN illustrator Gary Kwapisz, A HERO AT BRINKLEY is the brilliant culmination of the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series.

We anticipate releasing the RIGHT HO, JEEVES graphic novel, which collects the entire six-issue series, in a premium 10×7 paperback, before the end of the month. It’s going to be beautiful. In the meantime, the Kindle edition of Issue #6 is now available.

Yeats the Baptist

Greg Johnson writes of what he considers to be the hopeful message of Yeats’s Second Coming:

And the poem seems to indicate a reversal of that flight, and a reversal of the birth of Christ. Could Mary, resting on the flight into Egypt, rocking Jesus cradled between the paws of a sphinx, have vexed the stony beast to nightmare? Could it have finally stirred from its troubled sleep, its womb heavy with the prophet of a new age, and begun the search for an appropriate place to give birth? “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” And what better place than Bethlehem, not to repeat but to reverse the birth of Christ and inaugurate a post-Christian age.

One can ask, however, if the poem ends on a note of horror or of hope. As I read it, there are three distinct stages to Yeats’ narrative. The first is the age when Christian values were the unchallenged core of Western civilization. This was a vital, flourishing civilization, but now it is over. The second stage is nihilism, both active and passive, occasioned by the loss of these core values. This is the present-day for Yeats and ourselves.

The third stage, which is yet to come, will follow the birth of the “rough beast.” Just as the birth of Jesus inaugurated Christian civilization, the rough beast will inaugurate a new pagan civilization. Its core values will be different than Christian values, which, of course, horrifies Christians, who hope to revive their religion. But the new pagan values, unlike Christian ones, will actually be believed, bringing the reign of nihilism to its end and creating a new, vital civilization. For pagans, this is a message of hope.

I think his interpretation of the three distinct stages is correct. Which is why it is really going to be fascinating to see what Greg makes of Jordanetics, which I understand he plans to review. Because, despite the best efforts of fools, false prophets, and philosophers, no Man has been able to coherently conceive, let alone construct, a viable post-Christian civilization.

Slandered by the Secret King

Two-Face van Sciver is clearly shaken by something, as he’s now emotionally projecting worse than the average SJW and resorting to outright slander. Perhaps Nick Rekeita informed him that IndieGoGo is going to be required to turn over all of their communications with him to Arkhaven as part of the discovery process permitted by the required arbitration system. Or perhaps it’s just the strain of Cyberfrog being late and 2VS feeling the pressure to deliver something capable of justifying more than half a million dollars’ worth of hype. This is from the transcript of his November 15th video called The FUTURE of the CG Movement.

You know about John Del Arroz, and I’ll tell you guys here, you know John Del Arroz, basically, I’m not sure what his whole thing with white nationalism was. He says “I was just explaining what it is that’s not how I feel.” That’s not what I remember him saying when I heard him say it, but I’ll take his word for it. Uh, the problem is, and I told him privately, I said, “yeah you know, listen, even if it’s true that everyone’s smearing you as a white nationalist and you’re not, we all misheard, you everyone knows you an apology because that’s a serious thing.” But the next thing you know, when Vox Day tried to take over ComicsGate and I fought back, he sided with Vox Day in a really snake-like way, and then what he did after we had kind of, after we had sort of, it seemed, made up, um, he started to he started to mess with me on behalf of Vox Day, like he became Vox Day’s little toady.

Vox Day said, “you think that you can stop me with, you think you can stop me with,  with your copyright trademark stuff, I’ll show you what trademark, you know what I can do with trademark, I’ll play with you with that. So what he did was he went on Amazon.com and he launched a parody kind of, of CyberFrog, but spelled with a P like PsyberFrog, and he put it up for sale on, on Amazon.com. Now I never would have known about this because I don’t talk to Vox Day so he wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have found out, so who was the one who was assigned to let me know that this troll had happened?  John Del Arroz! And he shows up immediately and goes, “hey man, I just wanted to let you know about this, like what do you think of this, like that’s wrong,” and I was like, I got it, so you guys are just gonna do this, what what’s next, it’s gonna be like cyber frog but spelled like TSyberfrog, I mean like, are you guys just gonna do this just to show that you can get around? I get it, I get it, it’s funny, now stop it!

So after that,  like, I just kind of said, all right this guy is there’s something up with him. I don’t know what his thing is. I don’t know what what his thing is, but like if he’s gonna be Vox Day’s toady and troll me on behalf of Vox, like, I just, get away from me. Kind of, you know, like, just get away from me! But me saying get away from me, like, that’s apparently, you’re not allowed to just tell people to go away. You used to be able to tell people to go away, now when you tell people to go away,  they go “he’s harassing me by telling me to go away, how dare he told me to go away, this guy,  and he’s turned everyone against me and he’s telling me to go away!” No, I just, I don’t, I don’t like you, I think you’re a snake, you’ve proven yourself to be a snake over and over again. I don’t know what’s up with the white nationalism thing, but you know it seemed to me that you know that’s what you said, and then you’re gonna do this on behalf of Vox Day? You, you know, it’s, it’s just two-faced! Get away, you’re trouble.

First of all, as you might expect, 2VS is shamelessly and blatantly lying. And he knows he is lying. I did nothing of the sort. I didn’t say that and I didn’t do that. I had absolutely nothing to do with this Psyberfrog parody. I didn’t create it, I didn’t launch it, I didn’t put it on Amazon, I didn’t tell anyone to do it and I didn’t suggest the idea to anyone do. This is straightforward slander and I can easily prove it by providing a court with the complete list of all of our products in our Amazon accounts.

Second, Jon Del Arroz is not my toady. He’s not one of my 535 Vile Faceless Minions. He’s not Dread Ilk. Nor is he two-faced or snake-like; 2VS is clearly projecting. Jon is, of course, one of our Dark Legion and Castalia House authors, as we will be publishing his Flying Sparks as well as his Alt-Hero novel, and he was an outspoken figure within ComicsGate who refused to denounce and disavow me, which is probably why 2VS is attacking him and attempting to imply that Jon is a white nationalist despite being one of the leading Hispanic science fiction authors. And speaking of Jon Del Arroz, here is his take on why ComicsGate fell apart.

Third, I never tried to take over ComicsGate and 2VS knows that better than anyone. Again, he is projecting his own behavior onto others and repeatedly lying to cover the fact that he had no objection to my acquisition of the imprint and creation of a logo until others reacted badly to it.

And fourth, everyone here knows that if I were to launch a parody of something, it would be high-quality and quite likely better than the original. Read The Corroding Empire Book One: Corrosion and The Collapsing Empire, if you harbor any doubts about that. If I were to do a parody of a 2VS comic, I would hire a good illustrator and a good colorist, then publish a comic called Rainbow Brutus in January which would almost certainly be considerably more entertaining than whatever hapless story 2VS will end up cobbling together when Rainbow Brute finally appears in April 2021.

2VS is a good example of what happens when Gammas find themselves in positions of leadership. It never ends well.

Darkstream: Rethinking capitalism

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

Something that I said the other night I think is more important than I had initially thought it was, it was an answer to a question that Alex Jones had when he asked, “what should we do, what’s the one thing we should do on the Right? What I realized that we need to do is we need to fundamentally question our assumptions and ideals, because part of what has gotten us here, part of what has gotten us into these very difficult situations and challenging circumstances is our ideals and assumptions.

I’m talking about our ideals and assumptions on the Right. We cannot blame everything on the Left. You know if you look at the people who do nothing but bitch about the Left that’s that’s what the Ben Shapiros do, that’s what the Dennis Pragers do,  that’s what the William F. Buckley types did. You know, they’re constantly pointing their fingers at the Democrats, at the leftists, and they’re never looking at their own assumptions. Now, we’ve begun to do that. You know, those of us who are on the Nationalist Right have begun to do that, we’ve begun to question things like free trade, we’ve begun to question things like legal immigration. Think about how all the Republicans and the conservatives who have said for decade, “the problem isn’t the immigration the problem is the illegal immigration.”  As we are learning, the problem is actually the legal immigration, you know, legal immigration is just another word for slow invasion, especially in a democracy.

Okay, any time you catch yourself thinking in that the problem is not the pure ideal, the problem is the application of the ideal, that’s been used to try to rescue everything from communism to feminism to civil rights. I want to quote this guy here because it’s important. Patriot 95 says “crony capitalism is what’s wrong with capitalism, capitalism untouched and not corrupted it works well, it’s what grew America early on,” Well, no, that’s not true. Here’s the the problem with these false dichotomies, these false dichotomies lend themselves to that sort of misleading formula. Crony capitalism is a problem but the fact that crony capitalism is bad does not mean that capitalism is necessarily intrinsically and always good.

I was thinking about Murray Rothbard’s economic history he’s got a very large two-volume history of of economics, it’s from the Austrian perspective, it’s very interesting it’s very, very well-founded in economic history, but what I realized about it is that from the  Rothbardian perspective, modern economics is simply the acceptance of debt. Everything that he writes about – it’s kind of shocking when you think about it – he devotes an incredible amount of time in this very long book to address the question of usury and it’s really remarkable how much space he devotes to Christian theology because he’s focused on how getting rid of the prohibitions on usury was necessary for economic development and the modern economic system.

I started thinking more and more about the conceptual problems of capitalism because obviously the issue of debt is a massive problem, and I’ve demonstrated this, I’ve dealt with this before. You know, the biggest single problem with debt is that it completely warps the supply-demand curves, and this is without even getting into Steve Keen’s mathematical demonstration that there is no such thing as a collective supply-demand curve, that you cannot create a supply-demand curve by adding multiple supply-demand curves together so we’re still working within the concept of conventional economics, we’re still in the world of Adam Smith here. But once you add debt into the equation, then what you start seeing is people whose demand is lower than someone else’s suddenly have the ability to outbid those who have a higher level of demand and a greater ability to pay, and so this turns into a absolute warp of the demand process that completely eliminates the efficiencies of capitalism.

We’re not talking about crony capitalism here. We’re not talking about the fact that there are favored parties and disfavored parties and that sort thing. We’re simply talking about the fact that you have the ability to spend resources you don’t have to outbid people who have more resources than you today is intrinsically introducing a level of inefficiency and a level of market misinformation that did not exist before.

Let me back up for a second. One of the problems with communism was the fact that it destroyed the information that is provided to everyone by the market, it destroyed the pricing mechanism, but if you think about it, debt does exactly the same thing! It destroys the pricing information,  and if you look at the situation that we’re in now where you have the elimination of contract law and you have the elimination of accountability and contracts and the basic ability to reliably buy and sell – you know you can be working with Pay Pal one day and the very next day, even though you’ve met your obligations and you’ve paid what you’re supposed to pay and then suddenly it’s gone – well how can you build a business based on that kind of unreliable information foundation? You can’t….

What is our economy fundamentally built on? It’s not debt, if you think about it. What is our economy fundamentally built on? We know it’s not built on labor. What do we spend all kinds of money on trying to convince people to do? What our entire economy is built on is sales and contracts. It is entirely built upon talking somebody into agreeing to something, the whole concept of exchange. Rational capitalism is based on the idea that all exchanges are to the benefit of the person exchanging, but we know that’s not true, we know that’s false.

A reckoning cometh

From the Introduction to Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker, which is now complete and will be published on Amazon on Monday. It also features a Foreword by Milo Yiannopoulos that is a real barnburner. The final draft has been turned in, it’s the #1 New Release in Political Philosophy three days prior to publication, and you can still preorder it.

I also discussed the forthcoming book during my recent appearance with Alex Jones.

—
Introduction: The Meandering Fog of Meaning

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.
—Sun Tzu


I decided to begin looking more deeply into this popular professor who was being so widely hailed as a formidable thinker, a thoughtful philosopher, a courageous defender of free speech, and a champion of young men. But almost immediately, I discovered that his reputation was at variance with his actions, as in the case of his deeply ironic decision to ban investigative journalist Faith Goldy from participating in an August 2017 event at Ryerson University called The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses. The event was cancelled, and with Peterson’s approval, Goldy was barred from participating in the rescheduled event.

When he was subsequently asked about his decision in public, Peterson responded with what I eventually came to recognize was his characteristic bafflegarble, the word-smog he habitually utilizes to conceal his actual meaning.

QUESTION: I understand that Faith Goldy was removed from the original August panel because of her podcast with the controversial Daily Stormer after Charlottesville…. This strategy appears to parallel the SJWs, who wish to deny platforms to conservative speakers. I want to understand why Faithy Goldy was removed from the event simply for associating with identitarians, and if each of the panelists agree with that decision.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s an excellent question. So, the first thing I should say is that it’s not like we’re unaware of the irony. Number one. Ryerson cancelled a panel about the cancellation of panels about free speech. That’s irony number one. And then irony number two was the panelists removed a speaker for arguably engaging in the act of free speech. Okay, we got that, believe me.

All right, so why did we come to this decision? I sat down personally—the other people can say what they have to say—I sat down with my son and we went through Faith’s interview. I know Faith, I don’t believe that she is a reprehensible person. I think that Charlottesville was very shocking to her and I think that she put herself in a very difficult position. And I think some of that was brave, that she went down there to cover it.

However, I listened very carefully to her podcast, the one that got her in trouble. And my sense was that she wasn’t, she didn’t, she was associating with people whose views she should have questioned. It was her journalistic, um, responsibility to question them. She had to ask at least one hard question. At least one. Three would have been better. You know, and I understand she had to toe a careful line. She was on the podcast, they had invited her on, it’s much more difficult than you might think when you’re facing people, even when you don’t believe them, to be rude enough to challenge them, right? That’s not so easy, especially if you’re an agreeable person and she is a rather agreeable person.

But I believe she, she failed in her journalistic responsibility. And as a consequence of that, she became too hot a property for us. And not just for us. And, well, that was, that was the reason for the decision. That was, that was my reasoning.

Now, this was manifestly not the correct behavior of a highly principled man or even a reasonably honest one. Jordan Peterson did something he clearly knew to be wrong, he did something he clearly knew to be hypocritical, but instead of simply owning up to his obvious failure when called on it in public, he attempted to concoct a ridiculous ex post facto excuse to justify it. Again.

He had to know that he was going to have to face the question sooner or later. He even appears to have prepared for it, and yet this response was the best that he could manage. If you watch the video, you can even see that Jordan Peterson has, he has, a reliable tell that warns the viewer when he’s about to say something that he knows is not true. He also betrays another tell that indicates when he is going to very carefully attempt to conceal the weakness of one of his assertions or conclusions.

Just watch for the repetitions and the adverbs. Once you learn to recognize them, you can identify when Jordan Peterson is trying to pull a fast one on his audience even when you don’t know what he’s talking about.

And the obvious question Peterson’s response raises is this: according to what theory of human rights or journalism does one’s own right to free speech rely upon one’s correct performance of nonexistent journalistic responsibilities?

There is no such theory. It’s a nonsensical assertion. It’s classic Petersonian bafflegarble. But it requires a high level of mental focus to penetrate the fog of Peterson’s word-salad and see what he is literally saying.

After twice seeing Peterson’s shameless dishonesty in action, I decided that it was time to delve deeper into the man’s actual work. Being a writer myself, I was aware that men express themselves differently in different media. Many eloquent speakers reveal themselves to be superficial thinkers in writing, and no few writers—myself included—are unable to express their genuinely profound thoughts in a facile manner in front of a microphone or a camera. Perhaps Peterson was much better in print than he was on video or on the Internet; after all, he was the bestselling author on the planet at the time.

So, I read his bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I read his would-be magnum opus, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. I even read his contribution to the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development of which he was a member, Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A future worth choosing.

And this book is the result of what I learned from reading the three published works of Jordan Peterson.

UPDATE: Now the #1 New Release in Spiritual Self-Help too!

Darkstream: Decision time for Donald Trump

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

Not stick not stay that bag STATCOM and Amy’s to shake the happy a finish big medics begin my humanity is biggest angle. He started haven’t been I didn’t birthday last couple days I’ve been a little busy trying to get away it has a book on pre-order heels it for a while. Maybe I do? Big Mike Patton okay hang on and it she yeah let me see that I can give you okay hmm seems to be going in and out okay are we doing any better yeah it looks like oh it’s fixed okay, all right.

Seriously, that’s the actual transcript. I appear to have had a mic issue there at the start. But doesn’t it remind you of Jordan Peterson’s lectures, at least just a little? Perhaps I should do them all that way. Anyhow, it’s been disappointing to be reminded that not everyone is capable of grasping the basic idea that seeds planted in the spring face different prospects than those planted in the fall or winter.