Tag: history

I Do Not Support Free Speech

Andrew Torba has come a long way since he appeared on Brainstorm to introduce Gab to the community. I really respect his perseverance and appreciate what he’s accomplished. But he’s still clinging to his misapprehensions about free speech.

Doing this for almost seven years now I can tell you that sadly most people do not support free speech. Even those on “the right” who claim to beg Gab to censor certain words and ideas because it offends them or whatever. The good news is those of us who do support it are waking a lot of the people in the middle up, who then in turn end up supporting it after being censored themselves or learning something on Gab thanks to free speech.

At the risk of substituting dialectic for rhetoric, I took the liberty of correcting his meme for historical accuracy.

You needn’t take my word for it. Read JB Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought. It’s written by a major historian of the early 20th century who is a strong free speech advocate, and he’s not shy about explaining how the right to free speech came to be and what it was intended to accomplish.

If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin.

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Disney Adopts Zero History

Once a premier curator of American history, the skinsuit of the company founded by Walt Disney has opted for historical oblivion and the destruction of its own artifacts:

Walt had a vision of himself as one of the Big Americans, that his name would be remembered with men like Ford and Edison. Whether he genuinely felt an accurate record of his life and work would reflect well on him or he knew he was going to be in the history books anyway so he would be well served by writing the history book himself, he is one of the very few businessmen to start a museum dedicated to curating his life, his work and the company he built up from nothing.

So was born the Walt Disney Company Archive. Or simply The Archive. Just about every major or even minor thing the Walt Disney Company ever was a part of was dutifully curated. Decommissioned park attractions that were being dismantled would have disused animatronics packed away and sent to the archive. Every single addition and more importantly subtraction to the parks was carefully noted at the Archive. Artwork from all of the Disney animated features were meticulously cataloged and preserved at the Archive.

The Archive also operates public museums where you can gawk at such diverse things as Disneyland opening day curios, doodads, and tourist gimcrack. Want to see the real Pirates Redhead? She now lives at the archive. Original scripts, props from the Davey Crockett show. Various denizens of Tomorrowland’s obsolete future past are on display at The Archive.

You know what you won’t find at the Archive? Not one fucking thing connected with Splash Mountain. The most popular ride in the history of Disney parks and not one trace of it was curated.

The preservation of historical knowledge is one of the most sacred and important things that can be accomplished even by the irreligious. So it should come as no surprise that eradicating history is always among the foremost objectives of the Zero Historians in their permanent campaign against all that is Good, Beautiful, and True.

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The Testimony of Elie Wiesel

The award-winning author of NIGHT admits to telling stories about things that could have happened, but never did.

“‘What are you writing?’ the Rebbe asked. ‘ – Stories,’ I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. ‘About people you have knew?’ Yes, about people I might have known. ‘About things that happened?’ Yes, about things that happened or could have happened. ‘But they did not?’ No, not all of them did. In fact, some some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: ‘That means that you are writing lies!’ I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself. ‘Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; other are – although they never occurred.'”

Elie Wiesel, LEGENDS OF OUR TIME, Schocken Books, New York, 1982, p. viii

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Regression to the Historical Mean

Harold Robinson takes the time to explain the obvious and inevitable, namely, the inability of complex systems to survive the incompetent:

America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible for selection for competence to return, because the demographic changes to the US population means that politics are no longer ideology-based, but identity-based, and people from cultures that have never valued individual merit in any way are not going to start doing so in a post-meritocratic United States.

Furthermore, the average level of intelligence, and therefore, the average level of competence, has declined with the mass infusion of inferior genetics, to such an extent that the average IQ is probably 10 points lower than it was before 1965, when the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

One doesn’t need to be a eugenicist to understand the societal consequences of long-term dysgenics. Think of it as large-scale regression to the historical mean, or, if you’re not an abstract thinker, why the USA is going to lose its ability to provide widespread indoor plumbing to its inhabitants.

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Wagner Summarizes Bakhmut

The Marketing Director of the Wagner mercenary company provides an informative summary of its successful operation to take the city of Bakhmut from the occupying Ukro-NATO forces.

  • We fought in Bakhmut against superior forces, destroyed about 50,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded up to 70,000
  • PMC “Wagner” had 3.2 times fewer dead than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 2 times fewer wounded.
  • The PMC in Artyomovsk had 50,000 people at its best, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – 82,000, and the ratio for the assault should be 3 to 1 for the attackers.
  • During the operation, I chose 50,000 prisoners, 20% of them died, another 20% were injured.
  • The goal of Artemovsk was not Artemovsk itself, but the Bakhmut Meat Grinder. And in Artemovsk, we destroyed everyone we were supposed to destroy, we completed the task.

From this, we can glean a few useful observations. First, the Russians aren’t even using their military to accomplish their goals. Except for the initial attempt on Kiev, it appears their regular Army hasn’t suffered any significant losses at all. To date, they’ve primarily utilized convicts, Chechens, and ex-Ukrainian militia, and that has sufficed to devastate the Ukro-NATO forces.

Second, the Ukro-NATO military has been severely degraded. There is no way an outnumbered attacker should be able to drive a first-class military from prepared defenses, let alone in an urban environment. Wagner had one-fifth the number of troops the military textbooks say it required to take the city. Since it is not credible to suggest that a mercenary company consisting of convicts is a first-class organization, this suggests that the UFA forces are operating at a level more or less comparable to the Arab armies of the 1960s. This is not surprising, as conscript armies tend to be low-performance and low-morale.

Third, the Russian focus is on the enemy forces, not on the terrain. This is consistent with what Marshal Zhukov records in his memoirs of the Russian civil war and World War II. Consider the way in which Zhukov didn’t hesitate to advocate the early abandonment of Kiev in order to preserve its defenders, whereas Zaluzhnyi, like Hitler, refused to countenance the retreat from even a small, strategically meaningless city in order to conserve tens of thousands of soldiers.

Fourth, the real war hasn’t even started yet. The battle for the Donbass is little more than the opening skirmish in a much larger war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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The Failure of Modern Science

Peer review was supposed to be the gold standard of science. Instead, it turned out to be a fraud that polluted the knowledge base, corrupted the profession, and destroyed confidence in the method.

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.

Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.

The results are in. It failed.

The Rise and Fall of Peer Review, Adam Mastroanni, 13 December 2022

It’s very important to remember that most people neither know or understand anything about science, so the idea that science is not only less than perfectly reliable, but is, in fact, reliably false is extremely foreign to them. They have no idea that reliable science is called “engineering”, and in fact, their grasp of the credibility of the two fields is usually inverted.

But if you are an independent thinker capable of processing information on your own, it should not be too difficult to grasp that science is intrinsically flawed due to several unavoidable factors that boil down to the absence of any controlling factor for the human element.

Peer review was never that missing factor. As I pointed out years ago, peer review doesn’t even rise to the level of editing, much less auditing, it is more akin to slush-file reading by volunteers. The great irony of the primary defense of peer review is that it is a concept based on nothing more than pure logic utilized to justify an activity specifically conceived to replace the use of pure logic.

UPDATE: The retards are never going to learn, no matter how reliably they fail.

It’s already starting in the comments: I don’t think it failed perhaps as much as it stopped working. REAL PEEER REVIEW HAS NOT BEEN TRIED.

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Want Has Nothing to Do With it

A follower on Gab wonders why anyone would want to be part of the SSH:

@SigmaGame Why would anyone want to be an alpha, beta, gamma, OR sigma? There should be a check mark for ‘none of the above’

It’s not about “want”. Everyone has patterns of behavior. You can’t escape them.

And on the subject of the SSH, I recently read an interesting passage about one of the more obvious Sigmas in history, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, recounted by Charles Oman.

“The march of the centre column was accompanied by the curious case of insubordination by three divisional generals (those commanding the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions) of which Napier makes such scathing notice. Their orders gave an itinerary involving a march over fords in flooded fields ; they consulted together, judged the route hopeless, and turned off towards the bridge of Castillo de Yeltes, which they found blocked by the Army of Galicia. Wellington, failing to find them on the prescribed path, set out to seek them, and came upon them waiting miserably in the mud. He is said to have given them no more rebuke than a sarcastic ‘You see, gentlemen, I know my own business best’ and allowed them to cross after the Spaniards, many hours late. The insubordination was inexcusable—yet perhaps it would not have been beneath Wellington’s dignity to have prefaced his original order with an explanatory note such as ‘ the main road by Castillo bridge being reserved for the Spanish divisions.’ But this would not have been in his normal style. Like Stonewall Jackson fifty years after, he was not prone to give his reasons to subordinates, even when his orders would appear to them very inexplicable.”

  • History of the Peninsular War Vol. VI, Charles Oman

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The Russians Call Out NASA

For decades, Boomers who believe in the Moon landing narrative more firmly than they believe in God, Family, or Country have argued that the landings couldn’t have been faked or the Russians would have called out NASA. But now the former head of the Russian space agency is doing precisely that.

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof.

In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast.

Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time. All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon.

The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.

Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.”

Translation: NASA faked major elements of the space program and everyone in a place to know better kept quiet for fear of being targeted by Clown World. But now it is becoming increasingly obvious and the official Moon landing narrative is rapidly crumbling.

I very much doubt this will be the only historical hoax to be exposed by the Russians over the next decade.

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Now Wait a Minute

While we’re on the subject of stolen land and all:

Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is reportedly running for re-election, has suggested that white-owned businesses should be taxed at a higher rate than black-owned businesses, and that this revenue should then be given directly to black-owned businesses. Her apparent justification for this is that white people have built what they have on “stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen resources.”

I’m very curious to know how anyone can seriously broach the subject of reparations for historical crimes and decide that descendants of Africans from Africa, many of whom were never enslaved, should be compensated for land stolen – and yes, for the most part it was stolen, just read the treaties – in North America from the American Indians?

If there are any reparations to be paid to anyone – and I’m not saying there should be – shouldn’t they be paid to the descendants of those who actually owned and lived upon the land that was stolen?

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