Tag: history

The Modes of Persuasion

Now that we’re past the preludes, we’re into the substance of the Aristotelian text.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both, for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously, and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed but a small portion of that art. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. 

However, if you’re interested in the history of human thought, you might like to check out today’s post tracing the subversion of the concept of objective Beauty on Sigma Game, which was inspired by a question about the attractiveness of a Hollywood starlet.

From the smallest seeds spring mighty oaks…

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An Irrelevant Innovation

Larry Johnson cites an estimate that three percent of Russia’s strategic air fleet was either damaged or destroyed in the recent drone attack on five of its airfields and concludes that NATO intelligence officers were involved in the attack:

In my opinion, none of these attacks could have been planned and executed without assistance, if not the direct involvement, of Western intelligence and NATO officers. The drones likely were activated by a remote signal made possible by Western satellites and/or systems like Starlink. Those systems also played a critical role in enabling the drones to navigate to the targeted airfields.

While this is clearly a PR victory for Ukraine, it is a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory–i.e., a tactical win, leading to a strategic defeat. The Trump administration is denying any knowledge of the attack. I take that disavowal with a big grain of salt. People within the CIA and USEUCOM offices, who are providing assistance to Ukraine, likely knew about the plan, and may even have provided intelligence support to get the drones to their targets. Like any covert operation, they may have tried to give Trump plausible deniability, but the Russians know how this game is played.

I expect Russia will launch a massive retaliatory strike after the talks in Istanbul on Monday conclude. The Ukrainian attacks on the bridges, the train and the airfields have done nothing to alter the situation all along the line of contact in Ukraine. News continues to pour in from the front, from both Ukrainian and Russian news outlets, painting a picture of growing desperation, even panic, among Ukrainian forces, as Russians capture more territory and kill more Ukrainian troops.

The thing that is so pointless about these sorts of clever little innovations is that they are the sort of things that tend to appear after the outcome of the war is already determined, but the losing side hasn’t accepted its defeat yet. The flashy nature of the drone attacks reminds me of the German ME 262 and ME 163 jets, which between them shot down 542 Allied aircraft, and the Japanese kamikazes that sunk or damaged 402 ships.

Both were innovations that captured the imagination and succeeded in producing material results, but at a scale that was totally irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

Upon further review, I don’t think it’s even necessary for Russia to respond to this latest provocation by Western forces, as its best revenge and most effective deterrence will be to simply refuse to call off its infantry and armor as they continue to advance rapidly across the future Russian lands.

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Dual-Citizenship Illegal

The ban on dual-citizenship in Japan was upheld as constitutional by the Japanese Supreme Court:

Japan’s top court has rejected an appeal by a Japanese-born U.S. citizen challenging the constitutionality of the country’s ban on dual citizenship, finalizing lower court rulings.

The decision by the Supreme Court’s First Petty Bench, dated Monday, was on a claim that Article 11 of the Nationality Law, which stipulates the loss of Japanese nationality upon voluntarily acquiring a foreign nationality, infringes on the right to self-determination.

The Fukuoka District Court turned down the initial claim in 2023, noting that the law was appropriate and was not beyond the scope of discretion. The Fukuoka High Court also supported the first decision last year.

According to the ruling, the woman acquired U.S. citizenship in 2004. She applied for a Japanese passport in 2017, but her application was rejected the following year on the grounds that she had lost her Japanese nationality.

This is an interesting rejection of Clown World’s anti-nationalist campaign, particularly because the Japanese constitution was imposed upon Japan by the US occupiers after World War II. It’s a strong indication that the dual-citizenship effectively created by the US Supreme Court decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967) was both incorrect and inappropriately utilized in an excessively expansive manner to create a supra-national individual right that does not and should not exist.

Being ruled by foreigners is not only a curse in the Bible, it is a common late stage in empires that usually presages an eventual collapse.

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The Stalwarts of Library

Congratulations to the intrepid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack, as today marks the end of our second serialization. After 315 daily installments and 614 pages covering everything from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to the Teutonic migrations, we have finally managed to accomplish together something I never quite managed to do on my own despite it being one of my prize possessions, which is read every single page of The Cambridge Medieval History Volume I: The Christian Empire.

So, well done, everyone.

To be honest, I’ve been a little shocked at seeing how many people have been reading along; there are usually 1,000 post-reads recorded, so even if three-quarters of those readers are only glancing at each post, that’s a lot more people reading through one of the more advanced historical summaries ever published.

Tomorrow I’ll put up a poll for what the next daily serialization should be. One option is to simply continue with Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire, but perhaps we might do with a break from the Cambridge historians for a while. Feel free to make any suggestions on SocialGalactic, but recall that any work we serialize there must be in the public domain.

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A Century of Damning Evidence

If, at this point, you’re still vaccinating yourself or your children, you deserve the predictably suboptimal outcomes you are actively injecting into your life:

•Since at least 1933, the medical community has known that vaccines cause infant deaths. To conceal this, those deaths were renamed “crib death” and then “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” (SIDS), eventually being attributed to infants not sleeping on their backs.

•This revisionism is not supported by the existing evidence nor the historical changes in the frequency of SIDS. Most recently, SIDS rates have had an unprecedented decrease in tandem with the COVID-19 lockdowns reducing vaccination rates.

•The vaccine most strongly associated with SIDS, DPT, was protected for decades by the government despite knowing a large body of evidence around the world showed it killed infants—particularly when an inevitable hot lot was released. Eventually, so many injury lawsuits were filed that in 1986, the government had to give blanket immunity to the vaccine manufacturers.

•This article will concisely review the vast body of evidence showing vaccines cause SIDS and reveal the mechanism modern research has now repeatedly proven causes vaccines to trigger infant death.

We’re always told that vaccines were a medical marvel that safely ended the dark age of infectious disease. However, when the actual records are examined, they often abjectly failed to prevent those diseases, and worse still, frequently caused outbreaks and severely injured many of the recipients.

This in part resulted from the inherent toxicity of vaccines and in part because manufacturing challenges regularly resulted in hot lots being released. Rather than address this, the vaccine industry chose to create a variety of strategies to conceal those issues, such as enshrining the dogma “all vaccines are safe” and giving blanket legal immunity to all the “safe” vaccines.

It’s perfectly understandable that many parents do not want to believe this. But the truth is not only ruthless, it is inexorable.

The incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has grown from .55 per 1000 live births in 1953 to 1.28 per 1000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota. The peak incidence for SIDS is at age 2 to 4 months, the exact time most vaccines are being given to children. 85 % of cases of SIDS occur in the first 6 months of infancy. The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1000 in 1992. This rise in SIDS deaths has occurred during a period when nearly every childhood disease was declining due to improved sanitation and medical progress except SIDS. These deaths from SIDS did increase during a period when the number of vaccines given to a child was steadily rising to 36 per child.

What a tragic and inexplicable 133 percent rise in the number of parents shaking their babies and putting infants to sleep on their stomachs! Clearly more education is in order! More education and more vaccines!

UPDATE: the report got the rate of increase wrong. It was 0.55 to 1.28, not 0.55 to 12.8. Still an obvious problem, but literally one-tenth as glaring.

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Peter Turchin’s Substack

I’m a fan of Peter Turchin and his work in the historical field he has termed “cliodynamics”. He’s quantified and articulated a number of the things that those of us in the pattern recognition business had only dimly recognized, and it’s very exciting to see that he’s now permitting us to see more of his work outside his very good books, such as this recent post on the so-called French Wars of Religion:

I asked ChatGPT to give me a one-sentence explanation of the causes of this bloody and lengthy civil war. Here’s what it said: “The French Wars of Religion were primarily caused by growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) in France, fueled by religious intolerance, political rivalries among noble families, and a weak monarchy unable to maintain order.” This answer perfectly encapsulates the standard story as seen in popular historical books, or online encyclopedias (LLMs, such as ChatGPT, are great at summarizing such common wisdom).

Readers of my books and blog posts would immediately realize that Cliodynamics gives a very different answer. Noble rivalries and religious tensions were what happened on the surface. But the deep structural causes of the FWR were popular immiseration, elite overproduction leading to intraelite conflict, and fiscal collapse of the state. In other words, the usual suspects when we talk about structural-demographic crises.

The Day of the Barricades (Paris, 1588), an ostensibly spontaneous popular uprising, which was in reality organized by counter-elites

What I’d like to do in this post series is delve a bit into these structural causes (for a deeper dive read Chapter 5 of Secular Cycles). I have two reasons to do so. First, the onset of the FWR gives us a nearly perfect example of how structural-demographic trends lead to state collapse and civil wars. Second, it was the fiscal collapse of the state that triggered warfare in c.1560. I wrote about the possibility of such a trigger for the America today in a recent post, where I concluded that we are fairly immune against it. But France in the sixteenth century was, most emphatically, not immune.

The ultimate driver, as usual in agrarian states, was population growth. During the integrative phase of the cycle (1450 to 1560) the population of France doubled: from 10–11 to 20–22 million. The French Kingdom in the sixteenth century was an overwhelmingly agrarian state and agricultural productivity couldn’t keep up with such massive population growth. As a result, food prices exploded. The price of a setier (a measure of volume) of wheat in livres tournois (the standard monetary unit in early-modern France) increased 10-fold between the 1460s and 1560s. Overpopulation created a high demand for food, inflating its price, and it increased the supply of labor, deflating its price. During the sixteenth century real wages lost two-thirds or more of their buying capacity. The daily wage of the Parisian laborer could buy 16 kg of grain in the 1490s, compared to less than 4 kg one century later.

Turchin makes it easy to see how the mainstream historical narrative is every bit as dumbed-down and falsified as the current news reporting. If you’ve got any interest in history or the truth, and if you’re here, you probably do, I highly recommend taking a gander at his substack.

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Space is Green

If Shaquille O’Neal is to be trusted, and to be honest, I trust the Big Aristotle more than I trust science these days, the Blue Origin “space flight” should have been named Greenscreen Origin:

Spade said that they had been discussing why Shaq had not been aboard the space capsule. I would assume the answer is “real estate,” but Shaq explained that the reason was because he doesn’t think it ever went to space.

“Let’s discuss it: was it real?” Shaq began. “Let me go first. I know Jeff loves Laura…”

That’s “Lauren,” Shaq.

“…He wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, so I think there was some green screen involvement there.”

Alright, that’s some good conjecture, but any evidence supporting this, DJ Diesel?

“Number two: their hair was luxurious in space,” he said. “Katy Perry’s hair didn’t move Laura’s…”

Lauren, Shaq.

“…hair didn’t move. Nobody’s hair ever moved. Then I saw when they landed, Jeff had the special key, but it was already open.

“So, I’m going to go Universal Studios green screen on this one.”

I couldn’t agree more. Now do the so-called “Moon landing” by Apollo 11 in 1969. They’re going to need a new term for those of us who no longer believe anything related to the mainstream narrative, whether it relates to events of the modern era or ancient and medieval history. Conspiracy theorist doesn’t even begin to cut it when everything is more or less fake, and at the very least, dumbed-down and rewritten in a form that retards can begin to comprehend.

I think I’d prefer to go with Omni-Narrational Skeptic. If you’ve got a mainstream narrative to sell, then I am immediately and intrinsically skeptical of it. Look what happened to the very simple term and concept of “Sigma male” and then apply that filter to every single concept or event described since the year 1700.

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Vibrancy > Christianity

It’s no longer possible to pretend that the Episcopalian Church is Christian anymore:

Sean Rowe, the head of the Episcopal Migration Ministries, which leads The Episcopal Church, announced his organization will not resettle white Afrikaners refugees from South Africa.

In a letter published on May 12, Rowe revealed that the United States federal government requested Episcopal Migration Ministries to “resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government classified as refugees.”

However, he then announced the organization would not be doing it. He explained, “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.”

Episcopalians are more committed to diversity and the Devil, and worshiping at the altar of their black gods, than they are to the Churchian principles that they formerly espoused. Of course, those Churchian principles were always fake modifications of genuine Christian principles.

So much for all that “Jesus was a refugee” nonsense. Which was always blitheringly stupid and historically ignorant, considering that his family did the Roman equivalent of moving from New Jersey to Alabama because they had fallen afoul of the mayor of Newark.

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The Narrative is Always Wrong

James Delingpole actually reads Machiavelli for the first time and discovers that the generally accepted narrative about the Florentine is almost completely false:

Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince – it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 – Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name – Niccolo – was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.

But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us – the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose – get away so easily with doing to us what they do.

One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population – the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will – has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook – they really are evil – I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.

I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors – parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.

The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst – probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue – a cynical misrepresentation.

And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear – Machiavelli bad, m’kay – and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.

I am aware that some are dubious about my contention about the importance of the Junior Classics, Castalia Library, UATV, and preserving knowledge for the future. But when one considers the fact that every single backer of the Junior Classics, and every subscriber to Castalia Library, are observably better informed with regards to history, philosophy, science, and religion than even the graduates of some of the most elite college educations in the West, that contention suddenly appears much more soundly based on the available evidence.

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Science “Discovers” Auras

As I have said many times, the idea that science, in any of its three aspects, can ever be regarded as a truth-metric is both a) erroneous and b) fundamentally flawed due to its intrinsic ceiling based on the state of current technology. Which the new scientific “discovery” of a millennia-old observation illustrates rather nicely.

Mystics and spiritualists have often claimed they can see a glow of mysterious light surrounding living creatures. Now, scientists have discovered that there may be some truth to their claims.

Researchers from the University of Calgary in Canada have found that living things produce a faint ghostly glow. And their new study proves that this light is snuffed out the moment we die.

This isn’t a mystical force or evidence for the human soul, but rather a physical phenomenon called ultraweak photon emission, the team said.

As the cells in living creatures produce energy, the chemical processes involved release a tiny amount of light in the form of photons, the particles that make up light. While the existence of this glow has been controversial, scientists using ultra-sensitive cameras claim to have provided ‘very clear’ evidence for the existence of ‘biophotons’.

This is why Sherlock Holmes was always wrong and the improbable is more reliable than the impossible. Because our concept of what is “impossible” is necessarily time-biased and technologically-limited. Most people have always dismissed the possibility that others can see the emanations of life, but their dismissals were always self-centered and irrelevant for the same reason that my inability to see certain shades of green and orange does not suffice to prove that those colors do not exist.

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