Tag: philosophy

A Gatekeeper’s Manifesto

James Lindsay is one of the Fake Right Gatekeepers’ lesser lights, with whom most of you are blessedly unfamiliar. But he’s gone all in on the nonsensical concept of the “Woke Right” which is the way Conservative Inc. describes those on the Right who believe that winning is more important than losing gracefully by refusing to make use of the weapons utilized by the enemy.

You see, that’s why the people conquered by the British Empire were the real winners of the Colonial Era, because their noble decision to eschew the use of the Gatling Gun ensured that while they were defeated, occupied, and oppressed for more than a century, they maintained the moral high ground throughout.

In any event, he has written what purports to be a manifesto, and William Briggs, to his very great credit, has spared the rest of us the painful task of slogging through it ourselves.

When I first heard the term ‘woke right’, championed by Lindsay, I thought it a wonderful description of those normally said to be “of the left”, but who had embraced an element or two of Reality: a modern version of ‘neo-con’ without the overseas passions. Turns out Lindsay meant it as one who is mostly “of the right” and who accepts the Reality that it is sometimes acceptable to base decisions on someone’s race.

He thinks that since, for instance, the woke promoted (with a vengeance) blacks because they were black, regardless of ability, any and all race-based decisions are wrong. If a white (and only a white) makes a decision in favor of his own race, he is ‘woke right’. Lindsay never argues why. He assumes his conclusions are obvious.

The same lack of argument is found throughout his Manifesto (grandiose word!). Science, the Good, truth, individualism, on and on, all marched out to agree with Lindsay. But he simply cannot be bothered to say what he means by any of these words. Nor can he be, as we’ll see, consistent.

He has a go at defining Modernity, that ideal state of the world he would see preserved:

“Modernity” is the name for the profound cultural transformation which saw the rise of representative democracy, the age of science, the supersedence of reason over superstition, and the establishment of individual liberties to live according to one’s own values.

He sums up his own argument with this, what he must have thought was brilliant, bullet point: “Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.”

What if my own values are contrary to and would do violence to Lindsay’s? Perhaps he’d say we’d vote to decide whose views will be imposed. What if my side wins? Is the outcome Reason? And is Lindsay’s losing side thus proven superstition? Is this outcome the Good?

Nearest he comes to defining the Good is this:

An earnest appreciation that the Good is best achieved through a balance between human cooperation and competition brokered and mediated through the interplay of institutions that work on behalf of public and private interests.

This is as close to a non-definition as you can get…

It’s becoming ever more clear where the lines are now drawn. Not between Left and Right, or Conservative and Liberal, but between Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment. There is no fundamental difference between the godless communist Left-Liberal and the Churchian zionist Right-Conservative, as they accept fundamentally the same precepts and principles and differ only in how those precepts and principles are best applied.

And while they will obviously attempt to portray us as Pre-Enlightenment skeptics, that portrayal is outdated and and fundamentally false. The Pre-Enlightenment skeptics were correct, for the most part, but they held their beliefs on the basis of logic and reason. They did not have the benefit that we do of seeing how these untested theories actually played out over time. We Post-Enlightenment rejecters hold our beliefs on the basis of logic, reason, and undeniable, irrefutable evidence.

The principles of the Enlightenment were appealing back in the day. They promised a better world, which, for a time, they even appeared to deliver.

But now we know better. We now know where “representative democracy” leads: to something that is neither representative nor democracy. We now know where “freedom of speech” leads: to deplatformings, demonetizations, and prison. We now know where “free trade” leads: to the destruction of the industrial base, widespread unemployment, and lower wages. We now know where “the free movement of peoples” leads: mass migration, high crime, and the devastation of the social fabric.

Their very victory has doomed them. The societies in which their principles persist are dying, and the rest of the world no longer even pretends to believe in them.

History is not on their side. To the contrary: history condemns them!

DISCUSS ON SG

It’s the BECAUSE That Gets You

Stop explaining yourself.

I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t want to look like a moron on a regular basis, if you don’t want to force others to have to conclude you are stupid, for the love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, stop explaining yourself, your reasons, your decisions, and your actions.

Seriously, just stop. Consider the word “because” a period. Stop right there. When you hear yourself saying it, let it be your signal to end the sentence right there.

First, nobody cares. If they want to know your reasons, they will ask you for them. And be aware that if they are asking for them, there is a very good chance they are looking to argue with you, dispute your position, or at least convince you to change your mind.

Second, you’re probably wrong, either in your logic or in your assumptions. Perhaps in a small way, perhaps in a big way, or perhaps you’re not even wrong but there is enough ambiguous room for a pedantic person to intentionally object.

Third, you have a right to your opinion, whatever it might be. You don’t have the right to tell people to accept incorrect facts, incorrect logic, or general incoherency.

Fourth, when you offer an explanation, you are essentially inviting an argument whether you realize it or not.

So just speak your mind. Don’t justify your opinion, because if you’re like most people, you can’t do so in a competent manner capable of surviving an intelligent critique. You have your right to your opinion, however insane or stupid or justified it might be, so simply rest content with that.

Here’s how people know that you’re part of the greater retardery in which we are engulfed. When you explain yourself, and then your explanation is conclusively demonstrated to be substantively false in some way, you do not change your position. This informs your interlocutor that there is nothing inside and there is no point in attempting to engage with you on the dialectical level.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Civilizational Collapse Model

There is an interesting link suggested between the observed AI model collapse and the apparent link between urban society and the collapse of human fertility.

The way neural networks function is that they examine real-world data and then create an average of that data to output. The AI output data resembles real-world data (image generation is an excellent example), but valuable minority data is lost. If model 1 trains on 60% black cats and 40% orange cats, then the output for “cat” is likely to yield closer to 75% black cats and 25% orange cats. If model 2 trains on the output of model 1, and model 3 trains on the output of model 2… then by the time you get to the 5th iteration, there are no more orange cats… and the cats themselves quickly become malformed Chronenburg monstrosities.

Nature published the original associated article in 2024, and follow-up studies have isolated similar issues. Model collapse appears to be a present danger in data sets saturated with AI-generated content4. Training on AI-generated data causes models to hallucinate, become delusional, and deviate from reality to the point where they’re no longer useful: i.e., Model Collapse…

The proposed thesis is that neural-network systems, which include AI models, human minds, larger human cultures, and our individual furry little friends, all train on available data. When a child stubs his wee little toe on an errant stone and starts screaming as if he’d caught himself on fire, that’s data he just received and which will be added to his model of reality. The same goes for climbing a tree, playing a video game, watching a YouTube video, sitting in a chair, eating that yucky green salad, etc. The child’s mind (or rather, subsections of his brain) are neural networks that behave similarly to AI neural networks.

The citation is to an article discussing how AI systems are NOT general purpose, and how they more closely resemble individual regions of a brain, not a brain.

People use new data as training data to model the outside world, particularly when we are children. In the same way that AI models become delusional and hallucinate when too much AI-generated data is in the training dataset, humans also become delusional when too much human-generated data is in their training dataset.

This is why milennial midwits can’t understand reality unless you figure out a way to reference Harry Potter when trying to make a point.

What qualifies as “intake data” for humans is nebulous and consists of basically everything. Thus, analyzing the human experience from an external perspective is difficult. However, we can make some broad-stroke statements about human information intake. When a person watches the Olympics, they’re seeing real people interacting with real-world physics. When a person watches a cartoon, they’re seeing artificial people interacting with unrealistic and inaccurate physics. When a human climbs a tree, they’re absorbing real information about gravity, human fragility, and physical strength. When a human plays a high-realism video game, they’re absorbing information artificially produced by other humans to simulate some aspects of the real physical world. When a human watches a cute anime girl driving tanks around, that human is absorbing wholly artificial information created by other humans.

If there is any truth to the hypothesis, this will have profound implications for what passes for human progress as well as the very concept of modernism. Because it’s already entirely clear that Clown World is collapsing and neither modernism nor postmodernism have anything viable to offer humanity a rational path forward.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Self-Negating Argument

This made me laugh.

Why the right can’t recognize or create good art

by Helen Roy

First of all, I’m a Swiftie…

The not-so-funny thing about what, for lack of a more accurate and sensible word, we shall call “the Left” is the way that they subvert, if not invert entirely, every single word that comes out of their mouth. It doesn’t matter if it’s “art” or “racism” or “evidence” or “equality” or “justice” or “violence”, every single word used by them means something very different, if not entirely opposite to, the word as it is commonly understood and defined in the dictionary.

In fact, it is predominantly the Right that has created, and continues to create, good art. All the little left-wing fantasy authors are imitating Tolkien, not Michael Moorcock. The giants of art, music, and literature are so unabashedly white, European, and male to such an extent it was necessary to invent a whole series of fake awards to permit the Left to pretend that what passed for their art was even art at all, let alone good.

The thing that the Left, such as it is, will never understand is that quality is never conveyed by an awards jury, a publishing gatekeeper, or even the ability to purchase bots. Quality in the arts is inherent, and no amount of relying upon various mouthpieces to declare its existence can create it when it isn’t there.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vox’s Razor

The wider the variety of arguments against a specific assertion, the more likely the assertion is to be false.

When something is false, there are always going to be multiple angles and perspectives from which the falsehood can be perceived and exposed. So, a false claim is always going to have more observable flaws than a true claim, and many of the arguments against it, however weak or relatively unconvincing they may be, will be correct.

Compare the vast panoply of arguments against evolution to the relatively narrow range of arguments against the existence of God. While I personally don’t find some of the Intelligent Design arguments against the theory of evolution by natural selection to be particularly convincing, they are logical and they are also, in the end, absolutely correct. I happen to find appeals to conclusive mathematical analyses considerably more convincing myself, but it’s important to keep in mind that these various arguments are all ultimately correct because they point to the truth: what could not happen did not happen.

Now consider the various arguments against the existence of God. They are not only inconclusive, but they all amount to different flavors of the same argument: the appeal to personal ignorance and incredulity. The few attempts to utilize reason and logic are feeble and false even when they are not provably dishonest. See: Euthypro.

Anyhow, I think it’s possible that my philosophical Razor may be a more reliable heuristic than that of William of Ockham, which relies upon parsimony, and, in common use, is usually misapplied to competing hypotheses with varying explanatory power.

When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions.

DISCUSS ON SG

AI is More Accurate

People are sometimes amazed that I generally prefer engagement with AI systems to people. But the thing is, being pattern recognition machines, AI’s actually describe people much more accurately than most other people can. Consider the following quote from a recent criticism of my current projects by one AI:

Vox Day operates dialectically when he can (exposing logical fallacies, pointing out contradictions) and rhetorically when he must (reframing, using sharp language, appealing to observable reality over credentials), but he certainly doesn’t appeal to the authority of fields he considers corrupted or irrelevant.

That was just one little throwaway passage in a three-model analysis of the SSH I was doing in order to smoke out any obvious flaws in my reasoning. And yet, it’s considerably better than the level of critical understanding demonstrated by any of my human detractors, most of whom couldn’t distinguish between Rhetoric, dialectic, and rhetoric if their lives depended upon it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Isolation, Nietzsche, and Politics

Friedrich Nietzsche was a lunatic and his philosophy was little more than pompous Gamma self-inflatery. But one of his observations was not merely cogent, it explains Clown World’s tendency to enervate its allies and

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

Japanese literature is full of the talented samurai who leaves his liege lord, either voluntarily or dismissed under a cloud of social disapproval, disappears into the mountains or the small villages of the western provinces, and spends several years teaching poetry or performing menial labor in order to survive as a masterless ronin. Eventually, he is summoned back into martial society by someone, where his talents, strengthened and hardened by his years of solitude, allow him to win success on the battlefield and in the courts.

In like manner, those of us who were banished by mainstream publishing houses have prospered considerably more in the era of ebooks and artificial intelligence than the hothouse flowers who are wholly dependent upon the publishing infrastructure to sell their books for them.

And the world of German politics is proving no different, as the repeated attempts of all the mainstream parties to shun, slander, and even legally outlaw Alternative für Deutschland have only resulted in AfD becoming the obvious future of Germany.

The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD’s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.

The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD are evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified.

In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leadership had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD are stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems.

Sure, it hurts and it’s scary to find yourself banished from the castle and forced to scrounge, scratch, and claw for survival. But the self-discipline that comes from the experience is absolutely invaluable in the long term.

DISCUSS ON SG

Observation and Invention

A clarification.

It can be rightly said that Sigmund Freud invented the id, the ego, and the superego because those things, as he conceived and defined them, do not exist and have never existed. They are fictional constructs for which there is no material evidence and are nothing more than products of the late Mr. Freud’s imagination. It cannot be said that I invented the socio-sexual hierarchy, the gamma male, or the sigma male, because these things actually exist and there is material evidence for them that significantly predates my observations of them and my articulation of the taxonomy.

DISCUSS ON SG

We Are Not Conservatives

Andrew Torba has really been on fire lately. And he says it much better than I ever have:

Let us be clear so there is no confusion and no room for misinterpretation: we are not conservatives.

That word has become a mark of surrender, a synonym for the managed decline of a nation we refuse to abandon. Our allegiance is not to a decaying set of liberal principles, to a faltering democracy that serves global interests, to “lower taxes” or to a “rules-based international order” that has bled our people dry. We will not conserve the hollowed-out institutions of a dying empire.

Our allegiance is sworn to something real, something eternal: to our God, our people, and our homeland. It is the soil beneath our feet, the blood in our veins, and the spirit that calls us to greatness.

We have no interest in conserving a political system mired in bipartisan decay, where two heads of the same beast promise change and deliver only ruin. We will not perpetuate a cycle of foreign wars and endless aid to distant nations while our own communities crumble into dust and despair. We refuse to uphold an economic order that leaves our own citizens struggling, indentured to a global market that despises our traditions, our faith, and our very existence.

Our mission is to build something new. Not a fragile imitation of the past, but an order of strength, clarity, and purpose, dedicated first, last, and always to the national interest. We don’t want to turn back the clock. We want to forge a future worthy of our nation’s legacy.

For over a century now the liberal and conservative establishment have captained this ship. They inherited a vessel of unmatched power and prestige, and with a toxic blend of incompetence, arrogance, and malice, they steered it directly into an iceberg of globalism, demographic decline, and cultural erosion. The steel of the ship groans, the ice grinds against the hull, and still, they toast their success in the captain’s lounge, blind to the icy water rising around their ankles.

We are done begging for a seat at their table.

Those who stand for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are not conservatives. We cannot be conservatives, because conservatives defend nothing, conservatives conserve nothing, and conservatives stand for nothing.

Conservatives are the rear guard of the godless, globalist, satanic Left. The only function that conservatives serve is their gatekeeping function, and attempting to plant themselves at the head of the parade in order to subvert it and redirect it to harmless directions.

As has been observed many times before, a conservative is simply a liberal of 20 years ago and a progressive radical of 40 years ago. Whereas the things the true Right stands for are either material – blood, land, family, and gold – or timeless – God, Jesus Christ, nation, and truth.

We are not conservatives. We have never been conservatives. And we will never be conservatives.

UPDATE: An apt summary of conservatism on SG:

  1. Posture
  2. Compromise
  3. Surrender
  4. Retreat
  5. Whine
  6. Repeat

UPDATE: A cogent observation about how conservatives are not even our allies, as they are all too happy to join forces with the likes of Stalin and the literal grandchildren of the Trotskyites now known as the neocons.

The same conservatives saying things like “I’ll never ally with THOSE people on the Right” will also claim it was a moral imperative for America to ally with literally Joseph Stalin himself in World War II. They’re not above the Friend/Enemy distinction. They just have different enemies than you do.

DISCUSS ON SG

On Facing Age

Even after a man’s fifty or sixty, he can still know happiness, even do useful work.
—Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

As a man moving from middle age into old age, that’s certainly good to know. Personally, I’m hoping for eight more years of soccer and at least 23 more years of active writing. AI has been a real godsend with regards to the latter.

And apparently, I’m just hitting the peak of my mental powers now. So I should be able to produce one or two more original thoughts in the next few years.

Scientists in Australia say that overall mental functioning in the brain actually peaks between the ages of 55 and 60. People in this age range may be at their best for complex problem–solving tasks and high–ranking leadership roles in the workforce.

DISCUSS ON SG