Tag: philosophy

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Floating on the Sea of Retardery

An SG reader inadvertently discovers the raison d’etre of Stoic philosophy:

I have another 23 or so years left in my career. In reality I do not know if I can make it in my current positions. Being an accounting exec I see everything and it’s sickening. The vast majority of people serve Mammon from the top level employees down to the lowest level. The vast majority lie, cheat and steal with no remorse. They think nothing of doing things that hurt their coworkers to get an extra buck. When they aren’t doing that, they purposely allow people to make damaging mistakes so they can grandstand about it for 5 minutes and feel like they are scoring points.

I honestly don’t know how much longer I can take it. No one argues with me when I point these things out, but no one cares either, they do nothing and hope I shut up eventually, because they largely do the same things.

This is the sea of retardery that is the human condition. Balzac wrote an entire ouvre dedicated to precisely this endless series of bad decisions, shenanigans, and tomfoolery. There is little point in the reader trying to seek work elsewhere, because what is troubling him is not unique to his industry, but is absolutely normal human behavior.

This is why philosophers from the Roman Stoics to the Chinese sages have stressed the importance of not being affected by the behavior of others and refusing to let their antics disturb your equanimity.

I was just speaking with Spacebunny this morning about the distress of men and women working in the Swiss banking industry, who have belatedly realized that submitting to US pressure to give up everything that made banking in Switzerland desirable has unsurprisingly had very negative effects on their employment prospects. In just 15 years, the number of Swiss banks has fallen from 400 to 250, one of its two banking giants collapsed, and the only reason the other one still survives is because it was bailed out by the Swiss government.

All of this was predictable and predicted. Before the financial crisis of 2008, I told a VP at a Swiss bank that all of those things would absolutely and inevitably happen if they were dumb enough to submit to US pressure to change the practices that made them rich and the envy of the world. But I was not even a little bit surprised when the bankers did so, and did so in order to preserve their access to a market where they did nothing but lose tens of billions of dollars, because I would estimate that 95 percent of men and 99 percent of women are simply too retarded to be capable of understanding the inevitable consequences of their own decisions and behavior.

David Foster Wallace understood this. It’s probably one of the reasons he killed himself in his despair.

The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.

So, too, did the Chinese of yore.

卸磨刀石殺驢

Unload the grindstone to kill the donkey.

This is the way most people and most organizations operate on a daily basis. They readily sacrifice their goals, their objectives, and their material long-term interests for what they perceive to be in their immediate interest, because they don’t realize that the latter necessitates the former.

And there is absolutely nothing that one can do about this behavioral tendency except accept it, as Confucius observed.

隨風搖曳的綠色蘆葦，比暴風雨中折斷的參天橡樹還要堅強

The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.

And if you will excuse me quoting myself:

The gift of sight becomes a curse when one can’t intervene.

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BIH Ian Watkins

There can be little doubt that the recently deceased Lostprophets singer is not resting in peace, but rather, burning in Hell.

Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins has died after being attacked in jail, prison sources have confirmed.

The disgraced rock star from Pontypridd was serving a 29-year sentence at HMP Wakefield for child sex offences. West Yorkshire Police said they were called to the prison on Saturday morning to an assault on a prisoner, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Watkins, 48, was jailed in December 2013 for a string of child sex offences, including the attempted rape of a baby.

He was attacked with a knife by another inmate, PA reported, citing sources.

I quite liked Lostprophets back in the day. They had several really good songs. And while I never consciously decided to stop listening to them after Watkins’s arrest for some incredibly awful child abuse, I simply never really wanted to hear the man’s voice again. Apparently his bandmates felt much the same, as they decided to shut down the band in the aftermath of his arrest and conviction.

The fall of Ian Watkins into utter depravity is a reminder that no matter how much worldly success one has, it will never be satisfying and it will never be enough, so chasing it is an obvious fool’s game from the start.

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Be the Thing They Fear

The anti-American clowns are attempting to play the victim game. But the victim game only works when people actually care about not being identified as the bad guys:

this whole shabby psyop masquerading as a morality play has been being set up for years. the same people who flooded the country with illegal intruders to shift the census, electoral college, congressional seat counts, and to taint voter rolls (often using tax dollars to do it) always knew that the day might come when people got fed up and sought to reverse this.

they also know how incredibly difficult this would be, the draconian actions it would require, and how bad this could be made to look.

they were already prebunking this issue before the election. “if the bad guys win, they will round you up and put you in boxcars! it will be fascism! genocide! they will not follow the law!”

lost in this and absent from the barrage of talking points is the lawlessness, manipulation, and outright aggression ingrained in flooding communities with these groups and then leaving them protected by law and process but unbound by restrictions or standards. the manner in which they were brought in was wildly illegal, and now the selfsame perps demand law be applied.

the whole point is to be so provocative and violent that only violence can serve to resist or constrain it, then they call you violent.

It’s just names. It’s just words. And word magic doesn’t work if you refuse to believe in it. I’ve been called every name in the book. According to my enemies, I “rise all the way to outright evil” and I absolutely accept and embrace my place in their nightmares. My strongest supporters weren’t even named by me, the Vile Faceless Minions were given their title by one of the many bloggers who refused to name me while criticizing me for fear of my “vile, faceless minions” descending upon his blog to tear apart his insipid arguments.

The amusing thing is that once you embrace their attempted insults, once you wear their nightmares as your armor, they immediately reverse course and start trying to claim that you aren’t really what they called you. Because their words are meaningless, their words are quite literally senseless.

So do what you do and accept whatever ridiculous label they want to apply to you as you go about your business without hesitation or regard for anything they do or say.

First they call you names.

Then they cry that it’s unfair.

Then they shriek that it’s illegal.

Then they plead for mercy.

Then they cease to be a problem.

DISCUSS ON SG

On Motorcycles

There have been 3 motorcycle fatalities in my area recently. I’m pretty sure they’ve all been college aged guys. Really sad. Motorcycles are insanely dangerous.

There are good risks, bad risks, and dumb risks. For the most part, motorcycles fall into the latter category.

I understand motorcycles are a) fun and b) cool. I bought a red Suzuki GS 750 when I was 24. It was very cool, and matched beautifully with my leather jacket that had our dojo’s big dragon logo airbrushed on the back. It was also a big, heavy, and rather challenging bike for a beginner. I rode it on the backroads for a summer and had just gotten comfortable enough to ride it on the highway a few times when a much more experienced rider who was an acquaintance from the gym was killed on his Kawasaki 1100 by an old lady who didn’t see him as he was turning into a parking lot in a 25-MPH zone.

I sold it the next week and never rode a motorcycle again. There was no way I ever wanted to do anything that made me so vulnerable that a Iittle old lady driving about 20 MPH could do me in.

Buy a cheap old convertible instead. It’s only half as cool, but very nearly as fun and most girls will prefer the convertible.

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