Against Free Speech

Andrew Torba appears to have belatedly come around on the problematic nature of free speech, even if he has not yet accepted the historical fact of its essentially evil nature:

The Previous Policy: Focus on Individual Content Removal

For a long time Gab relied on a policy that focused on removing individual pieces of content that violated our community guidelines. This approach often involved issuing warnings to users before taking action on specific posts or comments. However, this strategy has shown limitations, as some users continued to engage in threatening, spammy, and harassing behavior even after multiple warnings. This led to the ongoing presence of toxic elements within the community, which often drove good and decent users away.

The New Policy: Removal of Entire Accounts

In response to these challenges, Gab has decided to take a more proactive approach by removing entire accounts that engage in threatening, harassing, or spamming behavior. This shift in policy is a direct response to the shortcomings of the previous approach, which failed to effectively deter users from engaging in problematic activities. By removing entire accounts instead of just individual pieces of content, Gab aims to send a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated and will ultimately lead to account termination.

We are giving no quarter to subversive accounts that exist for one reason and one reason only: to destroy Gab and our amazing community.

In order to strike the right balance between protecting free speech and ensuring the safety of our community, we must continually assess and refine our approach to content moderation. This involves ongoing discussions with users, legal experts, and other stakeholders to ensure that our policies remain both effective and fair.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform where individuals can freely express themselves while also feeling safe and protected from subversive freaks who want to scare them off the platform with violent threats and make Gab look bad.

As we continue to evolve and grow as a platform, we remain committed to the principles of free speech and community protection. By working together with our users and partners, we believe that we can create a space where individuals can engage in healthy and productive dialogue while also not facing a barrage of threats and harassment from subversive people who want to destroy Gab.

We’re cleaning up Gab and it’s long overdue.

This is a wise step forward, but an incoherent policy. Because “the principles of free speech” are inherently and always opposed to “community protection”. The very purpose of free speech is subversive and blasphemous; as we have learned, the primary advocates of free speech are the very first to criminalize and penalize it as soon as they attain sufficient power.

But I understand. It’s very hard to not only abandon, but actively turn against the very rhetoric that once inspired you. Most people are never able to slaughter their formerly sacred cows. At least Torba and company have recognized the poison in the false promises and are now taking practical steps against it, even though they are still paying lip service to the conceptual problem.

DISCUSS ON SG


A Significant Nexus

Some years ago, I predicted that Alpha Game would surpass Vox Popoli due to the fact that people are, on average, more interested in intersexual relations and the socio-sexual hierarchy than in the various esoterica that makes up the greater part of the posts here. That might have seemed unlikely, given the way in which VP grew to a daily pageview average of over 110,000 and the fact that I shut Alpha Game down entirely due to my lack of interest in people repeatedly asking what I refer to as The Incessant Inquiry.

The full poem will have to wait for the publication of my I novel to see the light, but it amounts to the simple, straightforward, and seemingly inescapable question: “what about me?” And it is tiresome in the extreme. What about you? Why are you asking me? I don’t care.

What’s interesting, perhaps only to me, is that the combination of the decline in VP’s pageviews that resulted from the move from voxday.blogspot.com to voxday.net with the spamalicious efficiency of Substack has unexpectedly resulted in Sigma Game traffic very nearly surpassing the Vox Popoli traffic yesterday, as Sigma Game hit 97.3 percent of the VP total. And given what I expect to be the popularity of today’s post on A Tale of the Two Heathers of the 1980s, I will not be even remotely surprised if Sigma Game ascends to the status I’d originally envisioned for Alpha Game before tomorrow.

Yeah, this one is going to do, as they say, numbers.

This is not a bad thing. You may note the aphorism that has been the philosophical foundation of this blog since its inception is relevant here.

Success comes most swiftly and completely not to the greatest or perhaps even to the ablest men, but to those whose gifts are most completely in harmony with the taste of their times.
– Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa Origo

And if this recent article by The New York Times is any guide, it appears my gifts may finally in harmony with the taste of our times.

Are you a “sigma”? Do you have “rizz”? The youngest generation is bamboozling its elders with terms all their own.

Sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

Can You Understand Gen Alpha’s Slang?, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 11 November 2023

In any event, we’ll be scheduling the SSH and Hypergamouse crowdfund as soon as we get Midnight’s War Vol 1 and AH:Q out the door.

DISCUSS ON SG


Economics, Reconsidered

In which the Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton and 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences begins to wonder if perhaps everything about the mainstream Neo-Samuelsonian economics he has been utilizing as his basic conceptual model is wrong:

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought…

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century…

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.

I can’t cast too many stones in the eminent Prof. Deaton’s direction. I, too, once believed that free trade was economically beneficial to both nations involved in the trade. I, too, once believed that the free movement of peoples was a net benefit to the economy and the well-being of the peoples involved. And while I was always deeply skeptical of, and completely opposed to, globalization, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I recognized the satanic thread that runs through and inevitably connects liberty, democracy, the liberal Enlightenment values, and economic liberalism to obvious evils like globalism, imperialism, techno-authoritarianism, and Clown World.

But the lies, some of them centuries-old, are shattering. They are being broken apart by finally being tested against real-world consequences. And in the aftermath of their discrediting, an entirely new economics, one that is not based on a false model of a perfectly rational economic man, will be constructed.

DISCUSS ON SG


A Quote, Updated

Ayn Rand’s famous quote about the difference between Communism and Socialism didn’t go anywhere nearly far enough to be accurate. I tend to doubt she ever truly understood that she was never on the side of the angels. Her flawed ideology, as with that of her successors, has been completely undermined by the opportunity to see some of the consequences of its concepts put into practice, and illustrates how secular reason inevitably fails due to its intrinsic inability to take the supernatural into account.

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A Few Thoughts on Usury

First, it’s necessary to define usury, which is not synonymous with either “loan” or “interest”, although unsurprisingly, the modern definition has been corrupted and is incorrect. The American Heritage defines it thusly:

  • The practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest, especially at an exorbitant or illegally high rate.
  • An excessive or illegally high rate of interest charged on borrowed money.
  • Interest charged or paid on a loan.

Even in the precise wordings of the definition, we can see the ambiguity that is the red flag that a word spell has been cast. If both interest charged and paid on a loan are usury, then both the lender and the borrower are usurers. And if all interest paid is usury, then there is no need to bring the rate of interest into the equation at all, and any exorbitant, excessive, or illegal aspect is irrelevant.

Now, the history of economics, especially as recounted by Murray Rothbard, is essentially the history of relentlessly challenging the Catholic Church’s ban on usury. And in retrospect, it’s clear that this incoherence is the direct result of centuries of gradually chipping away at the concept through adulteration and expansion of the moral and legal permissibility of usury.

In order to determine if a proposed contract is usurious, only three questions need be asked. If the answers to all three questions are unanimously yes, then the contract is not usurious and it is a legitimate census agreement as opposed to an illegitimate and usurious mutuum agreement:

  1. Is interest charged on the loan?
  2. Has the borrower posted collateral providing security on the loan?
  3. Is the lender’s recourse for recovery of principal and interest, in a case of default, limited to the named collateral and only the named collateral?

The difference, as is made abundantly clear in this extremely useful and well-informed FAQ on the subject, depends upon the nature of the guarantee for the loan, and NOT the existence of any interest. This is why student loans, credit card loans, and even car and home loans that are backed by personal guarantees are wicked, whereas corporate bonds and convertible notes are not. It is also why usury is so uniformly destructive from an entirely secular sense, while allowing the usurers to hide behind the legitimate utility of debt that permits the healthy growth of agriculture and industry without inevitably giving way to a credit bubble and eventual economic collapse.

In fact, the etymological shift in the definitional focus from collateral to interest looks downright suspicious to me as a student of historical kakology.

When reading old books and documents on usury it is important to keep in mind that the word ‘loan’ in English translations is almost always a translation of ‘mutuum’ or the like. It refers specifically to loans secured by the personal guarantee of the borrower, sometimes called a ‘loan for consumption’. Not all modern ‘debt’ or ‘loans’ are secured by the personal guarantee of a borrower or borrowers…

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that usurious lending involves selling something which does not exist.  This is very counterintuitive to people indoctrinated in modernity, and yet obvious once you’ve set aside modern anti-realism about property and economic value. 

Another way to see that what is bought-and-sold in a mutuum does not exist is to observe that, under the terms of the contract, it is possible for the lender to fail to recover everything he is entitled to recover under the contract. The reason a full recourse lender is sometimes unable to recover what he is owed under the terms of the contract is because what he is owed under the terms of the contract does not exist…

Part of what made the usury doctrine clear to me when I first really began to grasp it (as opposed to – and I was as guilty of this as anyone – superficially dismissing caricatures rooted in anti-realist modernism) is that as an investor and entrepreneur, I see investment contracts involving peronal guarantees of repayment as inherently dysfunctional. If either the investor or the entrepreneur feels the need to throw personal guarantees into the mix in order to get the deal done, that is a major red flag that the proposed capital structure of the investment doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Usually this is because the property risks – the risks of partial or total loss of capital invested – in the investment are high enough to make a simple fixed-interest debt instrument inappropriate. Instead of personal guarantees the structure should be something like a convertible note, with equity upside, or it should be secured by a larger base of existing (though probably illiquid) capital. Basically, someone is trying to consume capital they don’t have and/or shift their own risks – the risks inherent in their own portfolios of property – onto third parties, personally.

Anyway, I haven’t really added anything new to the ancient understanding of usury here. I was just a guy who happened to be standing in the right spot to see what caused the train wreck, and I’m trying to explain what I saw in our common modern language as best I can. Like theft usury often does pay, at least in the short run, and it causes all sorts of damage that impacts different people differently and unfairly. Usury is inherently dysfunctional and morally evil, like theft. It may be mildly interesting sociologically that the Catholic Church was right for millennia about a simple core financial and moral truth that modern people, for all their putative economic and technical sophistication, have gotten completely wrong.

This may be useful in the current economic hard times, as those who are wise stewards of their resources are likely to have friends, families, and acquaintances coming to them and asking them for help that goes beyond the usual charity that does not require deciding between one serious opportunity and another. The thing that is important to understand is that while one can provide a loan, and one can legitimately receive interest on that loan, the collateral provided as a guarantee against default on it must be real, specific, and, of course, proportional to the value of the combined principle and scheduled interest of the loan.

For example, if a farmer who owns ten acres of land worth 60k borrows 10k from you, you cannot hold him responsible for repaying it. And while you can require him to put up his land as collateral as a condition for the loan, you can’t legitimately have him provide all ten acres he owns as a guarantee since the land is worth 6k per acre. In that case, two acres is sufficient backing for the principle and interest; a proper census contract tends to look a lot more like a normal sale with a time delay than a bank loan full of terms and conditions that are manifestly one-sided and predatory.

Now, all this being said, it is still possible that the traditional distinction made by Christendom between mutuum and census is insufficient without a periodic jubilee, as this selection from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica shows:

In Athens about the time of Solon’s legislation (594 B.C.) the bulk of the population, who had originally been small proprietors or metayers, became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent that they were practically slaves. Those who still kept their property nominally were in the position of Irish cottiers: they owed more than they could pay, and stone pillars erected on their land showed the amount of the debts and the names of the lenders. Usury had given all the power of the state to a small plutocracy.

The remedy which Solon adopted was of a kind that we are accustomed to consider as purely modern. In the first place, it is true that according to ancient practice he proclaimed a general seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens: he cancelled all the debts made on the security of the land or the person of the debtor. This measure alone would, however, have been of little service had he not at the same time enacted that henceforth no loans could be made on the bodily security of the debtor, and the creditor was confined to a share of the property. The consequence of this simple but effective reform was that Athens was never again disturbed by the agitation of insolvent debtors. Solon left the rate of interest to be determined by free contract, and sometimes the rate was exceedingly high, but none of the evils so generally prevalent in antiquity were experienced.

It is informative to observe that Solon’s successful solution to the problem of usury-based plutocracy of the sort that we are presently observing all across the West was very similar, though not identical, to the later teachings of Aquinas on the subject. And it’s interesting to note that the Solonic imposition of a limit to the share on the property serving as collateral is exactly the same conclusion that I independently reached in the paragraph above, while his proclamation of a general seisachtheia is exactly what Michael Hudson prescribes for the global economy.

DISCUSS ON SG


Another Enlightenment Fraud

Again and again and again, we see that the “human rights” promoted by the self-styled “liberals” of the Enlightenment were always fraudulent to their very core. Here we see in England how so-called “equality” only goes one way and works systematically to the disadvantage of boys:

One of the biggest girls’ football leagues in the country faces being shut down by the Football Association for refusing to allow a boy to play in its matches.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a row has broken out between the FA and officials running a female league in Yorkshire after parents complained their son had not been allowed to join.

It is understood the FA has threatened the West Riding Girls Football League with sanctions and a possible suspension if it does not agree to let boys on the pitch, a scenario officials have branded ‘a massive threat to the girls’ game’.

Last week an emergency meeting was held by organisers of the league – which has at least 6,000 under-18 girls playing across more than 300 teams – where managers voiced their concerns that allowing boys to play would ‘open the floodgates’.

The FA’s gender policy states that any under-16 teams must allow both boys and girls to play, despite admitting that ‘physical strength, stamina or physique’ can put one sex at the disadvantage of the other. Fiona McAnena, at sex-based rights group Sex Matters, said: ‘A boy on the pitch changes everything. The law is clear that female-only sport is allowed. It’s sex discrimination for the FA to tell girls they must accept a male player.’

Top girls’ football league faces being shut down, THE DAILY MAIL, 3 March 2024

This is what inevitably happens when reality intrudes upon the dogmatic Enlightenment principles to which the secular champions of social justice have been appealing for more than 200 years. Whenever the ideological principle violates their identity priority, the principle always crumbles into dust.

We’ve seen it with free speech, as that has been trumped by the need for protect the ability of one group to believe they were uniquely persecuted in the 20th Century and for another group to ignore crime statistics. We’ve seen it with “democracy”, as that has been trumped by the need of Clown World governments to ignore the will of the people. And now we see it with “equality”, as three generations of unrestrained assaults on male-only activities are suddenly jettisoned as soon as female-only activities are threatened.

We are somehow supposed to believe that equality means telling girls they must accept a male player is sex discrimination, while not telling boys they must accept a female player is also sex discrimination. Which is, of course, a certain sign that satanic inversion is somehow involved.

The Enlightenment is the philosophical basis for Clown World. It is an outdated and sophistic philosophy that will disappear in the aftermath of Clown World’s demise.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Sweet Sound of Silence

The user experience on Gab has most definitely been improved by the new policy barring freeloaders from posting media. It’s as if one million retards cried out in dismay, and then disappeared. This is what it feels like when the illiterate savages are driven back beyond the borders.

I will say this response made me laugh, though.

Well your experience hasn’t changed much, you only listen to yourself anyway.

Valid point. In my defense, I will point out that if it hasn’t been articulated in a book that has stood the test of time, it’s probably not significant anyhow.

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.
– Petrarch

It’s also typical of how the loud, squeaky wheels vastly overrate their own importance. After all the predictions about how this meant that Gab was dead and so forth, the number of my followers there dropped from 35.3k to 35.2k. Now, I wouldn’t have cared if it had dropped to 3.5k, but the lesson is that the more whining there is from the Gammas, the better the decision probably was.

UPDATE: One of the dirty freeloading Gab peasants is confused.

I’m confused. This guy doesn’t appear to be pro or a donor, only certified, yet he is still able to upload images? I’ve noticed the same thing with several other accounts in the Explore feed already this morning. WTF Over?

It’s magic. What part of Supreme Dark Lord was difficult to understand?

DISCUSS ON SG


Mailvox: The Logic of the Cult of Free

I thought this exchange with a member of the Cult of Free who is upset over Torba’s very sensible decision to stop permitting users who pay nothing for Gab’s services to utilize them at considerable expense to Gab was informative, as it raised a basic philosophical issue that some people obviously fail to understand.

You might want to check and see how many of the “free cult” are among YOUR followers. Most paid users rely on their “free” followers to make people like you more “relevant” and give people like you a reason to pay to be here. The “free cult” also brings other people to Gab and some spend their money on products being sold on Gab. THAT is the REAL WORLD. Andrew Torba, paid users and “attention seekers” like yourself, are NOTHING without the “free cult”!

Totally wrong. I don’t care at all about the “free followers”. We have a community of more than 10,000, all of whom have skin in the game and are not only supportive, but reliable. Free followers are, by and large, useless cowards who abandon ship whenever their feelings get hurt.

I do hope all of the “free followers” read this and realize that they are considered “nothing” to people like you. Have fun in your imagined “important” world!

So, do all of the so-called “free followers” here at VP realize that you are considered nothing to me? Have I failed to make that sufficiently clear to all and sundry? Are you fully cognizant of the fact that this blog existed before you were here, exists without any help or support from you now, and will continue to exist long after you cease visiting here?

Is everyone perfectly clear on that?

While I have nothing against people who read this site, or Sigma Game, or Castalia Library, or Castalia House, or the Arkhaven blog, or Arktoons, and still decide not to participate in or support any of our community’s various projects for what are no doubt very good reasons, I don’t regard them as being important, I don’t rely upon them in any way, and, in fact, I don’t think about them at all. They’re not on my radar.

If you’re not involved, you are irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong, or even negative, about being irrelevant. You’re not a problem, you’re simply not a factor at all. For better or for worse, you don’t matter any more than some random individual in Ghana or Myanmar who has never heard of me.

Everyone is welcome to read this site for free. That’s literally what it’s here for. I would write here and post here even if there were only two or three people visiting the site every day instead of 30,000; it gives me no more and no less pleasure to go through the discipline of articulating my thoughts on a regular basis now than when there were only a few thousand pageviews a month back in 2003. But this site is just something I do for my own reasons, it is not a business, it employs no one, and it does not require any resources to make it work. Die Gedanken, sie sind frei.

The Cult of Free was created by the false application of an outmoded business model to a series of government-funded data-mining platforms. It’s not a surprise that so many people were misled by this; even 30 years after Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver published “The Death of Advertising” in Vol. 23, Issue No. 4 of the Journal of Advertising, the Cult of Free retards still think that sites like Gab can be funded by nonexistent advertising revenue.

They don’t realize that X has never, ever, made a profit. They aren’t aware that Google loses $2 billion or more on YouTube every year. And they have no idea how Meta actually makes its money. Silicon Valley’s One Million Eyeballs and Exit model was always fraudulent, on every single conceptual level, even though it appeared to work well for certain favored ticket-takers.

What is necessary, what is vital, what is absolutely required for an operation that is going to survive and thrive over the long haul is to build a community of 10,000 or more people and provide them with enough value for them to justify their moral and material support. We are very, very fortunate to have been able to do that, and it is my goal, every single day, to provide an excuse, a reason, or a justification for all of our supporters to continue with their support.

I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to think about those who not only don’t have skin in the game, they simply aren’t in the game at all. The value of the free content they create is zero. I know this for a fact, because when I shut down comments at this blog, all the same stupid arguments were mustered against it. I was “killing the blog” by shutting down the discourse here, or so they claimed. “Just as many people come to read the comments as read your posts,” they argued. The result: absolutely no change in traffic at all.

And here is how you know the so-called “support” of freeloaders is worthless: they never even do the free and easy things they could be doing to benefit the community without spending a single dime.

This isn’t a request for anyone to do anything at all. It is merely an philosophical explanation.

DISCUSS ON SG


“You Are the Winners”

Scott Adams finally and unambiguously concludes that even the fanciest analytics are trumped by a heuristic based on instinctive distrust.

“The anti-vaxxers are clearly the winners at this point, and I think it will stay that way. And I don’t want to put any shade on that whatsoever. They came out the best. They have the winning position. The unvaccinated have an advantage. Because they feel better. The thing they’re not worrying about is what I have to worry about. I wonder if that vaccination five years from now.

“Because really, I think the antivaxxers were just really distrustful of big companies and big government. That’s never wrong! It’s never wrong to distrust government. It’s never wrong to distrust big companies. So if you just took the position let’s just distrust everything the government did, well, you won!

“You won, you won completely – I did not end up in the right place. Agreed? You would all agree with that, right? I did not end up in the right place. The right place would be natural immunity, no vaccination. You should take that as a victory, and I should take defeat. We could agree on that, right? That my position is now the weakest, and your position has gone from the weakest to the strongest, and we can just say that’s true. The people who didn’t get vaxxed are absolutely in the winning position.

“You win. You win! You are the winners. You are the winners. Let me say that part with no ambiguity. You won. You won. All of my fancy analytics got me to a bad place. All of your heuristics – don’t trust these guys, it’s obvious – totally worked.”
– Scott Adams

It doesn’t really feel like winning, to be honest. But give Scott credit, as unlike most vaccinated individuals, he is willing to come out publicly and declare that he made the wrong decision, explain that the various bases for that decision were unreliable, and admit that he will have to live the rest of his life under the shadow of the possible adverse effects of that decision.

This is very important, not for the satisfaction of his critics, but for Scott himself, because now he knows he has to embark upon an early-detection regime for cancer and be careful to avoid activities that will elevate his heart rate to now-dangerous levels. And it’s also important for his fellow vaccinated, because perhaps failing this test will give them the wherewithal to pass the next one.

Because the next one is definitely coming, sooner or later.

The fundamental failure in Scott’s syllogism was the assumption that lay beneath his logic. He assumed, incorrectly, that scientistry and scientage could be trusted. This is quite common in those who fail to distinguish between the three aspects of science and don’t understand that scientistry is not only not scientody, but these days, does not necessarily have any connection to scientody at all. And given the massive twin crises of reproducibility and corruption in scientistry, the fact is that the anti-vaxx position was always the strongest position all along, even from a secular materialist perspective.

The heuristic was even more clear, and even more obvious, for the Christian. Never, ever, trust the wicked. Not offering tickets, not riding a black horse, not wearing a white coat.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Age of Paradox

Simplicius observes the way technology has created a paradox that currently provides a significant advantage for the side with the ability to “be in the most places at once” rather than the traditional principle of “getting there first with the most”.

It is the age of paradox in warfare: where de rigueur total dispersion of forces appears to make high casualty densities obsolete, yet the entire length of the battlefield is overwatched by the most unprecedentedly powerful and accurate systems in history, like Iskanders, Kinzhals, Zircons, HIMARs, etc., which allow the carrying out of near-instantaneous kill-chains—from detection to transmit/distribution, to fire order within moments.

This is why the only way to fight and advance has come down to dispersing your strategic operations over the widest possible scale, so that the end goal becomes the totality of victory rather than specific operational objectives like: “Capture this area of cities.” Such a task requires the concentration of forces, from divisions, brigades, battalions, whose every staging action is monitored with almost total transparency by the enemy.

This ‘war of the future’ will be won by the most flexible, resilient, and adaptable force—the force which can pull punches, use feints, and reorientations all along the entire combat line in the most expedient manner. Russia is showing this today by utilizing a confounding rotation of active fronts to not only unbalance the AFU, but to stress their mobility and logistics to the extreme. When you have the advantage in logistical infrastructure and facility, you can ‘daze’ your opponent by conducting small operations across a scattered range of fronts, causing them great stress in trying to keep up.

In the Avdeevka battle, we saw Ukraine being forced to pull significant amounts of elite units from several fronts like Zaporozhye and Bakhmut to reinforce the crumbling Avdeevka lines. When that finished, Russia launched a Zaporozhye attack, overrunning depleted AFU positions there as a result, with AFU unable to reinstate reserves fast enough. The same goes for the Kupyansk and Kremennaya regions: reports spoke of AFU’s desperate troop pulls from Kupyansk to bolster defenses in northwest Bakhmut, where Russia has likewise started a series of attacks.

It’s like pricking a spinning drunk with a needle from every side—he hardly knows where he’s being hit, nor has time to orient himself correctly. Lacking logistical mobility—in the form of physical haulers like HETs, transports, etc.—Ukraine gets the worst of it in being forced to constantly run around plugging leaks in the flooding deck.

Taking into account everything I said above and in the rest of the paid article regarding Ukraine’s NATO ISR overmatch plus the prevalence of drones in general and how they’ve vastly limited maneuver warfare, we know that the only way to truly win is to stretch your enemy on every front and defeat him in detail while bringing to bear your greater logistical and economic resources…

The concluding point is that it’s not about capturing particular towns or regions, the real work being done is internally—the AFU is being gutted and hollowed out. This is why it’s so difficult for blinkered pro-UA observers to understand the true underlying dynamic of the conflict. They judge the war algorithmically: Russia has only captured a few kilometers so that means Russia is not succeeding. But they fail to take into account the intangibles, that the very moral and mechanical fiber of the AFU is coming apart at the seams.

It’s intriguing to note that the principle described by Simplicius appears to be a fractal one, as the BRICSIA alliance is observably stretching Clown World on every front, and, for the most part, defeating it in detail while bringing to bear its greater logistical and economic resources and exploiting Clown World’s logistical weaknesses in order to destroy the neo-liberal world order and win World War III without going nuclear.

We know Clown World is crumbling in every sense, militarily, economically, philosophically, spiritually, morally, and most of all, in morale terms. It is increasingly – and observably – desperate and insane. And it is more dangerous than ever because it, and all its servants, are correctly afraid, and so they are tightening their grip and lashing out on every side, in every polity Clown World controls. If its global ambitions weren’t so ambitious and its rule weren’t so illegitimate and unpopular, it would be cutting its losses and retreating to a defensible core, but it can’t because no such core exists.

DISCUSS ON SG