Tag: philosophy

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

The Black Rider Has No Favorites

To him, you can never be more than a tool of momentary utility. Serve him if you are foolish enough to do so. Perhaps you think the earthly rewards are worth riding with the Black Rider. But sooner or later, when you are no longer necessary, you will be thrown from his high horse.

The wicked always think they will be immune to their own wickedness. They are seldom correct.

Marco Troper, who was in his second semester at the university, died Tuesday, his grandmother Esther Wojcicki posted on social media. Troper, a math major, was the son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who stepped down from her role last year after 25 years with Google, which owns the video streaming service.

“Tragedy hit my family yesterday,” Esther Wojcicki wrote online. “My beloved grandson Marco Troper, age 19 passed away yesterday. Our family is devastated beyond comprehension. Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being.” The grandmother told the Palo Alto Daily Post and SFGate that Troper’s death may have been as a result of a drug overdose. The family is waiting on a toxicology report that could take a month.

When reached via email Friday, UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore confirmed the university had a “student death earlier this week.” Gilmore said a student residing at the Clark Kerr Campus was found unresponsive on Tuesday around 4:23 p.m. Berkeley firefighters attempted lifesaving measures but the student was pronounced dead.

UC Berkeley freshman, son of former YouTube CEO, found dead in dorm, 18 February 2024

I have zero sympathy for these wicked people. They participated and helped make possible the very tragedy that is now affecting them as well as all their victims. They knowingly pushed lethal poisons on hundreds of millions of people and actively censored everyone who attempted to warn people not to take it or provided a safer and more effective alternative. I suspect the young man died the same way my youngest brother did, by taking a stimulant that increased his heart rate to a level that was too high for his vaxx-damaged heart to bear.

Cocaine use is associated with a large abrupt and transient increase in the risk of acute myocardial infarction in patients who are otherwise at relatively low risk.

It’s no secret that cocaine significantly increases the heart rate. The reason we’re seeing more overdoses that are blamed on fentanyl now isn’t because the drug is so much stronger, or because drug dealers have somehow lost the ability to correctly cut cocaine in order to avoid reducing their customer base, but because so many young people’s hearts have been damaged by the vaxx. It’s the same reason so many super-fit soccer players are dying of suddenly; certain drugs and certain sports both significantly increase the heart rate to a point that a heart damaged by myocarditis cannot continue to function.

The mean heart rate for a semi-professional soccer player is 172 while professional soccer players regularly record peak heart rates north of 190. Cocaine use causes the heart rate to momentarily spike in excess of 180, which is why both soccer players and cocaine users have been disproportionately represented among the victims of the mRNA covid vaccines.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never. Question. Me.

At least not by email. If you want to know why I am so actively hostile to being asked questions about pretty much anything, I invite you to consider the sort of thing that I still see in my email on a regular basis. Here’s one from just this morning.

I got into a huge argument with my co-workers who are all atheists. They now all think I am crazy because I seriously question evolution. Their main argument is that human dna and chimp dna are extremely close. I foolishly did not believe them, however when I checked online it said 98.8% similarity. If that is true then I’m gonna have to admit it, however I don’t know what is true. I personally think the entire thing is a scam, but I am not smart enough nor expertise enough to know how to prove it.

First, none of these retards are intelligent enough to be having a meaningful discussion about evolution. That’s obvious, considering the way they’re arguing over something that is a) meaningless, b) irrelevant, and c) scientifically outdated. It wouldn’t matter if human DNA and starfish DNA were 100 percent identical, that still wouldn’t suffice to prove that the theory of evolution by natural selection was correct. Sweet St. George, how I despise democracy!

Second, I have already addressed the theory of evolution repeatedly and in considerable detail. I have even presented a mathematical disproof that has thus far failed to meet with any meaningful critique and has not been refuted or even substantially addressed by any advocate of TE(p)NSSSBMGD&GF, which is to say, the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, which I believe includes most, though probably not all, of the evolutionary epicycles now required to explain away the pre-VD critiques of the theory. So, it’s pretty safe to say that if you have a question, the answer to it is already on the blog.

Dance, little scientist, dance the epicycles for me!

Third, in case it has somehow escaped your attention, there are a lot of people who read this blog. We have an entire social media community filled with very smart, very well-informed individuals who are perfectly capable of answering ignorant questions asked by relative retards. So if you have a question, start by asking it on SG, there are always a few Smart Boys who live for that sort of thing who will be absolutely delighted to show you how smart and well-informed they are. Which, by the way, answers the recent question that appeared on Sigma Game concerning what are the positive benefits of Gamma. They can be positive life-savers in this regard!

Fourth, when you consider that this blog has been around for 21 years and has well over 100 million views, what are the chances that no one has ever asked your Very Important Question before? What are the odds that I haven’t already answered it in a public manner?

Fifth and finally, save it for Stupid Question Day on the Darkstream.

Addendum: No, I won’t do an interview. I don’t care how Very Special and Important your publication or university happens to be. The answer is still no. When I’ve rejected multiple interview requests from The New York Times and Fox News, do you really think I’m eager to take advantage of “your chance to tell your side of the story”?

DISCUSS ON SG

A Textbook Failure

It was a pretty good game last night. However, I’m beginning to conclude that for all his many strengths, Kyle Shanahan simply isn’t a big-game coach. Rather like Denny Green with the Vikings back in the day, he’s capable of putting together a great team and getting them to play very well in the regular season, but he doesn’t have the mental flexibility to win the chess games that is necessary at the championship level.

Some things can’t be controlled. McCaffrey uncharacteristically fumbling in the red zone, Greenlaw getting hurt running onto the field, the punt hitting the leg of the blocker, the extra point being blocked. But I was pretty certain that Shanahan choked when he failed to try to close out the game when the 49ers had the ball in scoring position inside the two-minute warning of a 16-16 game.

There are two ways to play to win in that situation. The best is to burn the clock down to 10 seconds, then score. This is necessary when playing against a top-tier quarterback. You can trust your defense to hold on in many cases, but not against a Brady, a Mahomes, or a Rodgers. The other option is to play for a touchdown. In both cases, you are playing to win the game.

However, the NFL tradition is to always play to put off the final decision. Perhaps this is a league-dictated thing, or perhaps it is the textbook decision because it allows a head coach to avoid the criticism and accountability that comes in the wake of an execution failure that makes what was the right decision at the time look incorrect in hindsight. Shanahan kicked the field goal with too much time on the clock, and was lucky that Kansas City only scored three to send the game to overtime instead of putting the game away with a touchdown inside regular time.

If you don’t play to win, you don’t really deserve to be a champion anyhow.

And who would have thought that Andy Reid – ANDY REID – would win a clock management battle? In the Super Bowl! This is surely a sign of the Apocalypse.

UPDATE: With regards to the entertainment scripting theory, I think the NFL actually wanted SF to win. The one egregious call was the defensive holding call on 3rd and 13 in OT. And the grounding call on Mahomes, while 100-percent legitimate, could have easily been waved off due to the receiver in the vicinity, had the league been favoring the Chiefs.

DISCUSS ON SG

Negativity is the Consequence of Degeneracy

The great 20th century historian, Sir Charles Oman, presciently illuminates the philosophical mediocrity and fundamental inutility of what he describes as the Pessimist, and what we would describe as a Blackpiller, a doomsayer, or an MGTOW, in today’s selection from his epic STUDIES IN NAPOLEONIC WARFARE now being serialized on the Castalia Library substack.

The conception of the history of the world as a process of consistent deterioration, from a golden age down to a catastrophe well earned by degenerate mankind, is not a very cheerful or inspiring one to guide the way of life. The most obvious deduction from it is, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”. The average man finds within himself no power to withstand the stream of tendency in which he believes himself carried along toward an unhappy end. He does not even exclaim with Hamlet:

The World is out of joint—O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.

For how few minds even conceive the idea that it is their duty to stand against the spirit of the times, hard though the task may be.

Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History, Sir Charles Oman

This is precisely why I harbor neither respect nor regard for those who have nothing to offer the world except their ceaseless predictions of inevitable doom. For as Sir Charles explains, their negativity is the inevitable and inescapable consequence of their own degeneracy.

Hope is a Christian virtue. Even in a fallen world populated by mediocrities, engulfed by lies, and ruled by inverts, demons, and satanic pedophiles, we have the undying hope of the Cross. Despite our own flaws, sins, stupidities, and shortcomings, the Almighty God chose to extend His hand to us, and through His Son, offer us a way out of the material mire.

Having taken that Divine hand, it is now our duty to stand against the evil spirit of our times. Not our desire, our dream, or our mood of the day. Our duty, however hard it might be.

And if our inspired optimism pains our enemies, if our relentless conviction burns them, if our Christian faith enrages them, if our intolerance makes them feel bad about themselves, that is only further testimony to the fact that our perspective is essentially beautiful, good, and true.

DISCUSS ON SG

Identity > Ideology

Lee Kuan Yew’s doctrine is more important than all the ideologies and isms in history combined. Because no one actually believes in any of them, they simply use them for the advancement of their races and religions. Identity is even sufficient to transform a diehard, life-long libertarian and Austrian economist into a full-blown collectivist, as evidenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s criticism of Walter Block’s libertarian case for Israel:

Block et. al., in their attempt of presenting the liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, maintain that they can justify the claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine based on their status as “heirs” of Jews having lived two millennia ago in the region then called Judea. Not surprisingly, however, except for the single and in itself highly questionable case of the Kohanim (Jews of priestly descent) and their specific connection to the Temple Mount, they do not provide a shred of evidence how in the world any one specific present-day Jew, through a time-span of more than two thousand years, can be connected to any one specific ancient Jew and be established as legitimate heir of some specific piece of property stolen or otherwise taken from him two thousand years ago.

The claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine, then, can only be made if you abandon the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought: the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt. Instead, you must adopt some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.

This turn from an individualistic to a collectivistic perspective is on clear display in Block’s et. al. summary conclusion (p.537):

“Rothbard supports homesteading as the legitimate means of ownership (the first homesteader gets the land, not any subsequent one)….Libertarians deduce from this fact that stolen property must be returned to its original owners, or their heirs. This is the case for reparations. Well, the Romans stole the land from the Jews around two millennia ago; the Jews never gave this land to the Arabs or anyone else. Thus according to libertarian theory it should be returned to the Jews.”

Bingo. But homesteading is done by some specific Ben or Nate, not by “the Jews,” and likewise reparations for crimes committed against Ben or Nate are owed to some specific David or Moshe as their heir, not to “the Jews,” and they concern specific pieces of property, not all of “Israel.” Unable to find any present David or Moshe that can be identified as ancient Ben’s or Nate’s heir to some specified piece of property, however, all reparation claims directed against any current owner are without any base.

Another property theory is needed to still make the case for a Jewish homeland. And Block and his coauthors offer such a theory: property rights and reparation claims can allegedly also be justified by genetic and cultural similarity… Whatever these outpourings of Block’s are, they have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism. In fact, to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle. The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, “unfriended” and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.

First, setting aside the burning question of what is, and what is not, Rothbardian, I always find the historic Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the basis of previous ownership to be incredibly bizarre, given that in the very document upon which they base that claim, it is established a) the Habiru stole the land from the Canaanites and b) most of it didn’t belong to them anyhow, but to one of the other tribes. How would property that Simeon stole from Joe Canaan, which was then stolen by Assyrians and later stolen by Romans, then Arabs, and finally the British, before being stolen by European Jews somehow properly belong to a genetic heir of Judah?

But that’s just an observation that is literally the exact opposite of new. What’s much more interesting here is the way that Block’s argument relying upon the transformation of the ideological core of libertarianism into a form of ethnic collectivism not only proves Lee’s doctrine of identity, but even shows how predictive that doctrine can be. For the record, I had never read anything by Block nor did I know anything about his background prior to reading Hoppe’s article today

Walter Block was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents Abraham Block, a certified public accountant, and Ruth Block, a paralegal, both of whom Block has said were liberals. He attended James Madison High School, where Bernie Sanders was on his track team. Block earned his Ph.D. degree in economics from Columbia University and wrote his dissertation on rent control in the United States under Gary Becker. Block identifies himself as a “devout atheist”.

Show me your argument and you show me your identity.

Because, as the greatest political mind of the 20th Century once wrote: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

That’s why I no longer describe myself as a libertarian. Not simply because I have rejected the ideology, although I have, but because I no longer believe that most ideologists, past or present, are even remotely interested in, much less connected to, truth and objective reality. Despite its grandiose and universalist pretensions, ideology is the detailed rationalization of an identity group’s immediate interests, and it will always be subject to further modification and mutation as that group’s interests change over time.

DISCUSS ON SG