Tag: philosophy

How to Read the News

A brief lesson in mendaspicy, a form of divination based upon the inspection of lies exposed through the dissection of a media article. As the media’s relentless anti-Putin and anti-Russian propaganda increases in intensity, it’s useful to examine it closely in order to see if it can help us better understand what is really happening beneath the media cover of its inverted Narrative.

ITEM: Vladimir Putin is panicking. “Panicking Putin ‘calls up OBESE 20st retired general, 67, to lead forces in Ukraine'”

ITEM: Vladimir Putin is desperate. “Desperate Putin plans to send nuclear-capable arsenal to Belarus”

ITEM: Vladimir Putin is running out of financial resources. “Financial noose around Vladimir Putin”.

ITEM: Vladimir Putin is running out of military resources. “Putin ‘running out of puff'”

ITEM: Vladimir Putin cannot divide the G7 nations. “Vladimir Putin will not divide G7 leaders”

ITEM: Any steps toward peace will lead to global instability.

Boris Johnson reveals downside of settling Ukraine conflict. Any effort to resolve the conflict between Moscow and Kiev peacefully will cause more harm than good, the UK PM has said.

The West needs to keep arming Ukraine instead of seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Kiev and Moscow, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told French President Emmanuel Macron, according to Downing Street. Any attempt to resolve the conflict peacefully will lead to global instability, he said at a meeting on the sidelines of the G7 Summit on Sunday…

The prime minister also cautioned the French leader against seeking alternatives to resolving the conflict. The Prime Minister stressed any attempt to settle the conflict now will only cause enduring instability and give Putin licence to manipulate both sovereign countries and international markets in perpetuity.

Johnson took a similar stance at a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Sunday. “Ukraine is on a knife-edge and we need to tip the balance of the war in their favor. That means providing Ukraine with the defensive capabilities, training and intelligence they need to repel the Russian advance,” a statement from Downing Street read.

On Sunday, Johnson tweeted that Ukraine’s “security is our security, and their freedom is our freedom.”

Now, note that these are all headlines featured in The Daily Mail for 26 June 2022. There are 26 direct references to Vladimir Putin on the home page, compared to 20 for Boris Johnson, 7 for Joe Biden, and 0 for Xi Xinping. Applying the mendaspicic principle of narratival inversion, what can we potentially discern about the present conflict between Russia and the globalist forces from these six headlines?

  1. The globalists are panicking.
  2. The globalists are desperate.
  3. The globalist economies are in a financial crisis.
  4. The globalist militaries are running out of infantry, armor, and ammunition.
  5. There is an incipient split in the G7, most likely between those who want to negotiate a peace settlement (Japan and Italy) and those who don’t (USA, UK, Canada). France is leaning toward the former and Germany is leaning toward the latter.
  6. The neo-liberal rules-based world order will not survive either a) a peace settlement with Russia or b) a war with the Sino-Russian alliance. Therefore, gambling on c) defeating Russia while avoiding war with China is the globalists’ preferred option.

Time will tell whether mendaspicy is any more accurate than haruspicy, but at least it gives us a predictive model against which we can compare future events and actions.

DISCUSS ON SG

Antifragility: An Interpretation

ANTIFRAGILITY: a convex response to a stressor or source of harm leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Every attack is an opportunity.” – Vox Day

This is actually straight out of my Dragons training. In order to attack, a fighter must open a window. The mere fact of attacking intrinsically renders the attacker momentarily vulnerable. The properly trained fighter has five choices: a) break open a window through force, b) exploit an open window through speed, c) convince the opponent to open a window through deceit, d) follow-through on a window opened by a preceding strike, or e) counter a window opened by attacking.

Most people fear being attacked. They shouldn’t, because every attack is potentially useful to the party attacked in some way. It’s not an accident that “kick the dog until it bites” is not unreasonably described as the core weapon of the imperial USA’s foreign policy.

If there is one thing I have learned in 21 years of being targeted by various individuals and organizations, it is that every single attack will present opportunities that far outweigh any temporary damage inflicted. The challenge is to focus on identifying and pursuing the former while simultaneously dealing with the latter.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Collapsing Tripod

The Atlantic is not exactly a publication in which I have any trust whatsoever. But it is informative to note that even some of the most-hallowed mainstream media institutions are beginning to attempt to come to grips with the ineluctable fact that the economic order is on the verge of collapsing because the foundational principles upon which it rests have proven to be false.

The Anglo-American system of politics and economics, like any system, rests on certain principles and beliefs. But rather than acting as if these are the best principles, or the ones their societies prefer, Britons and Americans often act as if these were the only possible principles and no one, except in error, could choose any others. Political economics becomes an essentially religious question, subject to the standard drawback of any religion—the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do.

To make this more specific: Today’s Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics. From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work. A society is supposed to understand the laws of nature as Newton outlined them. It is supposed to recognize the paramount dignity of the individual, thanks to Rousseau, Locke, and their followers. And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market. So Adam Smith taught, with axioms that were enriched by David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and the other giants of neoclassical economics.

The most important thing about this summary is the moral equivalence of the various principles. Isaac Newton worked in the realm of fundamental science. Without saying so explicitly, today’s British and American economists act as if the economic principles they follow had a similar hard, provable, undebatable basis. If you don’t believe in the laws of physics—actions create reactions, the universe tends toward greater entropy—you are by definition irrational. And so with economics. If you don’t accept the views derived from Adam Smith—that free competition is ultimately best for all participants, that protection and interference are inherently wrong—then you are a flat-earther.

Outside the United States and Britain the matter looks quite different. About science there is no dispute. “Western” physics is the physics of the world. About politics there is more debate: with the rise of Asian economies some Asian political leaders, notably Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, and several cautious figures in Japan, have in effect been saying that Rousseau’s political philosophy is not necessarily the world’s philosophy. Societies may work best, Lee and others have said, if they pay less attention to the individual and more to the welfare of the group.

But the difference is largest when it comes to economics. In the non-Anglophone world Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies. In most of East Asia and continental Europe the study of economics is less theoretical than in England and America (which is why English-speakers monopolize Nobel Prizes) and more geared toward solving business problems.

First, Rousseau was always an absurd and nonsensical joke. Second, Steve Keen has mathematically proven the fundamental incorrectness of Adam Smith due to the unreliable nature of the collective demand curve. Third, List is not the solution to Smith, and for the same reason.

The hardest thing for even many of the people on the so-called ideological Right to accept – so-called because Left-Right ideology is incoherent, irrelevant, and entirely outmoded – is that the Enlightenment has proven to be an intellectual and philosophical dead end. Reason, at least in its human embodiment, has turned out to be irrational; all of the models and creeds and policies that rely upon the basic concept of human rationality have not only failed, but have been conclusively proven to be false.

It was simply inertia from Christendom that allowed the Enlightenment to pass itself off as progress. But the systematic eradication of Christianity from intellectual, professional, and public life combined with the adulteration of the European nations is finally overcoming that centuries-old inertia, to disastrous effect.

DISCUSS ON SG

You Can’t Stop the Smart Boy

I put up a solid meme from SG on Gab, along with a comment.

This meme should make the stupidity of the oft-heard midwit aphorism clear to even the most myopic midwit mind.

Of course, a Smart Boy couldn’t resist the temptation to prove that he’s a midwit.

@voxday that aphorism is true. Its misapplication does not invalidate it, merely demonstrates the intellectual incompetence of the user.

Of course, the aphorism is not true. It may or may not be true, because sometimes correlation equals causation, and other times it does not. A correct form of the aphorism would be: correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

But where is the fun in that sort of actual precision that doesn’t permit the Smart Boy to incorrectly correct others? The irony of the misapplication is that correlation is usually the first step toward proving causation. As a general rule, resorting to tautology in order to refute something that someone hasn’t said is highly indicative of a gamma behavior pattern.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Lobster Pope’s Music

In which the CIA, the Beat Generation, the Grateful Dead, and Jordan Peterson are all connected through the recognizable pattern in their esoteric influences in Speaking Ill of the Dead:

That path between dark and light. The balance of opposites. The “third way”. The same tiresome luciferian/gnostic nonsense that appeals to the vain and is catnip to secret kings. The message is specifically anti-Christian in that it is a spirituality that you achieve entirely through your journeying. There is truth to the value of moderation, but that’s not really what the path between dark and light is referring to. It’s more build your own god, or do what thou wilt.

Except Hunter backs off from full power-seeking with a warning. This is a solitary journey – no one will help you including the songwriter. And it leads “home” – another word with no real meaning but has a comforting ring to it when it floats by. Probably best to just trip, nod sagely, and not think too much.

There is something familiar about being teased with a spiritual path through vaguely luciferian gnostic “balance” only to be warned off diving in head first. Remember, it’s all an if – a hypothetical.

Why, that’s the Lobster Pope’s music!

There’s the pattern. Fake media world has no connection to reality beyond the rough settings and characters it bends to a narrative. Everything else – the stories, consequences, rules, ideologies, values, etc. – are made up whole cloth and can be whatever the narrative engineers want it to be. It’s how image and style change so fast, but the dyscivic message underneath always moves in the same direction. What changes are the pieces – the squid ink – used to cover the lukewarm luciferian de-moralization.

It’s easy to tell how unreal it was in hindsight – it’s legacy is all empty nostalgia. Dried-out protoplasm waxing over how awesome it was to twitch to stimuli, with absolutely nothing meaningful to show for it. If we know them by their fruits, it’s just another road to nowhere.

It’s become almost comedic in mediocre fantasy novels, the way in which everything – and I mean every single novel – has been about “maintaining the balance” for the last 30 years. It’s similar to the way in which TV constantly pushes the fake “we’re family” theme about people who are not family and action movies all seem to include the scene where a diverse group will “do it… together”.

And this doesn’t even begin to get into the diversity, inclusivity, and anti-boundaries wickedness that now abounds. But we all know where it was always heading.

Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council, 1824

Fake family + balance + together = the destruction of the ability for families to follow a father’s leadership toward the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

DISCUSS ON SG

On the Correction of Others

Dear Smart Boys,

Stop correcting people who aren’t requesting criticism, comments, or correction. Literally no one appreciates unsolicited correction, even on the off-chance that it is entirely, 100-percent, correct, which it usually isn’t. As a general rule, if they want editorial, they’ll ask for it. If they haven’t, they didn’t.

Sometimes people are just wrong, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s to be expected. Remember MPAI and file them away as people to ignore in the future. You’re not the Truth Police.

If you ever wondered why people don’t like you, this is why.

It’s really not that hard to allow stupid people to say stupid things, or to permit smart people to say strange and confusing things that you don’t understand, without interference.

UPDATE: To precisely no one’s surprise, least of all mine, the Gabtards didn’t hesitate to demonstrate their literal retardery.

You literally just did what you said you didn’t want other people to do.

Since apparently it is necessary to spell out the obvious, because MPAI, I will note that a general expression of one’s opinion about comportment is not criticism, commentary, or correction concerning any particular individual, and therefore is clearly not part of the set of irritating behaviors I am addressing.

DISCUSS ON SG

This Could Not Be Verified

Not only is it impossible to verify Ukraine’s claims of Russian losses in the Special Military Operation, it is impossible to take them seriously on a statistical basis.

The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin’s war rumbles into its third month today.

The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine’s armed forces and territorial defence units – though this figure could not be verified.

Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia’s military equipment and machinery.

A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.

According to the same article, “On February 24, Russia’s land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine’s 125,600.”

Now, the number of casualties in war is always a multiple of the number of fatalities. For example, the USA lost 407,316 KIA during WWII and 671,846 WIA out of 16.4 million troops, for a Cas/Fat ratio of 1.65. As medical science improved, this ratio increased over time, to 2.6 for Vietnam, 7.2 for Iraq, and 8.6 for Afghanistan.

So, if the most recent US war is a reasonable comparative, the Ukrainian claims would indicate an additional 180,600 wounded Russians for a total of 201,600 Russian casualties, which would mean that the Russian casualty rate of 72 percent exceeds that of the German, Japanese, and Soviet militaries during the entirety of World War II. And at 7.5 percent, the fatality rate is three times the US WWII fatality rate of 2.5 percent in just two months.

In other words, we can state with certainty that these reports are highly improbable, and logically conclude that they are false.

Clown World as Crucible

AC contemplates a thought that I, too, have thought before. What if we’re not the targets of clown world?

One of our greatest weaknesses is we tend to ascribe so much to stupidity. They have even fed us the meme, “Never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to stupidity.” But those we face have very smart people in very high places, telling all the idiot puppets in positions of power that we see what to do. More often than not, I think the planners and the puppet string pullers know exactly what they are doing. However if this is the case, it does not make sense in the context of the farmer looking to breed more docile, complacent sheep. It might make sense however if there were a farmer looking at the current crop of obese trannies, skinny manlets, and ultra-left NPCs, and deciding he needed to do some major selective breeding to salvage his herd’s reproductive viability.

Why do we assume that the elite want the fat, mindless, degenerate, and self-sterilizing subhumans that their policies are producing in such quantities lately? Of what possible use can they be to anyone? If we are ruled by an arrogant and aesthetic elite that values bloodlines, intelligence, and talent, is it not at least possible that clown world is a crucible intentionally designed to eliminate the weak, the stupid, and the ugly?

And isn’t that more in keeping with the beliefs and behaviors of the pagan elites of the past? I’m not saying that’s necessarily the case, I’m simply observing that almost every aspect of clown world appears to be designed to lure the susceptible into the consensual destruction of their selves and their genetic lines.

Regardless, our responsibility to resist and refuse to submit to it remains the same.

DISCUSS ON SG

That’s An Easy One

For anyone asking me “Maybe you should give up Crimea and Donbas in exchange for peace?” Before asking this question, name me the specific region in your country you would be willing to give up if Putin started bombing your cities.

Certainly. In order of preference:

  1. New York City
  2. Hollywood and Los Angeles
  3. Washington D.C.
  4. San Francisco
  5. New Jersey
  6. Miami

And if Mr. Putin would be so good as to bomb them before the USA handed them over, so much the better.

DISCUSS ON SG

We Never Needed Them

The Big Bear drops some hard truths on us.

It dawned on me this morning that @realdonaldtrump is the last significant gatekeeper before Nationalism. They’ve invested so much into his brand that they can’t let him ride off into the sunset post 2020 and they desperately need him to hold the line for disillusioned Americans.

He couldn’t get Gab to submit to kushner’s (((speech codes))), Parler & GettR were duds and Truth Social is the laughing stock of the internet.

This is the last, best move to gatekeep Nationalism. Another branded investment ‘hero’ (Elon) swoops in to save the day & restore the Don on twitter.

You don’t need these false idols, fake heros. They don’t have the power to save you & even if they did there’s no chance they would. They don’t care about your interests.

The good news is, you can build your own future. You never needed them.

Putting one’s faith in a media celebrity because he says one or two things that you like is always going to end in disappointment. Every single time.

DISCUSS ON SG