Tag: philosophy

Just Stay Home

Austria has imposed the most draconian lockdown yet. Several Italian governors are calling for the same. The Czech Republic and Germany are reported to be considering similar measures. Other countries may do the same in their desperation to force the vaccine-proof to submit to the insanity.

So what?

This is a sign of weakness on the part of the wicked authorities, not of strength. It is an exercise in complete futility. Nothing can be easier than outlasting the authoritarian absurdities. The coronavirus will continue to rage among the vaccinated, as they stroke out, suffer heart attacks, and die of vaccine-destroyed immune systems.

Just stay home.

You’re not going to starve. You’re not going to be unable to work. Go to the store, stock up, and lay in a good supply of books, movies, and DIY projects. Watch a Darkstream. Read Arktoons. Enjoy an afternoon coffee. Declare an early wine o’clock.

This is the easiest persecution anyone has ever suffered in human history.

Make the most of it.

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The All-Seeing Eyes

AC watches the watchers:

Even the best surveillance, caught off guard like this and adapting on the fly, will look confused about what they are doing. This guy really doesn’t have much to say, he doesn’t seem to have a place he is going, or some mission he is trying to accomplish. He doesn’t want to go, but he is hesitant to engage. Really good surveillance at this point will transition to a gambit, maybe asking for money as if they are a beggar. They will actively try to control your focus, maybe even repel you, so you leave, thinking it is you who is determining what is happening.

I ran into this sort of thing today, as it happens. The situation was actually rather amusing, as the overweight, well-dressed young man who looked like a typical college student couldn’t come up with anything better on the spot than to ask me if I had any money that might permit him to obtain a meal. It required a certain amount of self-restraint to not respond by asking him if it would not be beneficial if he were to skip a few of them.

The thing is, it should not distress any Christian in the slightest to know that we are often under surveillance both digital and physical. Do not fear the evil eyes of Man, rather fear the all-seeing eyes of the Almighty God. Even the virtuous pagans understood this.

God hath placed by the side of each a man’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over him—a Guardian who sleeps not nor is deceived…. So when you have shut the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is within, and your Guardian Spirit, and what light do they need to behold what you do?
—Epictetus

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We Weren’t the Problem

There is really no reason to feel any sympathy for some of the vaccinated individuals who are dropping dead or their families. It’s one thing to be deceived, it’s another thing altogether to go out of your way to needlessly castigate those who were not so easily fooled.

It is with indescribable shock, sorrow, and regret that the family announces the untimely death of Wade Baird. He is survived by his wife of 21 years Chantal and his children Nathan and Kaitlyn.

Wade had strong political opinions and would unapologetically share them with everyone. Saucy, humorous, and sarcastic banter with colleagues and close friends were a staple of his repertoire. He usually got the last barb in and it was, inevitably, a very good jab.

All invited attendees will require to show valid ID and proof of vaccination or a negative Covid -19 test within 72 hours of the service.

Karma is a real bitch. As a general rule, one does well not to tempt her.

UPDATE: Karma respects neither Jew nor Gentile.

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The Evidence of Evil

Bruce Charlton reasons his way to an identical conclusion that I have also reached before:

When we contemplate strategic evil, plans pursued over several or many generations; we must account for the fact of a leadership that is capable of such a thing. And, furthermore, a leadership that is also sufficiently powerful to impose their plan on a mass of humans who are dominantly-motivated by their own short-term gratifications.

When the plan is global and crosses many generations – there must have been a leadership of immense power, who are themselves immune to the normal constraints of human time – and a leadership for whom, personally, a decade is ‘the short-term’.

We are talking, in other words, of evil spirits, fallen angels, demons – those who are immortal spirits (i.e. without bodies, whose spirits persist forever); and therefore live on a timescale far greater than evil mere-mortal humans.

The many incredible and astonishing global policies and trends we perceive as of 2021 – the need for steady strategies toward evil ends that span multiple human lifespans – become instantly comprehensible if we assume that the leadership was demonic.

Once this perspective has been assimilated; clear demonic fingerprints can be seen all-over the plans of the Global Totalitarian Establishment.

This is why I have no doubt – no doubt whatsoever – about the truth of the core Christian perspective. Once an individual capable of thinking at the strategic level takes an honest and open-minded look at the world and its history, it is utterly impossible to reasonably conclude that evil does not exist.

Moreover, it’s entirely obvious that the material world is insufficient motivation and reward for those who are at, or very near, the top of it. There is quite clearly something – something non-material – that the Soroses and the Rockefellers and the Clintons and the Schwabs of the world are seeking which cannot be convincingly explained by mere hedonism, greed, or ethnicity.

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A New Foundation

The Tree of Woe contemplates the West’s need for new philosophical foundations in the aftermath of the complete failure of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism.

We need to do better than our great ancestors did.

To defend the good, the beautiful, and the true we must be able to know what is actually good, beautiful, and true — and then we must be able to persuasively demonstrate that to others.

For the good, beautiful, and true to be actual, they must in some way be real. Thus, to defend their actuality, we must be able to defend their reality; and that requires defending a theory of moral realism, a theory of aesthetic realism, and a correspondence theory of truth against those who would say they the good, beautiful, and true do not really exist.

But to defend these theories of realism, we must be able to defend the objective and knowable existence of the real itself against those who would say that reality as a whole is subjective or unknowable.

And to be able to defend the knowable existence of reality, we must be able to defend the evidence of our senses and the conclusions of our reason from skepticism.

To be able to defend the evidence of our senses, we must be able to defend direct realism, or something like it; to be able to defend the conclusions of our reason, we must be able to defend the laws of thought.

So we must do more than just identify the natural order, we must identify how we have identified it, and then defend both the method and the outcome.

The Enlightenment failed to do this. It failed to defend the evidence of the senses, it failed to defend the laws of thought, it failed to defend moral realism, it failed to defend aesthetic realism, and it failed to defend the correspondence theory of truth. It failed on every front and was routed from the field.

We must do better than the Enlightenment. We cannot return to classical liberalism. There is no retreat; the bridges are burned; the way is blocked. We must advance.

If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
Psalm 11:3

I could not agree more, having thought similar thoughts in recent years. In fact, I’d even begun laying out some of my own contemplations in this regard a few months ago, so this seems like a reasonable time to share a few of them here. For the time being, I’m referring to this proto-philosophy as “veriphysics”.

The Principles of Veriphysics

  • The truth is that which exists independent of any human perception, sense, or analysis.
  • The truth must be always be the foundation of any correct idea, concept, ideal, objective, policy, or principle.
  • The fullness of the truth cannot be conclusively and comprehensively established from any human perspective or by any human method.
  • Every partial truth is perceived on a gradiant that depends upon both the perspective and the method utilized to determine it.
  • The not-truth can be conclusively established by a wide variety of methods, including logic, observation, statistical analysis, mathematics, and experiment.
  • The practical objective of veriphysical analysis is to construct reliable predictive models that provide a sound basis for pragmatic decisions which produce observable results that correspond with the predictions derived from the models.

The rhetorical version of which is as follows:

  • Truth is reality.
  • Truth is the basis for correct thought or action.
  • All truths are partial.
  • The parts of the truth perceived depend upon the who and the how.
  • The not-truth is easier to establish than the truth.
  • Veriphysics is a practical philosophy.

The primary forms of existence are: ontological, experiential, testimonial, experimental, spiritual

That which can be imagined.
That which can be experienced by the senses.
That which can be testified to by others.
That which can be repeatedly and consistently observed.
That which can be perceived indirectly through its effects on the material world.

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Comfort, Chaos, and Conservatives

After reading a book that is one long interview of Lee Kuan Yew, the late founder of Singapore, a realization struck me.

Anyone over the age of 30 who is comfortable is a conservative, regardless of his ideology. And what a conservative is, at heart, is someone who will tolerate any evil that does not threaten to upset the order in which he lives.

The young, on the other hand, do not fear chaos because they are not comfortable, but because they are too callow and stupid to comprehend what discomfort actually is.

Even the most brilliant minds shy away from any chaos that could threaten the comfort of their order, no matter how inevitable it is.

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Machiavelli on the Haters

In his Discorsi, which are rapidly threatening to unseat the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as my favorite practical guide to life, the Florentine analyst explains the futility of attempting to appease, accommodate, reason with, or otherwise win over those whose enmity is ultimately rooted in envy. It’s from Chapter 30, That a Citizen in His Own Republic Who Wishes to Employ His Authority for Some Good Work Must First Extinguish Envy:

This text takes note of what a good and wise man should do, of how much good it can bring about, and how great a benefit such actions can bestow upon his native city when, through his goodness and exceptional ability, he has extinguished envy, which is on many occasions the cause of men’s inability to do good deeds, since it does not permit them to enjoy the authority necessary in important matters. This envy is extinguished in two ways: either through some serious and difficult incident, where someone, seeing himself lost, defers every ambition and willingly races to obey the man he believes may, with his exceptional ability, deliver him; this happened to Camillus, who, having given so many indications of being a most excellent man, having been dictator three times, and having always conducted that office for the benefit of the public rather than for his own, had acted in such a way that men did not fear his greatness; and since he was so great and so renowned, they did not deem it shameful to be inferior to him (and for that reason, Livy wisely declares in these words: ‘nor did they believe, etc.’). * Such envy is extinguished in another way when, either through violence or the natural course of events, those men die who have been your competitors in attaining a certain reputation and a certain level of greatness; such men will never be able to acquiesce or remain patient, seeing you are more highly esteemed than they. Furthermore, when they are men accustomed to living in a corrupt city, where education has produced no good in them whatsoever, in order to fulfil their wishes and to satisfy their perversity of mind, they will be happy to see the ruin of their native city.

To conquer such envy, there is no other remedy than the death of those who feel it, and when fortune is so favourable to a man of exceptional ability that he dies in a normal fashion, he becomes illustrious without scandal from the moment that, without any obstacle or harm, he can demonstrate his exceptional skill. But when he does not have such good fortune, he must think about every means of removing the envious from his path, and before he does anything else, he needs to adopt methods that will overcome this difficulty. Anyone who reads the Bible intelligently will see that, in order to advance his laws and his institutions, Moses was forced to kill countless men, who were moved to oppose his plans by nothing more than envy. * Brother Girolamo Savonarola recognized this necessity very clearly; Piero Soderini, the standard-bearer of Florence, also recognized it. The former (that is, the priest) could not overcome envy, because he lacked sufficient authority to do so, and because he was not well understood by those who followed him and who might have possessed such authority. Nevertheless, he did what he could, and his sermons are full of accusations and invectives against the wise men of the world: for this is what he called such envious men as well as those who opposed his institutions. The latter believed he could extinguish that envy in the passing of time through kindness, his own good fortune, and favours to some; he saw himself to be rather young and with the great new popularity his mode of conduct brought him, he believed he could overcome those many who opposed him out of envy without any unusual acts, violence, or disorder, and he did not know that time does not wait, kindness is insufficient, fortune varies, and malice receives no gift that placates her. In this way both of these two men came to ruin, and their downfall was caused by not knowing how or not being able to overcome this envy.

Discourses, Machiavelli

If it sounds a little bit too much like the average suburban mother’s analysis – they’re just being mean to you because they are jealous of you – keep in mind that Machiavelli literally recommends having them executed. While that isn’t generally an option for people who are not Roman consuls, Renaissance princes, or dark lords, what that means in a practical quotidian sense is that one should pay absolutely no attention to anything that the trolls, haters, and critics want, and one should not ever bother to engage with them in any way.

It’s really rather remarkable how many of the great minds of the past clearly observed the gamma mindset in action, they simply never happened to label it.

I view this section as additional support for my decision to not revive the comments here on the blog, as well as for the autoblocking of every social media account that attempts to correct, criticize, or contradict my posts on the posts themselves. While I neither object to nor mind correction, criticism, or being contradicted, those who wish to do so can do so on their own time, in their own space. As it happens, very little is lost this way, as the noise-to-signal ratio is so great that the extinction of the envious from the discourse is well worth the cost of losing the occasional substantive critique.

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Equality: The End Result

The Equalitarian Road to Hell:

  1. I don’t see religion or nation.
  2. I don’t see race or color.
  3. I don’t see sex or gender.
  4. I don’t see age.

Pedophilia is the end game of Equality. It always was.

And every single conservative who proudly embraced “judeochristianity” and every single liberal who preened about how he only judged people by the content of their character bears their share of the blame for walking down this road. Jesus Christ came to divide, not to unite, and there is absolutely no equality of any kind, not in Heaven and not in this world.

If you are preaching unity, equality, tolerance, and inclusiveness, you are serving evil.

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The Ugliness of Burning Man

The absence of beauty at Burning Man (PDF) sends up major red flags, in the trained artist’s eye of Miles Mathis:

What’s wrong with a bunch of people getting together and sharing their garage-craft creations and watching light shows? On the surface, nothing. If this event took place in a culture that still had a top end of art, I don’t think it would bother me at all. I am not interested in car shows, but car shows don’t distress me. I am not interested in monster trucks, but they don’t distress me as an artist. There are a lot of things that I don’t participate in or even that I don’t really understand that don’t distress me. I think of them as things that other people do, and no harm done. But events like Burning Man give me a bad vibe. They always have. I remind you of my paper on the Taos GlamTrash Fashion Show of many years ago, where I first tried to explain this. That event affected me just like Burning Man, because I think they come from the same place. My fiancée at the time didn’t understand my response to that, even after reading that paper, so I guess that is one reason I feel compelled to return to it. I think our disagreement on that was one reason we never got married. She never could understand why that event or those people bothered me so much. She thought I was just a stick-in-the-mud, raining on everyone’s parade.

My belief remains firm that if she really understood where the whole concept came from, she would agree with me. My hope is that maybe by viewing Steve Outtrim’s videos, she and others like her could finally comprehend the enormity of this whole project. She could not take my word for it, since we were too close. It is hard to take someone standing right next to you as an authority on anything. Strangely, that seems to require some distance. So the fact that this wealthy insider, who knows these people personally, would come to the same conclusion as me, might mean something.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are living in a time utterly devoid of real art. By that I mean art of beauty, subtlety and elevation. Sure, it still exists in museums, but almost nobody alive is now creating it. If they are, nobody cares. What is more, it didn’t just die out naturally. It has been killed with malice aforethought by the very people Steve Outtrim is outing: by the billionaires and trillionaires and their hirelings in the military, government, big tech, media, and academia. The death of real art and the rise of Modernism was not an organic fall and rise. It was planned and staged for various reasons which I have enumerated in hundreds of papers over three decades. These include the use of art in money laundering and the capture of the field for the talentless children of these rich families, who wanted to be artists but were not capable of it.

So someone like me can’t help but see Burning Man in that context. It is not just a meeting of grungeartisans and light show mavens. No, it is sold as a premier art event, drawing far more people and press than any art show in New York. In this sense, it is the low end of art posing as the high end.

Since the high end is extinct, almost no one notices. In the screaming artistic void that is the 21st century, the military tries to paper over the vacuum by filling it with fireworks and monstrous metal contraptions. Beneath that it promotes a bevy of marginally talented people—some of them admittedly energetic—far beyond their deserts. All to ensure that high art remains in the grave.

Burning Man and Modern Art, 3 September 2021

I find it intriguing how so many non-Christians, from Miles Mathis and Stefan Molyneux to Steve Keen and Camille Paglia, all react so similarly to the various aspects of Promethean pharisatanry despite their various and very different areas of expertise and knowledge. Whether they happen to be primarily in tune with the Good, the Beautiful, or the True, they are all offended on a deeply visceral level by the intentional violations of what they perceive to be correct and worthwhile.

Their understanding of the entire situation is intrinsically limited by their materialistic perspectives, but their perceptions are valid, their instincts are correct, and their revulsion is both real and entirely justified. This may help us understand how Christians not only admired the noble and virtuous pagans of the past, but went out of their way to protect and preserve their work. It is evidence of how God speaks to people in the darkness, and how He offers them many different pathways to lead them out of it and into the Light of the Truth that is Jesus Christ.

And, of course, it’s also fascinating to observe, over time, how integral core Christian theology and the Bible are required in order to make sense of the entire picture at hand. The more I read of anything from Renaissance history to Roman stoicism to modern esotericism, the more it becomes clear that the rampant evil that presently rules the world and is at war with everything Good, Beautiful, and True is the same ancient and seductive one that first convinced the exiles of Egypt to worship the idol of the golden calf, the same entity that Jesus Christ called the prince of this world, and whose blandishments he rejected in the desert.

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Means vs Ends

A programmer rightly condemns the code-first approach to programming:

There are two kinds of programmers, generally speaking. There are programmers who care more about code, and there are programmers who care more about product. The former – I’ll call them “code-first” programmers – are obsessed with how code is architected, what tools, libraries and languages are used, how much test coverage there is – stuff like that. Code-first programmers are psyched when they check in the perfect abstraction, when they get to use the latest language-feature, when they delete dead code. That is, they love the code they write – the code is the thing.

The product-first programmer cares about that stuff too, kind of, but only as a means to an end. For product-first programmers, the code is the scaffolding, the support, the steel beams in the building, but not the end product. The end product is, well, the product, not the code, and what matters to them is how well that product actually solves the underlying problem. Does the building stay upright? Do the elevators work? Is the A/C functioning? Do people like being there? Product-first programmers love building and launching and seeing users use what they’ve built. The product is the thing.

Anyone who has worked at a place like Google has met plenty of code-first programmers. They are the teammates who are always refactoring code and nit-picking spelling in your function comments. They are in the micro-kitchen complaining about “spaghetti code,” “technical debt,” and the lack of rigor in other teams’ code review processes. They are probably not fixing bugs or launching features. You can probably tell I’m not a huge fan of the code-first approach.

When I interview programmers I’m always amazed at how many of them seem to think the code-first approach is what I’m looking for. Trying to impress me, they ask: “What’s your unit test coverage like?” Pretty close to zero; this is a startup. “Do you guys use hot new technology X.” Not yet, no, how would that help us build the right thing faster? “Is there a lot of technical debt?” We will have to rewrite everything at some point, but it doesn’t matter right now because we haven’t even figured out the right thing to build.

They have an understandable but fundamental misconception of what programming is all about. Programming is about building products that solve problems for users not about writing beautiful code for its own sake.

It can be remarkable how difficult it is to convince people, in a wide variety of activities and occupations, that it is the ends, and not the means, that are the actual objective. Whether it is businessmen planning new ventures, people getting involved in politics, or sports teams taking the field, the confusion of means with ends and process with results almost inevitably results in eventual failure.

Process is important, but only with the context of achieving the desired results. It is not important in and of itself.

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