Tag: philosophy

Dear New Reader,

If you are someone who “doesn’t want to get your hopes up” or “is afraid to be disappointed” or “is concerned that it might be a trap” or “seriously hope you’re wrong”, or sees doom in every direction, then this is not the place for you. I’m not saying that you’re a bad person or that anyone here wishes you ill. I’m simply stating a simple fact: this is not the place for you.

No one here is interested in your fears, your worries, your psychological vagaries, or your concerns, least of all me. And if you’re going to talk about them, then your comments will be deleted and eventually you will find yourself banished, because this place is not about your feelings.

This is the place for those who hope even when all hope is gone. This is the place for those who are willing to fight to the last man. This is the place for those who will stab Godzilla in the foot with a butterknife when he steps on them. This is the place for those who remember the Alamo and consider the Americans who died there to be the real victors. This is the place for those who will fight in the shade of the enemy’s arrows. This is the place for those who will say to the world, “no, you move.”

This place is not for you.

With regards,

Vox

PS: Epstein didn’t kill himself.

PPS: Biden didn’t win.

I’m pleased to report that today, 17 years and 10 days after the initial post, the Vox Popoli blog has exceeded 200,000,000 pageviews. The blog now consists of 22,968 posts and 1,181,070 comments, although the number of comments does not include those left during the years when the two previous comment systems were utilized. In the interest of clarity, note that these numbers do not include the 26 million views at Alpha Game or the 150k views at DevGame.

A few observations about this traffic milestone. First, it underlines the importance of consistency. If you’re not going to post at least 3-4 times per day, you’re much better off contributing regularly to a group site. Very, very few one-man blogs have survived the demise of what used to be known as the Blogosphere. Second, with an average of 169 views per comment, it proves that the commentariat is not even close to synonymous with the overall readership. Third, it demonstrates that the media narratives about who and what are “popular”, and who and what are not, are largely false. 

Fourth, and most importantly, it emphasizes what I’ve said about the ticket. If you refuse to take the ticket when it is offered, not only will no amount of success or talent open any important doors for you, but the media will remain resolutely silent about anything and everything you achieve unless it provides them with an excuse to try to take you down.

I would, of course, be remiss if I did not express my deep personal appreciation to all the investigative reporters, intelligence agencies, science fiction social justice warriors, and self-appointed thought police for their assistance in making this possible. It literally could not have been done without you.

The great Japanese novelist’s answer demonstrates, as you can probably imagine, an interesting and unusual perspective:

“Mr. Murakami, how would you respond if someone were to ask you, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I would say, ‘There is no meaning to anyone’s life. It’s enough to be free,’ but I wonder if this shows a lack of responsibility or human emotion.”

“My answer would be ‘That’s something to think about after you die.’ While we’re still in the middle of being alive, it’s hard to really see the meaning behind it. We’re all busy, and we get caught up in all sorts of situations. So let’s think it over at our leisure after we pass away. I don’t think it’s too late to come to a conclusion after that.”

My answer, as both a Christian and a gamer, is this: “The meaning of life is to prepare for Level Two.” Which is why I don’t think we’ll necessarily have a lot of leisure to think over the past, unless we’ve been cast out into Outer Darkness.

Now, I understand that in this age of direct communications, it is sometimes easier to go directly to someone you know happens to have the information than proceed through the conventional channels, which can be slow and inefficient. That’s suboptimal, but it’s more or less fine. And I understand that not everyone reads every email, or post, or SocialGalactic update; despite our best efforts to keep everyone informed, someone is always going to fall through the cracks. 

But I am neither sales support nor technical support. If you send an email to my personal address, then you are going to get a personal response. You will not receive a professional or a corporate one. It may be helpful and informative, or it may not be. 

Translation: if you’re expecting some sort of “the customer is always right” posture from me, you’re in for a serious surprise. You’re not my customer and I’m not whatever the Hell you appear to think I am. If you suspect you’re inclined to flounce away in a snit because you think my failure to sufficiently kowtow to the Blessed and Thrice-Sanctified Customer is some sort of insult, just save us all the trouble and go away now. And if you have a problem with that, I suggest sending an email to Bill Gates about your problem printing from OpenOffice Writer in Windows 10, or to Scott Shannon at Penguin Random House about your inability to open your newly purchased ebook, for the sake of comparison.

Forget Pareto, one thing I’ve learned over 30+ years in the workforce is that one percent of the customers cause 95 percent of the trouble. Let this be henceforth known as the Day Principle of Customer Service. Logic dictates that an operation should seek to get rid of that one percent as expeditiously as possible in order to focus on making the products and services better for the 99 percent who just want quality goods and functional services.

What is particularly annoying about this to me is that this sort of idiot customer invariably expects a much higher standard of sales and technical support from startups with few hands on deck and limited resources than they do from giant corporations with tens of thousands of employees and near-infinite financial resources. Would they actually prefer it if we imitated the tech giants, hid our emails, and directed all communications to a call center staffed with third-worlders who have no information and no hope of being able to resolve any problem?

 Readers note some familiar ideas popping up in some unfamiliar places.

Holy cow, Michael Anton’s new book reads like he’s been swiping you for years. In fact I’m shocked at how far he and the Claremont Institute are pushing the envelope.

“In sum, America is for the Americans—just as France is for the French, India for the Indians, Israel for the Israelis, Japan for the Japanese, Mexico for the Mexicans, and each of the world’s countries for its particular people. That’s not to say, necessarily, that America should never take in immigrants—though I personally think that, after fifty-five years and at least ninety million newcomers and their descendants, a moratorium is warranted, not least in order to assimilate this latest wave. It is to say that America is not the common property of all mankind, that every one of the world’s nearly eight billion people is not “more American than the Americans.” If everyone in the world is American—actually or potentially—then no one is. The logic of immigration absolutism leads to its own unraveling: in insisting on the universality of Americanness, it strips Americanism of all distinction or meaning. The ruling class welcomes that outcome. Have any of the “conservatives” thought it through?”

It sounds as if he might have read Cuckservative. And then there are these observations on the effects of social justice on an organization:

People like @GadSaad, @ConceptualJames and @PeterBoghossian have been saying once you let social justice in an organization it will eventually destroy it. (Even if well intentioned, it deviates from the core org goals.)

– Dave Rubin

I believe that’s what is called “convergence”. Someone may have written a book or two about it. 

I’m not at all bothered at the fact that the popularizers will be credited for these ideas, as Friedrich von Hayek recognized the problem with social justice and J.S. Mill decades before I did, and the idea that American universality is self-negating is logically inescapable. Anyone who actually thinks the matter through will necessarily reach the same conclusion. We don’t create truth, we can only observe it.

Anyhow, I’m very pleased to observe that my personal radioactivity is proving insufficient to prevent these ideas, and more, from escaping this particular intellectual ghetto and permeating the mainstream discourse.

A reader is concerned about what he perceives as anti-semitism:

There are a number of us, Jews, Christians, and mixed Judeo-Christians (like myself), who enjoy reading your blog.  My friends and I meet over coffee (and/or beer and/or dinner) and the topics you highlight come up for discussion quite often. Educationally, we’re a highly varied group, anywhere from incomplete 10th Grade to multiple post-grad degrees (almost all in the hard sciences); politically, from just balancing the see-saw slightly left of center to falling off the right edge of the bench.

What we all have noticed is an increasing tilt towards anti-Semitism.  There isn’t one of us who’s going to stop reading your blog (no one’s dumb enough to cut off his nose), but it is noticeable (and disconcerting) that we do mention amongst ourselves from time to time.

They should be disconcerted. As the US empire spirals into breakup and the chickens of the largest invasion in human history come home to roost, the halcyon days of pretense and civic nationalism and ethnic propaganda and historical revisionism are over. It’s no longer possible for anyone, however philo- or anti-semite, to pretend that people of one nation can also be part of another nation, or that political power in the hands of not-Americans is even remotely compatible with the unalienable rights of Americans. And on a related note, the Sino-Jewish war for the intellectual high ground in the USA has begun in earnest.

The most observably evil organizations in the USA, from the ADL to the Hellmouth, are run by Satan worshippers who hide behind their ethnic identity and seem to genuinely believe that crying Holocaust will forever protect them from criticism of their evil actions 70 years later. While I don’t believe in the inexorable genetic determinism of DNA, the observable facts are observable and observation is the exact opposite of an intellectual crime.

Here is what should truly disconcert these disconcerted readers. Being an extreme outlier myself, I don’t personally care even a little bit about an individual’s ethnic heritage. I don’t concern myself with my own ethnic identity or allow it to influence my analysis about anything, so imagine how much less I care about anyone else’s. Macro is not micro, and the only thing I care about on the macro level is the truth. The objective, observable, and undeniable truth, however uncomfortable it might be for me or anyone else.

So, if you’re going to reject the truth and call it anti-semitic, or any other pejorative term, a) that’s your problem, not mine, and b) that doesn’t change reality by one single atom or iota. Because the fact, the objective, observable, and undeniable fact, is that I am anti-satanic, anti-globalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-promethean. If that somehow leads you to believe that I am anti-semitic, then you should probably look very, very hard at where your logic is leading you and whom you are serving.

Anyhow, anti-semitism is merely one of the charges that have been hurled at me since I was getting death threats from CAIR back in 2001, and I’ve been on the ADL hate list since 2016. So, I sincerely hope you will excuse me continuing to not give a quantum of a fragment of a damn what anyone else happens to think one way or another.

As Miles Mathis observes, this intellectual fraud (PDF link) is even more a priori obvious than the Einstein fiction.

They never tell you in school the interesting or important things about historical figures, but I will. Some of you may know I majored in philosophy and Latin.  I sat in on a graduate-level course on Wittgenstein my senior year, though I found it very tiresome.  I took it only because we had a Wittgenstein specialist in our department, and he was highly regarded—though I don’t remember by whom.  Not by me.  We also covered Russell in another class, though briefly.  I always had a sneaking feeling he was big phony, and of course it turns out I was right.  However, at the time I would never have thought to connect either of these guys to the rising Modern art movements of their time, or to Modernism at all.  That is because of the way they are taught—the way everything is taught in college.

IN ISOLATION.

In fact, I wouldn’t now say that Wittgenstein and Russell were taught in college; rather, they were promoted.  We were supposed to believe they were important for some reason, though no one ever really got around to saying why.  All the evidence was to the contrary, so everything had to be spun hard.  I now suspect that those promoting them must have been related to them somehow, though I was in Texas.  I can’t figure out why else anyone would promote these guys, or find them fascinating enough to study.

To start with, both of them come from fantastic wealth.  Wittgenstein’s father was one the wealthiest men in Europe. Karl Wittgenstein was an industrial tycoon who had a monopoly on Austria’s steel cartel, and he was a friend of Andrew Carnegie.  He owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.  But we are supposed to believe his son’s fame had nothing to do with that.  It also had nothing to do with being promoted by his professor Russell, a future Earl, who was also from one of the wealthiest families in Europe.

You will say I seem to have lost my usual cheery demeanor, along with my usual levels of pity and sympathy, which is true.  These people will do it to you.  I think you see why I am disgusted by Wittgenstein. It isn’t his Jewishness or homosexuality.   It is that he is such an obvious fraud, promoted only because of his money and background.  It is that his bio is such a pathetic lie.  It is that he beat up children and called country people worms and animals.  It is that he used his positions to prey on young men.  It is that he continues to be promoted by his cousins, although they must know all this.  It makes me wish the corona hoax will bankrupt all the universities, and that students will refuse to return to them in the fall, to pay exorbitant amounts to be lectured to online by a series of charlatans, liars, and monsters. 

Keep in mind that the guy wrote one book, one article, and one book review in his entire life. He was too lazy to even bother trying to make the charade look convincing. And that one book was a mere 75 pages of sophistics that consist of seven propositions.

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a truth-function is: {displaystyle [{bar {p}},{bar {xi }},N({bar {xi }})]}[bar p,barxi, N(barxi)]. This is the general form of proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

How very.

It’s always interesting to read Miles Mathis because he takes the time to dig up and expose the rampant phoniness that everyone with the intelligence to understand these frauds immediately picks up upon reading them. You can’t read Wittgenstein or Bertrand Russell without realizing that there simply isn’t anything there, which is why pretty much all post-medieval philosophy is literally worse than useless.

Just as most fame and fortune today is manufactured, intellectual fame is mostly fiction, the product of a propaganda machine utilized to manufacture false authorities that will eventually confer more false authority upon future intellectual frauds.

And now, the punchline.

A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.”
– Wikipedia

Ludwig Wittgenstein is what Jordan Peterson would have been without the Internet.

It’s been instructive to see how banning the blackpillers and pessimists not only improves the tone of the discourse, but boosts everyone’s morale. So, it is time to speak forthrightly on the subject. I will no longer tolerate those commenters given to negativity and despair. They will be banned without hesitation.

Hope, whether it is based on a sound foundation of truth and reason or not, is to be vastly preferred to the incessant pessimism of those who are afraid to hope because they fear being disappointed more than they fear being defeated. Those who always ask of every possible positive interpretation “but could it be a trap?” are narcissistic cravens driven primarily by fear and self-absorption.

Things may not always turn out as well as we hope. They almost certainly will not do so. The world is fallen, after all, it is ruled by an immortal and malignant narcissist, and our vision of the future is very far from perfect. But the one and only way to absolutely ensure defeat is to refuse to enter the ring. It is better, by far, to enter the ring full of false confidence and go down fighting than to refuse to enter it at all for fear of being beaten.

So, this is fair warning being given to those who are inclined towards pessimism, defeatism, and despair: this is not a place for you. You may be right, in the end, but I don’t care in the slightest. If we ride to doom, in any case, we will ride. You are welcome to cringe and hide and attempt to be the last one devoured by the flames of Surtyr. But if that is your goal, then this is not the place for you and you will never be one of us.

Avalanche insists that no one should feel ashamed for being taken in by Jordan Peterson. I very much disagree.

“I am ashamed for liking Jordan Peterson”

Every semi-normal person feels this way after having been taken for a destructive ride by a sociopath. “How how HOW could I have been so blind, not seen him for what he was? I cannot ever trust myself again!”

But there is no shame in being ‘used’ by a master-user! That would like saying, “I’ve just learned to play golf — but Jack Nicklaus just destroyed me on the links! It’s because there must be something wrong with me!”

No, you were just WAY outclassed! Ol’ Jordie is a (probably literally) insanely talented master at sociopathic manipulation of normal folks. {Raises a rueful hand:} He sure ‘got’ me!

Sociopaths are not normal, and normal people have no useful defenses against the first one they meet; and often not further ones if they’re unfortunate enough to run into another.

Whenever you get ‘down’ on yourself for not seeing it, remind yourself you had a run-in with a tiger on the veldt — and got away with with a mere financial scratch! GOOD for you!

The problem is that I told everyone what Jordan Peterson was the moment I started paying any attention to him. I saw through his act at first glance and immediately observed several points of evidence that strongly indicated he had a disordered mind and a deceptive character. Yet four out of five people WHO HAD FOLLOWED ME FOR YEARS reacted angrily and insisted that I had to be wrong, despite the fact that there was absolutely ZERO evidence to support their position. And by zero evidence, I mean none whatsoever. Even the most cursory reading of anything he had ever written, dating all the way back to college, was sufficient to cast doubt on the man. It was one of the strangest things I’ve observed in the history of the blog.

There is no intellectual defense for that kind of reaction. This is precisely why I say MPAI. Most people are idiots, by which I mean that they are primarily driven by what makes them feel good at the moment, which is another way to say that they are predominately ruled by rhetoric. That is just as true of Avalanche, and the majority of people here – albeit a smaller majority than the norm – as it is of society in general. An idiot, to me, is anyone who believes, contra all philosophy, science, and history, that the truth of the matter is, or even can be, determined on the basis of his feelings about it.

Even when Protagoras says “man is the measure of all things” he is not referring to any one individual man, much less that man’s feelings at a particular point in the space-time continuum.

These things are what they are. But don’t say there is no shame in them. It’s not for the rhetorical to judge or absolve the rhetorical, it is for those who are less susceptible to rhetoric to judge them. There were massive quantities of evidence indicating that Jordan Peterson was a fraud, and yet very, very few of his fans placed any weight on any of that preponderance of evidence, simply because he made them feel good for one reason or another.

If you fell for Peterson, then you should be ashamed and you should admit it to yourself. You should explore the reasons why you did so and why you were susceptible to his con. And you should do so in order to prevent yourself from falling just as readily for the very next fraud to come along. In fact, I would even suggest that the desire to explain away one’s feeling of shame is indicative of the very vulnerability that led to the feeling in the first place.

If human history is any guide, many of those who fell for Jordan Peterson will fall for the next person to make them feel similarly good about themselves. Because MPAI.

The genius Martin van Creveld considers how Plato would react to modern times:

First, he would have been disappointed (but hardly surprised) by our continuing inability to provide firm answers to some of the most basic questions of all. Such as whether the gods (or God) “really” exist, whether they have a mind, and whether they care for us humans; the contradiction between nature and nurture (physis versus nomos, in his own terminology); the best system of education; the origins of evil and the best way to cope with it; as well as where we came from (what happened before the Great Bang? Do parallel universes exist?), where we may be going, what happens after death, and the meaning and purpose of it all, if any.

Second, he would have questioned our ability to translate our various scientific and technological achievements into greater human happiness; also, he would have wondered whether enabling so many incurably sick and/or handicapped people to stay alive, sometimes even against their will, is really the right thing to do.

Third, he would have observed that, the vast number of mental health experts notwithstanding, we today are no more able to understand human psychology and motivation better than he and his contemporaries did. As the French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, there was (and still) an uninvited guest seated among us: the human mind.

Fourth, he would have noted that we moderns have not come up with works of art—poetry, literature, drama, rhetoric, sculpture, architecture—at all superior to those already available in his day. Not to Aeschylus. Not to Sophocles, not to Euripides, not to Aristophanes. Not to Demosthenes, not to Phidias and Polycleitus. Not to the Parthenon.

I’m not at all surprised that the great Israeli military historian inclines more toward Plato than Aristotle. But despite being an avowed Aristotelian myself, I would highly recommend reading the whole thing. After all, it is not often that we have access to the contemplations and meanderings of one of the greatest minds known to Man’s history.