Tag: philosophy

 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.

Posting will be light today. We’ve got friends coming over for holiday drinks and whatnot, so I will leave you to contemplate where you’ve heard this before, more or less, prior to encountering Pascal’s PENSÉES.

Imagination—It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; and it is among them that the imagination has the great gift of persuasion. Reason protests in vain; it cannot set a true value on things.

This arrogant power, the enemy of reason, who likes to rule and dominate it, has established in man a second nature to show how all-powerful she is. She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor; she compels reason to believe, doubt, and deny; she blunts the senses, or quickens them; she has her fools and sages; and nothing vexes us more than to see that she fills her devotees with a satisfaction far more full and entire than does reason. Those who have a lively imagination are a great deal more pleased with themselves than the wise can reasonably be. They look down upon men with haughtiness; they argue with boldness and confidence, others with fear and diffidence; and this gaiety of countenance often gives them the advantage in the opinion of the hearers, such favour have the imaginary wise in the eyes of judges of like nature. Imagination cannot make fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason which can only make its friends miserable; the one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

The governments of the West are RELIABLY lying to you. Not occasionally. Not sometimes. Predictably. Dependably. RELIABLY.

A leaked email last night dramatically indicated that the UN’s poison gas watchdog had butchered and censored a critical report on an alleged chemical attack in Syria. If substantiated, the revelations will be severely embarrassing for Britain, France and America, which launched a massive military strike in retaliation without waiting for proof that chemical weapons had actually been used.

Unconfirmed reports and videos, showing the corpses of adults and children foaming at the mouth in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, shocked the world in April 2018 and led to a joint Western attack on the supposed culprit, Syria, in which more than 100 missiles, including nearly 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles, were fired.

Although the reports and films could not be independently verified, as the alleged events took place in a war zone then under the control of brutal Islamist militants, Western governments, and many Western media, took them at face value…. a dissenting scientist, employed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) says in a leaked email that investigations on the ground at Douma have produced no hard evidence that the alleged gas attack took place.

It appears that these facts were deliberately suppressed in published OPCW reports.

The email makes no attempt to suggest what did happen in Douma. It simply points out that hard evidence, gathered and examined by non-political scientists, does not support the officially endorsed version. And it claims that this resulted in the OPCW redacting the report to the extent that its conclusions were misrepresented.

The revelation appears to be the worst instance of ‘sexing-up’ in support of war since the invasion of Iraq and Tony Blair’s doctored dossiers. A whistleblower has made public the astonishing email of protest which was sent to senior officials at the OPCW. It says that the independent scientists’ official report on the Douma incident had been slashed and censored so severely that it:

• Misrepresented the facts – by leaving out key information;
• Hid the fact that the traces of chlorine found on the site were merely tiny trace elements, in parts per billion, and in forms that could have been found in any household bleach;
• Contained major deviations from the original report submitted by impartial experts, so that it had ‘morphed into something quite different’;
• Suppressed a total mismatch between the symptoms allegedly displayed by victims at the scene, and the effects of the chemicals which were actually found. The symptoms seen on harrowing videos shown at the time of the incident simply did not match the symptoms which would have been caused by any material found at the site.

The Mail on Sunday has seen the email of protest which one scientist at the OPCW submitted to his superiors. It refers to the original expert report from Douma which the email says was savagely censored.

This original report, if it had been published as written, would not have supported widespread claims that poison gas was used at Douma on April 7, 2018. If any such gas was used, it was not a gas known to, or detected by the scientists who visited the scene, examined the buildings and soil and carefully checked the samples. The scientists accepted this. But even this promise was then broken, and a third version of the document was issued which left out the vital fact. The wording of this report was so vague that news organisations around the world concluded – incorrectly – that it said that chlorine gas had been used or might have been used. If the key material had been left in, they could not have done this.

When people ask me why I don’t believe any Official Narrative, from the Moon landing to the unemployment rate, my answer is always the same: because the U.S. government says it is true. In my experience, this is almost never the case. The Official Narrative and the elements of the truth that can be confirmed very rarely correspond.

I don’t know what the precise truth is in virtually any of the more famous controversial cases. But I know that whatever they say is true cannot possibly be true, because they have been repeatedly exposed as shameless liars again and again and again and again. Read the scientist’s actual email, which is posted at the link. Then contemplate what that level of intentional deception and misrepresentation applied to other Official Narratives suggests.

Frankly, it astonishes me that no matter how many times the U.S. government is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to have lied, from the USS Maine to Pearl Harbor, most people will nevertheless unhesitatingly believe the very next lie they produce. You have to be extraordinarily forgetful to believe anything the U.S. government tells you is true, whether the claim concerns the food pyramid, global warming, or historical events.

That’s the inescapable conclusion to which I have come after seeing yet another commercial equating “choosing to be free” with “choosing Hell”.

Think about how every Disney movie since Walt Disney died preaches either a) rebellion, b) following your heart, or c) freedom. This promised “freedom” is akin to Jordan Peterson’s “individualism”, as both are designed to render you alone, helpless, and vulnerable to the spiritual vampires who wish to feed on you.

Only the truth can set you truly free. Anything else that promises or celebrates freedom as an end is just another form of slavery seeking to entrap you.

For my friend stopped running today.