Tag: philosophy

From Appendix C of Jordanetics.

All is vanity. What is it that we must bestow our care and diligence upon? Even upon this only: that our minds and wills be just; that our actions be charitable; that our speech be never deceitful, and that our understanding be not subject to error; that our inclination be always set to embrace whatsoever shall happen unto us.
—Marcus Aurelius

 After a modicum of reflection, these are my suggestions drawn from 50 years of various successes and failures.

1. Embrace the iron. Lifting weights will not only help you stand up straight, it will make you stronger, healthier, and more confident. The iron teaches the weak to be strong and it teaches the strong to be humble.
2. Take the wheel. You are the ultimate architect of your own decisions and actions. Even if you were dealt a bad card by life, even if your genetics are inferior, your upbringing was terrible, and your instincts are suboptimal, you are the only one who can improve yourself. You are driving and only you can determine the destination.
3. Be the friend that you want to have. Smiles are contagious. Loyalty inspires loyalty. Stand by those who stand by you. Give every friend who fails you a second chance. Only abandon those who have repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted and do not wish you well.
4. Envision perfection and pursue excellence. You will never achieve perfection. But if you envision it and you strive for it, you may well achieve success, and perhaps even excellence.
5. Put a ring on it. Marriage is the manifestation of love. Children are the manifestation of hope. Raising a family to serve as the foundation of future generations is how Man rebels against an uncaring universe, a fallen world, and the spirits of despair and destruction. Yes, there are real risks, especially in the current social and legal environment. But they are well worth taking nevertheless.
6. Set your face against evil. You will encounter evil within and evil without on a daily basis. Stand against all of it, without fear, without hesitation, and without remorse. And when you fail, when you give into temptation, when you are defeated, regroup, repent, and rise again.
7. Do what is right. Learn to listen to the still, small voice of conscience. Do what you know to be right, not what you can rationalize, justify, or excuse. If you have to talk yourself into something, then you probably already know in your heart of hearts that you are doing the wrong thing.
8. Tell the truth in kindness. It is too hard and too exhausting to spend all your mental energies trying to keep track of an ever-growing multitude of exaggerations, false narratives, self-serving spins, and outright lies. Just tell the truth, as you best understand it, without taking pride in it or using it to hurt others.
9. Learn the easy way. You will always encounter those who are stronger, smarter, and more successful than you are. Rather than envying them or attempting to tear them down to make yourself feel better, do your best to learn from them and apply those lessons to your own life. It is considerably easier and more efficient to learn from the mistakes of others than it is to make all of those same mistakes yourself.
10. Believe the mirror. The most reliably self-destructive mistake you can make is to lie to yourself about who, what, and where you are, because doing so precludes any real self-improvement. Be ruthless with your self-assessments, without wallowing in self-pity or despair.
11. Get back on the horse. Perseverance is one of the most important skills a man can develop. There is absolutely no substitute for the confidence and the courage that comes from the certain knowledge that you will get up again after an opponent, or life, knocks you down.
12. Find a best friend. Dogs teach us many things, perhaps the most important of which is what unconditional love is. No matter how rich and successful a man may be, there is no life that the addition of a dog would not considerably improve. And yes, all dogs go to Heaven, obviously, because Heaven would not be paradise without them.

And it’s not going to help Jordan Peterson’s career survive. An article in Demokracija openly calls him a false prophet.

First problem with Peterson that woke me out of my trance and forced me to reevaluate what this professor of psychology is even talking about, was his stance on the usage of personal pronouns. If in the past, he claimed that the problem were the many pronouns people were making up, he now claimed he doesn’t have any problem with the individuals and their pronouns, only with the law which would compel him to use them. That was the same Peterson who not long ago insisted he was ready to go to prison because of his refusal to use preferred personal pronouns.

Every video of his I saw, every tweet I read, every lecture I listened to only confirmed what I already knew at this point. Still, I kept convincing myself that it cannot be so. After all, the progressive left hates him, after all, Peterson says in his 12 Rules for Life to stand up straight, after all, Peterson advocated for the truth.

It turned out all of that was just a big lie. To stop fooling myself, two other events were needed. The first was a debate Peterson had with the youngest of the so-called four horsemen of atheism, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The problems started right at the beginning of the debate when they couldn’t settle on the definition of truth. Harris claimed there is objective truth while Peterson tried by all means to defend the claim which was one of the craziest things I have ever heard. He claimed that truth is, according to evolution, something which helps the individual survive. When you think of it, Peterson’s definition allows that even a lie is truth as long as it helps you in pursuit of your own interests. How do you believe someone who claims that truth can be anything?

Meanwhile, the Lobster Cultists are desperately trying to prevent people from reading Jordanetics.

James E Moore, December 3 2018
Vox Day about as accurate as Vox News
For all the hoopla he claims his book is of little substance.

Folke Hermansen, December 3, 2018
Badly written and intellectually dishonest
As someone who has a genuine understanding of Peterson’s work, this book is filled with misrepresentations and false conclusions.

I guess it just depends upon what you mean by “genuine”, “misrepresentations”, and “false”. But it can hardly surprise anyone who has actually read Jordanetics that Jordan Peterson fans would lie about the book. After all, they are following the example of a man who habitually speaks with a forked tongue.

When you read this, keep in mind that this article in the American Thinker is actually supposed to be a defense of Jordan Peterson against Jordanetics:

The whole point of the revolution begun by Kant is that we can’t know “objective truth.”

For Kant everything we know comes through our senses and then gets processed by our brains and gussied up into a theory of the world. Thus, we cannot know things-in-themselves, prior to our sense impressions.

But the loss of “objective truth” is not the end of everything, it is just the beginning.

For one thing, it allows Carl Jung to experience the history of religion as the history of mankind trying to make sense of the world — the meaning of life, the universe, and everything — given the state of human knowledge about life, the universe, and everything at the time.

In his book Jordan Peterson tries to make sense of the world with everything from Biblical exegesis to Nietzschean aphorisms and Jungian analysis, with Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn thrown in for good measure. And, of course, his Biblical analysis compares God the Father and Christ the Son with Osiris and Horus, the Egyptian father-son duo. He would, because he’s a Jungian, and Jungians believe that you can bring together the religious beliefs of all ages to discover the truth.

And the only thing you need to know about Kant is that he was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. His entire life’s work was an unnecessary attempt to square a philosophical circle. The objective truth exists regardless of our ability to correctly perceive it at any given point in time. And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad. That’s not you make sense of the world. That’s not how you make sense of anything. And more importantly, that’s not how you “discover the truth,” that’s how you end up molesting children, drinking blood, and chanting nonsense in fake languages in order to magickally exert your will upon the world.

I wonder how many Jordan Peterson fans understand that in following the 12-Rule Path they are quite literally rejecting the core philosophical basis for the science they think they love?

How can anyone who is sane possibly defend a man who “advocates for the truth” when, by his own account and according to his defenders, he does not believe in the existence of “the objective truth”?

From Appendix C of the newly released paperback edition of Jordanetics. The first five rules were previously posted here.

6. Set your face against evil. You will encounter evil within and evil without on a daily basis. Stand against all of it, without fear, without hesitation, and without remorse. And when you fail, when you give into temptation, when you are defeated, regroup, repent, and rise again.

7. Do what is right. Learn to listen to the still, small voice of conscience. Do what you know to be right, not what you can rationalize, justify, or excuse. If you have to talk yourself into something, then you probably already know in your heart of hearts that you are doing the wrong thing.

8. Tell the truth in kindness. It is too hard and too exhausting to spend all your mental energies trying to keep track of an ever-growing multitude of exaggerations, false narratives, self-serving spins, and outright lies. Just tell the truth, as you best understand it, without taking pride in it or using it to hurt others.

Appendix C is now also included in the Kindle edition.

UPDATE: I also did an early Darkstream announcing the publication of Jordanetics in paperback. The man is already running scared; he’s STILL trying to explain away his Kavanaugh tweet.

The God-Emperor is blustering again. I don’t think he grasps that people have figured out that he much prefers talk to action:

President Trump threatened to permanently close the U.S. border with Mexico on Monday, saying he’ll take the drastic action if members of a swelling migrant caravan are not deported back to their Central American homelands.

U.S. Border Patrol fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at a group of migrants on Sunday, including families with young children, as hundreds tried to storm the border.

San Diego Sector Border Control chief patrol agent Rodney Scott said Monday morning on CNN that when the migrants approached border fences, they ‘immediately started throwing rocks and debris at our agents, taunting our agents.’

‘And once our agents were assaulted and the numbers started growing – you know we had two or three agents at a time facing hundreds of people at a time – they deployed tear gas to protect themselves and protect the border.’

Carla Provost, the chief of U.S. Border Patrol, told the Fox news Channel that ‘our agents were being assaulted. A large group approached the area and they were throwing rocks and bottles at my men and women, putting them in harm’s way as well as other members of the caravan.’

Napoleon understood that if you act decisively in the early stages of a conflict, you encourage others who witness the example being made to take your subsequent threats very, very seriously. Trump has the concept entirely backwards. He threatens, then threatens again, then threatens some more, but ultimately fails to act. He even backs down, at times.

That’s why his bluffs are increasingly being called by his enemies, foreign and domestic, and will soon be completely ignored if he doesn’t take action very soon pour encourager les autres.

BobbyDazzler@RobertLinder1
I listened to the whole debate Ethan clearly and deliberately said he did not like voxday, that he viewed voxday as anti-comicsgate.

I didn’t listen to the 2VS-Deathray debate; it would be hard to imagine anything that would be of less interest to me given that I have little-to-no respect for either participant or the moderator. But assuming the tweet is accurate, this sort of statement is precisely why I labeled him 2VS. Had Ethan simply made that dislike clear from the start, instead of talking to me about working together and so forth, I would have cheerfully ignored him in exactly the same way I have ignored every other illustrator or colorist who makes a habit of spouting off on the Internet. Remember, by his own admission, Ethan was always the one watching me and Arkhaven, not the other way around. He’s not a genuine leader, he’s the sort of dishonest political animal who watches where the crowd is going, then jumps in front of it and declares himself to be leading the parade.

As the people at DC discovered, as a number of people in the comics industry have discovered, Ethan Van Sciver is shamelessly two-faced and self-interested. His fans in the ComicsGate movement will eventually discover this too, much to their future chagrin. Now, even many of my critics, even many of my self-professed enemies will concede that I do not lie in public. What is 2VS’s reputation for honesty and personal integrity? And what do you really think are the chances that, on this one occasion, I chose to sacrifice my reputation for ruthless honesty… and for what did I sacrifice it?

But here is the more important question: what is ComicsGate, that I should be against it?

The Maximally Pathetic Schema: Xs who labor to convince Ys that “I’m not one of those despicable Zs!,” when in fact it is obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Ys see no difference between Xs and Zs, don’t care anyway, and would love to throw both Xs and Zs into a gulag.
– Adrian Vermeule

The winning side is Chaos and Unreason—mythologically, the monsters—but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

A pair of commenters discuss the weakness of William Lane Craig.

“If folks want a less satisfying taste of what an interaction between Vox and JBP would look like, WLC plays the role of the gentlemanly philosopher who never quite goes for the throat the way that Vox would.”

Vox has pointed out in the distant past how WLC has a tendency to corner his opponents but never go in for the kill shot. I’ve had the privilege of interacting and talking to WLC on many occasions and pointed this out to him. He admits he doesn’t want to humiliate or embarrass his opponents. Strikes me that Christ didn’t have an issue with this tactic when the proper occasion was presented. However, in his more recent debates, I’ve noticed that Dr. Craig has practically accused his opponents of being idiots, in a refined but no so subtle way.

I think William Lane Craig performs a real disservice to the followers of his opponents by failing to fully expose the arguments of his opponents or complete the unmasking of the charlatans he encounters. It’s fine to not wish to humiliate or embarrass your opponents, in fact, that is the hallmark of a decent individual.

The problem is prioritizing your own sense of decency over the truth and permitting those who follow falsehood to more easily continue to do so. Civility is not the prime objective. I believe that if one knows someone is committing fraud, then one has a moral responsibility to alert those being defrauded. This is just as true of intellectual frauds as it is of financial ones. One should not handle a Jordan Peterson or a Ben Shapiro any more delicately than a Bernie Madoff or a Charles Ponzi.

Whether one is cruel about it or not, and whether one takes pleasure in it or not, one’s moral responsibility remains the same.

John C. Wright asks a non-rhetorical question:

In the ongoing and ever-losing battle with my own personal dragons of pride, I took to wondering: why is the proud man angry or peeved with the stupidity (real or imagined) of his fellows? I ask because one would think a saint would be very patient with someone who was stupid, if it were honest stupidity, and not merely laziness in thinking. Whereas the devil (or Lex Luthor) is always in a state of haughtiest annoyance, because he is brighter than those around him. Their stupidity proves his superiority – yet it irks him. Why?

I think there are different reasons that irk different people. Speaking only for myself, I truly don’t mind people being stupid or being absorbed in interests that I consider to be stupid, pointless, or uninteresting. Let’s face it, I consider the average individual to be almost unfathomably stupid, if not actually retarded, and that doesn’t anger me any more than the fact that Spacebunny’s Ridgeback can’t work out differential equations. That being said, I do get extremely annoyed when one of the great masses of my intellectual inferiors takes it upon himself to attempt to correct me, almost invariably incorrectly, and in a manner that indicates that he didn’t even begin to understand what I wrote or said.

Take it or leave it, as you like, but don’t discuss it with me, don’t ask me about it unless I’ve indicated I am available for questions, and don’t even think about trying to “correct” me.

I also dislike when people tell me things that are obviously false or illogical and present them as factual, or even as conclusively true. I tend to regard this as a personal insult, since I find it offensive that they would imagine that I would not see through their transparent pretensions. This is probably why I hate midwits and gammas so much, and why the idiotic way in which they smugly posture and strike false poses is something I simply will not tolerate in my presence or on my blog.

It’s also somewhat beside the point that someone else’s stupidity “proves” my intellectual superiority to him. This is the one thing that normal people and midwits cannot ever seem to grasp about the highly intelligent. WE KNOW. We have always known. We can’t help but know. There is no way to avoid noticing it. You might need the proof, but we don’t and we never have. Because being smarter is no different than being taller, being faster, or being stronger; it’s just a readily observable state of relative being. That an outside observer can’t see the intelligence gap as easily, and that it bothers people more than other differences, doesn’t actually change anything.

As a child, all I ever wanted from the dim-witted was to be left alone. And they could not, would not, do that! Now, I don’t hate them, perhaps because over the last three decades I’ve successfully managed to arrange my life to minimize my daily contact with normal people. I can go days without ever speaking so much as a single word to anyone with an IQ below 120. But while I don’t blame the dim for their lack of intelligence, I find that I can’t blame the intelligent individuals who hate and despise them after enduring years of malicious abuse at their hands either. Because dim or not, it’s really not difficult to simply leave people the hell alone.

But before anyone gets too self-congratulatory about their intellectual superiority, here is an observation that will likely offend many of the more intelligent readers. I have noticed that the smart, but third-rate mind (which usually falls in the 130 to 145 range) inevitably feels the compulsion to explain itself because it needs the external confirmation of its self-assessment. First- and second-rate minds never require that confirmation because they are a) more confident in their self-assessment, and b) too accustomed to no one understanding or believing what they are saying from an early age.

Lest you dismiss what I am saying as simple arrogance, I would encourage you to keep in mind that the most reliably destructive behavior I have ever witnessed on the part of the highly intelligent is the equalitarian assumption that if they can grasp an idea or master an activity, so can anyone else with equal ease. Also, since I am literally retarded when it comes to spatial relations as well as protanomalous, I have a much deeper understanding of what it is like to be totally unable to see things than the average 3SD+ individual.

UPDATE: If you want to make life easier for the smart guy on your team and get along better with him, don’t repeatedly ask questions “just to confirm” things. It’s a maddening habit, and you can tell that you’re annoying the smart guy, whether he shows it or not, when he says things like, “the answer is still yes.” In fact, the word “still” serves as a pretty reliable indicator that the smart guy regards you as at least mildly retarded, particularly when it is spoken in patient, pleasant tones. The unspoken implication is that he suspects you will be genuinely surprised when you see the sun rise again tomorrow.

Some see incidents like these as tragic. I tend to view them as Darwinian comedy:

They saw the world as a warm, welcoming place where strangers would commit random acts of kindness every day.

“You get a feeling of wanting to give back, not just to this person who has welcomed a stranger into their home, but to the wider world,” Mr Austin wrote on his blog. “You become someone who wants to welcome others into your home. You become a merchant in the gift economy. You’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. ‘People,’ the narrative goes, ‘are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.’ I don’t buy it.”

The thing is, the world simply doesn’t care what you believe.

They were travelling along the Pamir Highway, a Soviet-era road that stretches across 2000km near the border with Afghanistan and has spectacular views, when a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group spotted them. They sped towards the group of tourists, rammed them, jumped out and attacked the cyclists with knives. The horrendous slaying was captured on grainy footage from the attackers — who also took the lives of one Dutch and one Swiss national.

I really fail to see why ignoring human nature is considered any less stupid than ignoring gravity or physics.

A comment thread at Bounding Into Comics about Alt★Hero #1 illustrates the core problem with tolerating gammas, even when one rides herd on them.

Considering how much of an asshole/sperg Vox Day is to everyone in his blog and his “my way or the highway” mentality, I’m surprised this isn’t a massive disaster or that Vox didn’t fire everybody midway through for not kissing his ass hard enough. That said, it seems this is fun and good enough, so I hope this does well and can keep going forward in the hands of other more capable people.
– Skullomaniac

Vox gets attacked constantly and doesn’t tolerate it anymore. He is an excellent guy to work for, however, and allows a lot of creative leeway.
– David The Good

I have followed his blog for a couple of years now and I’m convinced he has a severe attitude problem with everyone who may dissent even 0.001{329aa4aef5613a80085c3dd6bd84f5d0e8f5581fdc29e0868f0c3a40e8b25a32} with him, and he often appears to demand complete obedience to his words.
– Skullomaniac

It’s been an interesting process to watch. I started reading Vox Day’s blog back in 2008 and the discussions were provocative and harsh at times, but they were also thoughtful and highly-intellectual. Stay on topic, but nothing was really off the table because it was by and large a self-policing community. No one was afraid to question anyone else, including the proprietor of the blog. It was still largely the same through the Sad Puppies situation. Then, as the Alt-Right started to become a thing and Vox Day became a figure within it, his blog readership increased very quickly and the community rapidly changed. When this happened, everything else changed with it, including the house rules and the attitude toward comments.
– Arcturus Rann

Notice the divorce between the guy who has followed the blog “for a couple of years now”, the guy who has followed it for a long time and actually works with me, and the guy who has followed it for a decade.

Merely having to deal with gammas and the psychological trash they drag in with them has been sufficient to convince some casual observers that I am an oversensitive, incapable sperg who requires people to kiss my ass and doesn’t allow any questioning of my opinion whatsoever. This, as those who work with me know, is almost the complete opposite of the truth; the most common criticism I receive from those who work with me is that I don’t give them enough guidance and oversight.

Granted, I’m not given to much in the way of kumbaya and cuddles either, but if I have repeatedly erred, it has always been on the side of giving people excessive responsibility for which they were not truly ready.

Anyhow, being a game designer, I am putting on my design hat to address this problem. It’s probably going to be based on letting the Dread Ilk decide who is, and who is not, allowed to comment here. What none of my critics realize is that I have actually been far more tolerant of the newcomers than most of the historical readership here prefers.