Tag: philosophy

Right From Day One

Someone on Twitter declares that it might have been a good idea to take my criticism of Jordan Peterson seriously six years ago:

Watching Jordan Peterson – it’s hard not to conclude that Vox Day had it right from day one. Mentally unwell people can provide the stray insight that is unique, worth hearing. But they are not role models or gurus. It’s always a mistake to take a strange person and create a cult around him. This is basically also the problem of feminism – a handful of angry lesbians convincing healthy young women to live against their instincts.

The thing that was so frustrating for me about the general enthusiasm for Peterson was that it was based upon virtually nothing, and all of the contrary evidence was right out there on display. Literally all you had to do to know he was an evil, vainglorious nutbag was read either of his two books.

Stop looking for heroes. Stop looking for people to give you answers. Stop reading the Cliff’s Notes or paying any attention at all to the Next Great Conservative Hope. Because he will be a gatekeeper, and at best, a grifter. At worst, he’ll be a Federal honey trap, like good ol’ Ray Epps.

I don’t believe in taking advice from anyone who hasn’t been dead for at least 100 years. If their advice still holds up a century after their demise, then it’s probably worthwhile.

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Mad, Bad, and Dead

Gammas don’t take it well when their favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, is criticized. Or when it is suggested that perhaps a man would be well-advised to avoid adopting his philosophy, given how he wound up living out his days

The last eleven years of his life, Nietzsche spent in an incoherent madness, crouching in corners and drinking his urine. 

Now, I’m still of an instinctively libertarian bent, so far be it from me to deny any Gamma his right to live as a superman should. But crouching in corners and drinking your own urine while looking down on the rest of humanity for their slave resentment of your self-professed superiority does not strike me as one of the more desirable ways to live one’s life.

The crazy thing about Nietzsche is that a lot of people actually took him seriously, when in truth he was never anything more than a talented scribbler of navel-gazing fantasy fiction about himself. His entire ouevre is one gargantuan delusion bubble, or, as Cioran correctly describes it, “an unspeakable megalomania”.

This observation offended a number of Gammas who, for God only knows what reason, hold Nietzsche in high regard. This was one response.

Just because you call him a lunatic doesn’t make it so. you think and behave as if we are in the Middle Ages and you Catholics are top dog and have a continent-spanning secret police behind you but you don’t. All you have is a little internet echo chamber and a religion that is built on the flimsiest foundation that cannot stand up to any criticisms. So you arrogantly dismiss them. but the vast majority of people aren’t convinced by your bluster anymore and haven’t been for centuries. You come off as weak and ignorant now more than ever.

I have to admit, I have a fairly low opinion of the intellectual capabilities of the average Gamma, but I did not expect any of them to genuinely attempt to deny Nietzsche’s well-chronicled lunacy, considering that he not only had a mental breakdown in 1889, but suffered “a complete loss of his mental faculties” before he died in 1900.

And it’s ironic that considering it was something that he erroneously asserted was a symbol of powerlessness, Nietzsche certainly devoted a considerable percentage of his seemingly-lucid years to raging against the Cross.

The Fury of the Superman

My philosophy, such as it is, includes this precept: never take advice from a man who died in a state of raving dementia after drinking his own urine for 11 years.

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The Intellectual Father of Clown World II

Another round of Kant v Day. While people speak frequently about Enlightenment values, they very seldom reference, or presumably, even know, what Enlightenment actually means. Kant, one of the widely recognized central figures of the Enlightenment, and certainly the most respected, defined it as follows:

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

The first thing to note here is that Kant is clearly speaking in rhetoric here. This is not dialectic. Except for being directly cribbed from Aristotle’s objective distinction of the master and the natural slave, there is no genuine information content in this subjective distinction. This is exhortational manipulation designed to appeal to the reader’s emotions, as is the next section.

It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step toward majority to be not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. Now this danger is not in fact so great, for by a few falls they would eventually learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes them timid and usually frightens them away from any further attempt.

Kant has barely, and unsatisfactorily, addressed the What before immediately pivoting to the Why. This is characteristic of a sophistical deceiver, or at least someone who wants to avoid discussing the substance of a matter. Again, the entire paragraph is mere rhetoric devoid of any substantive information. You don’t want to be a coward, do you, anon? You don’t want people to think you are lazy, or a child, right, anon? So grow up! Think for yourself! Be enlightened! Definitely don’t pay any attention to those old books, those old priests, or any of the knowledge painstakingly acknowledged by your predecessors over the millennia!

Surely your massive Smart Boy brain will more than suffice to provide you with anything you actually need to know! Be brave enough to emerge from the childhood in which all those stupid jocks and pretty girls who rejected you dwell, and make use of your own understanding, whatever that may happen to be, without direction from anyone or anything else!

We’ve heard this before. This is Zero History combined with Thelema. This is literally the philosophical foundation for both the Khmer Rouge and the French Revolution justified on the basis of “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”.

The more one reads Kant, the more readily one grasps how his midwit philosophy is little more than the delusions of an angry Gamma seeking to justify his subjective sense of personal superiority in a world that objectively views him as inferior.

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The Intellectual Father of Clown World

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy, being called the “father of modern ethics”, the “father of modern aesthetics”, and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism earned the title of “father of modern philosophy”.

In last night’s Darkstream, I examined what is described as one of Kant’s “major works”, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” And, as I think everyone who watched it will confirm, I very easily exposed this highly-regarded historical intellectual as a verbose charlatan who substitutes rhetoric for dialectic, dubious enthymemes for valid logical syllogisms, makes wildly improbable assumptions, and gets basic observations about human nature completely and verifiably wrong.

One particularly cruel viewer even commented that Kant’s arguments sound a bit like Petersonian bafflegarble, which frankly I think is going much too far and is unfair to the Enlightenment philosopher, but while I don’t condone the observation, I can understand it.

It’s also worth noting that Kant cribbed from Aristotle without correctly attributing the concept, while changing the terms he utilized in order to make his justification of elite despotism appear to be more palatable to the public that will be enslaved, not because they are “natural slaves” per Aristotle, but cowards in a state of “self-incurred minority”. Below is just one of the several obvious flaws in what is nothing more than a rhetorical argument:

I have put the main point of enlightenment, of people’s emergence from their self-incurred minority, chiefly in matters of religion because our rulers have no interest in playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences and also because that minority being the most harmful, is also the most disgraceful of all.

This assertion is not only false, but downright risible, particularly in light of the way in which the rulers of Clown World are deeply and observably interested in “playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences” and have done so for decades in a considerably more aggressive, totalitarian, and harmful manner than any religious authority has for centuries.

Kant asserts the inevitability of the impossible, while simultaneously denying the indisputable. As with so many other intellectuals revered by Clown World, a critical reading of Kant quickly reveals him to be more of a useful fraud than a legitimately great thinker.

Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, like free trade, evolution by natural selection, and free speech, simply has not withstood the test of time. As with those similarly outdated concepts, the more one digs into his work, the more flaws, both in theory and in practice, reveal themselves to the conscientious reader.

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There’s More Than One Way

You already know not to take any tickets offered. But also, apparently, don’t put on the medallion:

And note, that was before his recent arrest on drug and gun charges. Your weaknesses will be exploited, which is why I am always on my guard against slender, pretty, blonde Norwegian women who are inexplicably interested in economics, epic fantasy, and the intrinsic flaws in the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Obviously, Nick isn’t a Douglas Adams reader. It’s a hot potato… don’t pick it up!

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Three Simple Steps to Sigma

It’s really quite easy if you know what to do. From Sigma Game:

I’ll be honest. Given my talent for unorthodox thinking and my ability to write more or less coherently, I assumed from a fairly young age that I would leave some intellectual legacy behind. Nothing particularly major on the scale of an Aristotle, a Thomas Aquinas, or an Adam Smith, but something more on the level of a Hermann Hesse, a Samuel Huntington, or a John Bagot Glubb.

Umberto Eco, I felt, probably represented my potential ceiling, although my inability to execute Summa Elvetica as I’d envisioned it made it pretty clear that even the Eco strata was beyond me. C’est la vie. It’s better to aim high and fall short than content oneself with mediocrity.

And while my small contributions to gaming, literature, science, and theology are likely to survive in some anonymous capacity to be expanded upon by future intellectuals, it’s been a real surprise to discover that the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, and the concept of the Sigma Male in particular, have gone viral to the point that they are being adopted and applied, however erroneously, to a wide variety of cultural applications. Well and good, even if Sigma is literally the least important of the various behavioral profiles to understand for practical purposes.

But it’s more than a little bizarre to see the way AI systems have ingested and processed the concept, to the point that it has now even incorporated my personal clothing preferences…

My intellectual ambition circa 2005 to 2015 was to one day write the Summa Economica, doing for economics what Thomas Aquinas did for theology. Now my ambitions are considerably more curtailed, as I’m just hoping to be able to publish Steve Keen’s magnum opus, finish Arts of Dark and Light, and wrap up the definitive work on the SSH before my ability to string words together goes the way of Mr. Martin and other washed-up writers.

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There’s Always One

I pointed out a few obvious observations about tattoos at Sigma Game. I know you’ll find this very hard to believe, but one reader shared a personal anecdote that proved those observations are completely unfounded.

READER: Huh, my partner has tattoos and also a very good job at an old company with renowned retirement benefits. As in, an extremely conventional employer. He’s doubled his income in the past three years and recently got his annual salary in shares as a bonus.

VD: Well, your unverifiable personal anecdote is obviously conclusive and clearly obviates every other bit of statistical and observational data on the subject. We now understand that tattoos are sexy, high-class, and will only help one’s career progress. You must be exceptionally nice and pretty to have locked down such an exceptional partner. You should probably tattoo FUKC on your forehead; I’m sure it will do wonders for your future prospects, which we will follow with interest.

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Lenin and the Art of the Impossible

The Tree of Woe contemplates the impossibility of revolution:

Every rock star began as a long-haired freak in a garage with a dream of a record deal and groupies. Every best-selling author began as a would-be writer being told that no one buys books. Every successful entrepreneur began by faking it until he made it. Every revolutionary began as a nobody. None of them had the odds on their side. Victory wasn’t assured; it wasn’t even plausible; it was so unlikely as to seem impossible! It was all a LARP… until it wasn’t.¹

The reason so many successful actors, musicians, and politicians are narcissists is that in order to become a highly successful actor, musician, or politician, you have to take long shots against long odds. Often the only people who take long shots against long odds are the people who are self-deluded enough to think they’re better than all the others who tried and failed.

People like Lenin.

Lenin was a self-deluded nobody. He was a loser. He had accomplished virtually nothing with his life except a stint in the gulag. He was nowhere near as influential as the well-established figures who currently are prominent among the dissident right. He wasn’t even… Nick Fuentes.

But Lenin he changed the world. Sure, he changed it for the worse — but he changed it. And so could we.

The advantage we have as Christian Nationalists presently subject to the wicked madness of Clown World is that we know, as Bob Marley said, Babylon is going to fall. Its fall is absolutely 100-percent guaranteed, because Clown World is a rebellion against God, God’s Law, and God’s Creation. It is a rebellion against morality, mathematics, Nature, and physics, and as such, it cannot possibly be sustained.

It is our job to be the hard place upon which Clown World shatters. Because Clown World is caught between a rock and a hard place, and the rock, being Jesus Christ, isn’t going to break.

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An Appeal to Innumeracy

I have to admit, while I was confident that all the true believers in the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection were going to do their level best to avoid every doing any of the simple math required by MITTENS (Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection), I didn’t realize they were going to go so far as to literally deny the applicability of mathematics to what can now only be described as “the magic of evolution”.

Whitelightning777: Humans and chimps only differ genetically by 1% or so. That’s hardly revolutionary. When zoos have to do surgery on primates, the vets often consult human surgeons for expert advice. Go to a zoo. Look at the hands of chimps. A common ancestor is obvious. There is no way that’s a coincidence!! Just the fact that chimps can learn sign language ought to show a recent divergence. The fact that they can use human metallic tools shows that the brain also works in a similar fashion, just that chimps still aren’t quite as smart as humans, about what a 3 to 5 year old child can do. Look at the difference between wild carp and goldfish. Living things can be pressured to change structure rapidly when circumstances create the pressure to do so.

Spacebunny: You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can’t do math, nor do you understand the significance of the numbers given. No, they could not have done any such thing “a few million years ago”. It is literally mathematically impossible.

Whitelightning777: Both a 1% to a 10% difference or maybe even more could be accomplished over a period of 2 to 4 million years. The main issues are what factors exactly drove this natural selection and how much pressure was exerted upon humans by nature, animal predators and other human species attacking each other. By the way, neanderthals weren’t necessarily as nice as we all seem to think.

James Dixon: The math says no.

VD: 1.23 percent of the human genome means 37,500,000 unique base pairs specific to humans. Now, tell us how long it would take to mutate and fixate that degree of genetic disparity…

Whitelightning777: First of all, the majority of your DNA is essentially junk. The exact percentage is disputed but can be as high as 90%. Small genetic changes can quickly lead to huge differences. Over a few million years you don’t have to change very much from one generation to the next. The ABILITY to evolve, genetic flexibility itself is something that nature selects for. Creatures that can’t evolve are usually extinct. The multiple numbers of human races attest to our genetic flexibility. The modern races are only a few hundred thousand years old & have meaningful differences in health and IQ, although the extent is disputed. If our species lost it’s ability to evolve, it wouldn’t be able to split off into races either. Chimps themselves also have different races and species. Bonobos behave very differently from other chimps, even though they can all interbreed.

Dirk Gently: So, in other words, you don’t even comprehend what Vox is saying

Whitelightning777: Vox is setting a “math trap”. This is a device used by creationists. What Vox fails to realize is that 90% of that DNA is junk and that there is no upper limit to how fast evolution and generic change which can occur so long as the offspring survives and is able to reproduce. What Vox fails to realize is that a creature that can only evolve slowly will go extinct, falling behind and losing out to those with more generic flexibility.

VD: A “math trap” is a simply a basic calculation used by people who are numerate. It’s not witchcraft, no matter how opaque it may be to you. There absolutely is an upper limit to how fast mutated genes can fixate. Evolution by natural selection, biased mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow is utterly impossible by the very fastest rates of fixation ever observed in the wild or in laboratories. I will put the problem in two very simple analogies so you might be able to understand the problem.

If someone tells you the score of a professional baseball game is 562,987 to 3, you know the score is incorrect. If someone tells you he walked from New York City to Los Angeles in 34 minutes, you know he is lying. And when someone tells you that the 37.5 million human-specific base-pairs in the human genome were mutated and fixated by natural selection in less than 10 million years, you know they are absolutely wrong. Your junior high logic will never bridge that gap. It cannot. Because it is based on incorrect and impossible premises.

Whitelightning777: MATH DOESN’T APPLY to evolution.

VD: Of all the absurdly retarded statements I’ve ever seen on every form of social media dating back to the bulletin boards of the 1990s, this is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most retarded. Congratulations. Even the kid who thought bacon came from rocks was simply ignorant. But this assertion actually required enough brainpower to contemplate the concept, think it through, and then reject the idea that mathematics necessarily applies to a process that is conceived to take place over a quantifiable period of time.

Whitelightning777: Let’s keep this simple. The only math that matters with evolution is that the birth rate of a particular lifeform exceeds the death rate or barring that is at an equilibrium. Creatures for whom the death rate exceeds their birth rate are dysgenic. Creationist trick boxes are neither required nor desired.

VD: You’re literally retarded.

You don’t have to be retarded to… well, yes, at this point, it is abundantly clear that you do have to be literally retarded to believe in evolution by natural selection. As you can see, the challenge posed to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis by MITTENS is so overwhelmingly devastating that the evolutionists have to abandon not only science, but math itself, in order to cling to their outmoded, outdated, and disproven explanation for the observable diversity of life.

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A Physicist Endorses MITTENS

Your MITTENS Theorem is of course valid, and more precise and detailed than was possible for the physicists in 1966. You have also independently proposed the correct, and only possible alternative to Neo-Darwinism, what you termed IGM in your October 14, 2012 blog post. You should repost this mechanism, together with more discussion. This mechanism has been repeatedly rediscovered since the famous 19th century Harvard biologist Asa Gray first proposed it, correctly identifying God, not intelligent aliens, as the agent. Charles Darwin himself denounced Gray’s version of your theory, which is less precise than your version.
– Dr. Frank Tipler, Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Tulane University

I had no idea what he was talking about until I looked up the post. It turns out that IGM stands for Intelligent Genetic Manipulation, which is a mechanism I developed in response to four points put forth to me by one of the more reasonable Neo-Darwinians.

  1. Let us take as evidentially established the fact that species which existed in the past now exist no longer and are extinct.
  2. Let us take as evidentially established the fact that not all species now extant existed at all times throughout the history of organic life.
  3. Therefore, it must be possible for species which did not exist to come into existence by some mechanism, just as species which do exist can go extinct by any variety of mechanisms.
  4. If it is a fact that new species can come into existence while others go extinct, by what mechanism other than evolution through natural selection are these species proposed to arise, and does that proposed mechanism explain more of the observed evidence than TeNS?

I more or less concurred with the first three points, and in response to the fourth, proposed Intelligent Genetic Manipulation as a mechanism that not only explains more of the observed evidence than TeNS, but unlike TeNS, remains potentially valid because it has not been mathematically ruled out by MITTENS. Please keep in mind that this was written 12 years ago, long before some of the significant advances in the various genome projects which are far more consistent with intelligent genetic manipulation than with the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, or TE(p)NSBMGDaGF, as it is properly identified in its full epicycular form.

Intelligent Genetic Manipulation is the mechanism that I propose. And yes, I believe that explains more of the observed evidence than TENS, since IGM is a scientific proposition, a readily observed action, and a successful predictive model, whereas TENS is a philosophical proposition, an unobserved process, and an unsuccessful predictive model.

Now, this does not provide any basis for assuming the existence of a Creator God, or even declaring that TENS did not actually take place. The logical fact of the matter is that even if TENS can be conclusively demonstrated to have taken place in various species, which has not happened despite more than 150 years of trying, that doesn’t necessarily mean the process was sufficient to produce Man. If one contemplates the biological differences between ape and man, the vast leap in cognitive capacity taking place in a relatively small sum of generational cycles from the proposed common ancestor in comparison with the timelines supposedly required for other, less complicated evolutionary changes, the logic suggests – though it does not prove – that some degree of purposeful genetic manipulation has likely taken place at various points in the origin of the species and the development of homo sapiens sapiens.

I’m not talking about Intelligent Design, but rather intelligent editing. And the interesting thing is that IGM should be an increasingly falsifiable concept as genetic science continues to improve. Only recently have we learned that junk DNA serves a purpose; even though we have sequenced various genomes, we haven’t yet understood how the code works or fully comprehended the various ways it can be manipulated. As our understanding grows, we should be able to develop an ability to recognize patterns that indicate purposeful alterations in the code have been made.

An Alternative Mechanism, 12 October 2012

Twelve years later, it is now clear that IGM is superior to the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow in every single way. It is not only not mathematically impossible, we know for certain it is possible because we already engage in purposeful genetic manipulation ourselves. IGM is not a philosophical tautology, it is an eminently falsifiable scientific hypothesis, as we are already developing mechanisms that provide the retroactive ability to see that a gene has been edited, and IGM already provides a better, more credible explanation for genetic anomalies such as human chromosome 2 (HSA2) that scientists presently imagine to have been caused by a single freak mutation that happened to fuse two primate chromosomes at the precise moment of a population bottleneck 740,000 years ago, a mutation that was so amazingly beneficial that it somehow managed to fixate through the entire human species at a rate much faster than Genghis Khan’s genetic lineage has been observed to propagate.

And if IGM does not address the question of the origin of life, well, neither does TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. And unlike TE(p)NSBMGDaGF, it even “predicts” the utility and significance of what was once erroneously labled “junk DNA” whereas all that TE(p)NSBMGDaGF ever “predicted” was the possibility of the existence of a rodent that had already been known to Man for centuries.

Biologists should not be the least bit reluctant to leave the useless theories of Neo-Darwinism behind or to abandon evolution by natural selection. To the contrary, we now have a growing body of scientific evidence that humanity is not, and never was, alone in the universe. And whoever, or whatever, the parties responsible may be, we know that they have at least a modicum of what appears to be beneficial interest in us, or they would not have manipulated our genes to enhance our cognition and self-awareness as they appear to have done.

On a philosophical note, I very much doubt it is a question of God or aliens. Because the answer, in all probability, will somehow involve both. We know that God works through men, even through the most unlikely of men. Logic therefore suggests that if aliens of any kind exist, God will work through them too.

“Yeah, I know, make sure it lays eggs, on it.”

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