Tag: philosophy

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.

John Cleese reflects on the history of Monty Python and other things in an interview with Daily Beast:

“As for the rise of social media in our lives, I think it’s a disaster,” he says as we wrap up. “All we have as human beings is our interpersonal skills. And I think that almost everything that social media has done has been making that worse. And trying to persuade young people that building up their egos is what they should be spending their time on is farcical. There’s a very fine book called Technopoly written by Neil Postman, in which he points out that, with every technological advance, there’s always gains and there’s losses. But that the people who come up with the technology have to be smart enough to realize that other people can use those advances against them for malign purposes. When I wrote my books with Robin Skinner, I came to the view that there was no system that humans couldn’t… destroy. It all depends on whether you’re talking about decent people or not. The system doesn’t matter so much as the fact that it relies on people behaving decently. There is a tendency in America toward predatory capitalism. And there’s nothing more destructive to society than the idea that the only thing that matters is money. Because that’s basically sociopathic. So I think that the greatest problem in the world at the moment is greed.”

I seem to recall a man once said that the love of all money is the root of all evil. And he said that nearly 2,000 years ago, so it’s probably not just a problem of the current moment.

It’s fascinating to observe how philosophers, scientists, and even comedians who reject Christianity keep coming back to its teachings despite themselves.

It was interesting to observe the reactions by many commenters yesterday to information that happened to challeng some of their assumptions about the world. Now, rather than resorting to simple Boomer “how dare you” rhetoric, let’s simply look at this pair of photographs logically. I don’t know about you, but I can think of at least seven obvious possible explanations for this apparent anomaly:

1. There were other boots used by the Apollo astronauts with different treads.
2. There were other humans on the Moon who were not Apollo astronauts.
3. There were aliens on the Moon! Aliens that wear boots and have feet roughly the size of a man’s foot.
4. Photoshop!
5. The second photograph was not taken on the Moon and the bootprint was left by a studio technician wearing boots with different treads than those worn by the fake astronauts.
6. One of the astronauts drew the alternate bootprint with his finger.
7. A studio technician drew the alternate bootprint with his finger.

They say you shouldn’t kick a man when he’s down. But that’s completely wrong. It’s a lot harder to kick a man in the head when he’s still standing.