Tag: philosophy

The ultimate argument for atheism

Even the formidable vocabulary of John C. Wright struggles to find the words required to address the most cogent argument in defense of atheism ever articulated:

When George Lucas sat down some autumn afternoon out on one of the verandas at Skywalker Ranch and began penning The Phantom Menace, with its two-dimensional characters and pointless plot, no all-powerful god living somewhere in the clouds stopped him.

When the first test footage of Jar Jar Binks surfaced and Lucas said something to the effect of, “Great job, guys. This really fulfills the vision of what I had in mind for this character,” no omnipotent deity struck him dead. There was no lightning from the sky, no sudden cardiac arrest. When we needed God most, he was silent.

He didn’t come to judge Lucas at any point during the travesty that was Episodes I-III. Any good and powerful god would have turned Skywalker Ranch into a smoldering crater where nothing else could ever grow, and yet your god remained silent.

I posit, then, that your “god” is no god at all. Either he was powerful enough to stop the Star Wars prequels from happening and didn’t, meaning he can’t possibly be all-good—or else he wanted the prequels stopped and couldn’t do it, meaning he can’t possibly be all-powerful.

Even the evils of Mao and Stalin and Hitler can be rationally explained by the ruthless pursuit of power. But there is no explanation for the so-called prequels. Free will? Nonsense! Nobody willed that. Natural selection? Even a blind and random process would not have chosen thusly.

It is a conundrum indeed.

Understanding the Alt-Right

This is a pretty good exploration of the conceptual thinking underlying the 16 Points of the Alt-Right:

Otto von Bismark described politics as the art of the possible.  Instead of listening to his advice, 20th century political theorists became idealistic, utopian, and mechanistic.  It would treat a given variable as independent from the rest of the equation, when in fact it was webbed to the rest of society through a network of feedback mechanisms. “If we could only tweak this one thing, while everything else remains constant, we would be able to create a more perfect world.” The law of unforeseen consequences followed from this, leading to a great deal of misery and destruction.

An organic, holistic approach is needed – one which doesn’t shy away from hard truths – while avoiding the fallacy of world building.  Castles in the sky have no place in adult discourse or political debates, and should be shunned by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously.  I have no idea if the Alt Right will remain a viable movement, or if it will be taken over by aggressive, subversive interests, but whatever happens to the label itself, Vox Days’ points remain a good starting point for creating a new political understanding of the world which is eminently practical, and capable of leading us away from the brink of societal collapse.


1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right.

Neocons are best understood as Neo-Trotskyists, the dialectical response to Neo-Liberal Democrats, whose inevitable synthesis is Globalist Stalinism under the influence of figures such as George Soros.


2. The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russel Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism.

Libertarianism is an effect, not a cause, of a well ordered society.

Obviously, I’ll be providing a considerably more in-depth treatment in time, but in the meantime, this is a productive continuation of the discourse.

You’ll notice that the media, which is nominally eager to push forward all things Alt-Right, has avoided even mentioning the 16 Points like the plague, although they have been more broadly accepted by many across the Right than most of the figures and concepts they have attempted to elevate. That is because the 16 Points are eminently reasonable, obviously rational, and intrinsically sound, and therefore are not at all amenable to the media’s false narrative.

The First Law of Female Journalism

Steve Sailer is right. Again. Every single time.

Plight of the Funny Female…. When I learned all of this, I immediately ran into the living room and asked my boyfriend if it’s important to him that his sexual partners are funny.

“Apparently not,” he said.

Ouch! But also, that’s so funny! Ugh.

* * *

Once, a guy and I spent several months in romantic no-man’s land, trying to decide if we liked each other. My issue with him was that he took me out for dinner at a fancy place and only ordered chocolate milk. I thought his issue was that there was another girl.

I was wrong:

“I just don’t get you!” he exclaimed one day when we were on a walk. “You’re pretty, but you’re like … goofy. It makes no sense.”

It’s depressing that for many women who aren’t professional comedians, the most valuable social currency is beauty—or worse, “being sweet.” In his infamous Vanity Fair piece about why women aren’t funny, Christopher Hitchens presents humor as an essential tool men can deploy to break a woman’s defenses:

If you can stimulate her to laughter … well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression.

Women can also stimulate people to laughter—not just for the purpose Hitchens had in mind, but to make a new friend, or to make an old one feel better. To impress a boss or a boyfriend’s parents. To lean in, for cryin’ out loud. If funniness is an implement of power, women deserve access to it, too.If we acknowledge that these prejudices exist—that men’s humor is encouraged at the expense of women’s—is there anything we can do about it? Buss is skeptical that human desire can be molded; that a stern PSA or even a shift in social mores could encourage men to seek out women who are witty rather than pretty. Entrenched beliefs that are ugly and passé—like racism—persist even when people disavow them. Men’s desire to be the Kings of Relationship Comedy, meanwhile, isn’t even frowned upon.

Hone, from the University of Missouri, is more optimistic. If humankind decides that women’s natural zaniness should be set free, mankind should start to ask funnier women out for drinks. And women could stop dating men who don’t laugh at their jokes.

“Just because a trait has served an adaptive purpose does not mean we should accept it,” she said. “I like to think that there’s hope for all the funny, single ladies out there.”

Translation: Me think me pretty, funny, and smart! Why come no men want me? And isn’t it terrible that men prefer sweet, pretty women? They should prefer unattractive bitches so that in time the human race will genetically devolve to the point that I’ll look like a charming supermodel in comparison!

Steve Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Also, with very few exceptions, female comedians aren’t even funny. And that’s even when one mentally gives a bonus to the rare female comedian who is capable of cracking what we will generously term “a joke” without a) talking solely about herself or b) making any reference to her ever-so-hilarious genitals.

The answer to why women are not funny is rooted in philosophy. Women are more solipsistic than men, and most humor is found outside of reference to the self.

How to let go of bad ideas

Mike Cernovich explains why it’s important, as well as how to do it:

Don’t take being wrong personally.

If your ideas are not yours, why care if those ideas are attacked? You are you. The ideas you choose to hold dear are how you live your life. Better ideas means a better life. Bad ideas are like a spare tire around your waist. Do you take it personally when you lose fat? You have lost part of yourself, haven’t you? Yet you rejoice. Adopt the same mindset when losing bad ideas.

Remind yourself that bad ideas ruin lives.

I saw too many friends go into bankruptcy after the housing bubble burst. I avoided that fate because I never purchased a home, though other bad ideas have cost me dearly.

Ask how much money you would bet on your ideas.

If your ideas are true and good, surely you’ll wager on them?

Do you know how many people cowered away from election bets? Everyone knew who would win the election, and few would put their money where their mouths were.

If you wouldn’t bet on an idea you hold on the world, then do you believe the idea to be true?

Embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for growth.

What is the element of every horror film? Suspense. Uncertainty. We cling onto certain beliefs, even when those beliefs are wrong, because in a state of nature surprise usually meant some form of attack from wolverines, tsunamis, and blizzards.

Hold true to ideas about gravity, as they will keep you alive. Remain fluid on ideas about the nature of the human condition, as other people have lives of their owns and those lives are influenced by an ever-changing zeitgeist.

Recognizing you are wrong today gives you an opportunity to be right tomorrow.

The first one is the most important. You are not the sum of your ideas. You can’t own an idea either. We are all wrong on a regular basis. Bad ideas are, by definition false, and anyone who values the truth should not hesitate to reject them.

The Awful Mask of the Alt-Right

A moderate reviews SJWAL:

In the most interesting section of the book, he moves from describing the tactics of the fight to advocating a strategy for winning the war. Personally, this is where things get most uncomfortable. While I can easily imagine myself falling foul of my companies HR department, or being hounded for being discovered holding an incorrect opinion – I have several – I struggle to imagine myself trying to get someone else fired in case they try to do the same to me. In fact, there is a section in the book devoted to the importance of keeping people like me on the margins.

Moderates… generally mean well, but they have a tendency to believe that goodwill, hand-holding, and being open minded will inspire even the most lunatic, hate-filled SJW to see sweet reason.

The thrust of the book is that the unvarnished truth is not worth speaking, because in the battle of ideas it will inevitably be defeated by persuasive lies. The only option for people who love the truth is to adopt a new way of speaking – a rhetoric – which crushes the lies that claim to be social justice, and at least allows a path for people to reach the truth, if they care to.

The rhetoric Vox Day advocates is cruel. It laughs at the mentally fragile, hurts by striking at weaknesses that opponents can’t do anything about, and offers little hope to those who want to live today in peace. Perhaps it is necessary for ensuring stability tomorrow. Reading the book is certainly necessary for anyone who wants to understand how our culture has changed.

What I find informative about this review is the resigned tone. I don’t think that would have been the case even one year ago. Moderates are finally capitulating, as they are beginning to understand that their paradigms are false, their enemies are relentless, and their jobs, their lifestyles, their families, and even their nations are endangered. They’re not ready to join the Alt-Right yet, but their eyes are now open, and it is only a matter of time before they realize that there are absolutely no other options available to them.

I received an email from someone with a similar perspective yesterday, who objected to the way I characterized (((Ben Shapiro)))’s statement about who he wants to have sex with his wife and what color the other gentleman should ideally be. I simply asked him to characterize (((Shapiro)))’s comments to which I was responding:

First he mischaracterizes the definition of cuck by going the sexual fetish route. He then used ineffective rhetoric in the quoted portion by saying if someone in the alt-right was actually cuckolded they wouldn’t care so long as the guy cuckolding them was white.

I understand meet rhetoric with rhetoric. What I don’t understand in this case is what truth the rhetoric was pointing towards.

What I fail to understand about “every tactic used against us is justified…” are the moral implications as I despise double standards in general. Your WWI mustard gas analogy makes sense but I still wrestle with the concept morally.

Actually, (((Ben))) lied, which was why his rhetoric was ineffective. What is the truth my rhetoric was pointed towards? The truth that (((Ben Shapiro))) is a shameless liar. (((Shapiro))) lied about  the nature of racism, he lied about American history, he lied about the Constitution, he lied about the Declaration of Independence, he lied about Western civilization, he lied about what “cuckold” means, and he lied about the Alt-Right. And he did it all in a single interview. He very nearly managed to tell all those lies in a single paragraph!

You simply cannot trust that filthy little (((creature))) about anything at all. There is absolutely no truth in him. None whatsoever. That alone should suffice to indicate the intrinsically false nature of “America’s founding Judeo-Christian values” he has proclaimed.

I understand there are those who struggle with the morality of tactical equivalence, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. We are called to forgive and be merciful, which means that surrender is not inevitable and victory must be a possibility. And, I can’t help but notice that few of those moderates who profess moral struggles with rhetoric tend to restrain their own whenever they shoot at extremists on their own side.

If you want to better understand the difference between dialectic and rhetoric, and how to make effective use of them, you can either read Aristotle’s Rhetoric or my SJWs Always Lie. SJWAL is easier and has better examples. And it’s even got cartoons!

THE NINE LAWS: now in print

Your acceptance of shackles is your sentence of death.
In agreement to be helpless you abrogate and abandon your manhood and power. By limiting mobility of thought, word or deed you reduce your humanity and nobility of character.

The dark and difficult truth is that freedom is the most dangerous thing in the universe. In recognition that unbounded freedom is the natural order, and in your rejection of the artificial constraints of external imposition, comes the ability to attain complete prerogative of choice.

In this ability to choose is your manifestation of purpose, the concealment of vulnerability, and the decision to survive despite all odds and to endure any experience presented.

When each action, each thought, each emotion and each breath of life is, for you, the result of a choice – then you have attained the ultimate fountain of total wealth, which is freedom itself from the will of others and from imposition upon you of choices that are not your own.

In the acceptance of your choice alone is the nurtured and honored primacy of your own conscience.

You cannot force a man to abide by his conscience.

You cannot force a man to violate it.

For a man’s conscience is the conclusion of his bare and starkly naked dialogue with God. The direction of his determination into the will of Heaven arises from a command deliberately made to his immortal spirit.

You must utterly adhere to your own conscience, and discard any lesser demands upon your thought, your word and your deed. For your conscience is your alignment with the divine and the salvation of your spiritual resolution.

The laws of men are merely arguments of the violent.

The strictures of culture are but drifting ashes of the weak.

Love is a choice. Honor is a choice. Trust is a choice. Success is a choice. Glory and power and gold are a choice.

A Dark Triad Man knows that his freedom is his birthright and guards that freedom with savage and unflinching perseverance, even before the glittering throne of Caesar.

Without freedom there is nothing.

Freedom is the Sixth Law.

Ivan Throne’s fiercely uncompromising philosophical action manual, THE NINE LAWS, are now available in hardcover and paperback editions.

The fortress of solitude

It’s not such a bad place to be. In fact, it’s rather comfortable, if not energizing.

While it’s widely accepted that socialising makes us happier, this might not be strictly true if you’re highly intelligent. Evolutionary psychologists from Singapore Management University and the London School of Economics and Political Science found exactly this when they studied more than 15,000 young adults.

They concluded that, while people generally feel happier when they spend time with others, very smart people are an exception to this rule.

The study said this could be because of evolution.

Smarter people can more easily adapt to their surroundings in the modern world, so they don’t need close relationships to help them with food and shelter, like our ancestors did. Or, in the modern equivalent, the Wi-Fi password and a spare phone charger.

Their other theory is that smarter people are more aspirational, and want to spend more time working towards their goals, rather than socialising.

The study found that more intelligent people actually had lower life satisfaction the more frequently they socialised with friends – spending time with friends actually made them unhappy.

Here is an example of why I prefer solitude. Imagine going through some form of this every single day, in almost every single conversation with almost everyone you encounter outside the home. After I posted a link to the 16 Points of the Alt-Right on Gab, no less than THREE (3) people decided that they had spotted a contradiction and promptly popped up to demand clarifications.

So are we the best of humanity objectively speaking, or merely our best selves when under nationalist administration? If you are speaking in terms of who wields power over who in point 15 rather than objective cultural/racial traits, that needs to be clarified.

It doesn’t need anything of the sort. Stop sperging.

Can you explain why #14 and #15 aren’t a contradiction?

Existence is not supremacy. Did you really need help understanding that? Learn to read what is there, don’t just latch onto one word in the sentence.

Wow, dude. Why so nasty? There are some racial nuances of the #AltRight I’m trying to understand…Much of what I’m hearing in practice sounds contrictory…but I see you have no interest in any questions.

I don’t have any interest in questions from people who can’t distinguish “race” from “civilization” or “supremacy” from “existence”. Seriously, how do I talk to you if you can’t even handle that? Sign language? Charades?

If you’re going to draw up what’s essentially a summative constitutional/base document, get it fucking 100% unambiguous.

I don’t write for relative retards. There are many translations of it. Feel free to translate it for those with normal-range IQs if you like. I’d genuinely be curious to see what that would look like.

Yes you’re quite right. Guess there’s no point communicating. You’re way too busy being pissed off to bother.

Do you know why people have to be paid to teach? Because no one wants to put up with idiots struggling with the obvious. I really don’t want to have to repetitively explain to people that 2 is not 37 and purple is not yellow every single time I open my mouth. It’s worse than aggravating, it is exhausting.

If you want to be more accommodating to the highly intelligent people in your life, there is one thing that you can do that will make you considerably less annoying than the average person: DO NOT CORRECT THEM. If you don’t understand something, or if you think something they have said is wrong, just let it go.

This is desirable because 75 percent of the time someone “corrects” a highly intelligent person, they are demonstrably and provably wrong. Another 20 percent of the time, the correction is trivial and totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. This percentage rises to 99 percent when the “correction” is based on something pedantic. I’m not saying that highly intelligent people are always right, I’m just saying that the odds are not in your favor.

It’s not about you

I find it very annoying when someone decides it is an optimal use of my time to ask me to contemplate their personal situation and ascertain a) if their current political position can be characterized as Alt-Right, b) what variant of Alt-Right best describes their current political perspective, c) what the Alt-Right makes of their family situation, which inevitably involves some amount of interracial sex or adoption, d) if the Alt-Right has taken into account their family situation, which inevitably involves some amount of interracial sex or adoption, or e) if the Alt-Right is aware that its political theories violate the individual’s current theological perspective.

Allow me to direct your attention to Point 12 of the 16 Points.

12. The Alt-Right doesn’t care what you think of it.

Perhaps that needs to be revised. The Alt-Right doesn’t care about you. Or made more succinct: The Alt-Right doesn’t care.

I certainly don’t. These questions are not merely solipsistic and stupid, they are utterly beside the point. They all consist of category errors. This should be totally obvious, but as I am frequently informed that what I consider to be totally obvious is not always, in fact, the case, let me attempt to explain.

Let us say that instead of political philosophy, we are discussing political economy. Let’s say that instead of discussing the Alt-Right, we are discussing Keynesianism, I point out that it is in the interest of the economy that interest rates rise. How, then, would one regard an individual who asked the following questions?

  1. Can my current financial position be characterized as Keynesian?
  2. What variant of Keynesianism best describes my current financial position?
  3. What do Keynesians make of my financial situation, which inevitably involves some amount of debt or investment?
  4. Have Keynesians taken into account my financial situation, which inevitably involves some amount of debt or investment?
  5. Are Keynesians aware that their economic theories contradict my current theological perspective?

Now does the utter irrelevance of these questions make a little more sense? The truth or falsehood of Keynesianism does not depend on the amount one presently owes on ones’s student loan debt or credit card balance. Many people seem to be of the opinion that the legitimacy of the Alt-Right somehow depends upon whether it is good for them or not. This is, in three words, stupid, solipsistic, and erroneous.

Communism is either correct or incorrect. It doesn’t matter if it is bad for you or not. Free Trade theory is either correct or incorrect. It doesn’t matter if it is bad for you or not. And the Alt-Right is either a more correct political philosophy than Communism, Liberalism, Conservatism, or Libertarianism or it is not, regardless of whether you and your mudsharking daughter or rice-chasing son or your Filippino ex-wife or your gay Hispanic uncle or your adopted Haitian son or your adopted Korean daughter or your Jewish-Nigerian granddaughter or your Kenyan-Slovakian grandson are United States citizens or alien invaders from Mars.

Seriously, to preen and posture and pretend that your personal situation is even remotely relevant to whether diversity+proximity=war is just embarrassing. The great social forces are as indifferent to individual specimens of humanity as the Deists’ hands-off clockmaker god; as Tolstoy conclusively showed, not even Napoleon’s opinions were directly relevant to the outcome of a single battle. As a general rule, Europeans don’t want to live in Somalia, Beijing, Manila, Nairobi, or Jeddah, and the more your presence forces them to live in some facsimile of one of those places for any reason, the less they want you or anyone to do with you around them.

Now, I think there is a strong argument to be made for the Alt-Right from an individual perspective. As a mixed-race individual, I will benefit greatly from the continued existence of Western civilization. If that means I cannot live in certain Alt-White-governed areas one day, what of it? It is still of massive benefit to me, as the appearance of mobile phones, fertilizer, and modern medicine in the most hopelessly savage areas of Africa should suffice to prove.

The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity’s golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation.

Libertarian vs Alt-Right

Jeffrey Tucker highlights the differences:

To the cheers of alt-righters everywhere, those angry lords of the green frog meme who hurl edgy un-PC insults at everyone to their left, the Democratic nominee has put them on the map at long last. Specifically, she accused Donald Trump of encouraging and giving voice to their dark and dangerous worldview.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether we are talking about an emergent brown-shirted takeover of American political culture, or perhaps merely a few thousand sock-puppet social media accounts adept at mischievous trolling on Twitter. The key issue is that more than a few alt-rightists claim some relationship to libertarianism, at least at their intellectual dawning until they begin to shed their libertarianism later on.

What are the differences in outlook between alt-right ideology and libertarianism?

  1. The Driving Force of History
  2. Harmony vs. Conflict
  3. Designed vs. Spontaneous Order
  4. Trade and Migration
  5. Emancipation and Progress

It’s a pretty good comparison, although not entirely accurate about the Alt-Right and understandably biased towards libertarianism. Regardless, it serves as an effective delineator that suffices to explain why I, once one of the top 25 libertarians on the Internet, can no longer reasonably be described as a libertarian, Christian, nationalist, or otherwise.

It’s not that I am opposed to libertarian ideals. Quite to the contrary, I cherish them as deeply as I ever did. It is merely that events, and a deeper understanding of history, have caused me to conclude that libertarian ideals are as ultimately utopian and irrelevant as communist ideals, progressive ideals, and conservative ideals.

I was always a minarchist libertarian; I embraced libertarianism out of pessimism towards the government. But libertarianism has turned out to be nearly as economically ignorant as Marxism, and nearly as dangerous as Leninism, Nazism, or Maoism. Mass immigration, of the sort considerably more limited than that envisioned by the purist libertarians who correctly subscribe to open borders, has proven to be at least potentially as disastrous as any of those three historically infamous ideologies. Just how bad, we don’t know yet, because the scenario is still in the process of playing itself out.

The key difference between the Alt-Right and libertarianism is that libertarianism insists on the existence of Rational Man. The Alt-Right observes, to the contrary, that Man is an irrational, rationalizing creature. Where you fall on that question alone will logically dictate whether you ultimately side with the libertarians or the Alt-Right, if your ideals incline towards the libertarian.

Tucker writes: This similarity is historically contingent and largely superficial given the vast differences that separate the two worldviews. Does society contain within itself the capacity for self management or not? That is the question. 

To which the Alt-Right responds: Define society.

That being said, one intellectual subset of the Alt-Right could well be described as National Libertarianism, because, after all, once the nation has been sufficiently established and defended, it still has to decide how it will henceforth live.

No shills, trolls, or cucks

From today until after the election, the moderators and I will be ruthlessly spamming all shills, cucks, and trolls attempting to spread demoralization among the Right. I don’t care if you are “genuinely concerned”, I don’t care if you are “just afraid” or “nervous”. In case it isn’t obvious to you already, I despise cowards and I see no reason to tolerate the paid petty operatives of the Left either.

If you put it in the comments, you will be spammed. Which, you will note, may affect your ability to comment here and on other Blogger blogs in the future.

There will be no appeals, no protests, and no consideration given to anyone whose comment is spammed, so don’t even bother. And if you dislike this temporary policy, please recall that I am, as many describe me, of the Alt-Right.

And We. Don’t. Care.

UPDATE: Trump is now up by 2.4 percent in the IBD/TIPP national poll, which has been the most accurate since 2004, with an average error of 0.9 percent, 43.1 to 40.7.

However, it also gives 8.5 percent to Johnson and Stein, which is about 6.5 percent too high, plus another 7.7 percent to “others” and “undecided”. Still, that’s Trump’s best performance in IBD to date, so he’s obviously peaking at the right time.