These two useful concepts, one a neologism, the other an aphorism, stem from the same SG thread, which may be of interest to those who have read, at a minimum, both Taleb and Gladwell, but which I will not cite here due to the inevitability of various tangents.
Syncreto-retardery: Relative cognitive incapacity. Syncreto-retardery should not be confused with literal retardery of the below-70 IQ variety, although it is worth noting in this quantified context that the midwit stands no closer to the VHIQ and UHIQ than the literal retard does to him. And let’s not even get started on the average…
VDDQ: “If you admire a man’s books, ignore his Twitter account.”
Very, very few men, myself included, find it easy to ignore the flattering requests for one’s opinion about a wide variety of subjects of which one knows nothing. I do my best to ignore these requests and I’m usually successful in doing so the first two or three times I’m asked. But it can be difficult to resist the temptation to at least say something that sounds more or less reasonable when faced with repeated requests for one’s thoughts on the issue du jour, even when those thoughts are nonexistent.
We wouldn’t think half so well of Aristotle or other great historical thinkers if a) they had social media accounts and b) we had access to them.
One of the things I admire about NN Taleb is his ability, unlike most intellectuals, to openly and unashamedly admit that he was wrong about something. That’s one of the reasons I take him seriously even on those rare occasions when I think he has gotten it wrong.
I concede that @DavidSacks is correct about the relative strength of the parties in the Ukraine war, and I was WRONG. Russia is not as weak as it seemed; it has staying power. This means a settlement is the likely outcome.
And by “likely outcome” he means “the rational outcome”. But since NATO is, by most perspectives, an intrinsically irrational party, I wouldn’t place too much confidence in that. After all, what is the point in Russia signing a third Minsk agreement with parties who have repeatedly proven to be agreement-incapable?
Still, it’s good to see the more intelligent elements of the mainstream perspective beginning to understand that Russia was always going to win its war against NATO in Ukraine.
Think of it as training the NPC-AIs that are assigned to you.
We’re not locked in here with them. We’re just here for a short time to speak the Truth, share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and live the Life. But as for them, they’re locked in here and we are their only way out.
“Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
Given the level of evil that exists, you will not, and cannot, ever:
Act as if you don’t know. Turn a blind eye to it. Pretend all is well when it isn’t. Or ever participate in anything that furthers, promotes, or somehow encourages that evil, no matter the cost, and,
And this is the most important part; you cannot EVER, live in despair, defeat, nihilism, depression, feeling overwhelmed, let the weight of the evil drag you down and make you miserable and thus also make life miserable for those around you, letting them perceive your mental, spiritual, physical, general oppression as a weight that crushes them too. You need to CONSCIOUSLY, CHOOSE, listen to me, CHOOSE, with your own free will, CHOOSE, to be a light of inspiration, hope, power, freedom, happiness, faith and love.
This is why I do not permit blackpillers, MGTOW, doomsayers, jeremiadites, fearmongerers, or concerned citizens any voice in our community. Even if their fears are genuine, they may as well be dancing on the strings of the evil puppetmasters, because they speak the words of the wicked under a cloak of concern.
Fear should never be confused with wisdom or common sense. Good decisions are seldom, if ever, motivated by fear. Fear reliably leads to paralysis, inaction, and eventual defeat.
When you take the ticket to achieve what passes for “success” in Clown World, the demands upon you will never end.
Kanye West believes his ex personal trainer Harley Pasternak has been following him in Dubai – one year after the rapper leaked alleged texts from his ‘creepy’ former employee threatening to get him ‘institutionalized again’. Photo and video obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com shows Pasternak, 49, in the lobby of a hotel on Monday where West is staying with his children – which a source called ‘extremely suspect’.
West, 46, was notably hospitalized in November 2016 after suffering a temporary psychosis at Pasternak’s home in West Hollywood – reportedly brought on by sleep deprivation and extreme dehydration following a stream of Twitter posting frenzies, political and personal rants at his fans and cancelled concerts.
West was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but has claimed in the years since that he was ‘mentally misdiagnosed’ and that Pasternak was allegedly to blame – later leaking texts Pasternak had reportedly sent him in the wake of the musician’s 2022 anti-Semitic rants.
An insider told DailyMail.com of Pasternak: ‘We have grave concerns as to what this creepy operative is doing in Ye’s hotel. ‘The timing is extremely suspect. We are very concerned indeed about his motives and intentions. This is the man who threatened to “drug Ye to Zombieland”. Why has he suddenly shown up here?’
Kanye West believes ex personal trainer Harley Pasternak is FOLLOWING him in Dubai, 22 November 2023
Notice how Kanye West’s straightforward observation that he’s being followed around the world by his Clown World handler – and yes, of course, Every Single Time – is being portrayed as a “belief”, thereby attempting to further the idea that West is paranoid, even though he’s being literally stalked around the world.
It doesn’t matter if it’s acting, business, music, or writing, there is no amount of fame, money, sex, or drugs that is worth the price that is demanded of anyone who seeks success in their field. And there is no shame whatsoever in seeing your inferiors surpass you and garner all the inorganic praise, plaudits, sales, and “success”, because if you are doing your best work, any success that you achieve is both real and entirely merited.
Unlike the “successful” celebrities, you will never have “imposter syndrome”, because, unlike them, you are not an imposter. There is no such thing as “imposter syndrome”, there are only imposters. Imposter syndrome, truly described, is the belated realization of the imposter that his success, such as it is, is manufactured, has not been earned, and he is fundamentally a fraud.
It may also be informative to observe that a Wikipedia editor named Hemiauchenia keeps changing the page to say “Harley Samuel Pasternak is a Canadian personal trainer” instead of “”Harley Samuel Pasternak is a Jewish Canadian-American personal trainer” and removing the link to a well-sourced article entitled “Harley Pasternak, Jewish Fitness Trainer to the Stars.”
Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed. In the late 1980s, he happened to show up on a rare evening when high school recruit Calbert Cheaney had a bad night. He upbraided his assistants for dragging him to see a player clearly not good enough for Indiana. They explained he had caught Cheaney on a bad night and should see him play again. Knight told them he wouldn’t waste any more time, nor should they.
Cheaney committed to Evansville — coached by Jim Crews, who had played on Indiana’s 1976 team and coached under Knight for eight years. Knight was at a summer camp game a few months later and saw Cheaney again. This time, the real Calbert Cheaney showed up.
“Why aren’t we recruiting that kid?” Knight asked his assistants.
The assistants told him he had ordered them not to recruit Cheaney. “Why don’t you just give him a call and see if he might have any interest in Indiana?” Knight said.
Cheaney, quite naturally, was thrilled. He chose Indiana, was the star of Knight’s last Final Four team in 1992 and is still the Big Ten’s all-time leading scorer. Crews was stunned that his old coach had recruited a player who had committed to him.
“If some other coach did that to me, you’d call him every name in the book,” Crews said to Knight. “I know coaches do this sort of thing, but how could you do this to me?”
Knight responded by telling Crews he would be nothing in basketball if not for him. Crews finally said, “You know something, Coach: The saddest part of your life is that you treat your enemies better than you treat your friends.”
The truth in that statement is very sad.
Peter King, in his NFL Football column, makes an accurate observation about how younger sports fans will wonder why anyone cares about the death of a coach of a minor university in a lesser sport: “It’s understandable that many will note the death of Knight and wonder how possibly could the basketball coach at Indiana be one of the five most dominant people in sports for 15, 20 years. He just was.” But if Bobby Knight had been a military general instead of a basketball coach, he would have been as famous as George Patton was, and probably more successful. He was a rare individual whose obvious talent was only exceeded by the force of his will.
But Knight’s career is a cautionary tale in how one should not treat others, no matter how talented, driven, or successful one is. For some reason, all too many people insist on treating their enemies better than they treat their friends. This is wrong, in every application, and ultimately leads to failure in everything from marriage to business marketing.
In your personal life, you should, you must, treat your partner, your family, and your friends better than you treat anyone else, most especially strangers. The idea that the closer you are to someone, the more you can “truly be yourself” and “be unconditionally accepted” despite your worst behavior is a pernicious one that is all too common today.
And in your professional life, you should, you must, treat your core market and your loyal customers better than anyone else. The idea that you should focus your efforts on the periphery and on potential new customers in different markets is much in vogue, but it has reliably led to complete failure in everything from beer and NASCAR to Hollywood and video games.
He always insisted he didn’t care what anyone cared about him when, in fact, he cared desperately and went so far out of his way to prove it that he hurt himself figuratively — and literally. Worse than that, he always had to have the last word — whether it was with referees, other coaches, players, the media and even his family.
This is another important lesson. Two, in fact. First, nearly everyone cares what most people think about them. The only people who genuinely don’t are either a) neuroatypical, b) 3SD+ more intelligent than the norm,(1) c) psychologically scarred from childhood,(2) or some combination therein. So, attempting to erect an uncaring facade is both futile and transparent. And worse, most of the efforts required to protect that facade tend to harm the person behind it.
As for needing to have the last word, this is just retarded and unnecessary. There is absolutely no point in repeating the same point over and over and over again, as most people do, much less resorting to insults and attacks because your feelings have been hurt when someone doesn’t agree with you. Did you somehow forget that you claimed you didn’t care what others thought? Then why are your feelings hurt, and why do you assume that they care what you think?
So, RIP Bobby Knight. The remarkable thing about the General is that even in death, he is still capable of teaching important life lessons.
(1) Contemplate the extent to which you care about a child or a literal retard thinks. Then consider the fact that in terms of IQ, they are closer to you than you are to Chris Langan.
(2) It’s virtually impossible to replicate, or even simulate, those psychologies shaped by childhood experience, particularly prior to puberty. For good or for ill.
Recently, some self-styled advocates of the white race, most of whom are anti-nationalist racial imperialists whose historically-ignorant views merit being taken about as seriously as those of the Black Israelites, the Christian Zionists, and the ADL, have been trying to push the idea that “Boomer” is an anti-white slur that is being used to “divide” white citizens of the USA.
First, the idea is obviously absurd because US whites have always been divided, for the obvious reason that race is a superset of nation. Americans are British. They’re not of German descent, Chinese descent, or Martian descent. The American Revolution wasn’t fought against the Holy Roman Emperor, the Tsar of Russia, the King of France, or the Galactic Overlord, it was fought against King George III of Great Britain and the British Parliament.
The fact that other Europeans “of good character” were permitted to enter and reside in the United States, and that the Indian tribes were conquered, and that the Spanish territories were forcibly seized in war, and that the global floodgates were opened in 1965 leading to the single greatest invasion in recorded human history no more makes those US citizens “American” than the US soldiers occupying Japan for the last 78 years have become Japanese.
Because the USA is an empire established by military force and occupation in 1865 that refers to all of its subjects as “Americans”, people are usually blind to the fact that the USA is not a “nation-state” at all, but rather, a literal empire of many states and nations very similar to the the British and Roman empires. Somehow, this obvious observation escapes most “Americans” even though they literally live in formerly sovereign States like Massachusetts and Texas. A casual term cannot define history; recall that the citizens of Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay have as much historical claim to call themselves “American” as does the average US citizen who is not of British descent. Neither citizen nor subject necessarily denotes national, which is why economists had to stop using GNP and switch to GDP.
Second, Boomer was never coined as a pejorative term and wasn’t viewed as one for decades. It was accepted by those it described and is still borne with pride by most of them to this day. It gradually, and organically, became seen as a negative due to the behavior of those it described, in much the same way that “gay” and “Negro” are now viewed as slurs. Now Boomer has come to describe a negative philosophy and a historical path, to describe those who consciously chose Hell over Heaven.
A recent dialogue on social media:
BOOMERBOT: “Boomer.” Another anti white slur. Divide and conquer, rather than trying to figure out why whites of ALL generations are being destroyed by the anti white propaganda
SPACEBUNNY: Actually this attitude is more of destroyer of white culture than your moronic “divide and conquer” bs, dear. We should be able to call out the mistakes and police our own culture, that the Silents didn’t call out the Boomers who were there children is part of the reason we’re where we are today. If you can’t acknowledge and admit mistakes you’re a failure as a human. Grow up, Boomer, take some responsibility for once in your life. Most of the Boomer hate would evaporate in a heartbeat if you all took responsibility for where the West in general, and the US in particular, is right now. But no, you just whine about how it’s not really your fault everyone is so mean…..
VD: Defending Boomers and trying to ex post facto redefine “Boomer” as an anti-white slur is one way to ensure that virtually no GenX or Millennial will ever pay any attention to you. Because we were there. We saw what they consciously chose from our earliest years. We lived in the America that they smugly rejected and ruined. The Boomers collectively were, and are, a wicked generation. They remain wicked and they revel in their collective identity to this day. The fact that evil influences exist does not excuse in any way those who chose evil new ways in preference to that which is traditional and good. And if you are defending Boomers and their dreadful choices that have led to the consequences we observe today, then you are an enemy of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
Here is the point: you are always responsible for whom you choose to follow. The temptation is not the sin. The Boomers were tempted by, and consciously chose, a broad and easy path with cheap credit, easy morals, and great ethnic food. We are attempting to forge a different path.
UPDATE: This may be the best summation of the Boomer philosophy that I’ve seen:
“The moralizing of objectively false platitudes in the face of their observable failure.”
UPDATE: The Boomers will hear no criticism of their actions, and they believe the only reason anyone would ever criticize them is due to bitterness at their own failures. Words are insufficient for how utterly despicable they are. To hear the Boomer is to hate the Boomer.
Mick Jagger had sympathy for the Devil because he took the ticket.
Mick Jagger: My 8 kids ‘don’t need’ my $500 million fortune
In other words, Mr. Jagger’s success was manufactured, his money isn’t his, and now the time to pay the infernal piper is rapidly approaching, despite his best efforts. I wonder if he still thinks it was worth it, or if he now regrets the deal he made?
Never envy the rich and famous. Their money isn’t theirs and the fame rapidly fades away. And the ticket has been on offer for a long, long time. The picture below shows the Rolling Stones circa 1966.
Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:
Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.
WELL?
I get it, people go along to get along.
But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?
After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.
I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.
By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.
A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.
I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.
Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.
Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.
