Tag: philosophy

Freedom

I do so enjoy having no credibility, as I have been reliably informed is the case for many years now. It’s just another word for having absolutely no external limits upon one’s behavior:

Vox has 430-odd (so far) Vile Faceless Minions who have pledged to vote as he instructs them. This gives some people heartburn. On the other hand, the VFM support Vox voluntarily, so it’s not really anyone else’s business.

By the next Worldcon, he’ll have even more Minions; a nontrivial voting bloc he can use as he sees fit.

The current “Vox Day” is a creation of the SJWs. They vilified him so thoroughly nothing he can do can alter public opinion one way or the other, so he’s free to say and do anything he wants without concern for repercussion.

“What part of ‘Supreme Dark Lord’ did you not understand? Don’t you get it? I am not the good guy. I am the very bad guy.”

They literally have no idea what to do when you agree and amplify their accusations. I mean, don’t you grasp that they are POINTING and SHRIEKING at you? That is supposed to be your cue to stammer, cringe, and apologize!

So now he’s the dark monster living rent-free in their heads. Which suits him just fine, as far as I can tell.

I had dinner with Mike Cernovich tonight. Two fearsome monsters of the Internet… and yes, we were most definitely plotting dastardly and nefarious deeds.

The importance of failure

I was speaking to an entrepreneur today whose project is struggling and on the verge of failure. I encouraged him to NOT ask for donations; the need for a commercial venture to ask for donations is the market’s way of telling you that your project HAS ALREADY FAILED.

Now, it is important to understand that failure is the seed of success, just as success is the seed of failure. This isn’t a Zen koan, it is a simple and straightforward observation. Most successful individuals, myself included, have more failures than successes. There are very, very, very few exceptions; I am having lunch today with a 2x New York Times bestselling author whose first two novels were #1 bestsellers, but she is the exception and she very well knows it.

The three keys to failure leading to success are as follows:

  1. Fail faster. Once it is clear that it isn’t working as anticipated, shut it down!
  2. Learn from the mistakes you made. 
  3. Apply the lessons learned in your next venture.

There is zero shame in failure. There is only shame in lacking the courage to try, and lacking the resolution to pick yourself up afterwards and try again.

A lesson learned

Since I hammered Ken White of Popehat for his howler on the UN report on “cyberviolence”, it only seems fair to point out that unlike an SJW, he did not double-down:

I was right in saying that we need to scrutinize any specific proposed laws or policies that arise from this report. But I was wrong to downplay the rhetoric as mere rhetoric, and to say it was premature to criticize it. On a more serious look, the report’s rhetoric suggests an effort to use the language of violence to cover non-violent and protected conduct. That is of particular concern since it is directed at the UN….

I screwed up. I didn’t blow a closing argument or put the wrong pacemaker in someone or crash a car, but I offered my thoughts without exercising due care. The easy reason was that I rushed, because I was busy. The harder reason is that some of my attitudes colored my approach.

I expected that the report would not be read, that its contents would be overstated and distorted, and that it would be treated as an open and explicit call for censorship because of the people involved with it. I wasn’t wrong to think that. But I was wrong to let that thought stop me from a more careful examination, and to allow myself to breeze by the implications of the rhetoric while looking for the specific proposals that weren’t there. If I had looked at it from a “is this rhetoric bad or not” standpoint, instead of a “imagine the reaction to this” viewpoint, I would have gotten it right.

People have been getting suckered by the Left’s “it’s only rhetoric” and “it’s just this one brick” for over a century now. That’s how the income tax got started. That’s how Britain joined the European Union. If there is one lesson to be learned from White’s mea culpa, it is this: rhetoric is not irrelevant.

Rhetoric is a form of persuasion and it is MORE effective than logic, science, data, reason, and dialectic for the vast majority of human beings. It is never to be dismissed lightly or ignored, not even by the dialectical thinker, because the manipulation of human emotion is one of the most powerful means of inspiring human action.

Furthermore, one should never assume that facts are either true or false on the basis of how one feels about the individual supporting or opposing it. Even the Devil can quote Scripture, after all. But if someone is known to be dishonest, or an SJW, or affiliated in any way with the United Nations, one should always take the time to carefully scrutinize any assertion they make as well as any source they cite.

Nero eviscerates PopeHat

The Popehat project–endless, tedious, insufferably smug posts about
minutiae–only really works if you read your own goddamn sources.

Top tip for bloggers whose raison d’etre is smugly correcting others: actually read reports before posting about them.

Milo is referring to this amusingly clueless post by Ken White, in which the inveterate champion of free speech flirts with abandoning his principles because a) he doesn’t like #GamerGate, b) he doesn’t like certain GamerGaters, including me, and c) girls had feelbadz! It’s a pity, because the guy has done some genuinely good work defending free speech in the past, but has somehow failed to recognize that SJWs represent one of the most serious enemies that his chosen cause has ever known.

Ken tried to belatedly explain his failure to bother reading the entire UN report before responding to it in an update.

Further information suggests I was far too benefit-of-the doubt here, which is what happens when you write fast and when you generally despise some of the people involved. Some of this is still right, but regard the conclusions and characterizations with skepticism. Taking a second look. See, e.g., the fact that they cited this [footnote 118] for the video game discussion I cite below. When I’m wrong I’m wrong. Will revisit.

Hey, I think we all understand that there is no time for actually “reading” things or ensuring one is accurately “informed” before leaping to the defense of a woman experiencing feelbads; it is a white knight’s pleasure to destroy his own reputation if by doing so he can save a fair maiden from even a single incident of cyberviolence.

I haven’t read the report myself nor do I have any intention of doing so. I have not hitherto found either the United Nations or Literally Who to be interesting or even remotely credible. But I do find Ken’s excuse-making to be fairly typical of the moderates who are always happy to bend over backward to rationalize the most blatantly dishonest SJW behavior while repeatedly casting aspersions at those who actually stand up to them. And I expect there will be further backtracking on the subject, as I would be very surprised if the SJWs responsible for the report got anything right at all.

“Cyberviolence” is a false and deceptive issue. I have been the recipient of far more “cyberviolence” and death threats than all of the Literally Whos combined, and for much longer; if it is such a serious issue then why hasn’t the UN or Ken White rushed to my defense at any time in the last 14 years?

When I reviewed and critiqued the economics study on immigration and jobs here yesterday and the day before, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the economists whose views on immigration creating jobs opposed my own. I interpreted every statistic and every assumption in a manner that favored their perspective, not mine. That is exactly what you must do if you wish to provide a serious analysis that will withstand objective review. But by his own admission, Ken White gives the benefit of the doubt to those who oppose people he generally despises. And that is why, despite his legal work on behalf of free speech, he cannot be considered an intellectually credible individual.

Case in point:

So there’s a solution to, that you know. Don’t read the blog any more. Unfollow the Twitter feed. Look for someone whose viewpoint is more acceptable to you. Maybe even write it up yourself.

But that’s not the GamerGate way.

Also, note how angry you are, and then look at the original again. I warned that UN speech restrictions are suspicious, I pointed to multiple things to be concerned about, and I even questioned the content at issue — I just didn’t see how crazy the sourcing was, yet. And I suggested that any actual codes that come out of it should be examined carefully.

But none of that is enough for you. You want hate. It’s not enough for you unless I excoriate the people you hate.

That’s why normal people don’t take you seriously.

This is deeply amusing coming from an individual who is literally mentally unstable. How would he know what normal people take seriously? Ken, you’re not normal. You’re not honest. You’re not intellectually rigorous. And you’re not credible. People like me would be delighted to continue to ignore you, but you go out of your way to attack us online, both on PopeHat and on Twitter.

Neither of the two commenters was demanding that Ken hate or excoriate anyone, they were simply expecting him to show at least a modicum of discernment concerning various individuals and institutions widely known to be less than entirely truthful. He failed to do so, and when rightly taken to task for it, he completely mischaracterized their responses.

Of course, it does make a certain amount of sense that he would side with the SJW whack jobs. Birds of a feather and all that. And as we all know, SJWs always lie.

Mailvox: get your syllogisms straight

TB goes awry in the second step:

This post (which was about IQ, part of a larger issue of Civilization) seemed to me to be about the very foundation of the Civilization discussion.

1. Genetics and culture are inseparable,
2. Only British genetics can grasp and enact Western Civilization,
3. The U.S. cannot allow a drop below a certain level of British derived population.

I understand that civilization requires trade-offs in education, economics, religion, and other systems. It just seems that the Civilization you describe was doomed the very moment it started. I believe the Constitution allows the nation to be hardier than this hot house flower being described.

2. is false. The U.S. Constitution is not synonymous with Western civilization. Western civilization is hardier than the U.S. Constitution, which was not only written by and for Englishmen, but is only understood correctly by them and those who have sufficiently adopted their culture.

More than that, it was only written for them and their descendants and was never intended to apply to anyone else except some of the German colonists who successfully grasped, accepted, and supported their unusual limited government philosophy.

The descendants of the countries who came later, the Irish, the Italians, the later Germans, the Scandinavians, the Jews, and the Hispanics are not the posterity of the Founding Fathers. It should be no surprise that they have not successfully defended a philosophy they have never accepted or understood nor respectfully abided by a document that was never written for them.

And my rebuttal to those who would argue is very simple and straightforward. Look around you. Do you see anything that is even remotely respectful of the concepts put forth in the U.S. Constitution?

Vox and the Fat Man

The great Cuck Defender Charlie Martin has been proving that he doesn’t care for two days now. A brief selection:

Charlie Martin
He’s made a bald assertion to which he himself is a counter-example.  It’s vacuous.

Charlie Martin
Vox has made the point that he’s  Italian now. Somehow his “race” hasn’t stopped adopting a new culture

Charlie Martin
As with his assertion that I don’t speak German. I answered in my “native” dialect of German.

Charlie Martin
And when he realizes he’s made a fool of himself he tries to change the subject.

Charlie Martin
And like a lot of “deep thinkers”, when caught out, he gets pissy.

Charlie Martin
So he veered to “fatty” — which hurt my feeling when I was six, not so much at 60.

Charlie Martin
Like a lot of other Great Men, he’s a childish bully and a shallow, petulant little man.

Charlie Martin
like a lot of other Great Men, he’s gotten a collection of sycophants who prefer following to thinking.

Charlie Martin
But as Trump, Obama, Sanders, and a million others have demonstrated, followers don’t make you smart.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
I’m sure if you just tweet 30 more times, you’ll convince everyone you don’t care, El Chubbo.

Charlie Martin
You’re a small little man whose major recent accomplishment was stealing someone else’s idea.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
So the Doritos didn’t do the trick? Perhaps you should try pizza, Chubbawumba.

Charlie Martin ‏@chasrmartin
And you still can’t get beyond middle school taunts.

Vox Day
That is all your butthurt rhetoric merits. I want you to be able to comprehend them, after all.

The trick is to leave them to it once they’re triggered. You don’t want to overdo it; that’s just sadistic. Just step in every now and then and give them a little slap to keep them spinning. Like all Gammas, El Chubbo has been looking for an opportunity to “get even” since the last time he was publicly slapped down, which is why he jumped in to white knight David French, but he’s too caught up in his delusion bubble to grasp how far over his head he’s found himself.

The revelation here is that Charlie Martin has apparently been prone to having weight problems as long as he can remember. That’s the psych tell that explains his otherwise overly defensive behavior. And sure, while it makes perfect logical sense that a petty taunt about his weight should bother him less at 60 than at 6, the emotional reality is that it bothers him more. That’s why it triggered him for two straight days.

The reason is that after all this time, after all these years, after all his various adult accomplishments and efforts, he’s still dismissed as the little fat boy. It’s not actually my taunts that cause the emotional pain that set him off, it’s the memories of past pain that they induce in him. That’s why they’re called “triggers”.

It’s also why Gammas find their attempts to trigger me so futile. Notice how their attempts are always all over the place; they are searching, in vain, for something that hurts. Perhaps because they can’t identify with jocks, they never seem to grasp the psychological implication of my not only having been smart as a child, but an elite athlete as well. I’m not saying that I don’t have emotional triggers because we all do. It’s just that mine have absolutely nothing to do with the average intelligent individual’s.

Mailvox: Rhetoric in action

The lightbulb goes on for IndecisiveEvidence:

My first instinct reading that exchange is to shake my head. It’s just you and Kluwe doing catty girl sniping. I’m a troll so I get it but it seems stupid. Then it hit me. You reminded me in the comment thread here. I read your book. You’re exercising the language Sparklepunter speaks. Brilliant. It’s still stupid but now in a completely different light that makes perfect sense.

Rhetoric often strikes those outside its emotional impact range as stupid. Think about the nasty little comment about her new dress that absolutely crushes the teen girl; the same comment made to anyone else might not only seem stupid, but insane. However, as I seem to keep having to point out to those who are quite stupidly attached to the idea that flawless logic and reason are genuinely capable of persuading 100 percent of all human beings of anything, rhetoric is devoid of information content. It is not intended to instruct or inform. It is intended to emotionally influence.

In the case of adversarial rhetoric, the objective is to cause sufficient emotional pain to the other party to force them to withdraw from the conflict. Now, withdrawal does not necessarily mean that any emotional pain has been caused, but one can usually tell if this is the case or not on the basis of any abrupt alteration of one party’s behavior. Usually, this will be the attacking party suddenly breaking off contact. To utilize the catty girl sniping analogy, whoever bursts into tears and runs away loses status, whoever remains there gains it.

Kluwe’s rhetoric was unfocused, shallow, and ineffective. He tried to associate me with Nazis, which is neither new to me nor true, and has no more effect on me than the previous five thousand attempts. Recognizing that, he then tried to pick at what he thought would be a sore spot, but I hadn’t spent any time thinking about how to respond to him and having three Hugo No Awards doesn’t bother me in the slightest. After all, I knowingly sought two of them this year. So he moved on to the assertion that my movement, whatever that may be, is failing and that my supporters are rats attempting to disassociate from me.

Considering that the VFM have grown from 434 strong to 445 in the last few days, the new book is still #1 in Political Philosophy, and the site traffic is on course to set a new monthly record, this was the precise opposite of effective rhetoric, which always has some basis in truth. How terrible do you feel, having been labeled a disloyal rodent by Sparklepunter?

Contrast with that my own rhetoric, which associated Kluwe, the father of two young girls, with pedophilia. This had a strong basis in truth, since Kluwe was actively defending a known pedophile in his unprovoked challenge to GamerGate. It was focused, as I continued to harp on that theme, and it was effective, as Kluwe rapidly went from attacking GamerGate and publicly asserting his support for Nyberg to retreating and hitting the mute button in the course of just a few tweets.

It was somewhat of a pity, because I had some even sharper rhetoric prepared, but it should illustrate that contra the mindless catty girl sniping some erroneously thought it to be, it was effective rhetoric that demoralized an enemy and defeated his rhetorical attack. No one came away from reading that thinking about National Socialism. A dialectical response that cited Nyberg’s various deeds would have been totally ineffective since Kluwe was already familiar with all of the relevant information and had chosen to ignore it.

“Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest
knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For
argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people
whom one cannot instruct.”
– Aristotle, Rhetoric 

I repeat: Meet dialectic with dialectic. Meet rhetoric with rhetoric. Meet pseudo-dialectic with dialectic to expose the rhetoric, then follow it up with rhetoric. Those who tend to favor dialectic very much need to understand that the emotional impact of dialectic in response to rhetoric is every bit as ineffective as the logical impact of rhetoric is in response to dialectic.

It may help to keep in mind that whenever you try to use information to persuade a rhetoric speaker, you sound like “the train is fine” guy. You may be correct, but you’re totally missing the point.

Embrace your extremists

Nero explains some of the rules of ideological alliances to a moderate:

Winston Churchill once said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a positive reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The logic of this should be obvious. Churchill recognized (rightly) that maintaining Britain’s liberal order was worth allying with the devil. No one went to war with the Nazis just because of the tactics they used. They primarily did it because they couldn’t stand the idea of living under a Nazi regime. I can’t stand the thought of living under what Cathy calls the “quasi-totalitarian” Social Justice regime. And I will pay any price necessary to make sure that quasi-totalitarian ideology is defeated and sent back to the urine-soaked faculty lounge from whence it came.

Cathy confuses what is prudent with what is moral when she says that rejecting certain far-right allies doesn’t count as appeasing the Left. Certainly, taking on allies who alienate the vast majority of people you’re trying to persuade is tactically stupid. But purging people when they have done nothing to damage your cause, but happen to have made you uncomfortable because of something unrelated, is simply cowardly. There is a very troubling tendency among many Gamergaters to believe that anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky is somehow “icky” or should be held responsible for the sins of Jack Thompson. This isn’t the early 2000s. Most conservatives have moved on from the stupid anti-video game craze, and the ones who are most loudly on Gamergate’s side generally never bought into that craze in the first place. Refusing to accept support from people who would destroy your ability to maintain your coalition is one thing. Simple bigotry against conservatives because you don’t like the idea of being on the same side as people you laughed at on the Daily Show is quite another.

I agree completely with Cathy re Nyberg, so I won’t respond to this prong. I will, however, only say that Social Justice Warriors take no notice of the difference between “combatants” and “non-combatants,” which is typical of fascists and terrorists. The only way to stop such people from targeting non-combatants is to make them afraid to do so, because they know the retaliation from you will hurt so much more than anything they could do. Mutually assured destruction requires the commitment of both sides to destruction if the other starts something, and it is why we have yet to see a nuclear war. If you want to stop people using bad tactics, the only way to do it is to make them prohibitively costly. And the only way to do that is to use the same tactics with such brutal efficiency that they cry “uncle” and agree to a ceasefire.

As I have noted on several occasions, for reasons unbeknownst to me, moderates are always more focused on firing on their own side than on the enemy. They are also always more open to negotiation and dialogue with the enemy than with their own extremists.

This is one of the reasons why moderates never accomplish anything. Ideally, moderates would stay out of the way, let the extremists lead the charge, and then show up after the victory is won and handle the negotiations using the extremists as leverage.

“Do you want to surrender to me or do I stand aside and watch as my very good friend here follows through on his promise of no quarter?” Accepting surrender is the true and proper role of the moderate. Policing those engaged in positive action is not.

The end of snark

I have always been a hard core fan of La Paglia Divina. And I never, ever, liked David Letterman:

I despise snark.  Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s horrible for young people!   And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he sold the book and then didn’t write one–he talked it. It was an appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute fraud to be talking about religion.  He appears to have done very little scholarly study.  Hitchens didn’t even know Judeo-Christianity well, much less the other world religions.  He had that glib Oxbridge debater style in person, but you’re remembered by your written work, and Hitchens’ written work was weak and won’t last.

Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal vendetta, and again, he’s someone who has never taken the time to do the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been based on the pre-Christian religions.  My first book, “Sexual Personae,” was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, I’ve been studying Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the close of the Ice Age.  In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native American view. I’m not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in the pre-Christian era.

You mentioned Jon Stewart, who leaves the “Daily Show” in two weeks. There’s handwringing from folks who think that he elevated or even transcended snark, that he utilized irony very effectively during the Bush years. And that he did the work of critiquing and fact-checking Fox and others on the right who helped create this debased media culture? What’s your sense of his influence?

I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark.

Goodbye, Dainty Flower

Good-bye my sweet mamma dog. Thank you for watching over us and loving us. We will miss you forever. –Spacebunny

We had to say goodbye to the Mamma Dog today. She practically raised the kids, whom she clearly regarded as her puppies, and she watched over them more closely than any human nanny. Every night when we turned in, she would go to each child’s bed, one after the other, and sniff at them until she was satisfied they were all right before returning to our room and settling down on her own bed on the floor next to Spacebunny’s side.

She had a very sweet, but protective nature, and whenever anyone visited the house, she always had to check them out before harrumphing in mild disapproval and retiring to a corner of the room where she could keep an eye on them. You know, just in case. She had a silly side to her too, as she would pick up pieces of her food and throw it in the air just for the fun of it. If you called her on it, she would stop, stare at you, and then do it again, almost defiantly. Her eyebrows were particularly expressive, as she would raise one, then the other, in a slightly skeptical manner.

She loved the whole family, but there was no question to whom she belonged, as she was always happiest being around her beloved mistress, with whom she even shared a birthday. She liked nothing more than to share a bowl of popcorn with Spacebunny, and when waiting for a kernel to be tossed her way, she had a funny habit of impatiently shifting her weight from one side to the other.

She was astonishingly athletic. I’ve never seen a dog with such an incredible combination of speed and power. We couldn’t figure out how she was getting in and out of the house without our knowledge one summer, and it turned out that she was casually leaping six feet vertically and four feet horizontally in and out my office window. And yet, when a baby would crawl on top of her, she would hold herself perfectly motionless, her eyebrows moving up and down as she patiently waited for the baby to crawl far enough away that she could move without hurting it.

She wasn’t flawless. I mean that literally, as the two whorls of her ridge were lopsided and she had an extra partial on the right side. She was literally half-price as a result, but she would have been a bargain at ten times the cost. She was also pigeon-toed, which gave her slightly unusual stance, and she was tall for her breed, bigger than many of the male Ridgebacks we encountered.

I only heard her “serious” bark twice. It was a deep, chesty roar that sounded as if it came up from one of the pits of the lower hells. It didn’t even sound like a dog, but some sort of cross between a lion and a hellhound. And yet, for all her size and strength, she was extremely feminine, hence the Dainty Flower. But to the kids, the cats, and the other dogs, she was always the Mamma Dog.

After my Viszla died in 2010, she went into a bit of a decline, and when she was subsequently diagnosed with cancer, we wondered how long she was going to last. But then the Prodiguously Large Puppy joined the household, she seemed to absorb some of his excessive energy, and she was visibly revitalized, going on long walks with the family and playing happily with her new responsibility out in the yard as well as inside the house.

She made it to Christmas, and then to another Christmas, and then was less than entirely pleased when a Ridgeback in need of a new home joined the family a year ago. She seemed convinced that the poor little puppy needed to be defended from The Other Ridgeback, never mind that he was not only a full-grown Viszla, but such an oversized and muscular version of the breed that he was frequently mistaken for a Ridgeback himself. Even though she couldn’t keep up with the two other dogs as they chased each other back and forth outside, she would bark warnings at The Other Ridgeback, promising dire retribution and serious consequences if The Other Ridgeback should somehow harm her tiny, defenseless 70-pound puppy in any way.

She lived three years longer than we expected, but the cancer finally caught up with her. Her heart was still strong, her eyes were still bright, and she would still perk up and flick her tail when she smelled espresso – she considered any cappucino placed within reach fair game for Ridgebacks – but her rear legs were withered and she was wasting away. We had the vet come out to the house to examine her, but no one knows dogs better than Spacebunny and we already knew what the verdict would be. After everyone had the chance to say their goodbyes, the vet put her to sleep for the last time in her beloved mistress’s arms.

It may be questionable theology, but I personally cannot conceive of anything that could possibly call itself Heaven or Paradise that does not contain dogs. And I have no doubt that only a little while ago the Viszla came enthusiastically bounding up to her, his tail wagging furiously, barking, “you’re here, you’re FINALLY here! What took you so long?”

To which I expect the Mamma Dog replied, “I had to watch over my puppies as long as I could.”