If you didn’t catch last night’s ARKHAVEN NIGHTS on UATV, you’ll probably want to check it out, if only for THE VOICE, THE FIST, THE WINGS anthem that JDA’s guy produced for it. It was a VERY wide-ranging discussion.
Arkhaven Nights Power Three
Tag: UATV
The Intellectual Father of Clown World
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy, being called the “father of modern ethics”, the “father of modern aesthetics”, and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism earned the title of “father of modern philosophy”.
In last night’s Darkstream, I examined what is described as one of Kant’s “major works”, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” And, as I think everyone who watched it will confirm, I very easily exposed this highly-regarded historical intellectual as a verbose charlatan who substitutes rhetoric for dialectic, dubious enthymemes for valid logical syllogisms, makes wildly improbable assumptions, and gets basic observations about human nature completely and verifiably wrong.
One particularly cruel viewer even commented that Kant’s arguments sound a bit like Petersonian bafflegarble, which frankly I think is going much too far and is unfair to the Enlightenment philosopher, but while I don’t condone the observation, I can understand it.
It’s also worth noting that Kant cribbed from Aristotle without correctly attributing the concept, while changing the terms he utilized in order to make his justification of elite despotism appear to be more palatable to the public that will be enslaved, not because they are “natural slaves” per Aristotle, but cowards in a state of “self-incurred minority”. Below is just one of the several obvious flaws in what is nothing more than a rhetorical argument:
I have put the main point of enlightenment, of people’s emergence from their self-incurred minority, chiefly in matters of religion because our rulers have no interest in playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences and also because that minority being the most harmful, is also the most disgraceful of all.
This assertion is not only false, but downright risible, particularly in light of the way in which the rulers of Clown World are deeply and observably interested in “playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences” and have done so for decades in a considerably more aggressive, totalitarian, and harmful manner than any religious authority has for centuries.
Kant asserts the inevitability of the impossible, while simultaneously denying the indisputable. As with so many other intellectuals revered by Clown World, a critical reading of Kant quickly reveals him to be more of a useful fraud than a legitimately great thinker.
Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, like free trade, evolution by natural selection, and free speech, simply has not withstood the test of time. As with those similarly outdated concepts, the more one digs into his work, the more flaws, both in theory and in practice, reveal themselves to the conscientious reader.
Brainstorm on Darkstream
As we’re working on elevating the content on UATV, I’m going to introduce a new concept on the Darkstream called Brainstorm. Essentially, I’m going to be live-critiquing a major intellectual work, or a section of an essay by a historical intellectual. When possible, I’ll post a selection and a reference ahead of time, to give viewers the chance to familiarize themselves with the material and attempt to anticipate my critique.
And I don’t intend on making it easy for myself, as the initial choice of Immanuel Kant and his well-known essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? which was written in 1784 and published in 1798.
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.
It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step toward majority to be not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. Now this danger is not in fact so great, for by a few falls they would eventually learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes them timid and usually frightens them away from any further attempt.
Thus it is difficult for any single individual to extricate himself from the minority that has become almost nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really unable for the time being to make use of his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. And anyone who did throw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over even the narrowest ditch, since he would not be accustomed to free movement of this kind. Hence there are only a few who have succeeded, by their own cultivation of their spirit, in extricating themselves from minority and yet walking confidently.
But that a public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed this is almost inevitable, if only it is left its freedom. For there will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the established guardians of the great masses, who, after having themselves cast off the yoke of minority, will disseminate the spirit of a rational valuing of one’s own worth and of the calling of each individual to think for himself. What should be noted here is that the public, which was previously put under this yoke by the guardians, may subsequently itself compel them to remain under it, if the public is suitably stirred up by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment; so harmful is it to implant prejudices, because they finally take their revenge on the very people who, or whose predecessors, were their authors. Thus a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may well bring about a failing off of personal despotism and of avaricious or tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform in one’s way of thinking; instead new prejudices will serve just as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.
For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear from all sides the cry: Do not argue! The officer says: Do not argue but drill! The tax official: Do not argue but pay! The clergyman: Do not argue but believe! (Only one ruler in the world says: Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!) Everywhere there are restrictions on freedom. But what sort of restriction hinders enlightenment, and what sort does not hinder but instead promotes it? – I reply: The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings; the private use of one’s reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted without this particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one’s own reason I understand that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers.
Those who are Darkstream and Premium subscribers to UATV will be permitted to participate in the polls for the subject of future Brainstorms. I’ll come up with a few possibilities and you can vote on the one of most interest to you.
The Return of UATV
Attention UATV subscribers:
Yesterday, May 15th 2024, Unauthorized subscribers once again received the ability to subscribe to the site and its various creators for the first time since this February. While this is not a return to full functionality for reasons which will shortly be made clear, it is a huge step forward for the team and a major relief to our creators who have to a man, woman, and bear been extremely patient about the whole thing.
This first issue of our Substack newsletter is intended to help both new and returning subscribers through the process of subscribing to Unauthorized as things currently stand, as well as answer the most frequent questions we have been receiving since the update landed.
For all the details, please visit the new UATV substack. The devs intend to use it as a place to provide all of the announcements, instructions, and other information likely to be of interest to the UATV community.
And yes, there is a new Darkstream subscription which has been created for those who have been asking for it. This is a good way to indicate your interest in my video-related efforts; as you are probably aware, we make our prioritization decisions on the basis of how people are voting with their various forms of currency rather than the more common practices of rewarding the squeaky wheels or what the devs happen to believe is most easily accomplished.
Unleash the Memes
You know the drill. One meme per customer. Meme Review tonight.
UATV ALERT
UATV will be down for the next two hours for maintenance. Please do not feel the need to alert anyone of the streaming service being down. This is scheduled maintenance. You will be informed when it is back up.
UPDATE: We’re back! Mostly. Some recently-published content is still being processed, so you may see a few broken links. These will be resolved in the next day or two.
UATV Brave Issue
A public service announcement from the UATV devs.
The current error screen shown on Unauthorized is an issue with the latest Brave update. Unauthorized is 100% operational and subscriptions are not affected in any way.
TEMPORARY FIX: Use a different browser.
As far as we can tell, the Brave devs broke some crucial connection components in their recent updates. They’ll almost certainly fix it soon, at which point everything should start working again.
Leaving the Cloud
A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.
Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!
And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.
To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.
But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:
I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.
On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.
The Three Stages of Social Maturity
Upon further reflection in the light of the recent Darkstream on the subject, I think I can present a more substantive and succinct TL:DR version.
- I care what you think about me
- I care what I think about me.
- I care what you think about you.
Perhaps this articulation will prove more useful in furthering one’s social maturation.
Number Six Video Essayist
Academic Agent lists and analyzes his top ten video essayists. He was gracious enough to include me on the list, and as high as number six, which is a nice surprise.
Next person on the list, and again this is somebody who’s still around but they tend not to do video essays anymore, they tend now to focus on doing streams, although this person’s streams are still typically solo and straight to camera so they are kind of essayish, but that is Vox Day. Now, again, he might not be to everybody’s cup of tea, but back in the day Vox Day made some of the best videos going, so let’s have a little watch of one of his…
You get the idea. So I did notice a lot of people kind of instinctively reacted against that. To me it’s just self-evidently true. It’s just obviously true. All of this stuff is clearly, self-evidently, observationally true, and all Vox has done is codified something that exists in the world. I mean, you all know this guy, you all know this guy and if you don’t know this guy, or if you’re instinctively reacting against it, you probably are that guy.
So in terms of why have I rated Vox, he has very clear way of articulating himself. He does have this kind of slow kind of speech pattern but he’s quite good at articulating exactly what a concept is, defining it well, I think Vox has some sort of background, whether it’s formal or informal, he has some sort of philosophy background. I seem to remember he certainly studied ancient rhetoric and so on, so he’s quite good at explaining his concept in a very clear way.
Vox has also got something that I think is an underrated skill, basically which is coining a phrase. I am actually very good at doing this, I have so many phrases, you know, back to Fresh Prince and Boomer Truth Regime, and you know, you all know my little slogans and phrases. Aon McIntyre is fantastic at this on Twitter as well, but Vox has also always been very good at coining a phrase, you know, day of the pillow is one of Vox Day’s, for example, and you know he’s got others as well, but his categories here in the psychosexual hierarchy are also a good example of it and you’ll casually see these terms used around the place so that is why I have ranked Vox Day.
The Deepest Lore, 25 Oct 2023
It’s always nice to see that one’s work is appreciated. I really need to somehow find the time to get back to doing more Voxiversities. One per month would probably be doable, assuming that one of my preferred producers have the time. Perhaps once I get a camera installed in the library, which is something I’m already planning to do, we can revive the concept in the new year.