[…] Mistakes happen for a reason […]

On fire today! "Well as I often say, if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing." Excellent. "At any rate, Scientism on Twitter had a good elaboration of what it means that “we got China wrong”. What did USG really think? Was it just the latest iteration of the Whig theory of Democratic Development, whereby democracy happened because of the rising incomes in the 19th century empowering the bourgeoisie into fighting against the royal houses of Europe for political rights? No, of course not. Nobody reads history anymore. Certainly not people in the American corridors of power. Whig history is stupid; but our ruling class today doesn’t know Whig history anymore. What they know is a degraded version of Whig history as remembered by the guys on Wall Street, who have some faint recollection of reading about it in Harvard; but that was a long time and many many hangovers ago." Is it not the case that the formal reason is consistent with the real reason? That is, the foreign policy gurus believed that trade would lead to China becoming liberal? However, part of that process would involve American media, NGOs and professors and their ideas infiltrating and undermining China from within. This is the Cathedral line right? "So the idea is that trade with China was a good idea because it was thought that China would always be poor, so the USA could always enjoy a sort of advantageous colonial relationship with Chinese factories. I can totally imagine some Goldman Sachs guy selling that to Clinton-Bush-Blair and those guys believing it hook, line and sinker. And the State Department QUANGO apparatchiks who had actually read the Whig theory of history could, on their end, support that thinking on all the opportunities for bioleninist missionary work. 1 billion souls to save organize!" Right. So the capitalists realized that with the end of the Cold War, there was no longer any reason for capital to be restrained. If Clinton did not support liberalizing trade, then the capitalists would fund the opposition. As for Clinton and consequences, well, in the long run we are all dead right? "That is true, and should be obvious, but there are dangers to the realization. There’s a reason why people dislike cynics. People don’t want to know the truth." Indeed. So now we have the 21st Century Struggle of the Systems: China: 1: Form: Top down hierarchy; one-party-state. 2: Matter: One China, one people and one paramount leader for life (Han supremacy). 3: Means: Top-down command and control; nationalism; state-capitalism; techno-Confucianism. 4: End: The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese People and Nation and the Glorification of China - the World's only Civilizational State. America: 1: Form: Imperium in Imperio (divided power, democracy). 2: Matter: Diversity (faggots, feminists and Islamic fundamentalists). 3: Means: Propaganda, shaming and anarcho-tyranny; invade the world, invite the world; welfare and Anglo-capitalism. 4: End: Equality, Freedom and Justice (poverty, oppression and war).

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

Hindus work extremely hard at not understanding Conflict theory. I'm wondering if western conservatism is really western Hinduism by another name. The same cuck behavior. The same indignation and pride at not being able to understand things.

I think another place where they go wrong is in their understanding of the word "democracy" itself. WE know that in the west, democracy is highly stage managed, it would probably be best to describe our system as really being "managerialism with a democratic veneer". However, the true believing leftist cannot accept this, it would undermine their idea of themselves as underdog revolutionaries. It is kinda funny if you step back. They think that "democracy" means rights for gays, ethnic minorities, and transsexuals without realizing that they value these groups because they are so small. But in any system that is truly democratic these groups would have no power at all.

There are a few earnest mistake-theorists (God bless them), the guys like J.D. Vance who really believe that, "Come on guys, we need to get together on this and think it through and we can all be, if not friends, at least tolerant neighbors." But 90% of those who adopt a mistake-theory rhetoric do so because abstracted appeals to and public displays of logic and rationality still carry social weight among a large swathe of the commentariat. You can see this at work when the left shouts "ignorant hick!" or "dumb ass Drumpf voter!" or "stupid redneck!" The real conflict-theorists, of course, do not bother backing up these accusations with a point-by-point breakdown of why the hick is a dumb ass (though it's interesting that even the conflict-theorists find value in terms casting aspersion on the other side's intelligence and rationality). But all those people using statistics, articles, and step-by-step arguments to demonstrate why the hick is a dumb ass---these people who are supposedly acting here like mistake-theorists---no, even these people are just doing the "rational argument" thing because, again, there are social points to be gained by appealing to logic and appearing to be logical. But it's still conflict-theory in action: all those statistics and syllogisms are just like peacock plumage in a society that still gets off on displays of argumentative prowess.

I'd add that many people adopt a mistake-theory rhetoric because they know the end game of conflict theory is, well, direct physical conflict. Conflict theorists recognize that policy and grenades are both just means to a desired end, and if the former won't work, eventually a group works its way to the latter. Being coddled and weak and materially comfortable, most first-world conflict theorists recognize that mistake-theory rhetoric (which they know is bullshit) keeps the conflict (which they know to be real) in the courts and out of the battlefield for as long as possible.

They are playing for themselves: to raise their status above yours, to drop their potential rivals into eternal misery and to rule forever over them. China, Syria, and everything else, is about that.

Forever? So their stated revulsion against GM is fake?

The stupidest story I have seen, in the response to Xi's ascension, is the story of "the ban on the letter N". Some sort of blip in the censorship system got amplified into an utterly nonsensical "theory" about censors stopping social scientists from using algebra to talk about Chinese presidential terms. And that was carried in the New York Times, the Guardian, and even Meduza.io, an outlet for Russian liberals.

So political opposition comes from the mistaken belief in mistake theory, and there would be less conflict if everybody believed in conflict theory. Hmm...

Buchanan pulls his punches and spares the elite, yes. But he needs the elite' s good will to achieve any policy change, he cannot antagonize them by calling them out in public like that. However, is generally a very brave and a public-minded man (see support for Trump -who had viciously slandered him years ago when they were both vying for the candidacy of the Constitution party-, or his treatment of racial questions), and this article is too harsh on him. Plus his book on Churchill is pretty good.

OT: Spandrell, regarding your tweet about hillbilly Tibetans . . . Did you ever read Heinrich Harrer's 7 Years in Tibet? Your description fits with that book's description of Tibetans, though Harrer hides it behind a thin veneer of noble savage stuff.

Your first paragraph is correct. In the late seventies China was isolated and without a friend, in total chaos and really poor, to the point that the world worried if it could feed itself. Nixon's political theory genius Prof. Kissinger thought that the right thing to do was to open the world markets including USA to China, so they could sell something and buy food (from America). Mao and Tsu Enlai were ecstatic. Only the British, with their long Asia experience, manifested doubts. Was it really a wise thing to create a big and rich China? It appears that experience wins. Now the USA has a powerful competitor in all industries and sciences, and also a geopolitical rival, not to say enemy. You may have noticed that China is taking possession of part of the Pacific Ocean, and disputing American ownership of that real estate, at least from Guam eastwards. Maybe Kissinger was wrong. May be not totally wrong, but he certainly did not think China's opening to the end.

What does correlate with Western values is proximity of US military bases: that correlates pretty damn close. It also happens that proximity of US military bases correlates to some degree with democratic politics. But the causality starts with US tanks, not with democratic politics. That goes into my Quotes text file, very well put. You once wrote a post about Trivers's book on self-deception. "You are subservient to me" = "You are free and independent" "You are not under my yoke = "You are under awful tyranny" are cases of (national) self-deception.

Hm, I am not entirely with you this time. "What does correlate with Western values is proximity of US military bases: that correlates pretty damn close. It also happens that proximity of US military bases correlates to some degree with democratic politics. But the causality starts with US tanks, not with democratic politics." The problem here is what even we are calling democracy. The historical definition is popular government. The Cathedral definition is precisely Western values / liberalism - gaymarriage is a "democratic right" and so on. The Cathedral calls popular governments that are not liberal "dangerous populists" these days. Duterte, Orban, and so on. So in the Cathedral sense of democracy, it is a tautology. In the old sense of democracy, what is called populism today, the correlation with US tanks is probably reverse. "So the idea is that trade with China was a good idea because it was thought that China would always be poor, so the USA could always enjoy a sort of advantageous colonial relationship with Chinese factories." Silicon Valley investors already saw China as a promising market (hence not poor) 10-15 years ago. Remember the term "Chinese math"? It meant: "they have one billion people, if we only manage to sell our product to 1% of them that is 10M customers, we gonna be rich!" Of course it is the kind of thing that gives bullshit a bad name because the effort required to sell something to 10M people depends on the fact that they are 10M people and not on how low a percentage that is of a very large country. But they already saw China a place with consumer demand. "That is true, and should be obvious, but there are dangers to the realization. There’s a reason why people dislike cynics. People don’t want to know the truth." That is not really the big issue with Conflict theory. The big issue is that basically every proponent of it comes from the hard left. Saying "yes there is class struggle and the rich should win it" is so extremely unpopular, it does not even compute at some level, doesn't it sound like some comical level of unfairness? In a somewhat similar way, I have raised a couple of times on discussion boards to mainstream to leftist intellectuals that why does it follow for them from "X is just a social construct" that "X should be ignored or torn down"? Why it never follows: "X is a construct of MY society, to which I am loyal, and thus I accept it, and if you don't you are a fucking disloyal traitor". I can assure, it totally does not even compute for 99% of mainstream intellectuals. The 1% calls me nazi. Similarly it does not compute to the vast majority of conservatives, this is, for example, why they try to desperately defend that everything is biological. Saying crap like "men are literally unable to not stare at boobs, because biology" when in reality 25% of young men are too nervous and inhibited to stare at boobs, and any monk who wants to keep his celibacy vow also better not to stare at such temptations, so it is certainly possible if you want to. But if we'd admit that this is possible, the leftist narrative, namely that "if you can, you MUST, because you must find my kind of ethics entirely compulsory" would be overwhelming. So nobody is even trying the "yes I am capable of not staring at boobs but I fucking don't want to, piss off" angle. My point is, Conflict theory is a nearly irresistible force in the hands of the left. And every application of it is a very convincing argument why people like you and me are evil and deserve to be hated. You could, in theory, behave like a feminist man but don't want to? You are evil. You admit X is a social construct but still want to enforce it out of national loyalty? You are evil. You admit the rich are not entirely avuncular benefactors of the poor and even the free market cannot always force them to do so, yet they don't want to seem them punished, humiliated and impoverished? You are evil. Die! On the other hand, the Mistake theory of the milquetoast Alexandrian liberal at least does not want me dead or impoverished. It holds if we discuss the issue enough and maybe throw some more statistics and Bayes on it we will reach an agreement. Surely that sounds less dangerous?

The comments to that Alexander post suggested that most people there interpreted "Mistake Theorist" as "someone who argues carefully and honestly" and "Conflict Theorist" as "someone who's disposed to lie and distort whenever he thinks that doing so will help his group". If a Mistake Theorist is someone who thinks that the ultimate goals of all human beings are compatible and that men can therefore work to together to achieve all of those goals and merely have to figure out the most effective way to do so ... while a Conflict Theorist is someone who thinks that the ultimate goals of various human beings are incompatible ... then a Mistake Theorist could in fact argue deceptively in order to help mankind achieve its common goal-set, while a Conflict Theorist could in fact argue carefully and honestly about how various men and groups of men might most effectively achieve their incompatible ultimate goals. So, many Progressives are dishonest Mistake Theorists (but Alexander is an honest one!) while many Conflict Theorists (Spandrell, for example, but perhaps not Marx) argue carefully and honestly. One might even be a compassionately honest Conflict Theorist who feels some affection for his foes and therefore some sorrow at having to destroy them. Scott Alexander sometimes seems to cross over into this territory.

Wait a bit, Spandrell. Pretty much every primitive or stupid guy is a natural conflict theorist. Everywhere from medieval Europe to Pacific Islanders, when some trouble happened like crops did not go right, the first assumption was that some witch put a spell on it. Or evil spirits, demons, or maybe God's just punishment, but basically SOMEONE is messing with you. Even today, the really dumb people on both sides of the political spectrum see the economy as a zero sum game where the only important thing is prevent "them" robbing you and the only main difference is that one extreme defines "them" as capitalists, the other as jews. It seems the "bad shit happens to you because someone wanted it so" is the native, natural reaction of the primitive mind. In this sense CT is not a new invention at all. To the contrary, MT seems to be a fairly modern invention. Enlightenment Liberals of the Scott Aaronson type tend to claim it was their camp who invented it, i.e. the whole idea that maybe people could talk and discuss their problems with each other and not just immediately resort to violence. It is not actually true that they invented it. It is probably true in a narrow sense that they reinvented it - Medieval Catholicism was mostly MT and fairly diplomatic and tolerant, and hell broke loose with the Protestant Reformation, that was when it went from "I see your point, but look up Aquinas's 473th proof" to "kill the damn heretic/popist". It seems to be true in that narrow sense that getting Protestants and Catholics not to want to gut each other alive probably correlates with the first steps of Enlightenment Liberalism - say, Hobbes. However, it is also true that whatever cred they gathered by fixing religious hatred, they immediately wasted it when engineering revolutions of the French type which were as hateful and CT as it gets. They tend to conveniently forget that. At any rate, MT is a modern invention in a different sense: science. Once we figured out how crops work, people got less suspicious about their neighbor casting evil spells to make their crops fall and more likely to admit it was their mistake or a natural problem. Same sort of thing with illnesses. And economics. Why would MT be tribal when it is people, not tribes who have interests? Look, if you are in a modern gang and Don Tyrone, da boss says let's go rob people in daylight and you tell him maybe it makes more sense to do it at night, he won't lecture you on your mistake, he will take it as a challenge of his authority, a dissin' that needs to be corrected with violence. Pretty sure that is also how most old timey tribes worked. Red-blooded, high-T men aren't very good at debating, they too much tend to see disagreement as a challenge. Talky culture, so MT was invented, at least in our past, in Greco-Roman times, while they were CT with their enemies outside (hostes), they tried to MT with their enemies, rivals inside (inimicos), the whole cedant arma togae thing, the toga as a symbol of discussion, debating, reasoning, the whole thing in the Senate was much like this "what is Rome's interest" and "we we we" and tried to at least pretend to not be at each others throats. They were, but there was also a strong drive to pretend to not to. I always thought a large part of Rome's success was sheer patriotism - very strong ingroupness. It was entirely normal in other Italicus kingdoms that an aristocratic family just gets fed up with the king goes and joins another polity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appius\_Claudius\_Sabinus\_Regillensis while Romans were probably the first ones to discover treason is actually a thing and it is a bad thing. And the whole republicanism they invented was mostly about trying to be as MT as possible with each other, at least the patrician families seeing their interests as something connected.The whole Athenian and Roman invention that maybe you could decide some things with a public debate - which assumes common interests: enemies negotiate, at best, not debate - was MT. Compared to at least brutally CT tribalism.

"If you understand evolution it stands to reason that all social life is about conflict." Thank you, Nietzsche.

Sad truth.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stalin\_apologetics#Tankies "Serious devotees of Soviet apologetics are referred to by the derogatory epithet tankies, after the tanks that rolled into Hungary when they dared leave the Soviet Union's loving hugs. This term was coined by other communists who didn't agree with such actions and originated as a term for the Communist Party of Great Britain when they followed the Kremlin line. The term is routinely used concerning Stalin apologists. Because he was dead by the time the tanks rolled, they will often claim the word properly refers to someone other than them — though approximately nobody goes along with this. You'll also see it being used for Berlin Wall apologists, North Korea apologists, Enver Hoxha apologists, Nicolae Ceausescu apologists, Khmer Rouge apologists, Mao Zedong apologists, and those who cheered the June Fourth Incident Tiananmen Square Massacre. Other groups get called "tankies" if they take an authoritarian line. There are actually tiny Trotskyist groups that supported military "intervention" in Hungary, e.g. the Marcyites." Related to present China. Horseshoe, you know..

I'm highly interested in the social technologies dealing with the fact that the basic, fundamental social reality is pure conflict for resources and reproduction (maybe simplifiable further into power- someone once said "Everything is about sex, and sex is about power"). The ideal slave would be one that is not realizing, perhaps made so to not even be able to realize that he is a slave. Democracies seem to do this by installing as a pretext the "dictatorship of the majority" - "We the people" is presented as the reason why things are as they are, and because "the people" (at least the majority of them) wants it so everything is legitimized. Still, master-slave relationships, in practice, of course persist; but it seems to me that at least in Democracies the slaves enjoy a global and historic maximum of high living standards, at least partially from a more equal distribution and spread of income. Real ruling, of course, does not work by majority rule; this is obviously only the pretext. Those with superior cognitive ability can rather reliably make the great majority think and feel as they see fit, it works with political voting just as well as with currency voting (consumption) - and by using the same exact techniques from advertisement and propaganda. A great underlying principle why this Democracy simulation works for the rulers seems to be that the great majority that is being "opinion-managed" cannot ever come to realize the full extent of this manipulation, because vanity and desire for having a high self-worth seems to prevent them from conceding that they are so inferior compared with the cognitive superior rulers that they are much like marionettes for them; after all, they "decide themselves" - but that their thinking and feeling, even their knowledge, their very ideas of good and evil, are very pretty much guided, must be rejected by them, at least when they want to keep up the illusion that they are "free". Otherwise, they would be like little children (or, comparably, cognitively retarded people) that can be made into pretty much doing whatever their rulers want, and the realization of their inferiority would be so terrible that this thought is prevented by self-tabooization. Like people suffering from Down's syndrome, the realization that one would be cognitively very inferior is so unpleasurable that it is ignored, repressed, or rationalized away somehow. One could say, the reason for why Western-style democracies function rather well is the human nature of desiring the pleasurable state of overconfidence, especially cognitive one - Dunning-Kruger as basis for a whole political system! The illusion of political freedom from the illusion of cognitive freedom. Just like almost all people think advertisement will not work on them, almost all people think their ideas and feelings are their own. Religions are marvelous in making people forget, ignore or even forgo their own objective self-interest (reproduction and resources) - Nietzsche was not the first to point out that, for example, Christianity is basically a slave religion - making people into docile slaves that are not to retaliate, to do as they are told by their superiors, to even "love their enemies" and so on. The principle: Christians are guaranteed to become high social status in the eternal afterlife, for enduring to be low-status in their earthly lives. What are a few decades of being a docile slave when you are rewarded with an eternity of being high status? Limited costs vs. unlimited profit. Great deal - for the ruling class, by selling to their subjects the idea of being really good slaves for them. Islam basically sells the same idea, only updated with violence and sex: Spreading Islam by becoming a martyr will get you the highest social status in afterlife's eternity, AND you get dozens of virgins on top of that, which sure seems to be a magnificent deal, especially for the kind of young men who are to die on the battlefields in search of "martyrdom" anyway. Islam as a social technology improved on the Christian religion technology by not only making people into slaves, but also into fierce, brutal (and, if they truly are believers, fearless) slave soldiers for their rulers whenever needed. It also exploits the typical male youth surplus of tribal societies as cannon fodder for advancing the rulers' military power while removing those young surplus men as inner-societal troublemakers, as a great surplus of young men ("youth bulge") in societies leads to inner-societal unruliness because of intensified and often brutalized social status rivalries (many more young men than are good positions in the social structure available). Mormons improved on that further - if you are a good slave for the Mormon church for all your life (most importantly that means paying the tithe, that is 10% of your income, accounting wise calculated from gross income, therefore more like 20% of net income, to the Mormon Church, but also doing significant amounts of unpaid work for them) you not only get super high social status in the eternal afterlife - no, you can then even become God YOURSELF! Now, try to improve on that!

"Countries don’t have interests: people do." Corporations don't have interests either, but they have fiduciaries.

Sometimes I feel that China is the immovable object meeting the irresistible force that is Islam. Look at this. Spandrell, how is any self respecting reactionary not supposed to respect this? https://swarajyamag.com/insta/china-is-separating-women-in-muslim-majority-xinjiang-from-pakistani-husbands-sending-them-to-re-education-camps A peep out of Saudi Arabia? No! Iran? No! Pakistan? Barely Afghanistan? No! Turkey? No! The Islamophilic West? Hahaha! The Indian secularists? Hohoho! Next time I so much as mention the name of his Imperial Highness, Emperor Xi, I will mindful to take off my shoes first.

[…] 42:00:  Mistakes Happen For A Reason (Link) […]

I had a laugh reading this, good job. Poor Buchanan. I always have the impression he would like to go much further right than he does. The transformation must have been incredible. About China being dirt poor in 1980, The Atlantic published a piece in 2015 in which it stated that the size of the Chinese economy that year was smaller than the Netherlands'. But in 2014 the increment of growth in China's GDP was equal to the Dutch economy. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/ Did you get to read it back then? If yes, do you agree with its general outlook? Lately I tend to believe less and less what I read in mainstream publications.

What about the Three Body Problem?

If corporations exist to maximize profits, and political parties exist to maximize votes, then for what purpose do religions exist?

Britain is at the cutting edge of BioLenninism https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/henry-heart-gold-card-left-12320963.amp Hahahahahahaha! There is no word in Sanskrit for Schadenfreude. The ancient Indians might have felt that it was a shameful emotion and decided to banish it from their vocabulary. We'll, I'm quite enjoying it, to be honest.

Btw,Spandrell! A showdown between you and this Gentleman would be fun. Not sure what it is about him, but I feel I would derive immense satisfaction from punching him in the nose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhXjF-g2lnE

Great insights. Just a question: Do you think that, once the BioLeninist experiment turns the West into a pile of ashes, China will taper on its milder Leninism (since leftism will be discredited) and return to a more realistic, conflict theory-based philosophy of government and legitimacy?

[…][…] if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing.“ […]