The fragility of logic
There's a funny paradox in all us reactionary bloggers. On one hand we believe that politics should be abolished. That a firm, inviolable power structure would make life safer, the economy wealthier, the people happier overall. With caveats of course, but surely the modern glorification of constant struggle, the micro civil war that democracy forces upon all of us is a bad thing.
Yet we are obsessed with politics. Writing a blog, commenting everywhere, fighting the liberal hordes wherever we find them. Some more than others, but we are way more involved than the average person. I don't know about others, but I was always like that. I started to argue at primary school, my teachers hated me. Then came the internet, BBSs, Usenet, IRC, you name it, I've been there fighting for my ideals. I used to gang up with friends and crack leftist's email accounts, then send erotic stories fetched from the web to all the female names in the address book. Damn, it was fun.
As a kid I first was a fairly typical rightist partisan, by late adolescence become a libertarian, then quickly grew up and realised none of it made much sense. Not that I met any intelligent debater who convinced me of the folly of any of it. In fact at the same time that I grew out of libertarianism, came an increasing feeling of tedium over political arguments. First I quickly got bored of debating with dimwits who did little else but parrot partisan lines. But arguing with smart people wasn't much better. It was better for a while, but after a while I would reach an unbreachable wall of disagreement. Reached the point, the opponent would just deny the facts. And this happened too with good friends, people I had met in real life and had beers with. So it's not about personal enmity.
I suddenly realised that universal agreement couldn't be reached, no matter how good is your logic or your facts. It just couldn't be done. So I basically stopped arguing politics, abandoned all my chat groups, BBSs, everything. Until recently I picked up blog reading, and basically now argue about nuance with people who mostly share my inclinations. I find that the blog comment format very much discourages adversarial debates, so it's well suited for these little arguments about nuance or perspective.
But I recently saw some example of the old unbreachable wall I was talking about. See here on Yglesias' blog.
He's talking about how Brave and Smart and Awesome Marco Rubio is for defending the immigrants into America's right to live in the USA, as they are just fighting for their "hungry children". Down in the comments Steve Sailer reminds everyone of the small fact that Mexicans, which are the big majority of illegal immigrants, are hardly hungry, in fact have the second highest obesity rate in the whole world.
Busted! We have a winner! You can't argue against that. Yet look at that kid, amusingly called 'reason', arguing against Sailer saying that "Obesity and malnourishment are not mutually exclusive". Which is the lamest argument ever. But he got 5 likes! The most liked comment in the whole damn thread. Then see Alcazar's rebuttal. Nobody gives a shit.
You can't argue against these people. They are just denying fact. It's not a river in Egypt, it's the whole fucking Pacific Ocean. OneSTDV recently found out the same thing, that you can't argue with passionate liberals. It's not only liberals though. Try to talk some sense to any cult follower. Or to a sports fan. It's not even a modern disease. A year ago I totally lost faith on the power of debate, after reading about the Muslim philosopher Al Ghazali.
Anyone today would fairly characterise the muslim world as an intellectual wasteland. All study but that of islamic theology is verboten, and Islamic theology is a mind-numbing legalistic affair which is only focused on whether Muhammad sayings justify a man eating goat meat while the second phase of the moon is starting, and whether it's a sin if an earthquake happens, and you happened to be nude with a boner on, and you happen to fall just right into your aunt's vagina (true story).
But it wasn't always like this. I won't parrot the leftist lie that Europe owes its philosophy to Islam, but the Islamic Golden Age actually happened, and it was quite neat. Muslims conquered much of the smartest half of the Roman Empire, and they did learn a lot from it. They produced Al Kindi, Al Khwarizmi, Avicenna. Which were quite awesome by the time. Avicenna even came close to the scientific method. People in Europe rushed to Toledo's translation school to get their hands in this material. It was good. People argued a lot, ideas were getting out. Formal logic, experimentation. The laws of physics. Good stuff.
But then Al Ghazali came. And like the Yglesiases of today, he had little time for logical argument. He said out and loud, for anyone who would hear him, that the philosophers were a bunch of frauds. All they say is bullcrap. He said there is no cause and no effect. There is no law saying that a flame necessarily burns cotton. From the wiki:
...our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.
Allah is great, and all is his doing. There are no patterns in reality. To patterns to exist would mean that Allah is predictable, and that's a slight. So he is denying logic, the laws of physics, everything. As simple as that. All he had to do, he morose looking mystic from the eastern desert, to win a debate against the foremost minds of his civilisation, was to say: fuck you. I deny your reality.
fuck you
And he won the argument! He is regarded as "the single most influential Muslim after the Islamic prophet Muhammad". This guy! Shortly after, Averroes saw the disaster that this man's thought would cause for the Muslim world, and sought to refute him, but to no avail. Al Ghazali won the debate, and hence the Islamic world has stopped thinking.
This could happen to us too. Logic is fragile. Facts are weak. It all depends in the willingness of the human mind to accept them. Over the last 50 years we have had our fair share of Al Ghazali's in the West. Keynes. Steven Jay Gould. Jared Diamond. Fuck, the whole western intellectual establishment is based on "stop thinking, equality must be achieved". We dissenters believe that the inherent madness in the progressive creed will eventually cause collapse, and afterwards sanity will prevail and we will keep on with Civilisation. I'm sure Averroes thought the same thing: he's just one sophist, sanity will prevail. But 100 years later the Mongols stormed Baghdad, and Islam effectively ceased being a civilisation, meagerly surviving today as a leech of the West. But who will we leech from?
30 comments
replyYou're a utilitarian, and as bad as Yglesias.
-
reply
Everything. As I've said before, you rational, logical types are good at putting others beliefs under the blowtorch, but never your own. Of course, you know this, by your own epistemological standard. You and Yglesias are vulgar utilitarians, a dime a dozen, you just squabble over the means. To someone who's beyond such petty arguments, it is boring, intensely so. So I'd like to see if you're even able to justify your fanatical faith in utilitarianism; seeing as how you unjustifiably attacked poor old Al Ghazali.
-
reply
Poor old Al Ghazali invites you to live in his native Khorasan to enjoy the fruits of his epistemological breakthroughs.
-
reply
You know, I'd trade places in an instant an Anglo-Saxon from the 7th Century. I don't care for any civilisational advancement you throw at me. Give me kin, kith and Christianity; you materialist suckholes can go blow yourselves a new head for all I care, you're not worth the shit of your ancestors.
-
reply
Once again, I go too far with my polemic. I apologise, you're one of the good ones, which is why I bother commenting on your blog.
-
reply
Well you couldn't do the flames and cotton experiment in 7th century Britain as there was no cotton. I insist in your considering Khorasan. I hear there are nomad tribes around still.
-
reply
The paradox is easily explained: (a) only people interested in politics will figure out what's wrong with ours (b) you may not be interested in democracy, but democracy is interested in you OTOH, it's worth understanding that you cannot change anything, and that therefore maybe you should just let go and live your life. (Personally, I think you should keep interested so you'll keep writing and I can keep reading your blog. But that's something else.) I note that Moldbug advocates passivism ("pussyism" might be a better label) as the Official Reaction Strategy:
The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure. The logic of the steel rule is simple. As a reactionary, you don't believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old.</blockquote
-
reply
The trick is to figure out how to talk about politics without talking about politics. Barring issues of data input, apolitical observers' offhand comments are almost always more accurate than anything people who Care About Politics can put out. Why? My guess is that it's partially recognition (conscious or otherwise) of the restrictions politics places on what can be said, but mostly group dynamics. If you call yourself a liberal, a conservative, a Marxist, whatever (I'm still not sure about "reactionary", but I'm beginning to think it's not worth the risk), that gets incorporated into your identity; to challenge the creed which you have sworn your allegiance to, which you have defined yourself as having sworn your allegiance to, is to challenge your identity, so data that doesn't fit gets received as a personal attack against you. It's not impossible for someone to blow their lie-swallowing circuits and jump out of their camp, but it's likely that they'll just end up doing what Mamet did: jumping into another and acting exactly the same as they did before but with different group identifiers. Becoming aware of the process is the first part, but it's very hard to do; it helps to read Robert Anton Wilson and swap in a hippie-zetetic camp for a while. As for getting out of the political identification process... well, that's probably impossible. Not even science can do it, and there are standards of proof there that don't (can't?) exist in politics.
-
reply
"As for getting out of the political identification process… well, that’s probably impossible. Not even science can do it, and there are standards of proof there that don’t (can’t?) exist in politics." The problem is, science has never looked at politics as analogous to anything in nature. If it had, what would immediately have jumped out at scientists is the similarity between r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology and political ideology. r/K Theory says nature produces two psychologies. It does this because nature produces two environments, essentially. One environment rewards fitness, and culls the less fit. The other environment doesn't cull for fitness, and provides free resources to everyone. If the environment culls for fitness, then individuals try to make small numbers of offspring, while investing very heavily in each offspring to make them as fit as possible, hoping a few highly fit offspring can carry their genes forward. If the environment doesn't reward fitness, then individuals will focus on producing as many low quality offspring as possible, since every one will have an equal chance at surviving as do the fit. The K-selected environment is the one they identify as favoring fitness. It usually arises because there are not enough resources to support everyone. As a result, individuals end up competing for resources, and those who are less fit will die, due to resource insufficiency. In this environment, those who survive will tend to have five traits. Competitiveness/aggressiveness allows one to get into dangerous competitions and acquire resources. Here, those who don't want to compete will be culled. Monogamy is a competitive mating strategy designed to give your offspring advantages in competition. If you're highly fit, you find a highly fit mate, monopolize it's fitness with monogamy, and all your offspring will enjoy that fitness in their competitions, while the offspring of other's will not. Those who find a highly fit mate, but don't monopolize it will see their offspring thrown into a competition with a bunch of highly fit half siblings (none of who will have the non-monopolizer's genes), and this will be a disadvantage that will be culled over time. Two-parent rearing is favored, since you want a child who wins his competition, and carry's your genes forward. Two parents produce fitter offspring than one. Better provisioned and nourished, better protected, better trained. Later age at first intercourse, heading towards abstinence until monogamy. If you enter the competition for a mate before you are mature enough to compete, you might get culled, in the competitive, K-selected environment. Also, if you wait until you are fully mature, you will be as fit as possible, and thus be able to pull a higher quality mate, for a monogamous relationship. This will produce fitter offspring than getting out and mating while immature. Finally, since intense K-selection tends to evolve into group competition, eventually, K-selection will favor loyalty to in-group, disregard for out-group interests, altruism towards in-group, and other pro-group traits (including monogamy which is strongly favored in group competition, since it eliminates infighting and jealousies, fostering greater group cohesion). Conservatives favor competitive, free market economic models, with winners and losers, we favor war when attacked, we even favor carrying guns, and shooting those who attack us. We support monogamy/marriage, high-investment two-parent rearing designed to produce as competitive a child as possible, and even abstinence until monogamy as an ideal. We embody every K-selected trait, for the reasons K-selection favors them – competition, and a desire to be the best. The opposite of K-selection is r-selection. It occurs when there is no advantage to being fit. This can occur during a surge in resource availability, or because some form of unselective mortality is killing the population back to the point the environment produces far more resources than the population can consume. (Think of disease like malaria, or often, predation). As an example, every rabbit has far more grass than it can eat, so no rabbit needs to compete with other rabbits to get food. In r-selection, free resource availability eliminates the need to be fitter than others, and abolishes competition. In such an environment, choosing to fight, and endure risk of injury is disadvantageous, compared to fleeing, eating free food elsewhere, and reproducing. So the first trait r-selected psychologies exhibit is competition aversion/fleeing from conflict. Second, since all offspring will survive, even if less fit, every offspring produced is a winner. Those who do the best are those who produce as many offspring as possible, so males will mate with as many females as possible, to increase offspring number, while females mate with as many males as possible, to give their offspring genetic variability. So the second r-selected trait is promiscuity. Third, r-selected organisms are prone to low-investment single parenting. Males are out mating as much as possible, while females want to create as many broods as possible. Since the environment is not culling the less fit, any cost to the offspring's abilities is meaningless. Fourth, r-selected organisms will try to mate as early as possible in life. This maximizes offspring output, and in prey species, this will see to it they are less likely to be eaten prior to mating. Finally, since there is no competition in r-selection, group competition never emerges, and thus r-types will exhibit no loyalty to in-group, disregard for out-group interests, or other group competitive traits. Indeed, such notions will puzzle them. Again, in Liberalism, every facet of their ideology is embodied by the r-strategy. Competition is bad, losers must not lose, the government provides everyone with free resource availability, regardless of ability. Economics must be anti-competitive, War is never worth it, even all guns must be outlawed so we can all be good little sheep, whether we want to or not. Liberals support promiscuity, have more partners, have shorter relationships (see GSS data, or go to http://neuropolitics.org/defaultdec07.asp), and they support single parenting, as the debate over Murphy Brown showed. Sex ed must be given to ten year old's, without telling them ten year old's that ten year old's having sex is bad. And of course, Liberals are aghast at the Conservative desire to show loyalty to in-group. Every facet of Liberalism is about abandoning greatness and success, and abolishing anything which fosters it. Liberalism is r-selection, it's just that nobody ever looked. If anybody wants more information on this, including a raft of scientific papers supporting this and attempting to dissect the mechanisms behind it, stop by my site at www.anonymousconservative.com . I am not territorial over this work or concept, so if you want to promote this around yourself, please feel free. I am on a mission to make everyone view politics as an intellectual manifestation of r/K Selection Theory, and see Liberals labeled (honestly) as r-types. My hope is to someday hear Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck simply refer to Liberals as “the r-types in our society.” If anyone can help bring about this day, I would greatly appreciate it.
-
reply
I understand your point but the problem I see with r/K is that they are not totally exclusive. Europe is a K type territory with a patchwork of r type gypsies who leech the K types. Africa is r territory but you do see the odd K tribe, and women do care very much about who they mate with. So there is always some concept of fitness. Liberals penchant for sex is not r selection; they are not having kids. It's hedonism. Sex feels good, people should have more of it, consequences be damned.
-
reply
I'm not saying it operates as an r-strategy today, per se (though it will return to that as smart Liberals die without reproducing, and the offspring of the fast breeding Idiocracy takes their place, populating the Liberal cohort with more fecund specimens). What I'm looking to see, is how did Liberals get these urges (which are so different from ours) in them? Where does an ideology get it's strange accumulation of issue positions? Why is it Conservatism groups together gun freedom, marriage, dislike for third world immigration, war when threatened, and free market economics? Why is it feminists tend to be antigun (especially since they are so aggressive), pro-sexual liberation, anit-war, supportive of single parenting, and supportive of income redistribution and immigration? Why do we only have two main ideologies, grouping such disparate issues, instead of a giant amorphous cloud of individuals who adopt separate platforms, each with a unique mix of issue positions. Every election, the Conservative and the Liberal each get 98.5% or more of the vote, while the Libertarian gets less than 1%? Did the two ideologies just accumulate issue positions by chance, or do these issues travel together for a specific reason, relating to human psychology? I'm looking at these ideologies, and saying, where do we see something similar, in terms of behavioral drives, in nature? If I found an animal, which was averse to competition, promiscuous, single-parenting, mated earlier, and had no loyalty to in-group, could I infer anything about the environment it was designed for? Now today, technology changes the outcomes of these drives, but the drives are still identical. Absent the technology of contraception, and a keen understanding of how babies are made, Liberals (even the smart ones) would still be promiscuous single parent-ers. And just as in nature, that r-strategy would produce a higher reproductive rate. As I said above, Liberalism, behaviorally, is identical to the r-selected reproductive strategy. And Conservatism's behavioral dries are all identical to those which motivate a K-strategy. I can't see how that could possibly be coincidence. The two main ideologies, which fundamentally separate the way we each want our world ordered, and they each are in lockstep with every facet of r and K? What this says to me, is sometime in our past, we had two environments, one r-selective, one K-selective, and these imbued our species with two very different psychologies. And of course we did have two environments, during our worldwide migration, when one group fought in an overpopulated home territory for limited resources. Meanwhile another took off to new uninhabited territories where resources had not yet been consumed, and then turned this into a survival strategy, continuing to flee every time resources grew scarce, spreading us across the globe. Today Liberals test highly for preference of novel environments while the gene associated with adoption of Liberalism (DRD4 7r) is still found in high numbers in migratory populations today. “Europe is a K type territory with a patchwork of r type gypsies who leech the K types. Africa is r territory but you do see the odd K tribe, “ Once we completed our migration, the pure r-selection of a new uninhabited environment ended. The only r-types which would have survived would have been those which adapted strategies to persist in the new K-environment. During the migration, untold numbers of r-selected individuals were in contact with K-types in the gray area of resource availability, between overpopulated K-territory and uninhabited r-territory. I would guess the selective pressures there, which were between pure K and r, were beginning to lay the ground work for this. Some r's had the ability to parasitize the productivity of the K-types in their groups, while posing as K's, when resources began to grow scarce. Others might even function as K's, though they might have still preferred r. Those few r's who adapted strategies to persist in K-selection, became the seeds which would pass down those adaptations to the next generation of r's. Over time, Liberalism became more complicated than mere r-selection, especially as it developed the ability to navigate complex social hierarchies, seeking personal gain as it still avoided competition and conflict, and followed an r-mating strategy. The one constant was the desire to avoid fitness-favoring competition, and follow the rest of the r-strategy. “and women do care very much about who they mate with. So there is always some concept of fitness” There is in r-selection too, but the mate assessments are performed more cursorily, and generally favor flashiness, with little concern for detailed assessments of fitness, and long term supportiveness or loyalty. K-selection tends to look at fitness closer for longer before paring, and it will closely assess loyalty/supportiveness as well. >Liberals penchant for sex is not r selection; they are not having kids. It’s hedonism. Sex feels good, people should have more of it, consequences be damned. r-selected organisms are psychologically programmed with urges to maximize mating, and minimize rearing investments. This motivates the single moms to kick kids out as soon as possible to make way for the next brood, while it allows dads to abandon the kids to find other mates. To me, birth control and abortion are the ultimate forms of low-investment rearing, to maximize mating. Rather than “burden” yourself with a baby (Obama's term), you either prevent conception or kick it out before it is born, and then you are free to go out mating again. Again, I'm looking in nature for a psychology which is behaviorally averse to all fitness-favoring competitions, thinks lots of sex with lots of people is a good thing, thinks single parenting is fine for kids, is supportive of children exposed to sex at an early age, and has little or no loyalty to in-group. That is the entire Liberal platform, and it is the perfect r-strategy. Think about it, and then picture a society. It's highly productive, and resources are plentiful. The citizens are compassionate, so they make enough excess resources freely available, so that those who don't have resources can survive comfortably without suffering. If r-selection thrives on plentiful resources, and nobody suffering adversity due to failure (it does), that society is r-selected. If r-selection is Liberalism, it should become more Liberal over time. Would it? You can't fully grasp the Liberal's thought processes, or what is happening to our culture, without picturing r/K Selection. Nice Blog, BTW.
-
reply
Thanks. Bipartidism is a puzzling fact, but you needn't necessarily map it to r/K duality. You can map it as well to differences in brain structure, or simply to basic conflict strategy: people tend to gang up to gain power, enemies must also gang up to contest the same power, you necessarily end up with 2 big armies, i.e. the minimum to fight a war. History is full of civil wars with 2 bands, with don't really mean there were only 2 opinions available. r/K originally mean reproductive strategies in different environments. If Europe has been overwhelmingly K selecting for thousands of years, how are European countries today majority leftist? How did that happen? Again your framing is exclusively American. Europe has conservative parties too, but not even one argues for free gun ownership, or for further free trade. The axis is mostly about attitudes towards the Catholic Church or about the labor market. "Humans" didn't have two environments. Different groups of humans had different environments, which forced different strategies. If you are arguing à la Robin Hanson that modern leftism is a revival of hunter-gatherer psychology, that doesn't exactly map to r/K anyway. European hunters where K selecting, tropicals were r selecting. The environment today is exactly the same for liberals and conservatives, and if anything conservatives are having more children and investing less in each. The only point you have for your theory is the fact that both r selection and liberalism follow from abundance, but that's about it. If you want to strengthen your theory, please try to give more concrete examples of r and K selecting societies. How it works in Africa, how it works everywhere else. Abstraction makes things simple, but often just too simple.
-
reply
I don't want to fill your blog with pages of my research, but pull the file at http://www.anonymousconservative.com/modern.pdf On differences in brain strucutre, Liberals have smaller amygdala. Amygdala deficiency produces docility, hypersexuality, and low investment rearing. Presumably hypersexuality would produce earlier age at first interocurse as well.
-
reply
I hit post too soon on that last one. Please disregard it. I don't want to fill your blog with pages of my research, but pull the file at http://www.anonymousconservative.com/modern.pdf at your leisure, which actually discusses the brain structure work, as well as genetic work supporting this. On differences in brain structure, Liberals have smaller amygdalae. Amygdala studies in humans and monkeys notes that defciency produces docility, hypersexuality, and low investment rearing. Presumably hypersexuality would produce earlier age at first intercourse as well. Aversive stimulus from the amygdala motivates costly social behaviors like sacrifice for loyalty. If r/K is real, and a fundamental Darwinian psychology, it will manifest in the brain somehow, since that is where behavior originates. That a structure different in Liberals, is involved in every facet of r/K doesn't mean r/K isn't at play. It just means that the structure is the mechanism which produces r/K. “If Europe has been overwhelmingly K selecting for thousands of years, how are European countries today majority leftist? How did that happen?” K-selection means the unfit get culled by the fit in a competition for insufficient resources. How long has it been since those who exhibit diminished productivity died in Europe? The last instance I am aware of was the plague, which preferentially killed the malnourished (and which then produced the Renaissance). Since then there have been two World Wars alone, culling those who showed loyalty to in-group. Like it or not, Europe has been pretty r-selected for some time now, and it is continuing to head further left with every generation. Britain now has massive increases in single parenting, and France just went Socialist. It will get worse before it gets better. “If you are arguing à la Robin Hanson that modern leftism is a revival of hunter-gatherer psychology, that doesn’t exactly map to r/K anyway. European hunters where K selecting, tropicals were r selecting. “ No, I am not even close to that. Hunter gatherer plays no role. Early r's and K's were both hunters/gatherers. The only difference was in the population density (and resultant competition) which they tolerated. “The environment today is exactly the same for liberals and conservatives, and if anything conservatives are having more children and investing less in each.” Birth control has changed everything on that front, right off the top. Second, the state operates with a fundamental perception that nobody should suffer any cost due to resource limitation. In America, we even give free cellphones with minutes and texts. That is r-selection, and it will produce a gradual increase in leftism, until the leftism gets so bad it collapses the entire system. And I have not seen any research saying Conservatives are investing less in offspring, though they are producing more. In fact, from GSS to Gallup, data would seem to say Conservatives are intolerant of single parenting, births out of wedlock, infidelity, etc. In America, at least, single parenting is an epidemic among the poor, and lower class in the inner cities, who tend to vote for the Liberal. I'd have to see a cite on anything which contradicts all of that, and even then I'd tend to go with GSS, unless the source was indisputable. “The only point you have for your theory is the fact that both r selection and liberalism follow from abundance, but that’s about it.” See the paper, I took it a lot farther than what I put here. The genetics lines up, the studies on rearing and r/K in animals and humans lines up (even the gene which produces r in the rearing studies is the same gene which is involved in producing Liberalism), the personality traits line up. And again, go to established literature, and every trait which is documented as r and K, line up perfectly with what the literature say are the traits of Liberalism and Conservatism. Those studies were developed in isolation, and yet they describe the exact same behavioral drives in each, uniting attitudes on free, rule governed competition with sexual behavior and rearing strategies. That in itself is intriguing, and says this may tell us what Liberalism is designed for in nature. “If you want to strengthen your theory, please try to give more concrete examples of r and K selecting societies.” Check my paper for the Hippie/counterculture example, and then look above to when Yersia pestis culled those who weren't eating sufficient amounts of food to mount an immune defense. There are more, from the plenty of the Roman Empire's success leading to gradually increased welfare, diminished military virtue, trust of imported foreigners/barbarians, and sexual liberation, to the Swedish Empire's abundance and subsequent decline (followed by a mass exodus as resources grew scarce). Then there is Early America - a fitness favoring environment which actually culled the less fit (The lost Roanoke colony), and which needed to be seized from a native population which was at the carrying capacity of the environment, and willing to fight for it. It was highly fitness favoring, and thus highly K, and it produced a highly Conservative group of founders. It is even documented that those who colonized it had higher paternal investment. I have been assembling all of this for some time now. IF you want to see an early pre-Liberal psychology in nature, look to the r-selected organism. And if you want to know why men want the freedom to compete, you need to look to K-selection.
-
reply
Never liked that piece from Moldbug. I don't buy the "teach by example" thing. I think the most effective way of convincing others is force or deceit Perhaps that's why I'm obsessed with politics.
-
reply
Depends on what kind of force. I'm not sure what the best way is, but one very good way to convert people to X is to make X cool, or otherwise socially necessary. The threat of ostracism is a very powerful motivator. So, are there any neocameralist rock bands?
-
reply
It's very important to know what democrats, anti-racists, NGOniks, etc. are up to so that (1) you can dodge bullets and (2) you can make sure your kids don't get pwned by the Cathedral. (2) is particularly important -- what if your daughter gets brainwashed into going to Africa with the Peace Corps and comes back thoroughly raped? What if your son internalizes the feminist narrative and turns into a cringing beta? What if your wife watches Eat, Pray, Love and decides to give the carousel another whirl? Forewarned is forearmed.
-
reply
Raped? hah. Got an acquaintance who is from a very rich and old fashioned rural family, those who still have a distinct accent. Well their girl went to university, then to the US for a masters degree. Now she works for some UN thing in central Africa. She is now the 'junior wife' of some African she works with. She's basically just screwing with him but Africans are more socially conservative than she is! She's a 3 in looks, 2σIQ. Funny if it weren't so sad. My woman ain't seeing Eat pray love, but she wouldn't let me see Something Wild.
-
reply
The junior wife! The noble savage! The carousel! If only Tom Wolfe would write a novel about her. Peace Corps rape is real and the Peace Corps actively covers it up while recruiting current Malcolm X scholars to become future "Malcolm X scholars," if you get what I'm saying. See here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11corps.html?pagewanted=all
-
reply
And OMG, this line: "But whether such a bill would pass Congress is unclear. Representative Niki Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts, is co-sponsoring Mr. Poe’s bill, but other Democrats are skittish about it. They worry that the legislation, and Wednesday’s hearing, might be used to undermine the Peace Corps — the legacy of a Democratic president — and cut its funding." Funding cuts for the Peace Corps vs. getting other people's daughters raped? An easy choice for congressional Democrats. The war on women is, it seems, bipartisan.
-
reply
“My own experience,” she said, “was that the treatment by the Peace Corps was worse than the rape.” Well at least it's not the white patriarchy's fault. It does make me feel happy with my non-elite status. It's the best antidote against status whoring. We should tell our women. Being elite isn't that good. Yeah you go to nice cocktail parties but your daughters get raped in Mozambique.
-
reply
Fascinating post, although I still think arguing the case & calmly presenting counter evidence in front of liberals is essential and worthwhile. Sure most will disagree and call you names, but most readers don't post comments and a significant number may start to think you have a point. Also... “When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.” http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2902
-
reply
[…] replaced with the slavish adherence to a creed that has empirically provided little but decay; for history tells us that those who prioritize keeping the faith of the state over winning lose. We should also worry […]
-
reply
[…] and civilization. The tinkered Canon (work in progress). Logic and absurdity. Anticoncepts. Economic pseudoscience. Awkward geezers. Genetic failure. Cat lady […]
-
reply
[…] and civilization. The tinkered Canon (work in progress). Logic and absurdity.Anticoncepts. Economic pseudoscience. Awkward geezers. Genetic failure. Cat lady […]
-
reply
[…] Turns out it doesn’t really need to be preposterous or unfalsifiable. You can say obviously false things and still get away with it as long as your frame is strong enough. Or as long as you have […]
-
reply
[…] replaced with the slavish adherence to a creed that has empirically provided little but decay; for history tells us that those who prioritize keeping the faith of the state over winning lose. We should also worry […]
Now that's a slur
lol, brevity is enforced by my phone. Do you think utilitarianism is a sophisticated and defensible philosophy?
What does that have to do with anything? Do you think fire burns cotton or it's all Allah's whim?