Bloody Shovel 4

Welcome to Bloody Shovel 4. The latest iteration of Spandrell's blog. Now revived as a larger community app. In addition to the old blog (which will be continued), this website now provides a discussion forum (the Board), live group chats and more functionality to come.

The blog is open to read by everyone, and there is one public chat and one public board. Everything else is login only. To login you will need an Urbit ID. They're easy to get these days. Click on the Login page for details.

Logging in allows you to leave comments on the blog, and post on the main chat and most forum boards. Also you can watch Spandrell TV.

All other functionality is exclusive to Subscribers. For more details please visit the subscribe page.

The basic building blog of this website is tags. Every blogpost and board thread is tagged. You can search for tags easily in the search page and board selection page.

If you're new here, what follows is the old text explaining what the blog is about. I'm happy to say I still stand by all my old opinions, even though of course I have new ones which I will develop further in new posts on the blog. Stay tuned.

I am a European man living in Asia who blogs about the past and future of civilization.

I started this blog in 2011, and since then I developed a few theories which have been influential. The background of my thought is that modern Civilization, more precisely modern Western Civilization, is on a death spiral. I try to use the insights taken from world history, the theory of evolution and pragmatic philosophy to understand why.

My self-selected bests posts can be found seen at this link:Top Posts

Here are some of my core theses:

Humans are social animals, and religions are the way that humans build social capital so that a culture can last and prosper. The present religions aren’t doing a very good job, so we should think about developing a new one.

Human minds do not have rational and irrational halves. Humans have evolved to care about social status, and all our behavior is designed to maximize it. Behavior which is often regarded as “irrational” should be understood as status-seeking behavior which happens to sacrifice other more immediate concerns. All people really care is about their position among their group of peers, their Dunbar circle.

All religions and ideologies contain silly, even absurd ideas. These ideas impose some costs into society, but they are necessary in order to ensure the loyalty of all members of society. In good, stable times, there is a set amount of ideas one must believe, but in times of political instability, when loyalty and cohesion in the power structure is broken, new absurd ideas and practices start to appear at an increasingly fast pace, creating societal chaos and cultural destruction.

Biology is quite simply a long history of conflict. Conflict is everywhere within and without species; entities grow different to compete better, or become more similar to prevail in conflict. Sexual species require some degree of cooperation to survive, but not a lot. The optimal mating strategy of the sexes is antagonistic, and there's no way around that. The smarter and wealtheir we get the worse the conflict will become.

Islam in its radical will continue to grow because it is good for men. Feminism lowers the incentive for men to raise families, hence the low birth rates all across the world. Islam allows men to dominate their women, which makes it easier for the average man to raise a family, hence the higher birth rates in Muslim countries. The shock that Muslim men feel on encountering Feminism in Europe is the biggest factor in driving Muslim men to Islamic terrorism.

Any group, any political body requires the loyalty of its members in order to survive. It is not easy, though, to check people for their loyalty. Besides surveillance, a common method is to force people to make costly signals, i.e. make them do things that are hard for them, which lower their status. A common way of doing this is to force people to believe absurd things, which has been recorded in Chinese history more than 2,000 years ago.

High IQ people are driven to big cities, lured good education and employment opportunities. However once they get there, they are drawn to a rat-race of competition for jobs and for sexual opportunities. This, added to the complete emancipation of women, leads to the best human capital in the world delaying marriage and childbirth, which results in extremely low birth rates, in some places (e.g. Singapore) with TFR’s below 1. This results in the systematic destruction of the genetic material which produces high productivity in our modern economies.

In order to sell a product, you make give something people want. In order to build a political movement, you must give people higher status than they presently have. The key innovation of industrial-era politics was Leninism, which built a movement with those who were socially deprived in traditional society due to their class; peasants, workers and foreigners, which were loyal to the Communist project in exchange for erasing the class and tribe distinctions of traditional society. In the post-industrial world, the mainstream political force, Progressivism, has build an effectively one-party regime by recruiting those who were lower status in both traditional and industrial society, ie. pre-1960 society due to their biological characteristics: unmarried women, homosexuals, people of different races.

Most of the theories above were developed not by myself alone, but are the result of many years through many years of debate and discussions with like-minded friends, discussions held in this blog and on other online and real venues. Some people call us reactionaries, others neoreactionaries, others #fullreactionaries. If you are more interested in these ideas you can reach me by email, interact with the community of commenters at this blog, or read other friendly sites, such as Social Matter, Thermidor, Outside in, Jim’s, or Mencius Moldbug’s.

My writing tends to have a focus on language, on using proper and accurate terms to name things, and how unclear language tends to have political intentions behind them. I also write often about international politics, which a focus on East Asia. China is growing to be a power which can rival the global hegemony of the United States. I believe that to be a good thing, but in opinion, informed by my knowledge of the people and my readings of its history, China is very different from Western powers, and has neither the interest nor the capability to run a global empire where it exports its culture and institutions.

I personally moderate the comments on the blog. I will delete Any uncivil comment, and ban reincident or hostile people.

I can be reached at site -at-spandrell●ch or on urbit as ~docteg-mothep