Bloody Shovel 4

“So what do you stand for?” I've been asked... surprisingly few times. There used to be a tradition of intellectual debate; adversarial, but polite. With clear rules so people didn't abuse their time to shill their own stuff instead of contributing to the actual debate. But we don't do debates in these parts; we never have. Which is unfortunate. Understandable, though, to the extent public debates are still a thing they've become an incredibly stale, cringe, Reddit-ish spectacle (I wish we h...

First of all, welcome to the new blog. Or should I say the new website. A lot more than a blog going on now, we have a discussion forum now (the Board), a live Chat room, a Twitter-like Feed, a book, a wiki, a merch store, and even a TV station, with a cozy live chat inside. And of course the good old blog, back after a year hiatus. Everything is running on Urbit.

I apologize for the long delay, and for the domain change. Long story short, I fucked up, and was too busy to fix it properly. Given ...

England's Queen Elizabeth is dead. 96 years old.

She was obviously a very likeable lady. Discreet, polite. I dislike vacuous words which are hard to define, which people usually use because they sound old and educated. "Dignity" is one of those words; you can search this blog and you'll probably never see me use that word. But if someone could be described as "dignified" Queen Elizabeth II was one of those. May she rest in peace.

It was just very hard to dislike that lady, as a person. The people ...

Hey, it's been a while.

Apologies for not writing much these days, but you know, shit happens, people form families, move countries, change jobs, get busy with this and that. And they just get plain old and run out of things to say. Even if they won't admit to it. Looking at you, sir.

Or shit just gets so bad that there's little to say either way. I have plenty I could write about, but I hardly see the point. I certainly have better things to do, and even if I didn't… would it help? The utter an...

Apparently Bronze Age Pervert was suspended from Twitter. Perhaps permanently. Though I imagine he'll be back.

People have been asking where I am; and well, I'm right here. Not blogging much, true, but I've been busy, so my time online has been almost exclusively on Urbit.

You can find me there, every day, most of my waking hours. Reach out by sending a DM to ~docteg-mothep.

You can also send me an email, but I don't check that often. I am also on Telegram but won't be for much longer. It's always ...

As I said yesterday, I was just banned from Twitter. They didn't give me a reason, nor a way to restore my account. I did file an appeal, and maybe I get lucky, but I doubt it. My ban was part of a massive purge of thousands of accounts, many of them much milder than myself.

I won't register a new account. I'm done. I've pumped Jack Dorsey's bags with my stellar content for long enough. Screw that faggot, his CIA handlers, his Saudi investors and his troon moderators. The Twitter link at the navb...

I'm accused of timing my last post just before the New York Times launched it's much awaited hit-piece on Scott Alexander.

It's all a funny coincidence. But funny it is. Indeed Scott Alexander was the subject of a post I wrote exactly 5 years ago where I also mention the story of Ying Bu.

It's been interesting to see Scott's development since then. On one hand he hasn't changed much. He's got progressively more famous, and deservedly so. He's also got progressively more fat. Which is sad, but not ...

Time for our next stratagem, the 反間計.

It's rather hard to translate the name itself. Literally it's "counter-between". A "between" is what foreign agents were called in ancient China. Half spies, half agents to sow discord in the enemy ranks.

Original text and translation follows:

疑中之疑比之自內不自失也

Doubts inside doubts. Befriend from the inside, you won't lose.

間者使敵自相疑忌也 反間者因敵之間而間之也

Secret agents [lit. "betweens"] spread doubt within you...

Today it's Stratagem 32:

Commentary: This is a bit of a stretched metaphor, but in a sense we're already running an empty fortress trick, and we have for a long time. Just that it's not we running the trick, but us being forced to.

The Left is strong and has dominated most wings of government for centuries. Their rhetoric however makes them repeat the mantra that they are the underdog, the weak and vulnerable, while the right is this scary mass of violent power, eager to attack them at any time.

In...

Biden was inaugurated yesterday. Didn't watch the thing, it's kinda depressing, so I went back to my old disinterested, cynical self. I used to be very happy ignoring mainstream politics. Damn you, Trump, you pulled me out of my detached cool lifestyle. Well it was more the pepes and other 4chan memes created since 2016. Damn you guys. I used to not care. I didn't want to care. But you draw me in. It was great. I had a lot of fun. But it was wrong. We all knew it was wrong, that it wouldn't get ...

There's a nifty book in China called the 三十六計. The "36 stratagems". Nobody knows when the book was written, though it must be old, the first mention of it goes back to the 5th century AD, when it was attributed to Tan Daoji 譚道濟, a general for the Liu Song Dynasty. The consensus is that he did indeed write it.

The 36 stratagems are organized as six different scenarios, with six stratagems each. Each stratagem is phrased as a catchy four letter idiom, the staple of Chinese vocabulary,...

Hi, it's been a while.

I don't know if anyone was expecting my take on the 2020 US Presidential election. I mean, I called it. I won a few hundred bucks betting that Trump would lose. But of course I'm not happy about it.

I mean, I'm personally cool. Quite cool really. US global power is coming down, and fast. Pressure on China will soften up (not disappear), Europe is starting to show some balls in asserting some independent foreign policy. See the EU-China Investment Treaty, and Germany actually...

Well well, tomorrow is the big day.

All big elections are interesting but the 2020 US presidential election is the most bizarre I can remember. People worthy of respect can be seen holding the whole range of opinions: Trump will get a landslide, Biden will get a landslide, it will be very close, etc.

So which is it? Who the hell knows. I sure don't. You, however, might have some idea. If you do, please head to https://spandrell.com/uselection2020 where I published a nice interactive survey.

Best of...

Lee Tenghui is dead. 97 years old. I won't wish he rest in peace, as his life was dedicated to making peace harder on earth. He was the man who single handedly prevented Taiwan from reuniting with China, thus prolonging the life of the American Empire in Asia for a good 3 decades. Of course I exaggerate, but only a little. The man really was a force of nature. Readers of historiography might now that there's a factional battle among historians, between the proponents of the "Great Man theory" wh...

Hi everyone, welcome to Bloody Shovel 3. It's only been one year since Bloody Shovel 2, but at lot has been going on and I decided to move the blog away into what I believe will be a more secure setting. Probably permanent.

Not that Bloody Shovel 2 was canceled; it was not. I'm not that famous, yet. Bloody Shovel 1 wasn't canceled either, I myself decided to move out of wordpress.com after they canceled Heartiste. I'd rather be proactive with these things and not be stabbed in the back unawares.

T...

So it seems that hostility to China is now official American policy. Redgov, i.e. the Military Industrial Complex has been pushing it for quite a while, and for good reason: they want war, or at least a plausible threat of war so they can get bigger budgets and waste more money so they can embezzle their cut and invest it in things like Theranos. That's their job. And it happens that the narrow pecuniary interests of the Military Industrial Complex now fit very well with the electoral interests ...

People have been asking for a blog post on the coronavirus crisis, and I've demurred. Mostly because I have little facts to add. I'm no virologist, no epidemiologist, I basically know nothing useful about the virus, and I'm not in the business of making up shit or speculating for clicks. I try to offer insight in this blog and I really have no insight about viruses.

Is the virus man-made? I don't know. Is it just the flu? I don't know. Did China release it on purpose? I don't know. Was it made by...

Hi everyone, sorry for neglecting the blog. I blame glycine: I'm the descendant of a long line of night-owls, but I'm able to sleep early now for the first time ever. Alas I've always been a late-night writer, and my healthy lifestyle was getting in the way of my blogging. Trade-offs. I should think of something.

Also apologies to my commenters: the comment notification system was broken so I had a backlog of unapproved comments: they're all online now.

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Years ago, back in the times before Biole...

There's an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don't actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environ...

A while ago I wrote a post on tax law, proposing some ideas that I thought could plausibly make for a better existence if implemented by a sane government.

Reactions to that were mixed. It was, admittedly, an uncharacteristic post. I am not a "policy wonk", I'm usually more interested in deeper questions of history and human psychology as it applies to our political environment. As such, some people said that that sort of piece, proposing some tweaks to tax policy or this or that law is not just ...