Bloody Shovel 4

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...

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 ...

A few weeks ago, a great artist who runs the blog Parallax Optics was kind enough to ask me for an interview on Bioleninism, to follow up on a great piece he published recently where he interviewed the man responsible for the Twitter account Woke Capital. That interview was great, and I had never done an interview before, so I thought it could be a good idea to try this new format. As it happened, the interview went great, and I very much enjoyed the process.

What follows is the whole text of the...

What do Bronze Age Pervert and Brett Kavanaugh have in common?

https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1044336637801615360

Not a lot. One is a nudist bodybuilder, a tropical Nietzsche who wants to burn the cities and reduce women to breeding stock. The other is a pasty Irish Catholic Yale graduate who was pretty much a virgin until his marriage at age 40, and to this day can't help crying like a girl when referring to the women "friends" during his life who gave him the slightest amount of atte...

A couple of interesting things happened on Twitter last week. One was this:

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/990612769182507011

I'm a great fan of Hanson from years ago. Not of his weird sci-fi stuff, that I don't get. But his socio-psychology writing is top-notch. After an incel unleashed his Beta Rage killing several people on a van attack, the very word "incel" has reached the mainstream. And the normies are flabbergasted. What's an "incel"? Involuntary celibate? Like, some people aren't ...

Happy New Year everyone. I left a bit of a cliffhanger on my last post, which I intended to resolve in a few days, but I've been pretty busy, not really in the mood to write long form.

I am sorry about that, but do note, this blog is a free service, so I hope you understand it doesn't quite take the priority of my time. Again, there's a Bitcoin address at the sidebar, so if you want me to write more, I'm sure we can arrange something.

2017 has been a quite eventful year. I guess the overall mood w...

Some things I said in Twitter yesterday. Man, 280 characters feel *way* better.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/940732305265610752

Bronze Age warfare used to be about great lords going around in their chariots, shooting arrows here and there, then getting on foot and engaging in Single Combat. Early Samurais also did that. They'd go around on their horses, shouting who they were, their house, their pedigree.

But eventually somebody figured out that winning a war is really profitable. So the...

It's 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It's been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days. People are still praising or damning the revolution. As if it mattered anymore. As if it were something more than history. As if the left and right of today had remotely anything in common with the left and right of Lenin's day.

I won't praise Lenin, an evil man. But great men ...

I propose a short ritual for when reactionaries meet each other. You go to a church, or some nice old building. Emphasis on old, more than nice. You get there, and the master says the following string, which the apprentice is to repeat.

There is no God but Gnon. Kek is his avatar. And Jordan Peterson is a pretty good prophet.

Once that is done, the master shows a red pill to the apprentice, hands it to him. And the apprentice swallows it. No. He bites it. Munchs it. He chews it. It's hard. It's bi...

After some lazy Youtube pastes, I guess it's time to write something interesting about Brexit. You'll have to forgive my delay as I was too busy getting drunk in celebration. Or in despair. I don't know.

The ghastly forces of nationalism are sweeping now across Europe, liberals say. "Racism is out of the bottle", they say. The European project, the liberal world order is in danger, they say. Oh yes, yes it is. And they are right to be frightened.

Perhaps people out of Europe don't know, but in Eur...

This is on the news:

yuri-kochiyamas-95th-birthday-5723472594468864-hp2x

Who's this bitch? Nobody knew until today. Before the Internet nobody would have ever known and nobody would have bothered to check. But now we have Wikipedia, which knows everything. And apparently this bitch is Yuri Kochiyama, a  Japanese-American psycho-bitch whose father was killed by the FBI after interrogating him about Pearl Harbor. As the good daughter of a samurai, she swore vengeance against the United States.

That'...

It's common now among scientists of the brain to propose that the brain is made out of separate modules, which receive input, process it, and produce an output, often in the form of behavior. If you've read any Haidt or Pinker you know what I'm talking about.

Letting aside the question of whether the brain actually works like that, even if we understand the idea of "module" as metaphorical, it does seem to be a productive framework.

Imagine that human beings all have a number floating above their ...

So I'm reading the Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan 水滸傳). Written in the 15th century, it's the most famous vernacular novel in Chinese history, together with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Well, I'm not actually reading it (it's long). I'm watching the 2011 TV show. Which is long too, but very neat. The Water Margin is the story of 108 men. Good men, strong, noble, virile men who are wrongly abused by the governmenet, and thus rescind their loyalty to the state, and run to the hills to form...

People used to ask me if there's any libertarian movement in East Asia. And there really isn't. Nothing. The very concept is very foreign to them. It hardly registers at all. Try to explain it to a random native and odds are they won't even get what you're trying to say.

The whole concept is so bizarre that I promptly forgot about the whole thing after living her for some time. I used to be a Mises.org reading teenager, and I have to thank my Asian hosts for making it so hard to parse the ideolog...

Ron Unz had an interesting comment at Sailer's blog a while ago:

Well put. But personally what struck me is that he had to come up with this by his own. A very intelligent man in his 50s had to personally realize this. When it should be a perfectly obvious point.

The very point of writing down history is to bring to make it easy for people to find out the patterns in human interaction, especially in politics, so that we can understand why things happen. Because the fact is that the same things hap...

Watch this.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x2j2jud\_atran2

This comes from this video, but I took the time to edit out all other speakers; it really boggles the mind why Atran even agreed to share the panel with that borderline retarded drivel. But I must also thank that he had the patience to listen to that drivel so that we can listen to his superior insight.

I'll transcribe most of it here for those who can't watch the video; but do watch it when you can.

There's a prize for those who can see the...

To expand on the Maoism post. Marquez came up with the flattery inflation theory to explain how cults of personality evolve in mechanistic terms. But the same idea can be used to explain not only Red Queen spirals of sycophancy. Any ideological innovation, both in states and inside small cults or organizations, behaves under the same principles.

Any political system, any organization, even the smallest one, is going to have people in power, and people out of power who want to be in power. Or at l...

This is going to be a long post.

The idea of Chinese people worshipping wax mangoes because some Pakistani minister didn't have time to have a proper gift made for his visit to China is indeed quite startling. Of course some people will instantly run into the old stereotype of those perfid Orientals slaves, who have been forever worshipping their tyrants as Gods on Earth. But that's bullshit. The Chinese have always been a fairly unruly bunch, and the Emperor was never worshipped as a God, unlike...

I was typing this as an answer to Jim's comment, but I might as well make it a post and be done with it. I don't really have much time to spend hours reading on religion in ancient Japan, interesting as it is. So I'll just start typing and see what comes out of it.

The gist of the issue is that Shinto was usual local animism, and the introduction of Buddhism with their holy ascetic monks and sutras and shit basically killed Shinto and replaced it for all purposes. Shinto animism was just your typ...

A female relative called from Europe to wish me a Happy New Year.

F: "What do you do out there for New Year's Eve?"

S: "Buckwheat noodles."

F: "Oh. And then? Any party after count down?"

S: "Not really. Actually no count down at all."

F: "How can you not do count down!"

S: "Count downs come from the European custom of having churches in every town with huge bells to mark the time. No churches here, so no bells. They didn't even have clocks until recently."

F: "That's sad."

S: "Actually tomorrow is the b...