Bloody Shovel 4

What are we all doing here? By 'here', I mean the internet, by 'we', I mean the sort of person who very kindly reads this blog of mine regularly and/or writes similar stuff in blogs or Twitter or whatever.

My original goal was to understand what is leftism, why leftist people exist and why our societies are decaying by enabling leftism to dominate all the levers of power. After years of writing, years of reading, and years of talking with like-minded gentlemen over the internet, I think I've succ...

A few weeks ago I had a short exchange with Nick Land on Twitter on the issue of debt.

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1115053094654451712

Debt is a huge issue, a big part of what's wrong with the fabric of modernity, a big factor of what's driving modern civilization into collapse. And yet it has remained largely underdiscussed in these circles. Moldbug, who to the end still remained something of a libertarian, did have a keen interest in finance, and after the great crisis of 2008 made a

Tl;dr. It really is that simple.

Long version:

I’ve never voted. Well, I lie, I voted once. I was 18, and my mother sorta forced me. It also felt like some rite of passage, you know, you grow to 18 and you get to do grown-up stuff like voting, having a voice in the political process. I’ve never been into rituals though, and I felt stupid immediately after putting my vote in the box. I didn’t even like the guy! I thought he was retarded. All of them, really. I still do.

Of course ever time the...

Everybody reading this blog may have noticed that I was ecstatic about Trump's election. I was really happy. I went out that night and spent days giggling with a MAGA hat on watching the progressives melt down.

That was of course a tribal feeling. I used to look down on people who behaved like that when their soccer team won. "It's not your team, dumbass, it's just a bunch of overpaid foreigner jocks". But the same way that most middle class men in the West put their identity in sports, I've alw...

Cost disease. Why is everything so expensive?

This is the asexual take. This is the sexual take.

Not much to add myself. Just a small observation. Look at the graph:

primary_scost

I wonder what the graph of "female participation" looks like. That would include teachers, administrators, lobbyists, women with influence in the school district, etc.

Methinks that graph would look rather similar to the blue one. Perhaps with some time lag.

This also should apply to the other stuff: healthcare, subway const...

Or, making virtue out of lack of lack of other paths for upward mobility.

The most important topic in social science, the humanities or however you want to call it, is what drives cultural change. Things change, that is obvious enough, and humans have been discussing it since they ever started doing abstract thinking. We understand a lot of change now. Physics tell us why the physical world changes: by obeying the laws of physics. Biology tells us why living things change: through evolution. What...

I found an interesting tweet by a Japanese academic. Robin Hanson might enjoy it.

https://twitter.com/tarareba722/status/730612364974772224

Let me translate: History shows that when humans moved from foraging into farming, this allowed for people who did not need to engage in hunting (bureaucrats, scholars, warriors, etc.), which vastly expanded the range of human activity.

Nowadays we force professionals to do sales, to participate in long meetings, to type their own reports and other paperwork, ...

So the Japanese government has officially announced it's considering bringing 200,000 immigrants per year, in order to stave off demographic decline.

They have announced it as part of the Growth Strategy driving this marvelous thing they call Abenomics.

I don't need to say how misguided this idea that bringing migrants from wherever is going to result in economic growth. It should be obvious that in the civilized world, actual economic growth is impossible. Not gonna happen.

Now some might bring up...

A long standing debate inside the reactosphere is the question about what is driving the push for mass immigration into developed countries. Why would anyone argue for bringing millions of, to use PC speak, low-skilled migrants from Third World countries? Yes they are cheap, but it's well established than in the long run they cost more in externalities than whatever you could save with their cheap labor. Not to speak of criminality, dragging down of school performance and just general tackiness.

I wrote recently about the High Level Equilibrium Trap in which China had fallen to in the modern era. Point was that Chinese labor and infrastructure was just efficient enough so that developing new machinery was never worth the trouble. Not to say they didn't invent machines, but they never caught on, in a similar fashion to Classical Europe which we know was full of cool gadgets which the Graeco-Romans just couldn't be bothered to use. Accumulation of capital makes less sense when you're bang...

So Bitcoin has reached one thousand dollars, and suddenly everyone out there is freaking out. Early adopters rejoice, crazy bullshit marketers change their minds, smug bullshit marketers don't, tenured bullshit marketers keep their options open. Everybody's onto it.

It seems that the sudden spike owes a lot to the sudden increase of Chinese people buying into Bitcoin, with Bitcoin China having become the biggest exchange worldwide as of now. Why did this happen? Bitcoin certainly is a godsend for...

Sorry again for the slow posting, but I've been busy with work et al. It's not only Civ, I swear. I'm a productive member of the community. I don't know quite which one though.

Most of human life can be described using Bell Curves and Pareto distributions. Say blogs and comments. The quality of comments in any given blog is distributed normally, and 20% of the comments have 80% of the insight. The bigger the blog, the more numerous the commenters, the most pronounced this effect is. In any popula...

Neoreaction is neo because it is new. There has always been a reactionary movement, descendants of De Maistre fiercely opposed to leftism, or modernity in general, but they were based on a defense of the past. In a way, old reactionaries behave in a sort of territorial way. If the past is a foreign country, reactionaries are patriots of that country. The further the culture changes, the more your country becomes a foreign one, and you naturally want to fight the invasion. So old reaction was (is...

I think people are not getting the point of my last post.

Everyone is putting forward their ideas for the "moron problem" as Jim Donald puts it.

Honestly I don't think that's rocket science. We know what to do. We do what we have been doing for centuries. Ask Gregory Clark for details.

But that's not the thing. Nobody gives a shit about the long term sustainability of society. What people care about is feeling good about themselves.

Now imagine there's a choice between:

1-Being part of a tribe/thede/...

Foseti asks What to do? i.e. what should we (people who understand that society is going to hell and why) do to prevent/palliate/fight the collapse.

It's a good question. But it's so 2012. Or 2010 maybe. As bad as dysgenics/balkanisation/moral collapse is, the sense of urgency has been totally replaced by the new Big Story. Which is the automation, and the Neo-Luddite panic that is sweeping all over the punditsphere. You know something is Big when Half Sigma just won't shut up about it. The guy r...

Arnold Kling is a smart fella. He reminds me of those girls who being pretty themselves, always go out to bars bringing a huge fat and ugly friend. They thing they look hot in comparison, and they do. But their friend is so disgusting that no sane man is going to approach anyway.

It seems he realised the problem and he now has a blog of his own. Again there's something girly about it. He says he started the blog because he "missed being part of the blog conversation". But most of his posts are sh...

With all the late talk about median wages falling and the rich getting richer, it seems capitalism is becoming unfashionable again. Now I don't define capitalism by any economic or policy parameter. I define capitalism as the system that supports and gives status to business owners. When you see students demonstrating against "capitalism", they aren't arguing against private property. They won't share their precious iPhones, will they? They're cool about people owning stuff. What they don't want...

What pushes Globalisation? Michael Pettis says that Globalisation is caused by inflation. Which is an interesting theory. But I'm not here to talk about economic theory. Let us say in more general terms that Globalisation has two vectors. One is economic; globalisation is pushed by money in search for yield. The other is ideological; globalisation is pushed by a faith in search for converts. Both can work together and add impulse to the process, but they don't always do, and sometimes they work ...

A friend of mine accuses me of being a "hedonistic sob" (his words). That's because I eat buckwheat crepes for breakfast, eat out in the weekends, and drink Masala Chai at home. I also watch international movies in a Macbook and own two smartphones.

My salary sucks, but I don't have children, and my woman is low maintenance, which helps. But the biggest factor is that I live in a pleasant neighbourhood, and I don't pay the rent myself. I couldn't afford the rent of where I live right now. But onc...

The Economist just opened a new exclusive section for  China, taking China out of their Asian. So China is the new focus country of The Economist, besides the US. Here they explain why the interest: they will use the section to argue for political reform.

Read the whole thing, it's the most disingenuous piece of journalism ever. I'll take some representative quotes:

Now what a huge bunch of non-sequiturs. Some points are reasonable, most of them are not. What reading between the lines gets you is...