Bloody Shovel 4

This is something I haven't written at length, but I've talked often with friends in person.

I've long been a proponent of hapamaxxing. I like yellows but they lack some spark in them which white gene...

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.

---

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

So my last post on Nassim Taleb's mental retardation has triggered quite a lot of laughs and chuckles, and also some criticism. Some people say I was not rigorous enough when writing about Nassim Taleb's books.

To those people I say: hold my beer. Seriously, people, this is a blog. A free blog, which I write under a pseudonym. I seek nothing from my writing, besides it being an avenue to make interesting friends. Which I have, dozens of them, and God bless them. But surely in this little place of...

Happy New Year folks, welcome to the 8th (!) year of Bloody Shovel. Let me start this sure to be eventful year with one of these posts which just need writing. A quick internet search didn't come out with any article with this title; so if I'm lucky this post will at some point become viral on Google. You think Taleb is retarded? You heard this exact phrasing here first.

What am I talking about? Most of you should know who Nassim Taleb is; a finance man turned maverick public intellectual by virt...

Yesterday I woke up to this piece of news:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612458/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies/

Chinese Scientists are Creating CRISPR Babies.

Hilarity ensued. This guy, Hè Jiànkuí 贺建奎, professor at China's Southern University of Science and Technology, with good, manly posture, was bringing the future to our time.

I was feeling weird already. But then this other bombshell happens.

https://www.apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d

Babies are...

Et tu, Harry?

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don't go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

And using Japan as a bogeyman. Japan has 120 million people. How many bright Chinese and bright Indians is Japan supposed to take in to offset their demographic decline? 10 mill...

Via Vox Day

The feminism angle is funny, but I think there's something more important to it. We all know that higher education is deleterious to female fertility. Probably the most harmful factor of them all. Well in 1900 elite women were already forsaking their beauty and fecundity to play the status game by learning some inconsequential knowledge to annoy their peers with.

It follows that the Western elites' mores have been dysgenic for quite a while then. Which made me think a lot in how little...

The deep sense of crisis one gets after knowing of HBD comes in two flavours. Let's call them macro and micro.

Macro is the danger of race replacement. Millions of migrants from sub-90 IQ populations have been moving massively into areas with super-100 IQ populations, namely the West. You don't need to have a tribal allegiance to your people to feel very uncomfortable about that.  For 20 years we have been hearing about how Eurabia will happen during this century, and there's nothing we can do a...

My last post on Nick Land's bionic catharsis of reactionary politics was received with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all it there is a very thick moral wall against tampering with human nature. How would it be done? Who would fund it? What would the government do about sucha  project?

But it seems that the gears of history have started moving.

The American director of the World Swimming Coaches Association is insinuating that China might be genetically modifying their athletes to win olymp...

Nick Land has finished his long series, Dark Enlightment. It was fascinating to find in an obscure chinese expat site a middle aged Philosophy lecturer writing what effectively was a summary of Moldbug's blog, with a slight touch of cyberpunk.

Of course the most interesting part in this series is that it has an ending. Which means it reaches a conclusion. In the last post before this one, his 4e, he advances how he sees the future unfolding. He basically sees three possibilities:

His bet is on a C...

A while ago Greg Cochran wrote a very insightful post, saying that older civilisations necessarily produce populations of cynical familial slackers, because the realities of warfare and human society mean that those more likely to fight for abstract ideals were killed off over the thousands of years of successive civilisations.

That's why more recently civilised places like Germany or Japan are still more orderly than, say, Iraq or Egypt. Still the historical data is patchy, so many people refuse...

I've been thinking a lot on religion these days, as you can see in some of my last posts. In part it's because of Vox Day's blog, where he has been talking theology a lot lately. I particularly enjoyed his debates with what he calls "Team Calvin", which is a bunch of american calvinists. In Europe religion is mostly a thing of the past, and discussions on religious doctrine is seen as a freaky medieval pastime. But I'm fascinated by it, I always liked reading philosophy, and theology is the most...

My RSS feed is full of reactionary goodness, as it should. But most of us are only part-time  thinkers, and good stuff takes time to come by, so reactionary blogs don’t update very often. For those quick fixes where I need something to read on my phone while waiting for public transport, I have a new feed which updates almost as often as Business Insider: Via Meadia.

I admit I only started reading Walter R Mead very recently, but he’s good. I particularly like his foreign policy commentary, ...

I just finished Mass Effect 3, which I heartily recommend. Hell of a game. The ending was quite lame,  sort of a cross between Contact and Terminator, but still. I imagine it must be hard to come up with an ending for a story of this scale.

For those unaware of it, Mass Effect is a series of games set in space in the 22nd century. One of the most interesting parts of the script is how it portrays artificial intelligence in this sci-fi universe. There´s some robots around (they call them 'mechs'...

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...

Jim tell us how books are being burned all over the Anglosphere. He links to an article on Cracked about some guy who tells how libraries all over hire him to dispose of books, because the library has to make space for new books, doesn't have the money to expand, actually doesn't even have the money to give them away. So the books are burned. They have a business to run, you know.

Oh, come on, you must be thinking, this can't be happening. We are spending trillions in bank bailouts, while public...

Bill was very kind to write a long comment to my last post. I was answering when I saw that it was getting even longer, and consequently I thought it'd be wise to just start a new post for it.

So here's the original comment:

Americans have this fixation with... well, America. So I wasn't talking about 1960s America, but rather about the late 18th century French Enlightenment, which is what I've been reading lately. The freemason, philosophe milieu was mostly anti-Christian, and they mostly cause...

I used to call myself a reactionary, but lately I'm developing a hate for the word. Let's say I'm evolving. I not longer think we should go back to the past. The modern world sucks alright, but the past sucked in his own way. Let me explain.

Let's talk about myths.

Conservatives have this myth.

In the old days people were reasonably well behaved, religious, serious, forthright, strong, men were manly women were ladies. Society enforced this behavior in many different ways, which we call tradition.

T...