Bloody Shovel 4

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 ...

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...

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,...

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...

It's been 30 years this week since the famous riots in Beijing. I refuse to give any attention to an incident which was of little consequence, which nobody in China knows about, and to the extent they know about it nobody but a small number of dieharders (i.e. the people rioting back then and their families) gives a shit about.

If the Western press won't shut up about something, odds are is all a pig pile of fake news, of official propaganda which has been concocted up at some upper level and bee...

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

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...

We live in a world of sexual license. Sexual freedom we could say. You can sleep with whoever you want and neither state authorities, nor most people, will interfere with your sexual life. You can even engage in the most unnatural, disgusting and disease-inducing activities; but criminal law just has nothing against you.

This alone is a sign that the patriarchy doesn't exist anymore. Patriarchies are systems in which all women belong to a man; the husband after marriage, the father before that, o...

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...

So Trump just met Marshall or Chairman or whatever Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

I don't have any opinion on the meeting. Nothing substantial was agreed on. Seems to me nothing real happened at all. North Korea isn't going to give away its nukes. And USG isn't going to withdraw its troops from South Korea. Thus, nothing is going to happen.

The reasoning is quite simple. At the end of the day, North Korea is a small, poor, fairly inconsequential country 25 million people. It's birth rate appears to be ...

The blog has been slow lately. Part of that is me being on Twitter, wrecking my long term IQ with short term dopamine hits. But man, those dopamine hits are good. If you’re not following me yet, there’s a link at the sidebar.

So anyway, one of the places I rely most recently for commentary is the online mag The Diplomat. It’s some Cathedral foreign policy rag, apparently with some close relation to the Indian government. Lots of Indians shitting on China there, which is funny. But by and la...

The way of properly learning a language is to do what languages are made for: use it. Ideally, live your usual life, do whatever it is you like doing, and just try to find a way to insert that language you're learning into your daily routine. So if, say, you like movies, and you're learning Persian, well, stop watching Hollywood crap and go pick up some Persian movies.

I get asked about books on Chinese history, and I tend not to know what to say. I haven't read a lot of Chinese history books in ...

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 ...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Gamal\_Abdel\_Nasser\_on\_the\_Muslim\_Brotherhood\_%28subtitled%29.webm

Cool title, huh? It always feels good to type this kind of stuff. "Empire". Pronounced with a 1900s British accent. Feels good man. Insert happy frog pic.

Anyway. The most interesting, shall I say "official" theory of historical geopolitics of the reaction must surely be Peter Turchin's theory of meta-ethnic frontier armies pumping up their asabiya and conquering the civilizational center.

The theory basically says that to run a civilization you need a strong army. To run a strong army you need c...