Bloody Shovel 4

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...

Well, well. Everybody predicted that 2019 would be an eventful year, with Trump realizing he must start to build the wall if he wants to be reelected; Cold War 2 against China heating up, and the trade war doing some serious damage to the Chinese economy, and China's slowdown dragging down the world economy in exchange. It's gonna be bad, but it's not gonna be boring.

And just after we welcomed the new year, this video by Fox News' Tucker Carlson came out and has owned the attention of political ...

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...

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 ...

Said Matt Yglesias. Who, while being a disgusting piece of grease, is more candid than most other apparatchiks. Which is useful in understanding what leftists, or a particular set of leftists from a particular ethnic group, are thinking about. See this other recent example:

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/896793662050283521

Mmm why would he say that?

fake-tweet20170814-9-190jihm

There, FTFY.

If you're into memes this guy makes the same point.

https://twitter.com/MLChristiansen/status/896800538

Liu Xiaobo is dead. Who the hell is Liu Xiaobo?

A pyschopathic status maximizer from Northeast China. Or may I say a high-IQ status-greedy sociopath. Or a shameless self-promoter taking money from USG to undermine his own nation?

Or in one word: an activist. Liu Xiaobo was a student activist from the 1980s. The 1980s were a very delicate time in China. Mao was dead. Deng Xiaoping had opened up the country. The old order was shattered; and when a country is in disorder, the status-hunters smell wea...

After Donald Trump won the election, the Central Politburo of the Free Media© came up with the official interpretation of their defeat: Fake News™. People on Facebook were pasting news from shady sites saying that the Pope had endorsed Trump, and that led to Trump winning. Or something.

Now, I don't know who came up with Fake News, but man, he struck a nerve. As a meme, Fake News is perhaps the biggest and most rapidly expanding one I've ever seen. It's everywhere, the Left uses it to shit on ...

Years ago, when the alt-right was barely beginning to form, many Western patriots hang out at Lawrence Auster's blog. There was one very interesting guy, called Conservative Swede. Eventually he surrendered, and I don't know what is of him now. But he had a very interesting blog on Europe and Islam and all this stuff which now has been taken over by the alt-right and Frog twitter.

The best thing I ever read of Conservative Swede is when he wrote that Mecca will be nuked. Eventually. It just has t...

The Dark Enlightenment is Dark. That's the whole thing about it. The more you know the truth the darker it gets. The very term was coined by Nick Land who is pretty much a Skynet apologist. He doesn't seem humans have it in them to get out of this shit. Now most people don't agree with that, but the term Dark Enlightenment has stuck, and there's a reason for that. Many understand that truth is dark, and that we're heading to dark times.

I also get called very gloomy and pessimistic myself. I thin...

People call me cynical because I say ideology is crap. It's just stuff people say to look good to their peers. Signaling, that is. And I support this claim by pointing out that people just don't know shit. David Hume proved that. We don't even "know" the laws of nature with any certainty. Yes, we're used to some things happening after certain things. There's chains of events that strongly hint at causality. But you can never know for sure.

Of course that kind of fuzzy knowledge is good enough for...

https://twitter.com/arthur\_affect/status/796420056544641028

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNi1hKi9Z5c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXUaQe3ziEY

You might remember that I called leftists "psychopathic status maximizers". Look at these people. Look carefully. Do you think they "believe" in some set of values?

No. It's all crap. We know since David Hume. We humans don't really know anything. You can't. You only get to be quite certain after a lot of trial and error about a very narrow area that yo...

Apparently I missed this kind post by Jim where he calls me clever but pessimistic. Guilty as charged. I agree with his point though. Irrational optimism works. I'm just not very good at it. Which is why I've been reading and writing on how to generate it exogenously, i.e. for people like me.

The discussion there at Jim is uncharacteristically good. The main issue people ask is that you can't just make up a new religion. That's a good point. It's also a bummer, given that my shtick for 5 years h...

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'...

One big idea out there is that what we need is Exit. We need to allow secession, for different people to go their own way. We obviously can't get along. Some people want homosexuals teaching sex education in kindergarten. Others want to put statues to Hitler and Genghis Khan. Others want the liberty to do drugs, own guns, preferably at the same time. Others want soda taxes enforced by a mercenary army. Many want sharia law.

That's what other countries are for! Give us borders. A patchwork, a poly...

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Islamophobia? Check

Racism? Check

Fascism? Check

Equality? Check

Diversity? Check

Human rights? Check

Pensions? Pensions?? Yeah, Check

Whatever sticks.

A while ago I wrote about a funny story in the Chinese classical novel, the Water Margin, where the "heroes" want to poach a strong general, Qin Ming from their enemy. What they did is force the guy to defect, by telling his boss he already had. His boss being an evil asshole didn't bother confirming the news, and vowed to kill him (and beheaded his whole family beforehand). Thus poor Qin Ming had no choice but to fall in the trap and defect. The same tactic was used with another hero-general,

I've been a bit harsh about France. Yes, the French are the kings of bullshit. Yes, their intellectual output over the last two centuries has been a net harm on human civilization. Yes, all things considered, the French might be better off just shutting themselves in madrassa and reciting the Koran, rather than reading Focault and Derrida.

But you can hardly blame them. The French just happened to take intellectual pursuit very seriously, and in a culture where everything is concentrated in the c...

My post on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Mao's mangoes still gets a lot of traffic, which is nice. I do feel like the title wasn't very elegant, but I wanted to make the point about ideology as "currency". Unfortunately it didn't get through. Let's see if I can explain myself better.

An inspiration for that metaphor was a post by Nick Szabo (who apparently isn't the inventor of Bitcoin. I hope at least he did become an early adopter and is now filthy rich), about the origins of currency. H...