Bloody Shovel 4

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...

As I write this, the news are coming out that the 12 boys trapped in 4km inside a cave in northern Thailand have been rescued, after having trapped in a cold, damp and pitch black cave for 10 long days until they were discovered, and another tense week when nobody really knew how to get them out. The rescue operation has been smooth, amazingly so.

The whole thing has been like a perfect movie. The setting is completely absurd. What were the boys doing there? Apparently the coach (apparently it's ...

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 ...

There's this stereotype that says that people who apply to join the police force are the kind of people that enjoys having power and using it over others. Power is nice but not everybody is equally driven to it. But some people just love the stuff. To lord over others. Give orders. The right to be nasty. Innate bullies, so to speak. I don't know how accurate that is, but there must be something to it.

Well, take a look at this, hat tip to Handle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clNDUoxzSIc&feature

A few centuries ago people in Europe discovered free trade. The market. They got the state to say: go make money, free of any guilds or regulations.  I won't stop you. Go out there and make money. Compete freely. So people went to make money. Started businesses, factories, mines. In short order we got 2 industrial revolutions, the greatest technological advances in history, and vast, vast, amazing amounts of wealth. Pretty neat.

But. We also found the market isn't perfect. Yeah it produces weal...

So the Role of Government used to be to Establish Order. That's something the Romans and the Chinese could agree on.

The the English parliament stumbled itself into winning the English Civil War. So they decided the role of government was the Protection of Property. Not a bad idea, all things considered.

Now though we know a bit more about how society works. Let's say we become worthy and assume power. What's the role of government now?

Let me propose: to break malignant signaling spirals.

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...

Ever since it became obvious that Trump had a chance of winning, the junior minions of the Cathedral, those mediocre status-seekers waiting for breaks on the status hierarchy so they could scavenge some point for themselves, started to come up with some long-winded arguments against democracy. Which was a lot of fun to watch.

Less fun to watch was the particular argument that they came up with. We need "epistocracy". The rule of those who know. That's mean to exclude those Trump voters. Those are...

So this:

zz25e5fc11

Led to this:

https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/801531616816496640

While Fidel Castro, murderer of tens of thousands, communist dictator which forever ruined what was a pretty nice country dies:

Fidel Castro

And a fucking ruling prime minister has this to say:

screen-shot-2016-11-28-at-1-52-46-am

Yes, of course, I know, it's not the same. They have power, they get to say what they want, we are not in power and gotta be careful. But the left has always been like this. They weren't a...

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...

Say Trump wins. Trump may very well end up winning next week.

So say he wins. He'll then be at the top of the Federal Government. A lair of snakes if there ever was one. Every single agency of government, and every single unofficial agency of government (Academia, the Press, all those QUANGOs, basically every organization which belongs to the Cathedral but is not technically part of USG) is against him; against him to the point of willing his assassination.

This is going to be tough. Trump needs f...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

So this video has been doing the rounds. You should watch it. It’s very well done. And the book it refers to, The Dictator’s Handbook, is also a great book. I read it a while ago. Hell, I should have done a book review. It’s a really good book. It’s analysis of government in general, and how dictatorships work, is brilliant.

Alas, the book flounders when it talks about democracy. Which it basically posits as the Great Solution, the final End of H...

I've writtenextensivelyaboutmonarchy. And for good reason. We're all here in great part because we share our criticism, or at least disillusion about democracy. Some critics of democracy come from the long reactionary tradition, going back to the De Maistre and the opponents and the French Revolution. But most of it today, at least on this corners of the internet, derives from libertarians figuring it out that democracy isn't quite conducive to liberty. Certainly not in a theoretical way. Han...

Just in case anybody was concerned, no, I wasn't killed at any of the recent Islamic murders in Europe in the last few weeks. And I really didn't have much to say about it. My last post stood as an almost miraculous oracle of why Islamic murders happen, and why they will continue to do so. And voila, they continued to do so. And of course, as I said, European governments did nothing of importance to address the problem. Because they can't.

But now some days have gone on without further incidents,...

Moldbug was about formalism. Which is funny because I associate "formalism" with Chomskyian linguistics. The idea that language can be modeled in a quasi mathematical form. Let's say that didn't really work out.

Moldbug's was political Formalism. Give everyone an official title of what he already owns. Let us say it how it is and not lie anymore. Good idea. I wonder how you formalize this?

Sailer writes how New York City is not actually run by its mayor; there's a sleazy bunch of "consultants" wit...

So we left as the Jurchens conquer the Song capital of Kaifeng, empty the city of all its valuables, butcher most of the population, taking around 100,000 people as slaves. Among them the whole imperial family, 5,000 people in all, plus all their servants. The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the emperor and all the nobility were taken as wives, concubines, or put to work as whores in the Jurchen official brothel. Those who made it alive to the Jurchen homeland, that is. Many died on the...

So let's continue the rise and fall of the Song Dynasty. Let me digress a bit and let me talk about the capital of the Song.

1xarprc1

The borders of this map are contemporary China, but look at the topography. The Song Dynasty's capital was in Kaifeng. Kaifeng is probably the most retardedly located capital of all 3,000 years of Chinese history. Up until the Song, the capital of China had been alternating between Xi'an and Luoyang. Xi'an is in the Wei river valley, which is fairly narrow and easil...