Bloody Shovel 4

Tabbarok summarizes a study on differences in attitude toward collectivism and competition between rice and wheat farmers in China, using a kind of unnatural experiment, in which de-mobilized soldiers...

It's recently been noted that there are strange affinities between wife guys and “my rapist” women. Presented for consideration:

What other similarities are there?

First of all, welcome to the new blog. Or should I say the new website. A lot more than a blog going on now, we have a discussion forum now (the Board), a live Chat room, a Twitter-like Feed, a book, a wiki, a merch store, and even a TV station, with a cozy live chat inside. And of course the good old blog, back after a year hiatus. Everything is running on Urbit.

I apologize for the long delay, and for the domain change. Long story short, I fucked up, and was too busy to fix it properly. Given ...

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.

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

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 ...

So our good Russian friend Anatoly Karlin had this take on his blog

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/climate-bioleninism/

I paste the complete link because the URL is quite ominous, "climate bioleninism". Imagine that. Karlin there makes a point that ideas that flatter the upper-class, like global warming, become entrenched, while ideas that they find inconvenient, like the genetic load of IQ or HBD more generally get killed or ostracized, no matter how solid the science behind them.

https://twitter.com/

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

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

A couple of interesting things happened on Twitter last week. One was this:

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/990612769182507011

I'm a great fan of Hanson from years ago. Not of his weird sci-fi stuff, that I don't get. But his socio-psychology writing is top-notch. After an incel unleashed his Beta Rage killing several people on a van attack, the very word "incel" has reached the mainstream. And the normies are flabbergasted. What's an "incel"? Involuntary celibate? Like, some people aren't ...

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...

So the news from last week were how China changed the constitution and abolished term limits in the only thing that had term limits; the presidency. This was followed by the USG propaganda apparatus (AKA the press) going into fits of panic. “We got China wrong”, they say. It took China changing its constitution without American permission for Americans to notice that they got China wrong.

What did they get wrong? China was dirt-poor in 1980. Really, really poor. It would have likely remained ...

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://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/world/asia/singapore-language-hokkien-mandarin.html?mcubz=0

Damn, New York Times link show up automatically like Tweets now. Talk about privilege.

Anyway; you know what Gell-Mann amnesia is. You read the news, and assume what you're reading is, well, worth reading. It's generally accurate. Then you read something on a topic you have some expertise about, and you find that it's worse than false. It's completely inaccurate and misleading. It just shows how the writ...