Archive for the ‘authority’ Category

So I'm getting divorced

Sunday, June 28th, 2020

So I’m getting divorced. Not because I had the courage, like I should have had, to have broken it off years ago, but because of a condom wrapper my wife found in my back pocket on the morning of Father’s day. My wife wants to try to fix things, but I don’t, and I’ve said that. I welcome the shift from feeling anger, resentment, and fear daily to mostly sorrow and relief. She’s been very apologetic, and I should have given her the chance to respond to how I felt, like I said above, many years ago, before it was way too late. In any case I have my freedom now, like I could have had all along if I had any courage at all.

Heraclitus

Monday, May 4th, 2020

I looked into Heidegger a bit and though I haven’t read him yet, I read that one of his influences was the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος). The last go I had at the Pre-Socratics I remember their texts as being enigmatic to say the least. Nevertheless I decided to have yet another go at one of them. One of Heraclitus’ fragments that struck me follows:

Τίς γαρ αὐτῶν νόος ἢ φρέν ; [δήμων] ἀοιδοῖοι
ἔπονται καὶ διδασκάλῳ, οὺκ
εἰδότες ὅτι πολλοὶ κακοὶ ὀλίγοι δὲ ἀγαθοι.
αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν αντία παντων οἱ ἄριστοι,
κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται
ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα.

And the English translation1:

For what thought or wisdom have they?
They follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher,
knowing not that there are many bad and few good.
For even the best of them choose one thing above all others,
immortal glory among mortals,
while most of them are glutted like beasts.

I was struck by how closely this fits with Etica Mircea and how it also fits with avoiding platforms.

  1. I looked at a few translations and this is the best I could find. Translated by John Burnet in “Early Greek Philosopy,” published in 1920. []

More on the idea of the "conspiracy theory"

Monday, April 20th, 2020

I heard somewhere (probably some podcast) that the CIA originated the term “conspiracy theory”, but that turns out to be a “conspiracy theory.” In fact, “conspiracy theory” is an older term than I’d thought. The first use of it in English I am aware of is from 1863 and is described here.

It is used in the context of dismissing a popular theory as to why the anti-slavery British would have sided with the pro-slavery South. The New York times, now best known for some of its Pulitzer prize winning journos, such as Walter Duranty and Russiagate conspiracy theorist Maggie Haberman1, published this correspondence on the subject from Monadnook2 in London:

Furthermore, it is the belief that before many months there will not only be division, and perhaps civil war, in the North, but that the Government will be overwhelmed by one of the most terrible financial explosions ever seen in a civilized country. English political economists look for a monetary [illegible] that will paralyze the government, if it do not utterly destroy it. They believe that America is on the brink of a terrific precipice, or over the crater of a volcano which may at any moment burst into an eruption. Why, then, should England interfere? It would be to hinder the very disasters that are a cause of rejoicing. Whatever may be the feelings or the motives of France or Russia, there can be no doubt of those of England. The Government, which is simply the organ of the aristocratic power, looks upon America as the rival and the foe of England, and still more upon American principles as dangerous to British Institutions.

And a reply from C. A. Bristed:

Now, when we look for the cause of this, any man who has made European politics his study at home, or, being abroad, has known merely so much of them as one cannot help knowing, from daily perusal of the French and English papers, sees fast enough that since 1849 (to go no further back) England has had quite enough to do in Europe and Asia, without going out of her way to meddle with America. It was a physical and moral impossibility that she could be carrying on a gigantic conspiracy against us. But our masses, having only a rough general knowledge of foreign affairs, and not unnaturally somewhat exaggerating the space which we occupy in the world’s eye, do not appreciate the complications which rendered such a conspiracy impossible. They only look at the sudden right-about-face movement of the English Press and public, which is most readily accounted for on the conspiracy theory.

Of Monadnook, I can find nothing. Mr. Bristed was perhaps the great grandson of John Jacob Astor3, and a Yale educated writer.

This obviously can not be the coinage of the term. It must have been floating about long before in perhaps conversations, or books not referenced or readily available to anyone interested in the subject. I am not surprised that it could have been first used unselfconsciously by a Yalie. Maybe he’s right but you know, what the fuck isn’t a conspiracy theory? Maybe he was one of those writers that never conspired with anyone.

  1. Alumni of Sarah Lawrence College []
  2. This is my best reading - the print is blurry. []
  3. Made his money in the fur trade and later NY real estate. []

The Tree and the Saplings

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

There is a tree of knowledge1 that has its roots in the ancient world and has leaves sprouting even now. Only spend time reading what branches from the tree. Don't read the saplings scattered all around. If you started reading at the roots, you will recognize the saplings as what they are: pointless repetitions of ancient idiocies.

  1. This is not my idea - I got it from some unfindable Trilema article []

Stuck on China

Monday, April 13th, 2020

This article is going to be a bit disorganized. I’m stuck on how to proceed with quantifying Chinese influence on the USG, and this is an attempt to do a brain dump on what I’ve learned and to maybe get unstuck.

A while back it struck me that I should attempt to quantify the amount of USD it costs the Chicoms1 to buy US politicians. This is easier said than done. I did some digging and while I can put together a plausible narrative2, the numbers are harder to put down in any meaningful way.

For example: Mitch McConnell, the current senate majority leader, married 39 year old Elaine Chao in 19933. The McConnells then roughly 15 years later received a 5 million dollar dowry from the Chao family, who runs an international shipping company with close ties to the Chicoms. So did it only cost between 5 and 25 million4 dollars to buy influence with Mitch McConnell? To put this into context this is 7.88644 × 10-6% of all wealth measured in dollars at the most while Warren Buffet5 has 0.03%. This is how much it costs to purchase influence with supposedly one of the most powerful men in the world who influences the largest government budget in the world and who runs a governing body that can crush or grow (mostly crush) industries. This seems absurd, but it appears that most of Mitch McConnell’s wealth originates in China. Put in this light it is clear that congress’s incentives are aligned so as to crush US industry to the extent possible. Now this is not to exclude the influence of campaign donors. McConnell’s biggest donor as of now is NORPAC6 at $160,075, so you know, it’s not just China, there’s Israel too. So we have these numbers, but what do they mean? How to measure influence? The result is legislation passed, but calculating the shifts in wealth resulting from legislation is hard and it is an open question for me at this point as to how to do this. I could just categorize any legislation McConnell passed as favorable or unfavorable to China, but this seems unsatisfying. Numbers are much more satisfying.

What else is interesting about all this is just how widely it is known and tolerated. This information is widely available in pantsuit publications. I can only assume almost everyone in Washington knows and accepts that China is running the show.

  1. orig. []
  2. This is the narrative I see. US businesses sought cheap labor in China and moved production there, making the Chicoms wealthy. The Chicoms used measly percentages of this money to buy US politicians, who then cause more and more manufacturing to be moved to China, who then use more measly sums to buy more influence in a feedback loop that will ultimately result in the collapse of the US economy. []
  3. Who in the hell with any money or power nowadays marries a nearly 40 year old woman? Unless maybe they’re a homo? The marriage is predictably unfruitful. I’m seriously trying to get into the mindset. OK your wife is now 45 and dried up. You still have some libido left, and lots of money. What do you do? You use lube? Or you don’t have sex with her anymore? Or you just don’t have sex? Or you have an affair? But then whoever you have the affair with has leverage on you, or their brother does or whatever. But if you don’t get married everyone thinks you’re gay and it’s hard to get elected in some states (I suspect especially in Kentucky) while gay. Or Maybe you’re just really easily aroused and a post menopausal woman still does it for you. But what does that say about you? I don’t even know. Maybe you like “influence” more than sex. But what kind of fucked up person likes influence more than sex? What perverted shit are they going to do? What does the country they run look like? Does it look like pre-revolutionary China with a bunch of low-to-no-t eunuchs running the imperial household? []
  4. orig. []
  5. Another eunuch? His current wife Astrid Menks is 74 years old. []
  6. orig. []

Gammas

Saturday, January 18th, 2020

This article is an attempt to salvage something useful from a rabbit hole that must be filled in. I was introduced to the concept of the gamma by Vox Day1. Vox describes gammas succinctly and in context here:

The introspective, the unusual, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Gammas are often intelligent, usually unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex. This mostly depends upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Too introspective for their own good, gammas are the men who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time and supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly romantic rhyming doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are probably in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there… sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women, the current direction of which is directly tied to their present situation. However, they are sexual rejects, not social rejects.

Some other aspects of the gamma personality type that Vox describes that I cannot find references for (and may only exist in video format for all I know) are:

  • Intense emotional pain when publicly humiliated resulting in unproductive spiraling
  • Of all male personality types, most similar to that of women
  • Tend to end up doing technical work and obsessing over the details of some particular subject matter (otakuism)

I am writing about this because I exhibit several aspects (though not all) of the gamma personality type, and because I believe there is a strong relationship between gammas and Being an Engineer2. I definitely did the obsessing over women thing when younger. I’m obsessed with certain foreign languages for no particular reason. My relationships with women are not good. 3

One of the conclusions I must come to if I consider myself to be a gamma, is that until I figure out how to not be a gamma and although I know I should contribute, my motivations are probably wrong4, and I may ultimately do more harm than good for any cause such as #ossasepia I join, after reading example after example of how they can poison an organization and must be ejected.

Some things I’ve started doing to try to break out of gammaism are:

  • working out (this gets me out of my head into the physical world)
  • writing humiliating articles
  • quitting listening to Stefan Molyneux podcasts5
  • quitting watching Vox Day videos and reading Vox Day’s blog6

Some things I’m planning on doing:

  • earn income using non-technical skills7
  • quitting reading Twitter
  • leaving the US - I find that speaking other languages puts me in a different mindset (this won’t happen for at least 2 years but I’m working on it)
  1. Is his blog a trap? I don’t know. He makes money through his own publishing company and through video game design, has been living in Italy for many years, and has been banned from Twitter. His blog is hosted on Google, but he apparantly has several backups and merely continues to allow Google to host it because “let the enemy pay, no retreat, etc.” I urged him to publish a gpg public key (which was kind of a gamma move considering he clearly knows about it based on the title of a song in one of Psychosonik’s albums - PGP), but he ignored me and with good reason because who the fuck am I. []
  2. I have read this article a few times, but I find it quite challenging to understand. Part of it is the terminology, another part is probably that a part of myself really doesn’t wanto to understand. Nonetheless the people in the Gamma and Engineer categories do seem largely to intersect. []
  3. Although I’m still married, I’ve figured out that the partnership idea was a scam, someone has to be in charge. I’m not entirely sure how to get out of my current arrangement. It’s going to be expensive one way or the other. []
  4. ego, narcisism vs. cause []
  5. At this point it’s become an addiction. People on his show are working through their problems, but I’m not. []
  6. I’ve gotten some great insights from him but I don’t have anything to show for it and I’m not getting anything new out of continuing to follow him. []
  7. Inspired by Diana Coman []

Julian Jaynes

Sunday, September 15th, 2019

Julian Jaynes had a very interesting theory concerning the Bicameral Mind.

This theory is that in earlier pre-conscious ages, men literally heard voices (auditory hallucinations) commanding them in mildly to highly stressful situations.  Men represented these voices as gods.  Due to many reasons, mainly the Bronze Age collapse, these voices began to fade away, leaving us with many highly unsatisfactory coping mechanisms for the loss of authority.

It seems to explain a good deal of the alienness of Bronze Age - the all-encompassing devotion to gods that no-longer exists, and many other things.  I wish Julian had written more about the remnants of the bicameral mind in primitive peoples that still exist today in the Amazon or New Guinea.

And of course he's in the logs.