Why Fat Activism Is A Godsend For The Right

I wanted to write a long article, but I found a photo on Voat that made it unnecessary.

It’s just so goddam perfect. One civilized, yet devastating way to fight people whose views you find harmful is to parodize and satirize them, largely by finding their real faults and inflating them into ridiculousness.

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

And we don’t even have to do this, because Fat Activists do this “for free” ! They act exactly like a fifth-column operation would, discrediting Progressivism by planting totally ridiculous double agents on them.

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good! And given that the only oppression they actually face in reality is people not finding them attractive (at least in a polite city where people stop making snickering remarks at 13), the very idea that attractiveness could be a political goal also speaks volumes – how feminism is all about an alternative sexual strategy for unattractive women, how Red-Pill theories about “solipsism” and “hamstering” are actually true for at least some women and so on.

But I am getting too analytical here. This is something to be cherished, to enjoyed, laid back , with a glass of wine, as the best comedy ever. Just the very thought of a self-important blubberwhale climbing on a stage and telling everybody with a stern, sincere face how to adore her laziness and gluttony as a way to end the patriarchical opression of women makes me want to roar with laughter. And when you imagine all the gammas nodding sincerely and sadly instead of laughing her off the stage it just becomes so much better.

I just watch this online quasipolitical freak show on Tumblr and basically want to buy all of them an extra large pizza or something, and pat them somewhere where I think their backs may be, for a job well done. My perfect, ideal satire, parody of a liberal, progressive, feminist, just offered voluntarily, without having to invest time and work! It’s glorious, and it is so well made! This is a case of reality being better than imagination really.

Imagine you are directing a satirical stage play and want put the ideas you disagree with into the mouth of a role who looks so obviously un-respectable, having crap for a character, and is generally low-status in a well-deserved way! How do you make it obvious? Poor clothes? Could be just tough luck. You want low-status but middle-class. You have to make their appearance suggest that their lot on life is not so bad, they just used it badly. What is an obviously good candidate for this? That they spend whatever resources they have on sugary slop and porked up.   If you want to cast someone in a satirical stage play as a middle-class idiot, you will probably come up with the role of the suburbian fatty. This is why it is so perfect a satire. And adding the plot twist that the suburban fatty is actually on a political campaign to convince people fatties are actually attractive and it is oppressive to think they aren’t – that is such a good satire, that reads like something written by Juvenal.

This is why all this self-satire is so glorious. It is just perfectly written and perfectly directed.

If there are any liberals reading this: this is roughly how you would feel if the media would catch Rush Limbaugh, Tony Abbot and Viktor Orban having gay sex in N@zi uniforms.  It is that kind of “All I want now is some popcorn…” type of feeling.

RE: The DIM Hypothesis of History

http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/10/27/book-review-on-objectivisms-sweeping-theory-of-history-the-dim-hypothesis/

The basic logic sounds familiar to me, interestingly, another influential group of people who tend to say distrust in Reason being able to grasp the actual truths of the world, and who also tend to consider civilizational rot is about distrusting Reason, are Catholics. Most famously Chesterton, who made the the following argument in Orthodoxy:

“If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.” There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.” In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think.”

But there is one problem. The radical doubting of Reason does not necessarily have to lead to this kind of modern rot. It only has to do so if people use it in a hypocritical way – they put a lot of trust into the Reason that does not trust itself. In other words, if people still give high prestige and status to intellectuals, if they still value books of philosophy, political manifestos, slogans, abstract concepts like equality and so on.

I mean, isn’t it weird that increasing doubt of Reason did not lead to the intellectual class losing power and status, in fact it led to them gaining more? Isn’t it weird how intellectuals can get more status by denying their job matters?

My point is that modernity sounds like a sham denial of the powers of Reason.  A true denial leads one back to practical experience (custom-conservatism) or emotion (Romanticism) or instinct (barbarism). When a Princeton professor (Rorty) denies Reason, somehow it is not to mean that the world should stop listening to Princeton professors and they should get a job as a carpenter instead.

Many great conservatives used to have a strong skeptic strain in them, and still do – Derb, Oakeshott, Burke, just from the top of my mind. Note how they were all British. There is something in British culture that cherishes the unthinking, unreflexive following of custom and tradition, which is far closer to true skepticism that this above mentioned sham. This is perhaps why we see dear old Scruton focusing more and more on rural life, hunting, and wine tasting – perhaps he is trying to demonstrate that essentially British thinking that one should live life, not analyze it.

(This made a certain impact here in Continental Europe around the 1980’s when leftie French Intelligentsia seemed to have started to run out of steam.)

Thus true skepticism is basically conservative. Not believing in Reason, the most basic thing we can believe in is experience, pattern recognition, and its accumulation called tradition.

And this skeptical conservatism has led many to turn off from modern dogmas. This was also my first steps on the path of the “heretic”.  Scruton, Burke and similar thinkers taught me how to trust experience more than logic. A liberal could give me a hundred and one logical arguments and I could simple point out the window and ask “Look, does it look like it is actually working?”  It explained me, for example, that while reading a million books often fails to make you more conservative, actually lived life experience can. Many liberal books taught me the world looks by clean rules of logic, actual life experience taught me life is messy, complicated, and pattern recognition works better than logic and anti-fragility works better than elaborate, detailed plans. In other words, life experience taught me to value sanity over reason or logic, and that is how I started to get fed up with modern ideology that is simply not rooted in hugging reality.

So, as a skeptic, I don’t think skepticism is responsible for the modern rot. It is more like sham skepticism, insincere skepticism being responsible for it, the kind where denying the efficacy of Reason does not lead to a healthy dose of skepticism towards intellectuals as a class and trusting experience (such as tradition) instead.

Perhaps, if we would examine more closer this kind of sham skepticism that made modernity, we would find that it is entirely inverted. Perhaps we would find the edge of sham skepticism was turned not so much against Reason but against experience. After all one typical modern Progressive thing is assign low status the kind of people who are called rednecks in America or Deep France in France. “Peasants” tend to typically those people who value experience (tradition) over Reason.  Respect for experience often means a certain respect for wise old farmer who perhaps cannot express his opinion in a sophisticated way but “he saw everything already” i.e. collected enough input from life to match the most important patterns.

And… perhaps we would find that the modern sham-skeptic  loves to argue.

To make it clear, what the conservative skeptic dislikes most is arguing. Arguing is all about appearing smart and knowledgeable about a thing by saying the right words about it and connecting them with brilliant logic – but to actually know a thing, it is better to look at it. Arguing is a far more a status game than anything else, and when a conservative is skeptical about Reason and logic, he is skeptical about their uses in arguing, not their uses in individual investigation. We are inherently social creatures, and a conservative way to distrust logic and Reason is to say we  humans tend to terrible poor at detecting seductively logical and reasonable-sounding, but still false arguments.  “Being reasonable” is a statement about our social, communicational behavior,  it’s not about lone minds wrestling with reality. It mostly means “arguing by the agreed rules”. And then the conservative skeptic says “Don’t argue – look!” So the kind of conservative skepticism I described approvingly tends to distrust Reason and logic primarily because of the role they play in arguing.

And now notice how the typical modern sham skeptic loves to argue.  This was true even of Kant. From Kant on they were absolutely great at arguing and this was their main weapon… how does a skeptic of Reason love to argue? What does he argue with?

Urbit And The Impatience Principle

Amongst the factors that determine the popularity of a technology meant for end-users, user-friendliness or usability plays a fairly huge role. I don’t simply mean pretty GUIs that can be added later on, as an afterthought (right, Unix/Linux?), I mean a certain principle which I will call the impatience principle here.

Suppose I need to reserve a flight to London for the next week and I heard Hipmunk is a good place to do that. When I go to that site, I will want to be able to find my flight ASAP. I don’t want to configure anything, I don’t want to learn anything, I don’t even want to understand how it really works or what it really does, I just want to find my flight ASAP.

(Programmers of the 1980’s used to be sore about this, “you can make idiot-proof programs but the universe just makes bigger idiots”, at some level it is disrespectful that your customers outright refuse to understand the work you are doing for them. Although the newer generation of programmers seem to have accepted this better, largely because they see the big $$$ in swallowing their pride and idiot-proofing everything. Ultimately, I as the user may even be a non-idiot and curious about how Hipmunk really works. But I will want to learn that later, when I have some free time to learn and discover things for fun, right now if I need a flight ticket, I just need that flight ticket ASAP! Hence the impatience principle.)

Now, in case of technologies meant for programmers, techies, IT folks, there is a similar impatience principle at play influencing how popular it is going to be and how quickly.

When complete non-programmers realize they have a problem they can only solve through programming, they are impatient, tehy want to invest a minimal time in learning the whole idea of programming, they want to bang out live productive code ASAP and solve their problem already.

Of course the code will be horrible, but whatever. Hence the popularity of Visual Basic. And early PHP which was exactly about this, too, web graphics designers found Perl too hard, because that actually requires learning programming knowledge, in early PHP they could just ask on IRC what built-in functions to call in what order.

Then sometimes actual programmers want to solve problems that are outside their expertise, like systems programmers wanting to whip up a web app. Again they will be impatient, they will want tools where they need to invest as little time as possible in learning their specifics and getting code running live ASAP. Hence the somewhat slower popularity gain of Ruby, Python and associated frameworks.

Then there are cases where you must be patient and really learn what it is about, but it makes you super productive for life. That is Common LISP and you can see how popular it is: not at all.My point is simply I don’t see the impatience principle at work in these early phases of Urbit – and it should not be an afterthought.

Admittedly I only looked at the theory at it so far, did not go deep into learning the specifics. But what the theory means, in my interpretation, if you want to purchase something from a webshop, you learn what a planet is, set up one for yourself, you learn what a shopping assistant application is, set it up, point your browser at it, and then go on buying things. This sounds like something that, starting from zero, takes even tech literate people _hours_ to do: the first time only, of course, but that is the point! There is always a first time, and usually people are looking for a new tech because they they want a problem solved that they could not really solve well before, and if they face hours of investment to solve that very first problem…

Yesterday I suddenly remembered a good book someone mentioned to me and, impatiently, I wanted to read it immediately. I took my Kindle, which was not used this way before, because I just used it to read ebooks acquired from other sources. So the first time in my life, without any learning or configuration, I entered the books title in Kindle’s search, found it, tapped one button to purchase it, and 15 seconds later I was reading it.

I really hope Urbit takes off, because I am damn curious about the politically philosophy Yarvin supposedly burned into it. It is not obvious to me how to get from his political writings to Urbit.

But for it to take it off, it must own the impatience principle.

Now of course, it is possible that the principle is already there, just not so visible yet. If most of the logic is in your planet, then maybe your computer, your browser, could actually be just a really dumb, cheap generic thin client? So in theory, a vendor could make pre-configured planets, and you had to do is to point your e.g. tablet at it? Purchase a tablet, purchase a card with a scannable barcode URL on taking you to your planet? Use it immediately, then as you go on, as you gradually learn it, you slowly take ownership of it and customize it? That could be satisfy the impatience principle well enough…

I know Urbit philosophy is closer to homesteading the web, of having your own nice little ecosystem, property on it. (There is a whiff of deliciously ruralistic, conservative philosophy there. Tolkien’s Shire as a web architecture model? Would love it.) But I think most people like buying ready-made things, and generally providing them as a service instead of a property seems more and more popular and succesful. Many people just don’t have this kind of ownership instinct. Even accounting software is going SaaS these days.

For example, I think home ownership is slowly on the way out. I don’t like that, but that is  the direction the world (at least, Europe) is moving toward. Renting a flat isn’t simply having a temporary property but more like using a service, and an enterprising landlord can couple it with other services provided for tenants, like cleaning, lawn-mowing, repairs etc. and thus it can more and more move towards a pleasant, lazy “hotel-like” experience. I think this is where we are moving towards. I don’t like it, I’d rather own and maintain my property both offline and online.  But I am not like most people.  If a technology wants to get popular, it has to follow what “normal” people want.

I actually intend to participate and contribute, so try not take it as an attack, but as an, I don’t know, strategic advice, strategic idea or something like that. Or just a personal observation how this angle is not yet obvious to me.

Virtual And Real Status, Left, Right

This is just an idea that occured to me during discussing a status-grab model of politics with Spandrell and re-reading Scott Alexander’s classic That Other Kind Of Status.

Basically I see a certain correlation. The more “real”, objective, solid, tangible, effective kind of status you want, the more right-wing / conservative you tend to be. The more virtual, subjective, feelings-level status you want, the more left-wing / progressive you tend to be.

Things conservatives I know tend to like. Owning a business. Owning land, agricultural, or other. Owning antiques, gold, old artwork. Owning large houses. Being physically strong. Having some capability at self-defense or violence, such as learning martial arts or owning guns. Owning powerful, fast or heavy (offroad)  cars. These are all things that can be bring one status (in certain circles at least), but they are also things that are intimately connected with reality and utility.

I don’t have that many liberal friends, but basically much of their status seeking is appearing to the smart, knowledgeable and enlightenened by saying the right kinds of things. Don’t you find that is somehow a more… fleeting kind of status than the one given by owning solid, valuable stuff? Or they take prestigious sounding jobs, but they don’t really get that well paid in cash. I think cash, savings, converted to valuables are far more real and long-lasting than the prestige generated by a job title? Or the whole SJWery, all that stuff about never offending anyone’s feelings and letting everybody feel perf. E.g. fat activists seem to be less bothered by not finding sexual partners and more bothered by people directly telling them this is because they are fat. Looks like they are more interested in keeping the illusion that they are attractive than actually getting more succesful in dating. Feelz before realz.

Imagine if the liberal is trying to gain status by buying a hybrid car and the conservative is trying to gain status by buying a Ferrari or expensive off-road Jeep. The first carries more social approval in those circles, but it is just based on the very far, distant, complicated idea of saving the planet – telescopic morality. The conservative’s  gas-guzzling sports car or jeep may be less popular in those circles, but some people will still respect it, and they will respect it for their real properties, that reflect real power: price, speed, or capability to deal with rough terrain.

Imagine you are a member of an oppressed group. Not in the modern and rather ridiculous sense, but more like it was in older times. Lefties talk about how you deserve equal rights and consideration as a fellow human being and citizen. But that is a bit… virtual? I mean that is essentially just talk. Imagine that instead of that someone just gave you a bag of gold so that you can buy yourself property, nice clothes, education for your kids and all the other purchasable kinds of status.  That would be somehow more solid and real?

Or even in modern groups. You could say gay marriage gave gays virtual status as it sent the message they are not “second class citizens” and “their relationships are of equal value”. But imagine someone identified typical gay professions like interior designers instead and just figured out a way to enable them to charge far more money. Wouldn’t that give them a far more real status increase? If some gay clubs are famous for having the best singers and the best drinks and full of celebrities, isn’t that more of a real status?  Or the basic human territorial instinct, rich gays buy parts of a city, rename it Gaytown, let only gays live there, wouldn’t having such kinds of exclusive privilege sound more like a real status increase?

Animal brains don’t want food. They want the hunger signal to stop in the brain, and the only way they know how to is getting food.

Humans are smart, so we learned to directly tickle various feel-good centers of our brain, such as with drugs, without getting the actual goodies they were “meant” to motivate us to get.

So maybe just subjectively feeling you have status, “status wireheading” is a thing. See also. But I just wonder if it is more of a leftie thing and the rightie thing is to try to get perhaps less good feeling, but more permanent, solid and useful status-giving things.

Moralistic rants look like a perfect example of status-wireheading, so going for virtual, subjective, not real status. People who get to judge people IRL are high status – imagine a king passing judgement on accused subjects. Or pastors delivering moral exhortations. So basically just delivering such exhortations, just on a blog, even when hardly anyone is listening, may subjectively feel like having high status.

This actually could be a big element. Again imagine just some old-time chieftain type basic king, like in the  Brytenwalda period. What is his job and how does he relate and interact to other people? War is a big deal. But war is against outsiders. How does he interact with the in-group? The two big ones are being a war leader, and being a judge.  These seem to be to very fundamental and basic forms of high status behavior.

So going on Tumblr or Reddit and saying “we must fight back against X” or “Y is a hateful asshole” is a way to simulate the two core aspects of kingship! Is it a stretch to think it is status-wireheading, it is status-masturbation, self-stimulation? Like it is a fantasy, you being king, judging subjects and leading charges on the battlefield?

And this is a leftie thing mostly. What do righties want when they want status? I mentioned some examples above, but if you want to simplify it:  money is always fairly high on the list. I am simply wired so that I would certainly feel more high-status as a “bigot” in a BMW (because the BMW is more real than the “bigot” insult) than a guy with wonderfully polcorrect opinions on the bus. Because that kind of respect is more fleeting. Are most righties wired so? Similarly I have a strange fetish for wanting to acquire land one day. Not agricultural, just a field or forest.  Because that is even more solid and durable than a nice car that depreciates every year.

I must apologize that it is not fully well developed theory and I just cannot express it accurately enough. It is just a hunch, it is just seeing a certain pattern. Maybe this patter does not really exist.

Suppose Alice is more interested in having a bombastic job title, which will be lost if she loses the job, and Bob is more interested in having an academic title, like Dr., which is never lost. Wouldn’t you think Bob’s desire for something more solid and durable makes it likely he is more conservative than Alice?

I don’t really know what to make of this hunch, but maybe someone else has an idea and picks it up from here.

Also, obviously – lefties are often going for real power. But only a small fraction of them has any chance of getting it. For their majority, just feeling high status may be the thing. It could be the that powerful minority gains and retains power by feeding high-status feeling into the leftie majority.

I mean if I go to Prez Obama’s Wikiquote page, the very first one is:

“Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous. ”

Translation:

“You, my voters, should feel you are a part of a group who are capable of reshaping the most powerful thing on this planet.”  Isn’t that basically saying “you my voters should feel high-status?”

Isn’t it this kind of trade – Obama gets real power, his voters get status-wireheading, they get to feel they are subjectively, virtually high status?

Of course we should really test it if the right does not do the same things. But then the problem is how do you define the right. For me someone like Reagan or Thatcher or Kohl just weren’t really right-wing  – and Reagan’s Wikiquote page is full of similar moves. Who should I look at as a proper right-wing example? Churchill? Franco? Bismarck? Someone more contemporary? At a random whim, I looked up Nigel Farage’s Wikiquote page. And behold, he is not saying anything nice about his supporters – nothing at all. The closest he gets to emitting “you are cool” messages is saying the UKIP is not for sale.  And that is more of a fighting message than a “you are awesome” one.

Conservative US Presidents and candidates are a different story, as they are usually just “Cathedral Right”, and this is reflected in the their message like “let’s make America great again” which basically means: “you, my supporter, are great, and can do great things”. They are not really what I would call right-wing so in this sense it does not really falsify this theory.

I don’t think I proved the theory either. I don’t even think I formulated it really.  But I think I can say there is a hunch here that has some amount of probability of being correct.

EDIT: To Melting Asphalt’s great post:

According to Kemper, 1991, “Social Structure And Testosterone” increasing dominance and increasing prestige (eminence) results in boosting testosterone.  You may want to work this angle in.

Don’t ignore the sexual angle: admiration, flattery plays a role in courting. Men compliment women’sbeauty, women pull a bit of hero-worship flattery on men they love.

But it is a chicken or eggs story.

If  getting flattered (more prestige) increases your T, it makes you hornier and thus more likely to want to mate. Both men and women.  Maybe this is why we flatter when we court / date. A tricky way to make your date horny.

But it could be the other way around. Maybe flattering and admiration evolved directly for the purpose of increasing someone’s T and thus making them hornier, and the other social aspects you described attach to that. I.e. by flattering, the admirer makes the high-prestige person hornier, and this feels good, and creates a form of bonding. Maybe.  I mean basically this Ancient Greek stuff when young men admired accomplished men, who then both taught, mentored them and had sex with them. Flattering up the old warrior gives him T, makes him feel horny, and if the mentored young man also has sex with him, the old man pays for this all with mentoring. Maybe such relationships were not uncommon in the EEA.

I am not sure where this all leads, really. Flattering a brutally dominant one makes him far less dangerous, while it keeps him in the same high-T mode. It could even be a way to domesticate the brutally dominant one, or for early wives to tame their ultra-dominant husbands.

Back to my own theory: feeling one has high status, even when it is not real, is also sexually ticklish, this may be part of its appeal.

RE: A functioning nation: system requirements

I intend to write longer about it, but as for now I just like Malcolm Pollacks IT-inspired wording, so maybe a quick and somewhat frivolous reply for now. If we are approaching nations from an IT angle, why not try to simulate them on a computer? And this is actually being done, there are “niche” videogames that focus on accuracy more than popularity. I am talking about Paradox, of course. One could start there.

Say, you are trying to survive playing Britain in Hearts of Iron IV. For an insane challenge, try it with France. Or try Germany and start the game after Kursk. Anyhow you will notice pretty quickly that you need four things:

• Manpower. This is mainly another word for demographics/natalism, although, of course, you can always increase it with insanely long conscription periods.

• Economic output. Wait, no, the service sector does not matter much there, especially if financial thingamajiks are counted in. Neither foot massages nor credit default swaps are going to help much with the old guns-or-butter problem. Mainly manufacturing and agriculture i.e. productive output it is.

• Morale. Not in the sense of “being moral and ethical”, more like in the sense of ardent nationalism, loyalty, an aggressive fighting spirit and suchlike. I.e. morale is precisely that thing that if you are a liberal type, it looks scary, ugly and halfway evil even if in the case of impeccably Allied countries during WW2. Morale is one good reason why you cannot just import immigrants if your manpower stat is falling due to the lack of births. I mean, it is not in the game, but I would easily model it with an increase in manpower and a permanent or very long term decrease in morale – it is not going away, not before a century or even longer period, because the cohesion of your nation just got essentially lowered and you won’t get it back until they have intermarried so much that there are no internal tribal differences anymore and  everybody is thinking like “we are a we, against them” again. Take some productive output points away, too.

• Intelligent leadership, management and experts. This is probably where the free market matters most – not in sheer quantitative productivity, as the Soviets were able to pump out enough tanks. But designing advanced electronics, i.e. qualitative productivity, now that is something the free market does best. Hearts of Iron IV models this with “research teams”, which are simply a “given”, you as the player, as the leader of a country cannot produce more teams. This inability in the game probably simulates that it is a free market thing, not so close under Dear Leaders control.

But wait a bit. Why am I basing my requirements of a functioning nation on a simulation of a period of total war? (Not that the simulations of the non-total periods, like Europa Universalis IV are much different in this regard.)

Let me ask a question. You need to test the fitness of a person. How do you do it? I would simply send him in the cage for a bit of MMA fighting. Fighting is a perfect test of all kinds of fitness because if you have a weakness in any of them your opponent will use it against you. Low on cardio? You will get tired out, and then easily finished. Weak upper body strength? The opponent will not have to care so much about defending himself. Poor balance (my bane) ? You will find yourself on your ass a lot.  Poor flexibility? Your opponent will make moves that can  only be countered by a head kick, but you can’t pull that off well. Actually your body is all right, but you get mentally easily scared? Will be used against you, too.

Fighting is such a perfect test of fitness, if you think about it, it is almost in the definition. Fitness is an ability to overcome obstacles, and a human opponent is per definition the kind of an intelligent, flexible obstacle who is the hardest to overcome because he will screw with your weaknesses.

The same way, the health and fitness of nations is tested by wars. Just about anything that is truly robust and healthy about a nation, can be used to  gain an advantage, or just about any weakness can be exploited. This justifies the use of computer war simulations for this purpose.

This is something non-obvious and seriously crucial to understand – I used to think I have to work on and test various kinds of my fitness separately. Strength Monday, endurance Tuesday etc. But at some point I realized I can just hand the whole thing over to e.g. a boxing trainer and he will make me overally well-rounded fit.  And the reason is simply that if the purpose of fitness is to be able solve problems, the best test is to find problems who intelligently resist being solved, who will find out your weaknesses and use them against you. In theory it could be any intelligence, from AI to extraterrestrials, but in practice just using other humans works best. It is pretty much the definition of intelligence and this is why intelligent challenges are per def the hardest because they are adaptive challenges.  Get real good at boxing, and it is practically impossible you will fail at an 5K run or neighborhood push-up competition or walking a tightrope or catching flies in the air, largely because you never become real good at boxing without these, so you will have to do all these and more in order to pass the ring test. Even more importantly, you will have to be psychologically fit, too.

And this is just the same for nations. Give me a nation who is very good at not letting other nations of the same calibre and weight class (important!) give them a pounding and I am fairly sure it will be a nation that will be good at solving any other kind of problem either. Because if they have just one true weakness, one category of problems they are really bad at solving: that is how they will get pounded.

And if we accept this hypothesis, we have not only these fairly decent simulations but also immense amounts of analytical literature of the “Why had France lost the Franco-Prussian war?” or “Had Carthage really no chance?” type.

American-talk and woman-talk

Disclaimer: drunk.

My ass lives in Central Europe. My mind lives in a Gutenberg-galaxy of English-language books, media, Internet and whatnot that tends to be so thoroughly dominated by Americans that I might as well say my mind lives in Mediamerica.

One thing I noticed in Mediamerica is how American males – I mean mostly liberals there – tend to use woman-talk. Expressions like “horrified”, “horrifying”, “outraged”, “outrageous”.

I consider this woman-talk, because essentially these all are just different words for complaining. Complaining is a classic female way to solve problems: complain and the man will solve it. Much of feminist “fighting for causes” is complaining: it means if you express something bothers you, a man will fix it. In the less feminist countries in the more eastern parts of Europe this is a recurring joke. How to replace a punctured tire as a woman? Apply lipstick. Wave at passing cars. Smile.

What does it exactly mean to be horrified or outraged? Let’s approach this rationally. (See above: drunk-rationally.) It is feelings, emotions. Are they positive? No. Negative? Yep.

What kinds of negative feelings are appropriate for men? Who are men anyway? It is not just about having something hanging between the legs. Best way to define a man: someone who values himself and is valued by others by what he does, not what he is.

Recipe for being a man: 1) get off the couch and do shit 2) forget the rest.

Anyhoe. Sorry: anyhow.  What are the appropriate negative emotions for a Doer i.e. a man?

1) Anger. I don’t like this obstacle and thus I am gonna remove it.

2) Frustration. I tried removing this obstacle and failed. Tried again and failed again.

3) Tragic sorrow. This obstacle nobody will remove, this is part of human nature / life / conditio humana.

4) Worry / fear for others, far less often than for yourself. People I love have this obstacle and I don’t think I will be able to remove it.

What does “horrified” even mean? I have this obstacle and cannot even try to do anything about it? That is not for a Doer. “Outraged”? Sounds like impotent anger. Why not just be angry and kick some ass?

Thirty thousand years ago, some caveman was surprised by a hungry lion. He was scared, of course. He raised his spear. He figured he cannot defeat it on his own, so he shouted for help, but as long as help arrived, he did what he could, trying to keep the lion at bay with said spear. His attitude, mindset was worry, but also an active kind, a worry closer to anger – he was not paralyzed with fear, he had to do what he had to until help arrived. The best way to describe it he was “stressed out” – but in a way that it did not prevent him from doing what he can.

Thirty thousand year ago, some cavewoman was also surprised by a hungry lion. She was horrified. She just dropped the berries she was gathering, and, paralyzed by fear, she just screamed and screamed. Pretty soon many cavemen were rushing to help her.

A true man is never horrified nor outraged. You see something you hate? Attack or strategically retreat. Maybe negotiate. Challenge or submit. Outsmart it. Button up and fight defensive. Evade and attack later. Hit and run. Lure it into a trap. And so on. There are many strategies of dealing with stuff you hate. Or people. I am of course not saying a true man must charge head-on into shit like a stupid bull. We are humans, we fight with brains.

But horrified and outraged just means screaming because you expect someone else will hear it and drop everything and rush in to help you, like a noble knight on a horse.

And such an expectation is a fucked up attitude for a man to have.

So leave it to women to be horrified or outraged.

And given how easily – mostly liberal – American men, writers, journos, authors throw “horrifying”, “outrageous” and similar woman-talk around,  and yet they still are the leaders of Western civ, as a somewhat peripherical member of Western civ, I am starting to think really seriously that our leadership is lacking the balls.

No Such Thing As Fascism

I was quite surprised when I saw Ilya Shiptser calling NRx “New Fascism”  in a comment at the SSC blog. We aren’t, of course, and the best argument I can give why exactly is not merely that Fascism is evil and we aren’t, nor that Fascism is destructive of civilization and NRx wishes to rebuild civilization, but even that Fascism is an virtual evil: there is no such thing as Fascism.  It is hard to convey tone in writing, but if I was speaking aloud, my tone would be that of a reassuring kind: calm down and fear not, nobody intends to revive those kinds of horrors anymore.  Don’t be afraid.  If it is any help in not being afraid, I am a descendant of Holocaust survivors.  My “anti-Fascist” immune system is fairly strong and yet my spidey sense is not tingling. It is dead. It stays dead. And I am not even sure it ever existed in that ideological sense today people think it did.

Why do I say there is no such thing as Fascism? Let me offer a parallel. I am an Atheist. I don’t believe Satan exists. And I think about Fascism roughly the same way I think about Satan:  the Satan concept is a projection generated by Christians, they simply project whatever they fear and hate most, and reify it into a virtual entity or symbol.  And the fact that Satanist murders actually happened does not change it: folks who claim they are Satanists do exist, but Satan does not.  In fact, if todays Liberalism is a direct Descendant of Puritanism, the popular concept of Fascism can be an inheritance from the popular concept of Satan.

Another way to look at it is comic book evils like Joker.  They are described not from their own angle, not as a man with motivations a man could reasonably have, but simply as whatever the good-minded reader – or Batman – fears and hates most.

We can see this process in movies like V for Vendetta or the Hunger Games. Such movies are clearly about fighting against Fascism in a fantasy universe. And look at how such political systems are described in such fantasy universes! They are entirely described from the angle of the good guys – they are what they fear and what they loath. The don’t have any sort of a consistent existence on their own. They just exist to have something the good guys can fight against. They exist as negatives, they exist as Others, seen through the eyes of the heroes. The Enemy.

This is what I mean by Fascism not existing. It is not something you would want to be: it is something you imagine your enemies are. Fascism is always The Other.

My point is not that Fascism isn’t or wasn’t evil. The kind of men who are commonly described as Fascists were, beyond any doubt, clearly evil.  My point is that Fascism hardly ever existed as a thing in itself, an ideology, a mind virus, independent of the historical circumstances and the personalities of those men. It is perhaps a useful label for whatever those evil men did in those historical circumstances, but the label is almost useless outside of that. I’ll be fair:  it  is largely the same with Bolshevism. I don’t fear a Bolshevik takeover. Liberals should not fear a Fascist takeover either.

The 1920’s and the 1930’s

The 1920’s and 1930’s of Europe had three major ingredients:

A) Large numbers of WWI veterans brutalized by both the extreme viciousness of that war and the hysterically hateful athmosphere thereof. They were generally open to the things they got used to: totalitarian leadership, rank and discipline, extreme nationalism, and extremely hateful rhethorics. In other words, the attitude of Total War.  Fascism was very, very strongly based on this particular attitude generated by this particular historical setup. And this is why the whole concept of Fascism is void today – we don’t have such masses of young men, we don’t have this historical scenario and I don’t think it is coming back any time soon. It would take a WW3 to brutalize men enough to be Fascists afterwards.  While my argument is that Fascism doesn’t exist, if you think it is, perhaps think about it like this: it is not the 1920’s and the 1930’s. It is 1917. In 1914, nobody was Fascist, in 1917, many young soldiers adopted a mindset – through the brutality of the war and through the hateful propaganda – that you could call proto-Fascist. Without the Somme or Isonzo, no Fascism.

B) This historical mental vulnerability was exploited by certain evil demagogues.

C) The Orwellian ingredient. There was a certain kind of a brutal totalitarian ideological drive kicking around, most visible in Stalin and Hitler. Orwell described how this could take over the world extremely well in 1984. In his honor, I will call this ingredient Ingsoc. The important part is that while Orwell was himself a Leftist, he still clearly described how Ingsoc is a Leftist thing. From my angle, the Ingsoc drive is something like a really virulent form of Jacobinism. National Socialism was basically racialized Bolshevism: take the usual Bolshevik hatred of capitalists, racialize it into a hatred of Jewish capitalists, and you got it. All this came from the Left.

My point is, Fascist ideology didn’t exist. Mussolini made it up as he went. He was one of the evil guys who abused the WWI veterans openness for totalitarian aggressivity and of course their attitude towards obedience, and just made up bullshit as he went. Part of the bullshit was of course based on the Ingsoc drive in him. But it was only after he consolidated his power when he charged Giovanni Gentile with writing a doctrine for Fascism. He really didn’t care that much.

Hitler’s National Socialism was closer to being an actual ideology, due to the Ingsoc, Bolshevik, Jacobin drive being clearer in him. But even Hitler was making up bullshit as he went. First his racism was entirely biological – Nordic superiority. Then he invaded Norway. That was a bit difficult to explain, so he turned his ideology into something of a more obscure “spiritual” racism: Norway was under British influence and Britain under Jewish “spiritual” influence so the blond Norse weren’t actually “spiritual” Aryans… I hope it is obvious for the reader that it was just random propaganda bullshit, made up as he went.  Even National Socialism was not much of an ideology – the Ingsoc ingredient was there, but mostly it was just a historical accident: an evil demagogue abusing the openness of WWI veterans for such a policy. (Romania was perhaps the clearest case: Legionary State! I.e. a state for veterans, an ideology for veterans of WWI.)

The 1940’s and onward

Propaganda, psychological warfare is a normal ingredient in every war. Of course you want to portray your enemies as evil. It helps with morale. This tends to work especially well when A) your enemies, like, Hitler, are actually evil 2) they actually have elements of an actually evil ideological drivein them, which I called, after Orwell, Ingsoc.

Due to the actual evil of the Axis and the evil Ingsoc ideological drive in the Axis (also in the Soviets, of course), Allied propaganda during WW2 was extremely succesful at portraying the Axis as evil. After all, it was mostly true.

This succesful and largely true propaganda was both during and after the war swinged into creating one of the biggest straw men of all times: Fascism, in the modern sense.  Orwell again described this perfectly.  “Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”

But of course nobody sees themselves as bullies. The bully is always The Other. It is how you see others – when you think they are bullying you – not how anyone would want to see themselves.

Historical Fascism wasn’t an actual ideology but a bunch of evil men abusing the openness of WWI veterans had to a “Legionary State”. It was shot through with Ingsoc, to be sure, but that did not make it an full ideology.

Succesful war propaganda is always about making your enemy look like something a soldier would hate and and a defenseless civilian (esp. women) would fear, in order to influence the defensive instincts of your soldiers. Of course the Allied propaganda used this as well, and it was really helpful that Hitler was truly that kind of guy an Allied soldier would hate and a civilian woman would fear.

The point is, both during and after the war, Allied war propaganda turned into the postwar civilian Liberal propaganda of the Cathedral. Something similar happened at the Soviets.

Anyhow, my point is that this hate-and-fear (and true) war propaganda was turned into a hate-and-fear civilian Liberal propaganda about a certain concept of Fascism as a perpetual ideological enemy.

This new propaganda simply downplayed how the Ingsoc elements of Fascism and Nazism were fundamentally Leftist, and how everything else was just based on historical circumstances (WWI veterans, evil demagogues).  Instead  Cathedral propaganda used this to create the scary image of Fascism as a Perpetual Enemy – the generic projection of all the fears and hatreds Liberals have. Same job as Christians did with Satan. It is always The Great Other – something basically nobody would want to be, it is something you imagine your enemies to be. (OK, some young fools play at being Neo-Fascists or Satanists. It is a consequence of the projection: playing with forbidden fruit.)

Do you think Crowley was really Satanist? Do you think Satanism did ever seriously exist? I would say this kind of Satanism was just a reflection on the Christian propaganda projection of their fears and evils as Satan. It had historical basis: in Paganism – the Wiccan Horned God turned into the idea of Satan. But it was still just a made up projection.

And it is really the same with Fascism. It had a historical basis in the post-WWI era, when evil demagogues preying on the psychological vulnerabilities of WWI veterans, and this combined with a crazy Leftist Ingsoc drive resulted in horrific outcomes. But just like the Horned God cult, it was something tied to historical circumstances. Like how Christians projected their fears and hatreds into an Eternal Satan, Liberals projected theirs into an Eternal Fascist. And the Golden Dawn type idiots are just like Crowley – a reflection on the projection.

And this is why there is no such thing as Fascism.  There is no Fascism and no Satanism, aside from some fools who play at it being one or the other, but only as a reflection of the projection.  Both are just projections of fears and hatreds – mostly fears. The Fascist, or Satan, is the Other, it is what you imagine your enemy is. Not what you would willingly become.

And this is why NRx isn’t Fascist, aside from he obvious we aren’t evil and we are pro-civilization stuff. We are real people, not an imagined enemy, not The Other. We are not Leftists, so no Ingsoc drive. We aren’t evil demagogues and there aren’t huge masses of WWI  veterans around anyway.  As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as Fascism  – it is just a liberal synonym for “nightmare” or “bad LSD trip” or “stuff I fear”.

I am not a Christian, so I don’t believe Satan or a serious Satanism exists. I am not a Liberal, so I don’t believe Fascism or serious Fascists exist. Both are just the projections of fears of of people who aren’t me. Clear?