On taxes, fair taxation and political communication

The author of The Migration Period blog proposed that very few people actually care about taxes as such: whenever they protest against their taxes, they basically mean that they disagree what their taxes are spent on.

Two minor disagreements first:

1) I think most right-leaning people disagree not as much about spending them their taxes on poor people but about spending their taxes on fat bureaucrats who pretend to care about poor people.

2) Even with taxes spent for the best possible purposes, one should’t really want too much of the GDP spent by a government because that means central planning and you know how effective is that. Keynes, not exactly a hardcore libertarian, guesstimated the healthy upper limit of sanity at around 25% of GDP.

But what I would really like to point out is this: I think it also matters how things are communicated. Why is it so that in the USA welfare is always communicated as the rich helping the poor, while in  Germany welfare is always communicated as citizens buying services from the government for themselves?

Towards A More Mature Atheism

Human intelligence evolved as a social intelligence, for the purposes of social cooperation, social competition and social domination. It evolved to make us efficient at cooperating at removing obstacles, especially the kinds of obstacles that tend to fight back, i.e. at warfare.  If you ever studied strategy or tactics, or just played really good board games, you have probably found your brain seems to be strangely well suited for specifically this kind of intellectual activity. It’s not necessarily easier than studying physics, and yet it somehow feels more natural. Physics is like swimming, strategy and tactics is like running. The reason for that is that our brains are truly evolved to be strategic, tactical, diplomatic computers, not physics computers. The question our brains are REALLY good at finding the answer for is “Just what does this guy really want?”

(If you still think human intelligence evolved to make us better dealing with nonhuman threats and challenges such as hunting, google “Ecological Dominance – Social Competition”.)

Thus, a very basic failure mode of the human brain is to overdetect agency.

The Suppression Feedback Loop

There is a less discussed feedback loop in action when things like guns or drugs are suppressed by laws, or ideas like, racism, misogyny and communism are suppressed by social ostracism.

As the law-abiding or socially respectable people stop touching those things or stop publicly supporting such ideas, it is largely the criminals, the misfits, the social outcasts who still keep doing so. There will be exceptions, but the average character of people associated with those things or ideas drops like a stone.

Thus, the suppression gets retroactively justified.

From Moldbug to Donovan and back

I like impossible challenges, such as attempting to reconcile seemingly unreconcilable ideas and attitudes. I think Mencius Moldbug and Jack Donovan are the two polar opposites of Reaction. Donovan is something sort of a high-T philosopher of violence-glorifying neo-barbarism, while Moldbug’s political philosophy is largely about the idea that absolute kings did a better job at protecting low-T programmers-intellectuals from high-T barbarians than democratic liberalism does. Can we find ANYTHING in common in them – can we come up with any sort of a theory or analytical method that borrows from both?

The king and the subjects: a thought experiment

Imagine you are the king of a people, 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago.  In what circumstances would you want your subjects to be high-T masculine men, and in what circumstances would you rather want to emasculate them?