Posts Tagged ‘decline of the west’

The Flaw in Moldbug’s proposed dictatorship.

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

Obviously democracy is not working, is failing catastrophically.  The productive are outvoted by the gimmedats, in large part non asian minorities and white sluts. Moldbug’s solution is simple:  Dictatorship, evolving into Monarchy.  The dictator, he hopes and expects, will fire all government employees, except for military, police, and some tax collectors.  What use are all the rest of them to a strong dictator?

A good government is a stationary bandit, since a stationary bandit has an incentive to shear the sheep, rather than flay them.  A bad government is a mobile bandit, and the government service in democracies increasingly approximate mobile bandits.  Each bureaucrat seeks to increase his power and wealth, even if the total burden is well above the Laffer limit.

The trouble is that a dictator is not necessarily a stationary bandit:  A secure dictator, for example a martial and charismatic monarch of a long established dynasty, is a stationary bandit.   Unfortunately, not only are long established dynasties in short supply, but when you have one, the legitimate heir to the throne is seldom martial and charismatic. (more…)

The Dark Enlightenment

Monday, September 24th, 2012

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,”

Well obviously if they were not created equal, which plainly they were not, then they were not created with certain inalienable rights either.  Rights are quite alienable.  If men were created, they were created by a God that wrathfully ordained Monarchy for sinful people who were unwilling or unable to govern themselves (first book of Samuel), a God who similarly also approved slavery. And if instead men are the product of the blind forces of natural selection, are risen killer apes, rights come from fire and steel, or the threat thereof, the second amendment being the father of all of the others, in which case you can rightly be enslaved individually for individual fecklessness, or collectively for collective stubborn but incompetent war making.

Rights and equality sound very nice, but it’s all fake, and we are being destroyed.

A lot of people do not want, and cannot competently exercise, real rights.  So “equality” means you start giving them such “rights” as “freedom from hunger”, meaning that someone more competent and thoughtful than they are has to provide them with food that they are too feckless to obtain for themselves, so the superior person’s real rights are destroyed to provide the inferior person with fake “rights”, the right to hay and a barn for human cattle – that being the only way that naturally unequal people can be rendered equal.

Rights and equality are fundamentally incompatible.  If you want rights, cannot have equality, because some people do not deserve, do not particularly want, and cannot competently exercise, real rights.  You are not going to make a below average IQ person with short time preference into a real citizen, independent, free, self sufficient, and property owning.  If some people are going to be free, they are going to be more free than such people.

And if you let such people, inferior people, vote, they will always vote against other people’s rights and other people’s property, being themselves incapable of exercising rights, and themselves too feckless and destructive to have nice things.  If they vote, they vote to drag everyone down to their own subhuman level, a desire politicians are eager to fulfill.

And if God created woman, he created woman to be a help meet for man. And if the blind forces of natural selection shaped women, they shaped women to function in a role profoundly unequal to her husband and her father, for in the ancestral environment, women were completely dependent upon men, resulting a female psychology that is apt to produce bad results for independent women, as is readily observable as one walks past a fertility clinic and looks at the clientele going in and out.

Dude, where is my flying car?

Monday, August 27th, 2012

The first man on the moon has died, and pretty soon the last men on the moon will be dead also.

where are the space settlements?  By the year 2000, we were supposed to have flying cars, space settlements, and cities that looked like this: (more…)

Legitimate rape

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Todd is deep trouble for using the phrase “legitimate rape”, for implying that a lot of rapes are not legitimate – implying that a lot of rape allegations are false rape allegations, or the post hoc reinterpretation of profoundly ambiguous events as rape.

Evolutionary psychology predicts that women will be far more upset about consenting to sex with someone that they subsequently deem a creep or a loser, than actually being forcibly and unambiguously raped, thus false or delusive rape accusations are likely to be common.

Surveys show that it is very rare for a woman married to the head of her household to be raped, and very common that the rapist is an acquaintance of the woman.

This suggests that most rapes occur under courtship circumstances, where it is apt to be inherently ambiguous whether the women consented or not.

In practice, the only common cases where a woman unambiguously consents to sex is marriage, where she consents verbally in front of witnesses, and prostitution, where she accepts a fee for service.  In other cases, consent is seldom verbal, and not merely merely non verbal, but, as in cats, pre verbal, making it genuinely hard to apply our contract based concepts of consent.  Illicit sex is usually inherently ambiguous sex.   You cannot really say she consented except she comes back or sticks around, she herself cannot really say whether she consented unless she observes herself coming back or sticking around. These days, much, perhaps most, sex outside marriage does not involve people sticking around or coming back. (more…)

Inflation

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

If we believe the official inflation figures, supposedly living standards in the US are rising: Yet the proportion of people with cars is falling, the proportion of households with a car is falling faster, and the amount of meat people are eating is falling – consistent with a cpi rising at about the rate that shadowstats claims, about six to ten percent (more…)

Monsters among us

Friday, April 20th, 2012

One curious and difficult to explain aspect of the left, is the tendency to hate what is good and true and  to love monstrous evil and barefaced lies.  Thus, for example, compare the worshipful treatment of China from 1956 to 1972, with the high pitched moral outrage directed at China when the Chinese government ended mass murder and artificial famine in the late seventies, and set to replacing slave labor and command with wage labor and profitability in 1981.  Similarly their affection for Islamists.  While the left is evil, the company they love to keep is apt to be astoundingly evil, with the result that old fashioned Christians, those few of them that still remain, are apt to suspect demonic infiltration rather than communist infiltration.   You will still today get denial that the old China used mass murder, artificial famine and slave labor, combined with hearty condemnation of the current use of wage labor in China.  Similarly, no one notices when our “allies” ethnically cleanse Christians from their lands, having already rendered those lands judenrien.

Below the fold, you will find an outlandishly disgusting video, which reveals that leftists frequently lack the gag reflex, are disinclined to turn away in horror and revulsion from that which is horrible and revolting.  A bunch of leftists, smiling, giggling, and joking, simulate cannibalism on a living person, and don’t realize how it is going to look when normals view the video. (more…)

Technological decay

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Earlier I argued that technology in the west peaked in 1970, Tallest building 1972, coolest muscle cars, last man left the moon,though it continues to advance in some other parts of the world:

Unreasonable expectations points at another indicator. The most advanced plane ever built, the SR71, was built in 1966, retired 1972. One would have expected stealthed mach three fighters and bombers to replace it, but instead, slower, lower performance stealthed fighters and bombers replaced it. Unreasonable expectations argues that all advances since then have been driven solely by advances in photolithography, and that when photolithography runs out, technological advance will end.

A number of posts have appeared by a number of people reporting slowing in technology, or actual decline in the level of technology: See Locklin for a summary and review.

I would instead predict that technological advance in the west will end. I see new technologies, such as the blue light semiconductor laser, which makes possible modern DVDs, e-ink, which made possible the kindle, and new construction methods for very large buildings, which make possible the remarkably cool asian airports, continuing to appear in Asia.

Oslo cityscape

Shanghai cityscape

Shanghai cityscape

You can see where the future is being made. The Oslo cityscape looks as though it should be in sepia, for the nineteenth century look – similarly when you google up street scenes from Europe and the US and compare them with equivalent street scenes from China.

In the 1930s, they imagined the world of tomorrow would look shiny and futuristic. It does look that way, but not in the west.

What is causing it?

Contrary to Charles Murray, it looks to me that our elite is less and less elite, less and less selected for ability, creativity, and intelligence, that it is now primarily selected for conformity and political correctness, and secondarily selected for race and gender, and thus excludes the person who is smarter than those around him, who tends to have difficulty conforming, and is apt to show signs of noticing the more illogical aspects of the holy faith. You observe a lot more women in today’s ruling elite, and women are noticeably less intelligent and logical, less capable of comprehending or advancing technology, and the smartest women are considerably less smart than the smartest men. There are no great female composers, despite the fact that women have been very strongly encouraged to go into music for several hundred years. There are no great female scientists, Marie Curie being a completely faked up poster girl and an affirmative action Nobel prize. So when you see lots of females in the elite, you are simply going to see less technology. You are going to see the really smart man (and he always is a man) simply have lower status and less time and resources to accomplish stuff.

If you read up on the challenger disaster, it is pretty obvious that the people making the decisions were just stupid, and engineers under them were markedly smarter.   Mulloy simply did not understand Lund’s presentation.  And because the bosses were just too dimwitted, the space shuttle fell out of the sky.  Further, the reason Lund was low status and Mulloy was  high status is because Mulloy was stupid enough to fit in with the elite, while Lund was just too smart to fit in.

Reading old books, it looks to me that in the US, selection on the basis of ability maxed in 1870 if we suppose breeding counts, and if we instead suppose that the college board test (which later became the SAT) is vastly more predictive than breeding, so that breeding should be completely and totally disregarded, then it looks to me that selection on the basis of ability maxed in 1910, when they started to worry more about the fact that high scorers tended to be affluent white males, than whether the exam accurately measured ability to benefit from the kind of material taught at college.

Ever since then, since 1870 or 1910, depending on how reactionary you are, our elite has just been getting dumber and dumber, hence, technological decline.

Inflation

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Total sales are rising ten percent a year in nominal terms.    Surprise surprise, shadowstats estimates ten percent inflation per year if we use the measure of inflation that was used in the the 1980s.    Hawaiian Libertarian reports that that is pretty much what he is seeing when he puts his money down.

So what is the true rate of inflation?

There is no one true rate of inflation, since to estimate inflation, one has to compare apples and oranges, and there is no one valid way of doing this.

But if inflation is substantially less than ten percent a year, we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year.  Do you think we are consuming substantially more goods this year than last year?

But whatever the true rate of inflation might be, it is increasing.  It is not increasing fast as I expected, not increasing very fast at all.  It is increasing at about two percent a year, so if this year inflation was not ten percent, but eight percent, next year it will be ten percent a year, and the year after that, twelve percent a year.  The rate at which prices increase, is itself increasing.

This does not sound all that terrifying, but recall that hyperinflation begins as the collapse of a paper bubble.  Everyone wakes up one morning realizing that inflation is a lot higher than they thought and will only get worse, so they all try to unload their paper at the same time for tangibles:  Land in productive use, gold, ammo, guns, non perishable food items, alcohol,  and suchlike, also overseas non tangible assets, paper assets regulated by solvent governments.

Only to discover that they cannot all unload their paper money at the same time.

If the rate of inflation is high and increasing, sooner or later, it suddenly starts to increase a lot faster.  Suppose inflation this year was seven percent, then next year it will nine percent, which is not imminent doom.  If people are not panicking today, they are unlikely to panic tomorrow. The end is not nigh.  But the end, nonetheless, is in sight.

 

Stultum facit fortuna

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Whom fortune wishes to destroy, she first makes mad.

Consensus leads to the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds.  As we move to a government ruled by consensus, and intrusively pervading every aspect of society with its power, madness and evil prevails. (more…)

The cause of the decline

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The  End of the Future”: (more…)