Monthly Archives: February 2016

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain

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I’ve been called a blind, unthinking sheep for buying an iPhone.

I’ve been called a cult leader for trying to teach people how to think independently and attain personal spiritual powers.

I’ve been called called a counterfeiter and liar for making a verbatim quotation from the Bible.

I’ve been called a right-wing racist misogynist bigot for having straightforward opinions based on evidence.

I’ve been called stubbornly wrong for claiming that 2+3*5=17.

I’ve been called illiterate by people who probably can’t sign their own name.

I’ve been called uneducated by people who think that the rocks in the pyramids of Egypt were organically grown.

I’ve been called unenlightened by people whose entire concept of spirituality is copied from some book.

It bothered me at first. Later I tried arguing with them. Now I just confirm what they said. Yeah, I’m a sheep, I’m too stupid to make up my own mind and I bought the expensive shiny thingy because I’m too lazy to see the alternatives. Yes, I’m a cult leader, I’m in it for money and pussy. Yes, I like counterfeiting the scriptures, my father Satan is very proud of me for it. Yes, I’m a right winger, Heil Hitler, get back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich. Yeah, I’m stubborn, and I’m too fucking lazy to just make operations in the proper order, from left to right like all normal people. Yeah, me dumbass, can’t write, can read a little but slowly. Yeah, I’m uneducated and close-minded and I don’t even believe in the tooth fairy. I’m totally unenlightened, I don’t care about that shit at all, I didn’t even give enough fuck to read a Richard Bach or Paulo Coelho book and get the right answers.

In other words, fuck me if I care.

About science, verifiability and equality

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Generally speaking, science is the best tool ever devised by mankind for the purpose of finding out the facts about the world. It provides us with the most accurate and verified information of all the sources of knowledge that we possess. It is more accurate than religion, it is more accurate than journalism, and it is much more reliable than politics. If you want to know something about the world, ask a scientist. Don’t ask a religious person or a politician.

On a more personal level, however, things are quite a bit different, because on a personal level, you can’t really verify science, and you don’t actually see it first-hand. You hear about science from the politicians and the journalists, or even worse, from the religious people, and what science survives this unreliable conduit is no longer science. It’s an interpretation of science that serves someone’s agenda, and to you personally, it’s served in form of a religion, which I call “scientism”. Scientism is the religion of science. It preaches salvation by science, and divides the world into scientific and falsehood. If there’s a scientific opinion about something, it’s a sacred dogma. If scientists agree on something, it’s to be viewed with the same worshipful reverence with which the Catholics view a council of the Church. If someone says a 97% of scientists agree on something, you don’t verify. You obediently comply and you don’t ask questions lest you be called one of those names that end all discussion and harm your chances of ever finding or keeping a job.

The problem is, the world isn’t neatly separated into science and falsehood. It’s separated into the part that is known to us and within our ability to process in any way, and the part that is completely beyond our grasp. The part that is within our ability to process is very small, and it is further divided into the part that the science has ways of dealing with, and the part that it can’t process because it’s incompatible with the scientific method. That’s why we have so much knowledge about chemistry and so little about human psyche; what we do know about human spirit is only the part that can be subjected to scientific analysis, and the psychologists like to believe that this part is much larger than my personal experience can attest.

There is also a big difference between science as a method, practitioners of scientific method, the scientific community, and the impression the general population gets about what it’s all about. What the general population thinks about science is basically what the newspapers and other media report. Think about it what you will, but I am less than pleased with my prospects of finding out any kind of objective truth with this method.

One of my problems with the so called “social media” is that it gives a platform to vocal but stupid people, who often know very little about what’s going on in the world, but they tend to have a huge following. Recently some ignorant musician went on a campaign to inform people that the Earth is really flat. There’s actually quite a following of conspiracy theorists who claim that NASA is all about computer-generated forgeries and that it’s actually impossible to go into orbit let alone to Moon and Mars, because the Earth is flat.

And that’s my main problem with the movie “Martian”. Regardless of how interesting and well made it is, it works with an implicit faulty assumption that we live in the same civilization that went to the Moon in the sixties and early seventies. We don’t. That then was a civilization ruled by white men who did what they thought was right and didn’t care much about anyone else. The result was that they stretched technology to the limits and did what people today would generally consider impossible, but not because it’s really impossible, but because they are stupid people whose arrogance and self-importance was inflated by the social media culture which conditioned them to believe that they are important and that they matter. Which they are not, and they don’t.

They are uneducated, because the education system in the West, and especially in America, under-emphasises hard science disciplines and a direct experimental approach, with the end-result of students getting degrees while thinking that it’s all just dogma whose purpose is to fill short term memory in order to pass the tests. On the other hand, what is over-emphasised is self-importance, self-confidence and rhetorical skills whose purpose isn’t to find out and defend the truth, but to win arguments for any side. Essentially, they are taught conceit and demagoguery, and that’s what we can see online – vain, stupid, conceited, argumentative people who post “selfies”, use the platform of social media to talk endlessly about their unimportant experiences and shallow thoughts, and never concede that they are wrong about anything.

As a result, this raises the noise floor so much, you can no longer reliably differentiate between the spikes of authentic signal and various social media propagandistic campaigns, with the end-result of nobody taking the serious stuff seriously, because we are repeatedly brainwashed with claims that everything is equally important and everybody matters. As a result, the civilization portrayed in the “Martian” doesn’t exist. It existed when Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev led the space programmes of their respective nations. It existed when important people were taken seriously, and stupid people didn’t have a platform from which to shout their worthless drivel, and as a result of them not having a voice, they couldn’t say stupid things and raise the overall civilizational noise floor.

What I’m saying here, is that ordinary people should be aware that they are not special. They are not important. Their opinions aren’t important, aren’t smart, aren’t well informed and, being aware of that, they should shut the fuck up and not drown out the voices of the few who actually have something important and relevant to say. The fact that everybody has a voice and a platform only served to reveal how stupid, unimportant and uneducated most people are, and why censorship and restricted access to public speaking platforms were such a great thing, that brought us to the Moon, gave us nuclear energy and produced all the great things of modern technology.

What social media gave us are the stupid conspiracy theorists who don’t know jack shit about how science and technology actually work, but who possess worthless degrees given to them by an education system that teaches people that truth doesn’t matter, that the facts don’t matter, but that presentation is everything.

As a result, we live in a civilization in which facts don’t matter, the truth doesn’t matter, and the media-created thoughtspace contains only presentation, propaganda, opinions and nonsense, and people like myself, who genuinely cut through that bullshit in search for truth and the facts are seen as some crazy right-wing kooks who say things that are completely out of touch with the stuff “everybody knows is true”.

Well, what you “know” is true is that 97% of scientists support the man-made global warming interpretation. That’s what the politicians tell you. That’s what the media tells you. But when someone actually bothered to ask the scientists, they said something quite different.

I once watched a Youtube movie called “Zeitgeist” that intends to reveal all the “bullshit” of religion, by uncovering all the “lies” Christianity, for instance, has been telling us. For instance, it states that Jesus is a myth, that stories about virgin birth are abundant in the Mediterranean circle of religions. I saw this movie because it was widely spread by “skeptics” and conspiracy theorists. Guess what, I actually bothered to be skeptical enough of the movie’s claims as to verify them, and found them to be complete and utter drivel. For instance, Krishna is quoted as an example of someone born of a virgin. Only he was his mother’s eighth child. This is something I noticed immediately because unlike the author of the movie, I actually know something. I proceeded to verify other similar claims, and they all fell apart, nothing even remotely makes sense when you look at the actual content of some belief, not the one-sentence presentation made by a liar and a conman. So, it appears that the self-proclaimed skeptics are the most gullible people you can ever meet. They will believe literally anything, as long as it isn’t the “official story”, and the cause of all this is that stupid, irrelevant, common people have been lead to believe that they are special, that they should question things and not simply accept them, and that narrative is everything and the facts are relative.

And when you have stupid people who are skeptical of what the smart people tell them, you get a doomed society.

Common people believe that we are all the same, that they are equal to the smart people, because they were never required to actually test this belief. If they were, their opinion of themselves as God’s special snowflakes would suddenly wane. At one point in life I was surrounded with average people who didn’t think I’m special because I looked like them, only more scrawny, I talked to them about the common banalities, but they heard that I’m supposed to be some Mensa-IQ guy so they got some IQ tests and offered that we solve them together, to see how we compare. I will never forget their faces when they saw with what ease I solved the test while they got stuck at the simplest questions, and not only did I do my test flawlessly, I simultaneously helped them with theirs. They felt humiliated, probably for the first time in their lives, and not because I laughed at them or made fun of them – on the contrary, I was as polite and forthcoming as always. It’s because for the first time in their lives they saw that not all men are equal, not because somebody told them, but because they were forced to confront the evidence in their living experience.

When people are told all the time that we are all equal, that IQ doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, that there is no more than 1% of difference between people, that all souls were made the same by God, they tend to believe that – “those scientists, they’re not really smarter, they are just deceiving us, but we know better”. I personally experienced many situations where I was faced with someone who knew much more about something than I did, and I couldn’t delude myself into thinking that we are equals; I was the stupid one, and if I wanted to overcome that I had to learn. I truly wish everyone had the same experience, and then this entire political correctness multicultural egalitarian bullshit would go away. There’s nothing more harmful to a civilization than belief that we are all the same and that everyone’s opinions and lives matter the same.

They don’t. Narrative is not all that matters. When some people succeed where others fail, it’s not due to discrimination, it’s because some people are better than others, and they are worth more. If you think you’re anyone’s equal, take an IQ test against a 1-percentile.

About conflicting vastly different viewpoints in a discussion

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I’ve been thinking about how politics, philosophy and religion are always intellectually degraded when the medium for their presentations is a conflict of opposing opinions.

This is opposite to what people believe, of course; it is commonly believed that a dialogue of opposing views improves the arguments, but this is not my experience. According to my experience, I can present the highest quality of arguments and make the best possible case for my ideas when I’m left alone to write a careful, deliberate monologue in which I can explore ideas in peace, and write one of my rhetorical arcs. Occasionally, I can improve my arguments in a discussion with an intelligent, knowledgeable person who has an intellectual position that is very close to my own. If I’m having a discussion with someone whose opinions differ greatly from my own, the result will be that everything beyond the intersection of our opinions will be hotly contested, and since I’m yet to see someone actually change his mind based on good arguments from the opposing side, usefulness of the entire exercise is questionable. The best discussions take place when the point in contention is very narrowly constrained; the wider the constraints, and the greater the area in contention, the greater the probability that the entire discussion will degrade into a shouting match and an ad hominem shitstorm. Similar but slightly different viewpoints, on the other hand, can create very fruitful brainstorming sessions, but of course one must be careful not to descend into the echo-chamber mentality in which outputs are reused as inputs and people start using very dubious suppositions as facts on which they proceed to build quite insane mental constructs. It must always be an exercise in “let’s see where this leads if we take the arguments to their reasonable limits”, but one must remain mindful of the word “reasonable”.

I tried dialogue as a rhetorical instrument. God knows I tried. The results were almost always insignificant compared to what I could do in a monologue, when I can explore my thoughts without interruptions. What interruptions can do is clearly visible in TV and Youtube arguments where all discussions worth seeing are basically between people of very similar positions. Whenever their positions diverge too much, the discussion degenerates and is very difficult to watch. I’m not talking only about the positions I personally agree with – for instance, I personally hate Islam and hold it in greatest imaginable contempt, but if I want to understand what the Muslims really think about an issue, I will watch them talking to other Muslims, expressing their true thoughts unhindered and uninterrupted by opposition, among people of similar beliefs. Watching a Muslim’s speech interrupted by constant shouts of consternation isn’t useful for finding out his actual opinion. The same goes for everyone else; a discussion between advocates of very different positions is more of an exercise in rethorics and skill in manipulating the audience with sound bites, than an exercise in finding out any kind of truth. I, personally, don’t function well in a situation where I have to condense my entire position into less than five carefully weighed soundbites delivered with humour and cynicism. I prefer to tell a story, to make an atmosphere in which you can get a taste of an idea cooked in its own juice. I prefer it to be a complete meal, rather than a short snack.

Don’t get me wrong, I am good in a live dialogue, but I’m deadly in a written monologue, because when I’m arguing with someone in realtime, I have less time to consider my arguments and it is more difficult to source supporting quotations and facts. I have to rely on my memory, which is quite good, but not as good as a search engine that allows me to find supporting facts on the Internet and link them into the narrative. In a realtime discussion, I’m also limited by the capacity of the audience for processing what I’m saying in realtime, which is too much of a constraint for my arguments to bear, because in written form I can go far beyond almost anyone’s ability to follow in realtime and count on the audience re-reading the texts for years in order to digest them properly. If I did that in a realtime discussion, I’d lose them entirely, because in a live discussion you win if you can leverage what people think they know, and introduce only as much new information as can be digested in realtime. If one degrades things further from the already low baseline, by introducing opinions that are so divergent as to make any kind of a discussion hard (for instance a physicist and a flat-Earth apologist, or a religious mystic and a militant atheist), you can be sure only that the opponent with most practice in delivering comical soundbites will “win”, but the entire exercise will not be greatly informative.

So what I’m saying is that I like to watch opposing ideas and philosophies and see where they lead when their advocates are allowed to extend them to their logical limits and beyond, in the same way in which I like both hot sauce and ice cream. I just don’t like them mixed together at the same time, because the result is useless.

Bad ideas that refuse to die

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I was thinking about socialism and how wrong ideas never seem to die, regardless of how harmful or useless they proved to be. For instance, at one point more than half the world tried to implement socialism in one form or another, and it invariably produced widespread human misery. It simply does that by design, with its “eat the rich” paradigm. It eats the rich and then everybody is poor, there’s nobody to blame, and then the infighting begins, millions die, everybody is poor, and eventually people completely give up on the system and adopt some form of social Darwinism, which works excellently, produces enormous wealth and prosperity, but, of course, not everybody succeeds and then some fucking idiot re-introduces socialist ideas, like, how about redistributing that wealth so that those few poor people don’t get excluded from the widespread prosperity, so taxes are increased, the state bureaucracy is increased, free market is stressed by taxation, the worthless people get welfare and reproduce exponentially (because they are rewarded with more welfare for reproducing and failing at everything) while contributing exactly jack shit, the state goes into debt, scientific and high-tech programmes are curtailed because the socialist politicians think that all money must go to social programmes because socialism, and if there are problems, blame the evil black beast of capitalism and ask for more state control and socialism as a solution. The problem is with the concept that the poor possess virtue, that God is on their side, and that people are equal and therefore deserve the same outcomes regardless of their actual abilities and choices.

If you try to introduce some alternative to socialism or use common sense, you’re immediately attacked and “de-platformed”, as it is called – you’re a x-ist and x-phobe and all the tolerant multicultural people want to kill you. Somehow, there’s an implication that they are good, that they are progressive, despite the fact that what they are proposing was actually all tried in Stalinist Russia, and is by definition regressive because it’s a step backwards in history, and despite the fact that their socialism is probably the only political system that was scientifically tested and tried, and proved not to work, so basically if someone wants to benefit mankind, socialism is the only system he should never attempt to use because it’s worse than useless.

There are, of course, other ideas that are a disaster; determinism, for instance, which basically states that whatever you do, the end result will be the same because it’s determined by outside forces, be it God, destiny, karma or societal circumstances. By adopting such attitude you are guaranteed to fail, and this is the main reason why Catholic countries are economically usually worse off than the Protestant countries, because the Protestant countries are closer to the Jewish belief that God will reward the righteous people with wealth, while those who are not in his favour will be poor. The Catholics believe that God doesn’t work like that, and that wealth can actually be a hindrance or a temptation. Be it as it may, beliefs of this sort influence people’s work ethics and attitude, and if they believe that wealth is a reward from God, they will try to attain it, and see their success or lack thereof as feedback. I actually see the Catholic position as a contamination with Cathari beliefs that were semi-officially canonized together with St. Francis and St. Claire, where worldly possessions are seen as a spiritual burden and avoided altogether. How useful that is in a spiritual sense, it’s difficult to tell, but as an influence to economy it’s a disaster, because the wealthy and successful individuals are shunned in favour of ragged demagogues. If the wealthy aren’t respected and admired, the end result will be social apathy and widespread misery. But determinism causes an even worse problem: those who actually invest effort in order to change their situation are seen as “not having faith” or “not accepting the will of God”. This gives apathy and despondency an aura of spirituality and elevates it to the position of almost-holiness.

I understand that such negative attitudes about wealth might have been the result of unity of church and state, and that the church was so preoccupied with amassing wealth and power that it neglected its spiritual role, and that those who preached poverty might have played a constructive role of redressing an imbalance at one point, but such ideas are actively harmful from the position of economy. If you see wealth as a snare of Satan, well, nobody wants to be ensnared by Satan. I personally believe that poverty is a snare of Satan and that wealth means freedom to pursue forms of spirituality that are not pre-determined by the shackles of poverty, but I’m the enfant terrible of spirituality and nobody really listens to what I have to say.

The problem isn’t social injustice. The problem are the bad ideas that produce misery, suffering and death wherever they are implemented, but somehow still get to wear a halo of sainthood.

And regarding sainthood, it might be a very good showcase of all the widespread misconceptions and illusions which hinder spiritual and personal growth of individuals, because when you think of it, sainthood seems to be defined by poverty, self-denial, extreme compassion, self-sacrifice, detachment from all worldly issues, celibacy and, essentially, removal of oneself from all practical matters of society.

Wanna hear my definition of sainthood? A saint is a person who has a first-person realization of God, and attained success at harmonizing his/her entire life with the nature and character of God.

Which means that for me, an ideal saint is Krishna, the warrior-king who lived a life of first-person godhead and who fought, had sex, fooled around with his best friend, and inspired holy scriptures of the highest order. He wasn’t poor, he wasn’t celibate, he wasn’t self-denying, he wasn’t dedicated to “fighting his ego” or “controlling his thoughts and desires”, and to whom yoga was the art of correct action, not denial of action or removal from the world. To me, St. Francis and St. Claire are worthless examples and worthless people, because they did exactly jack shit to improve anything in the world, and if one tries to emulate their lifestyle it will be a personal disaster. The thing is, Bhagavad-gita wasn’t a result of two renunciate monks discussing haute spirituality in some cave. Bhagavata-purana wasn’t inspired by the life of Shuka the renunciate. It’s about Shuka the renunciate praising the life of Krishna the warrior king as the perfect example of what God looks like when he comes into this world.

So yeah, being a saint isn’t about being poor and naked and celibate and “controlling your ego”. It’s about being in the flesh what God is in His pure spiritual nature, and while we’re at that, we should have in mind that the probable reason why all the renunciate sages fail to understand true spirituality is that they fail to take notice of the fact that Vishnu is married to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune. So the next time you think of how spiritual some poor person is, or how spiritual you must be because you’re poor, or how spiritual you are because you are ignorant of worldly affairs, remember that that the perfect image of God in this world fucked the goddess of fortune (who looks like a billion dollars BTW) while not otherwise preoccupied with waging wars, manipulating politics and inspiring holy scriptures. And the barefoot sages, they merely wrote it all down while trying to figure out what the fuck they were missing in the entire picture.

Tales of the glorious white men

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I’m going to tell you two short stories about “privileged white men” in high positions of power and authority.

The first story is about the “M” in MiG, Artem Mikoyan, Hero of socialist labor, order of Lenin, order of Stalin, deputy in the Supreme Soviet. He was the head of the MiG design bureau and designed some of the best and most famous airplanes in world history. As Americans would say, he was the “bad guy”.

During the familiarization flight with MiG 25 in 1969, another “bad guy”, Lt. General Anatoli Karantsov, the air defense aircraft commander in chief and a personal friend of Artem Mikoyan, was killed.

Artem Mikoyan was so distraught that he died from a heart attack soon afterward – his aircraft’s malfunction killed his friend, and it literally broke his heart.

The second story is about the flight of Soyuz 1 and cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov. Prior to launch, Soyuz 1 engineers are said to have reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns “were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday”.

Yuri Gagarin was the backup pilot for Soyuz 1, and was aware of the design problems and the pressures from the Politburo to proceed with the flight. He attempted to “bump” Komarov from the mission, knowing that the Soviet leadership would not risk a national hero on the flight. At the same time, Komarov refused to pass on the mission, even though he believed it to be doomed. He explained that he could not risk Gagarin’s life. Knowing he was about to die, he made the last will in which he ordered his burial to be in open casket, for the bastards to see clearly what they have done.

During the flight, one solar panel failed, causing shortage of power to the systems. By orbit 13, automatic stabilization system was dead, and the manual system was only partially effective. Still, Komarov managed to make a successful reentry into the atmosphere, but then his parachutes failed and he crashed at full speed to his death.

So let me get this clear. I’m directing these two stories both at the American propagandists and at the feminists – at the propagandists because they portray the Soviet Union as some sort of an evil empire populated by communist zombies from hell, who wanted to unleash the “dark side of the Force” upon the poor freedom loving Americans.

You have an “evil” air defense commander who personally test-flies an airplane and dies, and as a result his friend, the “evil” main aircraft designer in the “evil” country, is so heartbroken he literally has a heart attack and dies. Just two years earlier, two other “privileged white men” and “champions of the evil Empire” had a discussion that went something like this:

Gagarin: This Soyuz thing is a death trap, Vladimir Mihailovitch. I can’t let you fly in it, let me go instead.
Komarov: No, I cannot allow this, Yuri Alekseevitch. It’s my time to go, and I can’t have my friend die in my place. But remember me and have a good life.

If you think that the story about the bastard politicians who sacrificed their best men for the sake of mere propaganda are proof that Americans are right about the Soviet Union, you can read another story, about three more “privileged white men” who burned alive in the Apollo 1 capsule which was also a deathtrap and a piece of shit no better than the Soyuz 1. Prior to that, Neil Armstrong saved Gemini 8 from being a similar disaster, when one of the roll thrusters was stuck in the “on” position and the spacecraft was rolling uncontrollably at the rate of one revolution per second. Regardless, he managed to manually control the spacecraft to a safe landing.

As a conclusion, to those who portray the Russians as the “bad guys” and ridicule them, a big “fuck you” from me. If those same Russians lived in the USA, you’d have given them a Congressional Medal of Honor or something similar, instead of the Order of Lenin, but the meaning would be the same: they are heroes, and if they were your own, you would honor them as the best of your own. If they didn’t prod you to a technological race, you’d still be in the 50s. They, together with you, helped make this civilization glorious and great.

To feminists, who in their propaganda state that men, especially white men, are privileged, another big “fuck you”, because it wasn’t women in Soyuz 1, Gemini 8 and Apollo 1, and it wasn’t the Africans, and it wasn’t the Arabs. It was white men who risked their lives and died so that you could have your air conditioning at your comfortable safe well paid office job. That’s why white men rule the world, because they made it what it is, with their risk-taking, their loyalty and courage. And since you live in the world they made for you, you might as well show some respect and some gratitude.