I encountered a very strange and crazy phenomenon in public discourse – not only in online comment sections and chat-rooms, but the main stream media as well, and that is preconditioning of dialogue.

Basically, that means that you can label someone as having non-permissible opinions or attitudes, basically not being ideologically appropriate, and you simply refuse to talk to that person, to “give him platform” for expressing his “propaganda”, because if an idea is different from yours, it is “propaganda”, and you need to suppress it by non-platforming it.

I’ve seen things like that before, in socialist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Basically, this politically correct thing that has infiltrated public discourse and preconditions dialogue with having politically correct opinions, it’s not a new thing. All totalitarian systems did this.

I think it all started with antisemitism (in our modern post-WW2 society, at least). When it was basically outlawed, the precedent was set for removing certain intellectual and political options from public discourse and effectively penalizing them. Once that was in place, the list of attributes that put you on a no-speak and no-work list was extended to encompass everything some shitty group deemed unfavorable to their interests. Once the pedophiles manage to get enough public support, they will force the lawmakers to decriminalize fucking children, they will force the psychiatrists to stop viewing pedophilia as a disorder, and will invent a newspeak term “pedophobe” for someone who has a “pathological fear of pedophilia”, basically putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. If you think this is unrealistic, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. The inmates have been in charge of the asylum for decades already. Normal people are seen as a problem that needs to be solved, and all kinds of perverts and minority groups are praised as the best thing ever and something the world needs more of, not because they did something of value, but because they are minorities. They now treat being a “white male” as membership in some crime syndicate, and every instance of failure is attributed to oppression; and of course, you blame oppression on the group in power.

So, being labeled as one of the oppressors is the way of excluding people from public discourse – you shouldn’t have a voice because you’re part of the problem, because I say so. I see no difference between that and Stalinism. You shouldn’t have a voice because you’re [insert label here] and you should be deported to Gulag. So, basically, it should be called “argumentum ad Gulag”, which is a combination of ad hominem (because it discredits the person and not the arguments), ad consensu gentium (because “we all know” that [label] is evil and those who are evil need to be suppressed”) and ad baculum (because of the implicit threat of sanctions that result from the labeling).

My recommendation is that this entire approach should be abandoned immediately, and that people should be judged individually and on basis of the actual merit of their ideas and actions, and not by some label that is attached to them. I also recommend that any attempt at labeling is to be seen as a symptom of a desire to oppress others, essentially of passive aggression, and that it should be seen as very suspicious and indicative of malicious intents. There are simply too many historical precedents showing this.

And you know what the funny thing is? The very fact that this strategy is used shows that the one using it is in power and is using oppression against others. This is evident from the very fact that the true oppressors are never afraid of being labeled as such. When the racists were in power and owned slaves, if you accused them of being racists they would laugh at you: of course I am, you fool. When the Nazis were in power, accusing them of being antisemites and Nazis would yield the same result. So it’s proven that the one using labeling to direct social outrage and legal sanctions is in fact in power and is using oppression to fight dissent. Think about that for a while.

The test of a free society is whether you are free to respond to a label with “yes” or “maybe I am”, suffer no sanctions, and the debate continues with the actual arguments. If you need to defend yourself from the accusation in order to even participate in the discussion and not suffer repercussions, you live in a totalitarian society.

From all the available evidence, Hillary Clinton has some serious brain problem and should be in the hospital preparing to die, not running for president.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3QO-Bssv4

Meanwhile, Obama is playing golf on his vacation.

We are one fuckup away from nuclear war. America is simultaneously provoking Russia and China. Muslim invaders are flooding Europe and America. Muslim terrorist attacks have become a daily occurrence. Incirlik airbase in Turkey, hosting nuclear weapons, is basically under siege. Russia just used cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea to strike targets around Aleppo.

The missile path wasn’t published but my guesstimate based on observing the map would allow for the possibility that it went very close to that airbase.

There are unconfirmed reports that Americans are evacuating the nuclear weapons from the Incirlik base and moving them to Deveselu base in Romania, which just accidentally happens to host the newly installed AEGIS missile defense system. Putin went ballistic recently, warning that any kind of weapon can be brought there once the system is in function, among other things the offensive nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

And all the while, the current American president is on a vacation, playing golf, when he’s not watching ESPN, and the main-stream supported candidate to replace him is a fucking zombie. The world governments are busy bullying anyone who has an anti-Muslim stance, and the media is busy nitpicking over politically correct bullshit, displaying outrage over meaningless trivia, while the world burns.

Am I dreaming this or what the fuck is going on?

I’ve been listening to the arguments against state power and, for the most part, I think they are perfectly valid and reasonable. Unfortunately, I think there is one serious issue with them that makes all such theories moot. In order to explain that, I will use the example of the ancient Rome.

You see, the reason why Rome became powerful and why it spread across the known world is that it had an organized state that could maintain a steady army that was well organized and could indulge in prolonged military campaigns. Other nations, that didn’t have an organized state, that didn’t have an organized government that could implement laws and levy taxes, they simply didn’t have a chance against a country that did those things. Their army needed to disband quickly in order to work for a living. There was no state infrastructure that could support prolonged campaigns of a large standing army.

So, let’s say that America returns to its small-state origins. One of its main problems during those times was that its military was very small and unable to wage major wars. Essentially, Mexico had a better organized army. It’s perfectly understandable why – in a capitalist, market-oriented society, military is an unwarranted expense, and could make sense only if you want to make your country into a predator that robs other countries of their resources and you finance yourself that way, as Islam did from the days of Mohammad, for instance. Otherwise it’s a dead expense. But if you don’t have a well organized modern army, you are defenseless against countries that do.

So, want it or not, you need to increase the state in order to arm your country, but then you empower the military industry and the people who decide where the money goes. You also incentivize borrowing or printing money, because this way you delay and defer the financial impact of war. Once you get defense as a valid reason for taxation, some people will come up with ideas about better ways of spending all that money, such as fighting poverty instead of waging war. So, essentially, in a few logical steps you get where you are now.

But is there really an alternative? I certainly don’t see how a civilization could shun defense and survive – the imperial China and its fall under the Mongols is a great warning. Wealth attracts predators. You need to have defense. In a modern world this doesn’t mean pitchforks and swords, it means intercontinental nukes and strategic submarines, networks of satellites and a conventional armed force. Someone, of course, needs to pay for this. You can say, let’s make them mercenaries. Yeah, that went well historically. So keeping a democratic control over the military is preferable, and this means government, which means either taxes, borrowing/printing money, or simply invading and robbing other countries in order to pay for your army.

Essentially, if you want to have a modern army you need to dedicate a significant portion of the GDP to that, and you need to dedicate a significant portion of the industry to military production. You can avoid financing this with taxes if you simply invade and rob other nations, but sooner or later you’ll run out of countries to invade, like Rome did, and then the cost of the military will be directed inwards, in form of taxes and government regulations, or inflation. This will very quickly result in destruction. An alternative is to do what the Imperial China did, to demilitarize to the point of only having a small mercenary force at the borders for token defense. Then the invaders come and make the mercenaries a better offer: “Let’s kill all those wealthy folks, take all their gold and divide it between us”. We know what happened to imperial China at that point.

So basically, you either have a country that collapses under the foreign invaders or under the burden of the expense of its own military. The state does seem to be part of the problem, but there are no obvious ways of getting around it in a way that doesn’t result in the other extreme, of having no borders and protections against invaders.

The situation is a direct consequence of the equality of all men in power. From this, it follows that the only way to get greater power is to organize men into larger groups and/or arm them with better weapons. Other human groups are then forced to respond with symmetric measures or risk being violently conquered; basically, when one human group invents the state, other human groups need to organize into states as well, in order to be able to deal with external pressure. It’s like the nukes: when one nation invents them, everyone else also needs to invent them or be bullied, invaded or destroyed. If anything is to be done, those basic parameters need to change.

…A black gay Muslim man who transitioned to become a lesbian woman and will vote for Hillary, supports BLM, drives and electric car, feels guilty about anthropogenic global warming and thinks government should take firmer stance on bullying and oppression.

🙂

There is an interesting type of a logical error, called ad hominem. I say “interesting” because it’s frequently misunderstood. Let me demonstrate.

A: The fundamental constants of the Universe appear to be finely tuned, because any variance would preclude the existence of the kind of Universe that would make our existence possible. Since this is too unlikely to be the result of chance, the explanation that the Universe was deliberately created with those properties and with a goal of producing us, is actually the most probable one.

B: This is all religious bullshit, you believe in a talking snake and therefore nothing you say should be taken seriously.

This is argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that attempts to refute the argument by attacking the person that makes the argument. Since credibility of the person making the argument is irrelevant (if a known criminal says that 2+2=4, this is not false), the argument stands. But let me show a different example.

A1: There can’t be a space station in orbit because the Earth is flat.

B1: You can take an amateur telescope and observe the space station in orbit. You can also use a parabolic satellite antenna to narrowly constrain the position of telecommunication satellites in orbit.

A2: That doesn’t prove anything.

B2: You’re an idiot and further discussion with you is pointless.

This is not argumentum ad hominem, because it isn’t an argument, it’s the conclusion based on the displayed properties of the other party. If instead of B1 one immediately wrote B2, it would be ad hominem. However, since A1 was refuted by B1, this essentially concludes the argumentation loop – an argument was offered and it was decisively refuted. Since A doesn’t concede this, B2 is no longer an attempt to disprove A’s argument (because none remains), it is a conclusion about the state of affairs and is perfectly legitimate. For instance, if a person desires admittance into MENSA, is rejected because his IQ is tested to be 80, and someone tells him he’s too fucking stupid to join, that’s not ad hominem. That’s a legitimate conclusion that was expressed in a way he might find unpleasant, but is valid nevertheless. When you tell someone he failed at mathematics because he spent all free time playing Call of Duty on his gaming console instead of learning maths, and he responds that you’re fat and ugly and therefore your argument is false, that is ad hominem.

And that brings us to our false dichotomy: are you an egalitarian or a racist?

Do you believe that races are irrelevant and people are basically the same, or do you believe that racial origin decisively determines one’s properties?

My position is that I don’t know. People are obviously not all the same, or you wouldn’t have qualification exams at colleges and job requirements and interviews later on. It is obvious that if there is a bar defining qualifications, some will pass and some will fail. So, believing that this is right and proper, I am obviously not an egalitarian, but a meritocrat. In my opinion, all privileges are derived from personal qualities and contributions. In my opinion, if you have a difficult entrance exam, which consists of mathematics and physics problems, and the only students who pass on merit are Koreans, Chinese and Europeans, this is not racist against the Africans. It would be racist against the Africans if you’re disqualified from even taking the test if you’re black, or if you have points deducted from the final result if black. But if the test is same for all, and one race consistently fails, this is not racist. Furthermore, making conclusions about that race based on the displayed results isn’t racist either. If it’s OK to praise the Asians for demolishing the test, it’s perfectly OK to ridicule the Africans for failing miserably. What actually is racist is to make easier admittance conditions for the Africans, because it is assumed that they are too stupid to qualify on merit. This essentially amounts to conceding that they are inferior as a race, but saying that both superior and inferior races should be equally distributed among the students because then it’s somehow not racist.

Any kind of quota for employment or admittance into any kind of institution, based on criteria such as race, sex, sexual orientation or similar things, is racism (or sexism or whatever-ism). There is no difference between preferential quotas for blacks and “no niggers allowed here” rule. If you think blacks are equal, make equal rules for all. If you advocate preferential rules for blacks, it means you think they are inferior as a race but you happen to have a pet race and you want it to succeed. This just happened to be Hitler’s motive for committing all sorts of crimes – he had a pet race, aryan, and wanted it to succeed. Since it seemed to fail compared to the Jews, he decided to clear the way for the aryans by introducing the rules that closed the doors for Jews and opened them for aryans. The way to solve this is not to hate Hitler, it is to abandon the idea of trying to help some failing group by introducing special rules. Instead, we should make sure that the rules are just, and if someone consistently fails, allow him to. Don’t make rulings that define if races are equal or different. Make fair rules and allow people to either win or lose. You don’t even have to introduce preferential criteria for the particularly capable or talented individuals – if they are capable, they’ll manage just fine on their own. But certainly don’t try to prevent those on the bottom from failing, because that’s the worst thing you can possibly do. That’s the kind of thing that destroys societies, states and civilizations. In fact, if there’s anything we can learn from nature, it’s that a species thrives if a predator consistently kills the least fit specimen. You don’t actually have to reward the most capable ones – just kill the worst ones, and the species will thrive. Capitalism is actually the opposite – it has special rewards for being the most capable specimen, and that seems to work better for human societies. If a society allows the poor to simply die off, it creates a great incentive to not be poor, which creates incentive to master marketable skills, which then creates competition for the top places in everything, resulting in general improvement of the society. If there’s any lesson to be learned from history, it’s that providing free bread for the poor creates an attitude that it’s a perfectly acceptable option to be poor, and then the society dies. So yeah, if introduction of meritocracy shows that race and gender are irrelevant, great. If they show that races and genders are good at different things, great. If it shows that some group is consistently inferior, let it die off.

I have no problem with Jews ruling in finances, Africans ruling in basketball, Whites ruling in science, or Asians ruling in engineering. It’s not some racist conspiracy, it’s what happens when you allow people to succeed on merit – you learn that there actually may be a difference between the races, or you learn that there isn’t any. If there happens to be a master race that will consistently outcompete others, so what? I don’t see anyone objecting to our species out-competing the Neanderthals. I don’t see anyone objecting to the fact that those who were able to digest grains and milk survived better in the early Holocene than those who weren’t. So suck it up.