Category Archives: society

How we lost freedom

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It was a slippery slope.

Initially we had freedom of speech that was the core value of our civilization.

Then they came and said that isn’t right; if there aren’t limits on the freedom of speech, should the Nazis also be allowed to speak? Should holocaust deniers be allowed to speak? There should be limits to freedom.

Then laws were introduced that limited free speech for Nazis, holocaust deniers and “hate speech”, which was initially defined as calls for violence against groups of people based on their collective identity.

Then the “Nazis” were defined as “anyone who doesn’t agree with me”, the concept of “holocaust deniers” was expanded to encompass “deniers” of any kind of “accepted truth”, however flimsy, in order to protect weak ideas and beliefs from need to be defended by reason and evidence. “Hate speech” was extended to mean “any kind of speech that makes anyone feel uncomfortable”.

So now we no longer have freedom of speech, and soon we won’t have freedom of any kind, at all, because we are already locked down, and anyone speaking out is a “denier”, and apparently to deny the official narrative of corrupt politicians, journalists and “scientists” who are a propaganda arm of big industry, that’s a thoughtcrime comparable to eating small children.

Imposing any kind of limitations on the freedom of speech was a terrible mistake. Nazis are fully within their right to say what they think. You are fully within your right to disagree with them. Also, if someone verbally commits something that is an actual crime, prosecutable by actual laws, for instance crying “fire” in a theatre, or inciting a crowd to murder someone or damage his property, those are not things that need to be solved by restricting freedom of speech. They can be easily dealt with using normal laws. If normal laws cannot be applied, it means it was impossible to demonstrate a causal relationship between verbal incitement and actual physical harm. Also, it is very difficult to categorically state that it is universally wrong to preach against entire groups bound by similar characteristics. If we can see logic in preaching against drug cartels or totalitarian states, we can also see why this should be extended by allowing one to preach against any kind of life-choice, behavioral pattern or in fact religion or race. As far as I’m concerned, KKK is fully within their right to preach against Africans, and Africans are fully within their right to prove them wrong. Nazis are fully within their right to preach against the Jews calling them an inferior race, and the Jews are fully within their right to show them the stats about Nobel prize winners per race, which demonstrates that, if anything, they are the superior race. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works – you say something, and then someone else counters your arguments with something that’s either correct or foolish, making you look either like an ass, or like someone who actually has a point. If someone thinks his arguments are too weak to win against the Nazis and the holocaust deniers in the open marketplace of ideas, then he’s the one with a problem, because if they are so wrong that they should not be allowed to speak at all, then it should be very easy to let them speak, and then expose the facts and make them look like complete fools.

After all, it’s not like “hate speech” is something that is universally abhorred. It’s perfectly allowed, as long as it’s against the “right” target. The movie “Lethal weapon II” is pure hate speech and slander against the Republic of South Africa, probably devised because America was having a financial problem with RSA selling the enormous amount of gold from the Witwatersrand Basin, which amounted to 22% of all the gold ever mined, in the history of mankind, on the world’s market, in form of Krugerrands. From what it looks like to me now, the entire “apartheid” issue was a CIA active measure against RSA, to limit their access to the world’s market and the resulting change of balance in the financial sector, since America moved away from gold in the 1970s and had a problem with its resurgence, especially if someone else controlled it. This is a very cynical interpretation of American “fight for human rights” across the globe, and postulates that whenever America wants to suppress an economic or political adversary, this or that human rights violation will be invented as a justification, in order to rally the well-meaning idiots behind its imperialistic cause. It’s always some children that will cry unless America bombs some state or prevents it from selling cheaper gas, oil or gold to the market where America wants to sell their overpriced goods. Basically, Krugerrands are racist and Russian gas is not democratic.

So hate speech is obviously fine – you are allowed to hate the “Nazis”, the “racists”, the “deniers” of official ideology, the Chinese, the Russians and the white people. You’re just not allowed to hate the people in power and their ideology, because that will get you “deplatformed” and “un-personed”.

So, tell me, how many of you have heard of the Witwatersrand Basin and how much gold was actually found in there? I knew there was lots gold in the RSA, of course, but I had no idea how much until very recently, and then it clicked – the time that gold was massively exported abroad coincides exactly with the time when the entire media industry and all sorts of celebrities started making propaganda about poor black people being oppressed in the RSA and calling for international sanctions against the “corrupt” and “racist” regime there, presenting it as if the blacks were the indigenous people of the RSA, and the whites came and robbed/enslaved them and it’s a huge injustice. In fact, nobody lived there before the white people came. It was a wasteland. Then the Europeans came, made it into a paradise, found ways to mine useful minerals, grow food and basically make it look like Europe, and it created so many jobs that the blacks from all parts of Africa migrated there because the living conditions were so much better. The Europeans didn’t like the concepts of all those black overrunning the little paradise they made for themselves there, and made rules that allowed the Africans to work there and be paid fairly, but were not allowed to participate in politics of what was basically a white European country, which was all very much in line with the politics that were in place in the American South in the 60s, implemented by the Democratic party (which BTW is to the KKK what Sinn Féin is to the IRA). Then they made a mistake of exporting too much gold in form of Krugerrands into the world market, the CIA didn’t like it, did their psyop, RSA government tried to appease them by removing the apartheid measures, and now RSA is in the process of devolving into a typical African shithole run by corrupt tribal fuckwits who think AIDS can be treated with garlic and raping virgin girls, and all their problems can be solved by robbing white people.

So, how did we lose our freedom? Was it when we decided that “Nazis” should not be allowed to speak, or was it something deeper, more insidious, like accepting the concept of universal human rights as a supreme civilizational value, when it was in fact pushed – if not outright invented – by the CIA, as a method of pressure on the rival powers? Or did we lose our freedom by blindly following the propagandists who took over the emptied platform once occupied by the Church? In any case, as in any totalitarian system, we are free to criticize the enemies of the regime in power all we want, and we are free to praise the ruling ideology all we want. For anything else, we will be swiftly and cruelly punished. And oh-by-the-way, we now also aren’t allowed to work, move freely and are basically under house arrest, because someone’s granny will die and children will look at us with tearful accusatory eyes if we drive cars, have money, or in fact exist.

Free market and value

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I’ve been thinking more about the weird aspects of the free market economy and the concept of valuation in general.

There are two basic ideas about value; first is that everything has some sort of “intrinsic value” and the point of free market is to discover it. The second idea is that there is no intrinsic value, that things are dynamically valued according to utility and scarcity and the market value is the only value there is.

I had a problem with this, you see. The concept that there is no objective value is contrary to my belief system, where certain things are valuable as such, not just because someone put a market price on them. I’m not talking about gold or bitcoin, I’m talking about more fundamental principles, such as virtue or spirituality. Some things can be infinitely valuable even if there isn’t a market value. So, basically, I am opposed to the free market fundamentalist idea that there is no value outside the market. However, I don’t think there is an inherent value to anything material, outside human needs, utility, desire and fear, which create a balance of desirability and scarcity, eventually resulting in market valuation. For instance, water and air are extremely desirable, but if they are not scarce, their market valuation is low. However, if they for some reason become scarce, their market valuation could climb to extremes. Also, some things can be extremely rare, but if they have no utility and nobody needs them for anything, their market valuation can be extremely low, so scarcity is no guarantee of value either. An example are exotic elements found in piles of radioactive waste – all quite rare, but nobody so far found any use for them, and as a rule you have to pay people to take them, not the other way around.

And then it dawned to me: market doesn’t discover the value of things. It reveals a quantified representation of human needs, desires, greed and fear. Market is a mirror in which humanity sees itself through value it puts on things. If probabilistic statistics quantifies human ignorance, marketplace quantifies human values: shelter, food, energy, hygiene and cosmetics, greed, status symbols, sex, guilt, fear. Basically, if Ponzi schemes are popular, what does that reveal? It reveals that people are greedy and stupid, not that the schemes themselves are actually useful, valuable or scarce. They stop being popular only when enough people lose enough money that it becomes common knowledge that they are the opposite of useful.

This is also my answer to the question of inherently worthless assets that trade on the market for often insane amounts of money – why are they popular, why are they valuable, and what does it mean. It’s not the worthless asset that is made valuable, it’s the human greed and madness that became revealed and quantified. You can actually convert greed, madness, stupidity and sin into money, and it’s not only easy, it’s the foundation of the most profitable business models; for instance cosmetics and luxury items are ways of monetizing human vanity.

The more “normal” assets are very easy to evaluate in this manner – for instance, the fact that you buy food gives you the obvious answer that you need to eat in order to survive. The fact that you buy fuel for your car says you need mobility in order to function. However, luxury clothes, watches and cosmetics, they are more difficult, because their function is to create an outward appearance of yourself, and the underlying motive can be dignity, vanity, or in fact anything. It can be samyama on some aspect of God, or it can be deception, of both self and others. In any case, it’s a wonderful opportunity for introspection.

Thoughts on value

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I watched a video today where some average young people were shown watches of various brands, and they tried to guess the price. More often than not, they would be wrong by several orders of magnitude – for instance, estimating a Paul Newman Daytona as something in a $800 magnitude, while the actual price is $250000.

That made me think: are they ignorant, or are we often duped into believing that paying extreme amounts is reasonable, for things that aren’t worth that much money in any reasonable frame of reference? I used to live in a world where mechanical watches were the norm, and it used to be that a watch would justify its higher price by accuracy, durability and actual features, and “brand” was just something that would make you recognise things that were well made. Today, the concept of “brand” is detached from every possible objective criterion of quality, and a brand like Seiko or Citizen can produce a watch that is objectively better by every single metric, compared to top tier luxury watch brands, and yet they are perceived as “mass market junk” that cannot possibly command the price of the “quality” brands. The madness goes so far that actual metrics, such as accuracy, are seen as irrelevant, or even as a property of low-tier watches. I’m not necessarily even talking about quartz watches – for instance, ETA coaxial movement designed for the Omega brand, with a silicon hairspring and non-magnetic properties, is technically speaking the best mechanical watch movement ever made, and yet this somehow doesn’t have anything to do with the price of the watch. Omega Aqua Terra coaxial is seen as a mid-range watch, while some Rolex or Patek that is an order of magnitude less accurate, and also infinitely less resistant to magnetic fields, can command ten times greater price, or more. This is obviously beyond all reason, so why would anyone be surprised that normal people, who didn’t memorise the expensive brands so that they could tell what should be expensive, can’t tell based on the actual features of a watch? If the actual reality is that a technically superior watch can be a thousand times less expensive than a limited-series “haute horlogerie” brand watch, then you can’t really come up with a reasonable estimate of the price based on the inspection of the features of the actual device, which is another way of saying that the price is based on bullshit.

This made me think further, and I remembered a similar video where someone was asking people on the street how much do they think a gold coin was worth, and I think most of them would rather take a $5 candy bar than a $500 coin, or something like that. It makes you wonder how well we would fare if we had to trade gold and silver for goods and services in some post-apocaliptic scenario. If I showed a Krugerrand to random people, how many would understand that this thing costs $1900? After all, it’s just a coin, and coins are perceived as something of low value today. As for gold, most people never saw gold in person, except in insignificant amounts used in jewelery. Any estimate of value would probably be wildly off.

I can’t really blame them – I was shocked to learn how much an ounce of Rhodium was. I know that it’s a Platinum-group metal, and I expected the price of Rhodium to be comparable to that of Platinum, but it is not. It was – up until 2020, when the price went off exponentially for some reason I won’t even pretend to understand because it’s probably something to do with some industry or another, and it’s now in the order of magnitude of 20000 USD/oz, which is about ten times more than gold, and 16 times more than Platinum.

One conclusion is that our intuitive sense of intrinsic value can be wildly off. Supply and demand as a measure of value can produce very weird valuations where, at least temporarily, complete garbage can appear to be precious, and otherwise precious things can be valued as garbage. More often than not, market valuations are a measure of human greed and fear, rather than intrinsic value. Also, people tend to value things that other people value; when they see that something is commonly perceived as precious, they will usually adjust their sense of value to match. That’s not the case just with watches or precious metals; it extends everywhere.

In any case, it’s a very interesting line of thought.

False positives

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There have recently been concerns over COVID19 tests that return positive results at excessive rates.

There is a real danger in those tests, because when you combine a perception of a deadly disease that justifies all measures in order to control it, and a test that returns excessive positive results, you get two problems.

The first problem is a perception in public that the threat is out of control and that further powers need to be given to the “authorities”, which raises the question “cui bono”. Basically, if we accept the premise that the entire COVID19 overreaction was engineered to increase state power and take power away from the individuals, by nefarious actors behind the scene, tests that create exaggerated sense of threat would fit this narrative perfectly, because who benefits from this hysteria not winding down?

The second problem is a corollary of the first: if there’s a perception in the public that COVID19 is a deadly threat that justifies drastic measures of containment, a person of interest to the “authorities” is “tested” and found “positive” (the general public wouldn’t perceive the quotation marks), and if people in hazmat suits accompanied by police pick that person up and take him to a direction unknown, but assumed to be a special quarantine facility, and that person is later reported to have died of the illness, nobody would really raise an eyebrow because, after all, COVID19 is deadly. And if body is said to have been cremated in order to control the contagion, that wouldn’t be surprising either. Basically, it gives the totalitarian-minded assholes in power the instruments to “disappear” anyone at will, no annoying legal procedures needed, and no questions asked, and not only would it not compromise their position, it would actually augment the argument for their totalitarian powers.

Both false negative and false positive tests can be used to create panic, and, from what I can tell, they actually have been. False negatives came first – their purpose was to create the false impression that virus isn’t as contagious as it actually is, and that it is far more dangerous than it actually is (because a greater percentage dies). The first impression is useful because if the virus isn’t really that contagious, it gives the government something to do – they can prescribe measures, make us wear those stupid and useless masks, control our movement, monitor us. If it was known that most of us already had the virus, those measures would have been useless. Also, the fewer the known positives, the higher the perceived lethality of the virus, which is how the real panic was created. If people knew that most of them already had it and were either asymptomatic or had a mild flu, there would be no panic, and no need for emergency state powers.

False positives came next – after the fear of the virus had been instilled into the population, suddenly there’s an impression that it can’t be contained by present measures (because more and more people test positive), and since it’s perceived to be a deadly threat, all measures to contain it are justified.

Of course, I can’t be sure that this narrative is actually true, but based on past experience and patterns of behavior, I have every reason to suspect the “authorities”, especially when a suggested course of action gives them the only thing they desire above all: power. Unfortunately, their victims are not only stupid enough to put trust in them, they are stupid enough to create virtue-signaling mobs on social networks that actually “discipline” everybody into obedience, and scream for more state control to “assuage their fears”.

 

May God save us from atheism and other evils

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The leftists call themselves “woke”. I assume it’s how the American blacks think you say “awakened”, and they are of course wrong because they speak shit English, however the white leftists are so collectively obsessed with self-flagellation over belonging to the race that invented our civilization, which includes being the only race in history that actually abolished slavery, they think they have to culturally appropriate this illiterate bullshit to ritually de-white themselves. But to return to the point, their idea of being awakened means perceiving the world through a neo-Marxist lens of exploitation dichotomies. One sex exploits and subjugates the other, one race exploits and subjugates others, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s stupid, intellectually lazy bullshit that’s taught at American worthless universities. You know how I define lazy ideologies? They give you a very simple pattern that explains everything, so that you don’t have to do complex thinking. This neo-Marxism is surprising in a sense, because it’s really hard for me to grasp how any adult person could find that shit convincing, because, for instance, game theory provides a much better explanation of how humans interact in groups; however, if you apply game theory to large human groups in a free system, what you get is basically cooperative meritocracy, a free market of ideas, goods and services that is self-regulating. Essentially, when you stop fucking with the system, people are motivated by self-interest to create things and provide goods/services that will be of most use to most people, because they trade those things for money which gives them more power. They are also motivated to limit disruptions to the freedom of the system by controlling crime, and so on. Sure, when you look at the system from the outside, the distribution of wealth and power always turn out to be hugely unequal, but that’s apparently normal not only for human groups, but also for physical entities; it’s called Zipf’s law, or Pareto distribution. So, basically, the entire “woke” understanding is just nonsense, it’s intellectual laziness and sheer idiocy. To think that you’re “awakened” because you have a simple pattern for explaining the entire reality and to keep sticking to it regardless of the evidence to the contrary doesn’t make you awakened, it makes you lazy, stupid and arrogant, but first and foremost it shows you’re deeply insecure, because only insecure people, who feel they are worthless, have to resort to such stupid forms of self-deception. I almost forgot, the “woke” are of course atheists, because they understand religion as a system of oppression.

The right-wingers are also “awakened”, only they call it “red-pilled”, in the much overused image from “The Matrix” movie. Basically, take the blue pill, you keep sleeping, take the red pill and you wake up and see the real world, ugly as it might be. This “red pill” thing is applied to almost anything, from wild and completely idiotic conspiracy theories where “they” are doing “thing x” to fuck you over, but you saw through it because “red pill”, all the way to the realization that women apply game theory to mating and sex, basically they will use all the power at their disposal to create what they see as preferable outcomes for themselves and their children. As we would say in Croatia, congratulations on discovering hot water. This “red pill” community is as arrogant and stupid as the “woke” community, and yes, they too are atheists, because they are “red pilled” to understand there’s no God, because science, and shit. They’re not the ordinary “sheeple” who will go to church and believe in God, they are “woke”, oops, sorry, they are “red pilled”. They are so much smarter than everybody else, because they got a rudimentary understanding of the intuitive interpretation of game theory.

As for me, I’m done. Fuck atheists; as far as I’m concerned, they can all shut the fuck up forever, because I’m done listening to their stupid bullshit arguments, the same stupid bullshit arguments I’ve been hearing for the last few decades. They always act as if they are the ones who figured it all out, and everybody else is stupid, but you know what? People have been building civilization, which was always tightly interlaced with their relationship with the transcendental – call it religion if you will – for thousands of years, and atheism has realistically been around only a few centuries, and in those few centuries they managed to wreck everything to the point where you are no longer free to state that humans exist in two sexes, male and female, which are distinct, different and immutable, because you’ll be attacked by rabid herds of fucking idiots who will try to destroy your life in every possible way. For something that purports to be inherently rational, it’s quite interesting how atheism spawns the most ridiculous, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific ideologies at a whim. Also, they like to say that religions are violent, but atheism is literally dripping with the blood of millions, from the French revolution and its guillotine orgies onwards. They come to power using lies and propaganda, and then they start killing everybody who doesn’t agree with them; that’s how their “rationality” works in practice. They argue with you just enough to confuse you and get themselves into positions of power, and then they simply use violence.

They will say the science is on their side. No, it’s not. It was, somewhere between 19th and 20th century, but it advanced to the point where it no longer is. You know why there’s so much talk about crazy shit such as “the multiverse” in today’s “science”? It’s because it was proven that this Universe wouldn’t work if some basic constants varied even the slightest bit, so you get either the option of accepting that it’s created by someone who knew what he’s doing, or that an infinite number of universes was created by accident and one of this infinity just happened to have the right fundamental constants and here we are to observe it. The trick is, by Occam’s razor, the hypothesis with an intelligent creator suddenly became infinitely more probable than the random-creation theory, because you need to introduce one entity in order for the hypothesis to work, not an infinite number of them. However, the “rational” atheists just skip over that inconvenient fact and talk about that multiverse bullshit as if that’s actually proven physics; as a footnote, remember Carl Sagan and his “Universe is all that is, all that was and all that ever will be”? Well, apparently that became inconvenient, so “multiverse” was pulled out of thin air, as a sleight-of-hand to rescue materialism and atheism. The same goes for the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever heard, because it doesn’t even understand that the wave-function collapse really works with how our quantified ignorance (also known as “probability”) transitions into knowledge, and imagines it actually has to do with anything in the actual universe. Today’s science is, for the most part, desperate garbage, the only purpose of which is for someone to get a PhD and grants.

I’m not saying that problems with atheism and materialism mean we should go back to some medieval religion. Those religions got kicked to the curb for a good reason; we can’t base our understanding of the reality on bronze-age scriptures written by sheep herders. However, we also need to accept the fact that those bronze-age sheep herders got more things right about what works in a human society, and what doesn’t. If you want to create a society that actually works, a bronze-age scripture will get more things right than all the “rational” atheist philosophies ever devised. It’s curious how there are people on YouTube who will point out all the ways in which our civilization screwed the pooch, but without pointing out that all the “primitive” and “regressive” things that came before actually got all those things right. I know why: because they would have to admit that the religions, such as the traditional Christianity, obviously possess better answers, far superior to anything devised in the “age of reason” and “humanism”. This would be highly unlikely if they didn’t have a better “source” than human reason. You can be “sceptical” as much as you like, and invent word-trickery and irony about religion, but if something is as stupid as you try to make it, and it gives better results and provides better predictions of social outcomes than anything you came up with, “stupid” or not, it’s better than anything you have, so as far as I’m concerned, you atheists can go collectively fuck yourselves, and I don’t want to hear a single word in defence of your stupid bullshit philosophy.

Now that we come to this, it’s interesting how the Catholic Church here in Croatia, several years ago, gave a perfectly accurate interpretation of the phenomenon of “gay marriage” and other “civil rights and liberties” considering normalization of all kinds of anomalous and aberrant behaviours, and their interpretation sounded too extreme and improbable, and they were for the most part laughed at. Their predictions of the destruction of the entire value-based structure of our civilization, as well as the destruction of the family unit and the traditional concepts of human sexual identity, were exactly right, everything they said was on point. It’s interesting how that works: all the “stupid” and “backward” traditional religions got it right, and all the “progressives” were completely wrong, to the point where you couldn’t be more wrong even if you actively tried. It’s as if those religions actually do know what they are talking about, of course using their own respective imagery when trying to “interface” with the infinity of the Transcendental. As a conclusion, I would concur with the quote from a Catholic priest, who said that atheism is an evil that can be fought only with fasting and prayer. Truly, atheism is an evil worse than murder, because all murders and other evils arise from the lack of awareness of God’s presence, and I would agree that it can be fought only by firmly establishing our consciousness in prayer to God and renunciation of our lower animal nature. Only thus can we be saved from this nightmare created by godless men and their father in spirit, Satan.