Bloody Shovel 3

As I write this, the news are coming out that the 12 boys trapped in 4km inside a cave in northern Thailand have been rescued, after having trapped in a cold, damp and pitch black cave for 10 long days until they were discovered, and another tense week when nobody really knew how to get them out. The rescue operation has been smooth, amazingly so.

The whole thing has been like a perfect movie. The setting is completely absurd. What were the boys doing there? Apparently the coach (apparently it's a soccer team) had a habit of taking the early teen boys hiking and exploring and doing boy-scouts kind of stuff. Which is fine; but why on earth did he get into 4 damn kilometres into an unexplored cave in the beginning of the raining season? What was he thinking? In some other place or time the coach would have been left to rot inside, and his whole family beat to death. In Japan today he would probably have to kill himself after he and his whole family are completely ostracized. The Japanese are quite amazed at how nice the Thais have been in general.

But again, like in a movie, the setting is not important. The drama afterward is, and this cave-rescue story has had all the necessary elements. The long search, eventually finding the kids. The kids being in good health, because their mysterious coach has taught them meditation (to 13 year old boys? come on). The international teams coming in, all rushing to find a solution. Discussing for several days what to do, ...

So Trump just met Marshall or Chairman or whatever Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

I don't have any opinion on the meeting. Nothing substantial was agreed on. Seems to me nothing real happened at all. North Korea isn't going to give away its nukes. And USG isn't going to withdraw its troops from South Korea. Thus, nothing is going to happen.

The reasoning is quite simple. At the end of the day, North Korea is a small, poor, fairly inconsequential country 25 million people. It's birth rate appears to be close to 2, more than double that of South Korea, but still, it hardly matters at all.

Yes, it has nukes. But why would it give them away? Gaddafi gave them away. He was killed shortly after, as the evil fat women USG likes to employ laughed about it. No way North Koreans with their 105 IQ are going to surrender their nukes. Not a good idea.

Unless USG packs and leaves South Korea, leaving the degenerate land of barren K-pop whores and their long legs achieved through horrendous surgery open to domination by Kim Jong Uns soldiery. That would be a reasonable deal.

Which is not going to happen. The US military, or more precisely the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower put it, is today about half of the US power structure. It funds the larger part what Moldbug called Redgov, the Republican party and its app...

https://youtu.be/JF4GFGMNm3g?t=16m3s

This is David Irving. A man famous for writing a hagiography of Adolf Hitler. And by heaping untold amounts of scorn to Winston Churchill. A man with all the balls in the world, the probably most prominent denier of the narrative that underpins the international power structure, the world order of our day.

A man who has suffered dearly for his ideas, a man who was thrown in jail for being too jealous in his labor as a historian.

That man, the man who was thrown in jail and lost much of his fortune because he denied the Holocaust. That man asked God for forgiveness because he said a mean word to a feral black in Florida.

A couple of interesting things happened on Twitter last week. One was this:

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/990612769182507011

I'm a great fan of Hanson from years ago. Not of his weird sci-fi stuff, that I don't get. But his socio-psychology writing is top-notch. After an incel unleashed his Beta Rage killing several people on a van attack, the very word "incel" has reached the mainstream. And the normies are flabbergasted. What's an "incel"? Involuntary celibate? Like, some people aren't having sex? Well most male journalist aren't having sex either, at least by the soyboy-on-pajamas look of them. But they've been domesticated enough that they aren't unhappy about it. The thing about incels isn't that they can't get laid. It's that they dare to protest about it.

Mr. Hanson as usual didn't get the progressive joke. That's part of his charm, of course, it is his very cluelessness that pushes him to write, and to analyze well this kind of thing. But he's looking at things that the Left doesn't want him to look at; so he got burnt pretty badly. I won't link at Slate as a matter of principle, but Hanson is lucky that his patron is the dilettante, and secret Roissy/Heartiste fan, Tyler Cowen, and not some other normie academic.

Which brings us to this.

https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496

As I was saying the problem that normies have with incels is not that they are losers for not getting laid. The problem is that they...

The blog has been slow lately. Part of that is me being on Twitter, wrecking my long term IQ with short term dopamine hits. But man, those dopamine hits are good. If you’re not following me yet, there’s a link at the sidebar.

So anyway, one of the places I rely most recently for commentary is the online mag The Diplomat. It’s some Cathedral foreign policy rag, apparently with some close relation to the Indian government. Lots of Indians shitting on China there, which is funny. But by and large it’s a pretty standard Cathedral foreign policy rag, so if you want to know what USG, i.e. the compromise between the Redgov empire (the Pentagon and its foreign satellites) and Bluegov empire (the State Department and its foreign satellites) are up to, it’s not a bad resource to follow.

Yesterday I took a look at their feed and they had this tweet, which I found hilarious.

https://twitter.com/Diplomat_APAC/status/988630863347945472

Seeing a picture of a woman academic I didn’t bother to read the whole piece; I assumed it was a piece about the Abe’s government long-discussed plans to nationalize college education. I thought some USG-supported feminist QUANGO had joined the plan and was salivating at the possibilities of extending Bioleninism in Japanese colleges. As it happens there’s a #MeToo assault o...

So the news from last week were how China changed the constitution and abolished term limits in the only thing that had term limits; the presidency. This was followed by the USG propaganda apparatus (AKA the press) going into fits of panic. “We got China wrong”, they say. It took China changing its constitution without American permission for Americans to notice that they got China wrong.

What did they get wrong? China was dirt-poor in 1980. Really, really poor. It would have likely remained quite poor if USG hadn’t decided to open trade relations with China, having them join WTO and all that. The theory, now stated openly, was that economic growth would eventually lead to the formation of a middle class, and that middle class would then agitate for democracy; a democratic China would naturally be a jolly good thing, aligned with USG’s interests (also known as “Western values”).

I don’t quite see how that last line follows. Democratic politics doesn’t correlate with “Western values” well at all. Look at Turkey or Iran. What does correlate with Western values is proximity of US military bases: that correlates pretty damn close. It also happens that proximity of US military bases correlates to some degree with democratic politics. But the causality starts with US tanks, not with democr...

Well, the news is out: Xi Jinping has become dictator of China for life. He's the new Mao, a totalitarian ogre who will destroy human rights across the world.

Or so would the Western media have it. But that's why you're here reading my blog, of course, because you want a better take. Well this is mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWBw7mFTIGY

What just happened? Well, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the de-jure highest power of the land, made by 205 members, has proposed a series of changes to China's constitution. Amongst them are the abolition of term limits for the 主席 President and 副主席 Vicepresident. Previously, since 1982, there was a limit of two consecutive terms for both offices.

What do the president and vice president of China do? The offices have no power. The constitutions, and any other law, give them no power. None at all. They are completely ceremonial.

So what's the point? That's a good question. China has a weird double structure, where the party and state are distinct entities, but have completely mirror structures. For every province, city and county, there is a government, with its governors and mayors and vice governors and vice-mayors. And then there's a Communist Party committee for the same province city or county, with a secretary general. The secretary general calls the shots. The mayor isn't an entirely ceremonial office, but it is comp...

The way of properly learning a language is to do what languages are made for: use it. Ideally, live your usual life, do whatever it is you like doing, and just try to find a way to insert that language you're learning into your daily routine. So if, say, you like movies, and you're learning Persian, well, stop watching Hollywood crap and go pick up some Persian movies.

I get asked about books on Chinese history, and I tend not to know what to say. I haven't read a lot of Chinese history books in English. Certainly not any general ones. I read China in World History by Adshead after Steve Sailer recommended it. It's a fascinating book, not very accurate, but a fun read for beginners, so I do recommend it too. Generally speaking most English books on China are pretty bad, and badly written. With the exception of Frederick Wakeman's, which are awesome.

What I often do to read up on Chinese history is watch a historical TV show, then stop anytime something bugs me and go check out the primary sources out there in Wikisource. If the thing is interesting I check out 知乎, China's much improved version of Quora, where they have detailed explanations and book recommendations. If the topic is interesting enough I get the (Chinese-language) book.

There's a recent TV show in China about 司馬懿 Sima Yi, one of the most important leaders of the Three Kingdoms p...

Jordan Peterson is an old friend of this blog, which I'm sure he reads, even though for obvious PR reasons he can't quite admit to the fact. Mr. Peterson is getting increasing amounts of mainstream attention after he utterly and completely destroyed some dumb journo British woman a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54

I won't pull the hipster move of saying I was into Peterson before he was cool. But I have written quite a lot about the man, his ideas, and why he's so popular. Do check it out.

In short, the reason why Peterson is so successful is that he's selling a single proposition. It's OK to be Christian. More precisely, he's selling It's OK to be a White, Christian Man. That is of course a revolutionary slogan, as White Christian men are the officially most low-status people in the West. They're not even just deprivated, they're the enemy of the state. Not just low, positively evil. Well,  we know that selling hope and validation to low-status people is very good business. And as it happens, the low status of White Christian Men is not the result of any natural law, but the highly unnatural result of a centuries old political endeavor. Peterson slightly hints at that. Just pull yourselves together, White Christian Men, and you'll be the ruling class again. Nature Says So.

Anyway, the mainstream m...

This is the third of three essays on the topic of Biological Leninism, the organizational principle of the contemporary left. You can find the first part here, and the second part here. I also gave an interview with some more thoughts on the topic which you can read here.

Happy New Year everyone. I left a bit of a cliffhanger on my last post, which I intended to resolve in a few days, but I've been pretty busy, not really in the mood to write long form.

I am sorry about that, but do note, this blog is a free service, so I hope you understand it doesn't quite take the priority of my time. Again, there's a Bitcoin address at the sidebar, so if you want me to write more, I'm sure we can arrange something.

2017 has been a quite eventful year. I guess the overall mood was disappointment. Trump didn't get anything done. Doesn't seem like he'll ever get anything done. Europe slowed down the refugee invasion but not by much. And China has realized that AI makes state control so much easier. It's showing the way in censorship and crowd control. All China is doing will be done on the West in a few years, with the aggravating factor that Western states will use Orwellian tools to ...