Bloody Shovel 3

This is going to be a long post.

The idea of Chinese people worshipping wax mangoes because some Pakistani minister didn't have time to have a proper gift made for his visit to China is indeed quite startling. Of course some people will instantly run into the old stereotype of those perfid Orientals slaves, who have been forever worshipping their tyrants as Gods on Earth. But that's bullshit. The Chinese have always been a fairly unruly bunch, and the Emperor was never worshipped as a God, unlike the Roman Emperors of our humanistic West.

And the Chinese aren't stupid either, they've always been one of the major civilizations on Earth, often world leader in wealth, scholarship and technology. They have the longest unbroken literary tradition; not having undergone a dark age, it's amazing how many ancient books are still extant in China.

So why did this intelligent, civilized people fall so low as to worship a rotten Pakistani mango? Politics, that's why. They are humans and so are vulnerable to politics. And modern politics can get very, very ugly.

I'll quote liberally from the original post by Marquez:

The idea of a “cult of personality” is in some ways a peculiarly modern one. Practices of “leader worship” were of course not unknown in the past; one might almost say that they were basical...

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To expand on the Maoism post. Marquez came up with the flattery inflation theory to explain how cults of personality evolve in mechanistic terms. But the same idea can be used to explain not only Red Queen spirals of sycophancy. Any ideological innovation, both in states and inside small cults or organizations, behaves under the same principles.

Any political system, any organization, even the smallest one, is going to have people in power, and people out of power who want to be in power. Or at least marginally increase their level of power.

Which means you need to challenge those who are in power. The powerful are powerful because they have organized themselves into a power coalition, bound by ties of loyalty. A solid power block where all members are strongly loyal is, for all purposes, indestructible. So the only way to challenge the powerful is to try to incite disloyalty among its members.

More likely than not, some members of the ruling coalition are not very loyal. They'd rather defect. But they can't backstab the coalition just like that. You don't do that; it looks bad. Your comrades will go against you. There are costs to defection.

Unless you're not the only defector. You need a way to signal your intention to defect, so that other disloyal fucks such as yourself (and they're bound to be others) can join up, thus reducing the likely costs of defection. The way to signal your intention to defect is to come up with a good excuse. A good ...

Say Trump wins. Trump may very well end up winning next week.

So say he wins. He'll then be at the top of the Federal Government. A lair of snakes if there ever was one. Every single agency of government, and every single unofficial agency of government (Academia, the Press, all those QUANGOs, basically every organization which belongs to the Cathedral but is not technically part of USG) is against him; against him to the point of willing his assassination.

This is going to be tough. Trump needs friends. Lots of friends. He needs to purge the whole establishment and put people he can trust on their place.

But who can he trust? Who are his friends? It's not that he has no friends. He has plenty of supporters and sympathizers. Even inside USG. But how can he find them? Of course he could ask them to stand up; but plenty of evil entryists would stand up too and try to destroy his projects from within.

So Trump has a big problem here. He needs to find loyal people and he needs a good way to identify them. How can he do that?

If you've been reading this blog for some time, you may have some hint at the answer. But let me do some historical analogy. Of China, of course. It's not a very good one; but it's what I'm reading right now so I might as well write about it anyway.

The Mongols conquered China in two stages; In 1234 they destroyed the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty, which controlled North China, and in 1279 they conquered the Southern Song...

The Dark Enlightenment is Dark. That's the whole thing about it. The more you know the truth the darker it gets. The very term was coined by Nick Land who is pretty much a Skynet apologist. He doesn't seem humans have it in them to get out of this shit. Now most people don't agree with that, but the term Dark Enlightenment has stuck, and there's a reason for that. Many understand that truth is dark, and that we're heading to dark times.

I also get called very gloomy and pessimistic myself. I think that's a bit unfair; I write more about history, which is plenty dark, and more abstract points on how human society works. There's always some room for uncertainty when you write in the abstract. You wanna see real dark? Real, concrete, visceral dark? Take a look at this guy.

Now I don't know who this David Hines guy is. But he knows his stuff. He knows it really well. Some snippets:

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107066933202944

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107288459546624

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107345695035393

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107423683899392

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/820107598234087425

Of course they are. The Left is about Power. The Left is where psychopathic status maximizers go in order to attain power, i.e. maximize their status. It follows that the Left will always have the...

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

It's 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It's been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days. People are still praising or damning the revolution. As if it mattered anymore. As if it were something more than history. As if the left and right of today had remotely anything in common with the left and right of Lenin's day.

I won't praise Lenin, an evil man. But great men are often quite evil. I'm not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I'm very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state. It's taken 5 years of Xi Jinping shouting every day about the Leninist orthodoxy of the Communist Party of China for people to realize. N...

This is the second 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 third part here. I also gave an interview with some more thoughts on the topic which you can read here.

Some things I said in Twitter yesterday. Man, 280 characters feel *way* better.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/940732305265610752

Bronze Age warfare used to be about great lords going around in their chariots, shooting arrows here and there, then getting on foot and engaging in Single Combat. Early Samurais also did that. They'd go around on their horses, shouting who they were, their house, their pedigree.

But eventually somebody figured out that winning a war is really profitable. So they'd just raise a big army of common people, give them cheap weapons, a cheap shield, drill them into having rock-tight discipline. And they'd win. A disciplined team always wins against the most talented man.

The theory of democracy was that rich people, with the leisure to educate themselves about public policy, and a financial interest in the government of the nation, would run for individual office, represent their constituency, be reelected if they did their job well, replaced if they didn't. But laws are p...

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 ...

A few weeks ago, a great artist who runs the blog Parallax Optics was kind enough to ask me for an interview on Bioleninism, to follow up on a great piece he published recently where he interviewed the man responsible for the Twitter account Woke Capital. That interview was great, and I had never done an interview before, so I thought it could be a good idea to try this new format. As it happened, the interview went great, and I very much enjoyed the process.

What follows is the whole text of the interview for those who missed it up at Parallax's. Let me use this chance to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and happy year end holidays. 2018 has been a quite eventful year. Hopefully it has been good for you personally as well (unlikely if you're invested in the stock market, but nobody's perfect). A lot has been going on in the reactionary sphere, much of it good. Bioleninism has become a widely known concept. Here's for a great 2019.

Bioleninism has widely been acknowledged as perhaps the most important contribution to reacti...