Bloody Shovel 3

Anomaly UK wrote a couple of weeks ago the kind of post I always want to write, but never do. It's really good, and it touches many points that should be obvious to any interested in public policy. For example, on employment:

That isn't wrong — within the libertarian framework it's completely true. But I've left the framework behind. Political power will be gained and held by people who believe that gaining and holding power are always a first-order consideration. I hope for a government whose hold on power is so solid that it does not depend on interfering in the market for labour, but that is not relevant to any present government or any feasible near-future one. Welfare is here to stay (even if based on private charity rather than the state, it would still have market-distorting effects), and unemployment will therefore always need to be addressed.

This is so true it's painful. It should be branded on steel on every libertarian's thigh. Politics is not about policy, it's about power. And power is about patronage. It has been so since at least Roman times, who gaves us the words Patron and Client. Well it happens that the powers that be today have the widest and deepest clientela of human history, one that goes starts in government, goes through the civil service, big business, the ...

AnomalyUK was so kind as to write a response to my last post. I was commenting on his post at his blog, but it got too long, so I'd better post it over here.

He talks about the problem about organizations having a nominal and a real agenda is basically what it's called the agency problem. Which it is.  The problem is that for any organization to be efficient, by definition, it needs to have goal orientation. And the goal must be shared by all. And that is pretty much impossible, as individuals tend to have their own individual goal. That's biology. The old way of solving that problem is by absolutism: only one man gets power, so his goal prevails, and he has power to enforce that the people working for him actually do his work.

Of course absolutism solves the agency problem, as there is no agent, or the agents get no power. Absolutism, also makes administration way more efficient, the market shows that, corporations work when a man has absolute power, and he has drive. Absolutism has two problems, one is that not all monarchs are driven by any purpose, preferring hedonistic idleness. That historically has set their countries into chaos as other people driven to power fight between themselves to occupy the power vacuum that the idle kin...

Most Honorable commenter Handle said in a recent comment on how he finds Japanese culture superior:

The near-universal level of courtesy, honesty, politeness, pleasantness, efficiency, work-ethic, competence, intelligence, self-motivation, willingness to, “go above and beyond the call of duty,” and genuine consideration for the customer, even for a foreigner to whom they show considerable patience, has been an extremely agreeable experience for me.

This is a very common feeling for all those who stay or live in Japan for any period of time. It happens also to a lesser degree in other Asian countries, such as Taiwan, Singapore, and  South Korea. The reasons for the courtesy, pleasantness, and the simple prevailing sense of order that one feels in Japan are varied. Some are genetic, some are based on long rooted tradition. But some are pretty simple and straightforward.

Perhaps the best time spent while on college was when I went to the library and rented Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs. It's a huge book, hefty and dense too. I skipped class for a week to read the whole thing. Fascinating stuff, I learned a lot. Much of it is about the history of the Chinese community in Malaya, how they fought the Malays and each other. But the most interesting part was the bits where Lee Kuan Yew confesses his political influences.

Lee had just got into college when Japan invades Singapore in 1942. The invasion was a shock for everyone, Singapore ...

A while ago I had the mother of all chats with Nick Land in our local classy bar in Shanghai.

It felt like we just reached the singularity just by ourselves. Might have been the whisky though. Yeah it probably was that.

Perhaps because I'm shy, but I tend to overcompensate the awkwardness of meeting strangers by talking too much. And the usual reaction to someone who just doesn't shut up is agreeing and letting me talk. I guess it's also me being the junior partner, i.e. I talk more mundane stuff that he can relate to. It's easier for the conversation to go on by me talking about China, than not Nick Land talking about Deleuze and Gattari, or the nature of time.

Still today we had a pretty even-handed debate, on tribalism and the singularity and expat life and all that. We actually reach several end points where no further debate was possible. When you start talking on macroeconomics you know there's little real data to throw around, and although speculating with scotch is fun, it's seldom productive.

There's tons of posts to be written to elaborate all we talked about, but it was all quite abstract and can wait really.

He did ask me to write about one of our most salient disagreements, which is about the political theory of Moldbug, i.e. Neocameralism. Or Formalism, or whatever.

Now I was a late comer to the Moldbug party, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but the idea of Neocameralism is to abolish democratic politics, and actually polit...

Isegoria linked to an interview of Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series. I don't need to explain how great the books are, and how amazing a writer Frank Herbert is. You could feel that the man is Darkly Enlightened just by reading his fiction, in the same way you can feel that Isaac Asimov is an establishment technocrat when reading Foundation. This interview confirms my feeling.

JMS: In the Dune books, you seem to question a number of other cultural assumptions.  One of them is the belief that the establishment of a democracy necessarily addresses all of humankind's problems and needs.

HERBERT:  One of the things I noticed as a reporter -- I was a journalist longer than I've been on this side of the table -- is that in all the marching in the streets in the '60s, the people who were shouting "Power to -the People" didn't mean power to the people.  They meant "power to me and I'll tell the people what to do."  When you questioned them it was confirmed at every turn.

I don't think there's a fucking bit of difference between a bureaucracy that is instituted by a democratic regime, a state; socialist regime, a communist regime or a capitalist regime.  Take a look at us right now.  We ...

Continue Reading →

Steve Sailer has been posting on the NYC universal pre-K, which is the stereotypical stupid progressive policy, which everybody knows it doesn't make any real sense. But progressives arguments are those of faith, faith who nobody (besides us) dares contradict, lest the demons of HBD appear and Hitler returns to Earth to execute the Gay Holocaust. Or something.

I could go on repeating all the arguments against spending public resources on trying to make stupid toddlers stop being stupid, but Sailer has done that very well already. Of course the question remains, are NYC public officials really that stupid? Or so devote to their progressive faith? Well perhaps they are but that can't be the whole story. Religion is a powerful force in human society, but a skeptical attitude towards the real power of religion in peoples motives has always done me good. A commenter in Sailer's post expresses my attitude very nicely:

Universal Pre-K is nothing but a pork project. They use it to create jobs and contracts to reward their friends. The politicians who argue that universal Pre-K will bring about racial equality do not care in the least if that claim is true.

The stuff about racial equality is equivalent to the low-pitched grunting noises that gorillas make when they don't want other gorillas messing with their food.

"Don't mess with my pork or I'll call you a racist an...

Continue Reading →

Ron Unz had an interesting comment at Sailer's blog a while ago:

Actually, another suspicion I’ve often had is that much of that massively-promoted total nonsense like transexualism and Gay Marriage is meant to flush out and expose potential troublemakers potentially lurking within ranks of the elite before they can rise high enough to become a serious problem. In support of this hypothesis, the leading purge victims are usually found within the fields of popular culture, entertainment, celebrity, and the media, which constitute a crucial chokepoint in controlling our society. It’s obviously much easier and safer to detect and purge a future Mel Gibson while he’s just a rising young actor than after he’s spent a dozen years as Hollywood’s #1 star.

the reason the King walks down the street naked in his imaginary suit is to draw out and catch those people unwilling to say they see what isn’t there.

In an actual historical example, the Emperor Caligula appointed his favorite horse to the highest official government position in the Roman State. How better to break the spirit of potentially disloyal Senators and military commanders, and determine which of them might have independent thoughts.

Well put. But personally what struck me is that he had to come up with this by his own. A very intelligent man in his 50s had to personally realize this. When...

My previous post has been understandably interpreted as an endorsement of the Dalrymple (echoed by Unz) theory that absurd ideas are made up on purpose to humiliate people and check who is really loyal to the power holders.

I should clarify that my point was not an endorsement, just an observation that absurdity as power-trip is a very ancient trick. The Chinese noticed 2200 years ago. I'm sure it's happened a lot, in all countries on earth. Even in middle sized organizations it happens to a lesser degree.

But Western culture never noticed. Andersen got close, but didn't get the actual point. Dalrymple, and now Unz, did notice by themselves, but it's still not a common observation. The fact is Western culture has its own conception of power, a very naive construct that prevents us from noticing how things actually work. We seem to think people have ideas, and act because they believe those ideas, and power just comes out of the strength of those ideas. Call it faith in Christ, or Protestantism, or liberalism. Our conception of history is the history of ideas. Never we stop to think who comes up with this ideas, how they change, why some spread and others don't.

Dalrymple and Unz seem to think that absurdities such as Communism or WWT are made up on purpose by a cabal of evil conspirators in order to show who's boss, and check who's on board with the program. Vladimir in last post had this to say:

While I agree that such stories provid...

Continue Reading →

My last posts were very well received. I guess there's a market for the intersection between Chinese history and Ron Unz, so here's another one.

Steve Sailer writes:

As you may have noticed, Ron has this wacky theory that a surprising percentage of our political leaders have, shall we say, compromising incidents in their past. He even speculates that perhaps having something to hide from the public might make a rising politico more attractive to those who make it their business to decide which of the ambitious to help climb the greasy pole of political power.

And he just had a new post on what he's named the Unz Suspicion.

Mr. Unz is very right to suspect that much. But again Unz had to use all his powers of insight to come up with his idea. Which given his upbringing is quite impressive. And yet this has been common wisdom in China for thousands of years. A 10 year old in Kaifeng could have told you as much in 1034.

There's plenty of examples of great leaders of bureaucratic factions, imperial prime ministers who purposefully surrounded themselves with crooks in order to be able to crack down on any defector with ease. It may sound counterintuitive, but the group is much stronger if everybody is a crook with something to hide.

None of this is surprising...

In my last post I mentioned that Western countries are signaling themselves into annihilation due to the spill over effect of upwardly mobile people wanting to show themselves as being upper class, i.e. not proles. Others have called that Goodwhites signaling they are not Badwhites. Same thing.

There's a recent article in the New York Times that unintendedly makes the same point. It's about how Sweden has run out of means to actually accept more refugees, but it can't stop signaling virtue so they just can't stop getting more. If you're in a charitable mood, you might think sounds like a reactionary is very skillfully trying to use progressive rhetoric to make the case for closing the borders. But note this part:

The government’s slow response to all of this seems baffling. But the seeds of the current debacle were sown earlier, when immigration became an untouchable centerpiece of Sweden’s politics. For the past five years, the nationalist Sweden Democrats party has been the only force opposing the country’s refugee policies. Born in the late 1980s through the fusion of an anti-tax populist party and a neo-Nazi activist group, the Sweden Democrats have grown exponentially since entering Parliament in 2010. Their rise has nonetheless been condemned and hotly contested by a mainstream weary of seeing the country’s reputation for tolerance tarn...

Continue Reading →

I've been writing for so time now the idea that bad things happen not necessarily because bad people are out there conspiring to do them, but because humans are, well, just a species of highly social monkeys, cooperation is difficult, large scale societies are weird, and sometimes bad things happen even when nobody really wants it that way.

In 1966 probably nobody wanted to end up worshiping mangoes as Mao's holy fruit. And Mao himself didn't want that to happen. But it did, because of bad incentives feeding into human's SP cognitive process. And there are plenty of examples of the same thing happening all over our thousands of years of history. This includes of course the collapse of Western Civilization occurring just as I write this.

But you know the saying. The fact that you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not really out there to get you. Take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqIdghXyOP8

Insane, right? Apparently Merkel has not had enough with the Afghan teenagers ravaging the German countryside. A million Muslims is not enough, she wants more. And she wants to not just open the doors; she wants to go out there to tell them to come! To Africa! To be fair the word "propaganda" means just advertising, it's not necessarily associated with Goebbels alone in German, but still. Look at the faces of her audience. ...

I sometimes get asked if learning foreign languages is worth it, especially if you don't make money from them, or actually have a need for them. It's a though question. Learning Chinese was hard. I don't live there now, I did for a while, but most likely will never do again. Chinese upper-middle class people are leaving the country in droves, especially people with children. It certainly isn't a very comfortable place to live with a family.

Was it a waste then? I personally don't think so. There's always books and movies to make it worthwhile. And China in particular is a very interesting place, which is very worth knowing about. First of all it was the first modern state in many ways. Centralized government, meritocratic bureaucracy, universal education, state-run economy. All of that was invented in China, they run it for thousands of years, and it's not that different from what modern liberal democracies have become. I strongly think that understanding the political dynamics of ancient China is very useful to understand how Western states work today, even more so than understanding the history of the West itself. Our bureaucracies in many ways have more in common with the mandarinate in the Song Dynasty that they have to a 17th century European kingdom.

And this convergence is actually increasing. Look at this:

Continue Reading →