The House of David

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Astarte's curse

I've lately noticed Conservative men searching desperately for women to lead them out of their malaise. We've been asked to pay homage to Palin and Bachmann; last year, Clinton(!); and until recently Prejean.

We're seeing now how the eastern Britons rallied around Boudicca, or the French around Joan of Arc. There is something about aggressive yet homespun femininity which appeals to the rural reactionary. As if the very Mother Earth has rejected the interloper.

It's Romantic nonsense. Queens often do well (from Hatshepsut to Catherine); but that's because they were born to the purple. History teaches that reality is a harsh school for Romantics. Eastern Britain was wholly broken after Boudicca, and the French didn't start winning until after Joan was gone.

Some Conservatives are building up these flawed and naive women as if they were goddesses, but they are not goddesses. People are going to be disappointed and people are going to get hurt.

Labels: conservatives, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 23:50 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Trolls trolls trolls

I don't know if it's even worth my time to blog about this...

I'm dealing with a couple of the inmates at Moran's nuthouse. Moran as far as I can tell is saying "meh, we're getting socialised healthcare" and shopping for KY Jelly and condoms. His commenters are more extreme.

Here's one:

“Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because the CEO of your health insurer needs a private jet? Well too damned bad, pal, the GOP does not give a damn.”

Or, we could say “Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because ‘budgets are tight for everyone’, and Sheila Jackson-Lee needs a private jet?”

What we have here is an appeal to emotion and a not-very-roundabout way of calling libertarians evil. Because the people have the right to the contents of your purse; you, on the other hand, have the duty to sit in line for months. For the chilllldrennnn!

And then there's this:

This bill however flawed, is the only serious one on the table; the GOP had control for decades, and not once made any serious attempt to fix the problem.

What's "the problem"? If we're talking comprehensivity of existent care, George W Bush "fixed" a "problem" of medication not being covered well under Medicare. That effort was pretty "serious", as I recall; Bush had to twist arms all over the place. If the problem is cost and complexity, then Pelosi's monstrosity makes things much much worse.

Then there are the guys who claim that it's all the fault of Beck, Limbaugh, and the extreme right-wing GOP who wouldn't play ball. Another commenter (mannning, 3 n's) refuted that; the GOP did show up to the plate with several amendments which Pelosi struck out. (Trying to keep all the metaphors on point, here.)

You can say the GOP sucks as much as you want. But that doesn't make the Democrats any better - and if you compare the two, the choice is clearly on the (R) side.

I know, it's the internets. But these blustering bullshitters still annoy me.

UPDATE 6 PM ... and they should annoy Progressives. There was another objector in the Nuthouse, by name "busboy33", who had substantive points and a better attitude. He would be tough to debate. But it's easier for me to play whack-a-troll so I just, well, whack those trolls. It fills up the comment thread with an apparently one-sided smackdown of people out of their depth. It makes the argument seem more settled than it is. On a personal level it's not fair to someone who is there for a real argument, like busboy33, who then has to share space with the circus.

Labels: bullshit, misanthropy, progressives, propaganda, trolls

posted by Zimri on 17:24 | link |

Monday, November 02, 2009

Apostasy and tribalism

The Jawa Report has a quote from Wafa Sultan about how she's being treated as a Muslim apostate. Rusty, the commenter, then compares that to how Mormons treat their apostates (nerf-bat harassment) and Fundamentalist Christians theirs (passive-aggressive threats, shunning).

I am not about to belittle the Muslim penchant for violence, which is real and terrible. But it's not what these religions do to their apostates which hurts the most.

The trauma comes when you find out that your former friends - Muslim, Mormon, Christian, whatever - only ever saw you as another mark in the tally.

If you lived your life for your friends, and then a theological disagreement causes you to be harassed or shunned: you learn quickly that all you did for your friends, didn't matter. They never cared about you as a person. You may as well be dead to them.

Is the shunning worse than death? I'd prefer the shunning, myself, but then I've been called a sociopath on several sites. Most humans are social creatures.

Anyway Islam seems to offer the death along with the shunning. That makes the question somewhat moot.

Labels: islam, misanthropy, personal

posted by Zimri on 18:10 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Why freedom?

Conservatives, if they argue for freedom (as American Conservatives do), tend to justify it as a gift from God which no man may alienate. Liberals take God away and then proceed to alienate people of their freedom. Is this inevitable - are secularists bound to be crushers of peoples' dreams?

I think not. There are two arguments I can come up with, which support individual liberty against serfdom. This should work even for secularists.

Ayn Rand had one: morality can be constructed from the axiom “human life == good”. Liberty allows humans to live their lives; oppression does not. We might call this the mathematician’s libertarianism. It’s kind of... cold, but that’s Ayn Rand for you.

There’s also the school of thought that people have two innate drives: to avoid being crushed under someone else’s boot, and to be the person crushing others under your own boot. Libertarians understand that there are a limited number of job openings for boot-crusher. They also understand that even if they got to be one of the boot-crushers, they would no longer be able to enjoy the society of their peers; it’s a life of fear. So, liberty is better because it’s just easier and more fun to live that way.

I used to believe the former but I am leaning to the latter these days.

Labels: liberty, misanthropy, secularism

posted by Zimri on 16:40 | link |

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

We are not ready for this

Daily Mail says: we can create a sperm cell from a stem cell, and an egg cell from a stem cell.

The article claims this was done through embryonic stem cells; which I'm against, as a pro-lifer. But it could just as easily have been done through stem cells in the bone marrow. The researchers are talking skin cells. So I am not going to get into the embryonic / pro-life dispute here. What is going on here is bigger than that.

I see here humans being cloned by strange humans, humans who have no genetic relation to the humans being cloned. This scenario is not exactly new; there was always rape, most bluntly, but also (since 1978) we could have had forced harvesting of eggs and sperm, and in vitro fertilisation. But those methods were crude and difficult to implement. Now someone can have the needed cells when he bumps into us on the subway.

I see here the fulfillment of The Abolition Of Man (CS Lewis) toward the Brave New World (A Huxley).

If human society worldwide, the technologically-advanced nations anyway, all took part in stable, contractual unions for the purpose of procreation then I would be embracing this discovery. (I have supported government discrimination for the sake of heterosexuality; but supporters of gay marriage and even polygamy should agree with me here, within their equivalent unions.) Human society would enact laws worldwide that mandated that only a stable family had the right to this technology. This would end the curse of infertility; at the same time, no child would be born except to parents who loved them.

But if there is a theme to this blog (this month anyway) it is this: human society is not inherently nice. We are higher primates; the act of being good is a conscious effort. There are evil people in the World Jungle, who don't bother; there are even evil nations. An evil nation of high IQs - I have in mind here, North Korea - can and will use this to mix and match the genes the nation wants. They will use this to create a genetically engineered caste of bastards. Worse than bastards; they will not even know a mother's love, and their real father will be the Dear Leader.

Labels: fascism, misanthropy, science

posted by Zimri on 23:46 | link |

The SHOCKING x That y DOES NOT WANT You To See

Are there people who still fall for that? To me it is obviously both an appeal to one's natural curiosity for "forbidden knowledge" ("x"), and an appeal to the hatred the audience has for their common enemy ("y").

It is likely technically true that person y doesn't want to bother with x. On the assumption that y is like most non-sociopaths, and x a pile of crap, then y would prefer that belief in x is minimised. I may not be a good example of a non-sociopath, but even I don't want you to be watching Expelled, dabbling in UFO theories, or hunting down copies of the Protocols. There are enough malinformed lunatics in this nation without adding to the pile of People I Must Avoid.

Or maybe I'm in on it! Oh noes!

Labels: bullshit, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Former market-dominants

GNXP, and now Van der Byl in UR, have commented that the Mesticos in Angola - a mixed-race bunch - are now the overclass in an ostensibly Marxist nation.

This is notable because before that the Mesticos started out as the most pro-Portuguese bunch in the colony. They remind me of the mixed-race people in Haiti. In Haiti, famously, the Whites wanted what we might call a unilateral declaration of independence and a slave state; the Blacks wanted blood. Mixed-race people are a natural middle group - they know they don't stand a chance without help. In Haiti this group supported France.

What pushed the Angolan Mesticos to Marxism was Salazar the dictator, in the mid twentieth-century. Salazar had exported a lot of Portuguese trash to this colony. There they predictably set to discriminating against the locals. The former elite resented that.

Mestico Marxism followed the Russian "socialist worker" model and not the Chinese peasants'-party model. They knew that a peasant-party would be indigenous and, if the worst happened, Haitian. In effect the Mesticos found new colonial masters, in Moscow.

Labels: misanthropy, progressives, race

posted by Zimri on 22:05 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Know your place

I think this blog's bias might be toward aristocracy.

I'm not talking about bringing the House of Lords back into the US (the Lords these days are a bunch of Labour Party hacks anyway so, no thanks). And I'm not so undemocratic as to support the Sulla solution.

Aristokratia means, literally, "rule by the Better Sort of people". But I take it as locally-applicable. In my place in the world, I can strive to be the best I can; and I will know enough not to dabble too far in stuff I'm not so good at. We would all be happier if we all learnt our place.

Religious people tend to reject modern science; some of them claim that their religion forces them to. When they propose to affect scientific standards, that causes trouble. Religious people are still good at preserving cultural and moral norms. They just need to stick to what they are good at, within their limits.

I was born in the UK, and raised in elite-ish circles, and I didn't have significant contact with the average American until I first ventured into an AOL chatroom in 1996. Someone like me shouldn't be elected President and, as it happens, I legally can't be elected President. I'm not sure I should be running for any public office. I know my place and it's not public office.

So, that in mind, let's talk gay marriage. Here, as elsewhere, homosexuals want to be treated the same as heterosexuals.

Conservatives, and most people in general, counter-argue that self-perpetuating cultures have an interest in promoting - that is, discriminating in favour of - stable heterosexuality. The demand for equality for group B must necessarily mean the loss of prestige for group A. That's fine and dandy if group A doesn't deserve its prestige. But in this case, Conservatives insist, group A does deserve it. If heterosexuality loses prestige in a given culture, that culture will die.

I side with Conservatives here. But I reject Andrew Sullivan's contention that this means I have "contempt" for him. (Beyond my general distrust of humanity, of course.)

The culture retains an interest in recognising reality (as with evolution). The two relevant realities are that homosexuality is an innate trait that cannot be changed, and that sex is dangerous. In that spirit, society has an interest in taming sexuality among homosexuals - as among heterosexuals. Therefore I disagree with National Review insofar as that a system of state-sponsored monogamy makes sense for homosexuals. This would be a second-tier of interpersonal contract - "civil union" - with a limited slate of rights associated with the first class (which is marriage).

What Sullivan doesn't seem to understand is that just because I put him in a lower caste on this issue, that doesn't mean I think he has no place at all; and I would put him on a higher caste on other issues. He has this opinion that it's all or nothing. This sounds narcissistic to me.

It's not that I have anything in particular against homosexuals. They, and Sullivan, just don't matter all that much to me. I've got an inventory of many other nails who stick out too far and need hammering down - including religious Conservatives, and including marginal-Americans (like myself and Obama). Besides even gays should have more important concerns.

Everybody should make their peace with the state they live in. For those who feel like overreaching - imagine what you'd get if the culture collapsed, went Muslim, and/or went through a Reaction. Rather less than what you have now, most likely.

Labels: conservatives, ghey, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 16:34 | link |

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Internet "Bad Craziness" as social pathology

Here's a pretty good article, from Research News: EXTREMISTS MORE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR OPINIONS, STUDY FINDS.

There's a slight irony in the hat-tip. It comes from the anonymous "Vitruvius", who shares the site "Small Dead Animals" with one "Kate". Their associations with extremists bear scrutiny.

The base group of extremists I have chosen are the essayist "Fjordman" and the blog "Gates of Vienna". These two share a consistent, principled, and courageous stand for indigenous Europe against foreigners. This happens to be about the definition of "racism" although, to their credit, they don't much mind that tag either. That much is out of the pale for American Republicanism, which has been what we now call "neo-con" at least since Frémont in 1856. As a result, when Little Green Footballs called out Fjordman & Co., they were frozen out of the mainstream American Republican-leaning blogs.

Where Kate links 76 times to "Gates of Vienna", Vitruvius links 26; and for "Fjordman" the stats are similar. Vitruvius is a third the extremist Kate is. He probably sees himself as a moderate by comparison with his friends; and, being a moderate in his own mind, sees "Small Dead Animals" as a blog which accepts moderates and, therefore, a moderate blog.

I don't have much of a "blog in this fight". I know my views are extreme, if only because most Americans like democracy and I don't.

My self-awareness as an extremist may well derive from my choice to be as antisocial as possible. People in a community, like cobloggers (here, Vitruvius) always establish a Somebody Else's Problem Field when they come across a friend who disseminates what the LGFers call "Bad Craziness". Vitruvius doesn't agree with all of the positions of the sites his blog has linked so many times. But he's chosen his side and he knows who his friends are. Which is a comfort.

I don't mean to pick on this one poor guy. On the Left side, propagandist scum like Jones, Zinn, and Lerner ought to be poison; ditto, ACORN. Some, like David Corn, get it. Most Left bloggers don't.

It's just a microcosm of what happens in the wider blogosphere. It's easy enough to diagnose. When you see a blogger attack the extremists in a given community, it might be a principled stand. But if the blogger is only attacking the former community, at the same time making excuses for extremists in another community, it is not. "Something else must be at work." That something is that he is a member of that latter community. He's a hack, maybe even a shill; and his pretensions to higher principle are to be laughed at.

The blogosphere enables this pathology, this willful hyperopia. Even among Sagacious Iconoclasts.

Labels: fascism, misanthropy, progressives

posted by Zimri on 15:43 | link |

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The mind of the troll

There's a discussion going on at Ace's. One of the sporadic commenters dropped a troll post. The brawl went along its merry way, and then - as I expected - one of the "good guys" dropped an equally bad comment.

I've been a troll in some boards, including Ace's. It's a bit like why the Joker liked to cut people with knives. He wanted to know which of his victims were cowards. Sometimes I want to know which of Ace's commenters is/are going to come up with something stupid.

There is something in Internet impersonality, when I'm in a crowd like a comment-thread community, which brings out the "sociopath" in me. I wouldn't hurt someone in person. I don't even like killing ants, when I find them wandering the house (although I know I'll have to get rid of them somehow). But when I see an anthill outside, I wonder about what the ants would do if you kicked their hill.

Labels: misanthropy, trolls

posted by Zimri on 14:46 | link |

Monday, October 19, 2009

Pascal-completeness

I'm currently seeing a tactic on various comment threads: a (polite) dismissal of findings in modern science, on the grounds that we will all know what the truth is when we die. (There's no point linking to an example; it's easily found.)

Says the person laying out this case - evolutionists (say) have but a "theory". If there's a 90% or even a 99.9% chance that evolution is true, it is still safer for us to be wrong in denying evolution and to deal with that minor bummer, than for us to be be wrong in accepting evolution and... well.

The first step, in any problem, is to find out if the problem fits any known template. In this case we are dealing with a passive-aggressive version of Pascal's Wager, cited here almost five years ago.

A debate develops in much the same way as an automaton, or machine, or running process. Some automata can be grouped into "-complete" classes, which follow principles common across the class. For example, Turing-complete automata: once you know that your machine is Turing-complete, it's just a matter of writing the compiler and then you can run your C program on it. Conversely, the NP-complete problems: once you prove your program is NP-complete, you know you're screwed.

So here, I give you the Pascal-complete argument - once The Wager is laid, the argument has become an argument over the Wager, and the original argument is dead.

There are counters to The Wager but unfortunately, no-one you meet will accept them. Anyone who reacts to an objectively knowable fact about this world, by means of Pascal's Wager (however much Nerf foam s/he wraps it in): that one has shown their hand. They'd have to want to change their outlook and, it's not going to happen. They are not to be reasoned with. evolutionThread.Abort(); if C# is your thing.

In a moderated debate, Pascalian arguments would be slapped out of bounds. If the general population were more rational, then the other observers to the debate would step in.

Real life isn't a debating society; standard-model humans, who aren't up with the literature and have lives outside logic - they judge based on personal feelings. And anyone who puts on their Shatner-face and yells "PASCAAAAL" into the monitor isn't going to win friends.

UPDATE 10/29 - This post assumes that it is intuitive that a debate is like a computer program. I've since written an explanation for that, and linked it here.

Labels: algorithms, misanthropy, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 19:14 | link |

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Meghan McCain: STFU

By now everyone in the US has been made aware of Meghan McCain's cleavage (h/t Ace). She had enabled comments; I must assume, because she wanted praise. She got some praise but other commenters levied jibes. She then took public offence.

A Devil's Advocate would counter that Sarah Palin played up her sexuality too; referring to lipstick, appearing in heels and hose, throwing out that slogan "drill baby drill" - you'd never see any of that from, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton. But Palin was funny. And when she was complimented, she reacted with wit and panache; when she was derided, she ignored it. This much is independent of whether you think she was a competent governor or a good candidate; this little tramp McCain doesn't rise to Sarah Palin's level, wherever you care to set that level.

In addition to that, McCain took a swipe at AllahPundit at HotAir. Again, you might not think much of AllahPundit - if you're a Leftist, you may think he's a patsy; if a Rightist, you may think he's not on your team; if a Muslim... well. But if there's one thing all should be able to agree upon, AllahPundit supports McCain (and has taken hits for that too). So here's the thanks he got: "pretty much my image of @allahpundit is I am the chick from silence of the lambs and he is screaming at me in a hole 2 put lotion on my skin"

I don't pretend to know why AP bothered with McCain. My theory was that it was a running gag and that AP is too socially inept to know when the joke is over. It didn't matter much to me. But seeing McCain's viciousness makes it matter.

Whether she thinks she was being funny or not, Meghan McCain has acted like spoilt trash. Considering how disdainfully she treated most of the people who voted for her dad, she needs all the support she can get. She thinks family connections, money, and boobs will get you anything. Nothing in her life so far has proven her wrong.

It's not fair.

Labels: misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 17:51 | link |

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Protocols of the Elders of France

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is notorious as an anti-Semitic forgery. What's a little less noted is that it isn't structurally anti-Semitic. Here is one fellow who has noted that feature, "Bunk X" from the blogmocracy:

I read the “Protocols” before I knew about the background of the hoax. BUT, while I was reading them, it occurred to me that they could have been written about any other group of people, in any major religious or racial category, and some folks would believe the hyperbole.

In any case, I didn’t buy into it, and I told my respected elderly arab friend, who lent me his copy, why. He was stunned that I’d been able to see through the propaganda.

This feature is a "textual seam" - evidence for an underlying text, anti-elite and probably not anti-Jew. It turns out that we have the original text, Dialogue in Hell by Maurice Joly; and, indeed, it was about ruling elites - in his case, Napoleon III in France. The forgers then rewrote it in Russian and replaced some of the figures.

Other readers of the Protocols have been shocked at how far the Elders' cynical view of the "Christian" commons seems to "ring true" for them. Of course it does! It is simply a caricature of how any elite looks upon any commons it views as separate and contemptible. That is what the Protocols took from Joly, and Joly from Macchivelli. "Christians" would then be the forger's interpolation, and indeed this word is not in the source by Joly.

For the Protocols, it would not be hard to replace the "Elders of Zion" with any ruling elite or other market-dominant minority. One might even be able to dig out this source, and to trace it to Napoleon III; although admittedly, when confronted with such cynicism, one would first think of Macchiavelli and wonder if he had written a secret book.

As an analogy, say that some loser took C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters and replaced Screwtape with "Herschel" and Wormwood with "Irving". Would it be anti-Semitic? Certainly. Structurally? Not really; it would be recognised at once as a crude plagiary, and (I hope) nobody would accuse Lewis of digging into anti-Semitic tropes.

Labels: antisemitism, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 21:05 | link |

... and then they came for me

I've had to deliver a few apologies over the weeks. (What the hell - decades.)

If theorem T seems objectively true, even if T has been demonstrated to the limit, there sometimes remain people who still won't see the truth of T - to a part of me, these people have ceased to be people. They have become a problem: a mathematical singularity, or at any rate an algorithm gone NP-complete.

I have to remember to step back and to remember that these people are, still, human. More human than me, a humanitarian would argue. I've shared my worries on that, over five years ago. Nothing much changes in human nature.

What might change is how I deal with the buggy software in my own head rather than fantasising about deleting everyone else from my life.

There is, or was, a large-ish sociology experiment on the 'Web, run by liberal jazz musician Charles Johnson. After 9/11/2001, he developed a community called "Little Green Footballs" - and then over the past couple years he placed ever more onerous restrictions upon that community.

One of his little roadblocks he set up in our little lizard maze: he declared for tyrant Zelaya in Honduras. At this point I wrote up an essay proving that L.G.F. was "anti-conservative". I figured I'd be quickly banned, or (much less likely) Charles would post something to the effect "yeah; deal with it".

Nope. First the post lingered around and attracted "down-dings". I picked up 10. And Johnson's final comment to me, announcing that he was terminating my account there, got about 2 or 3 "up-dings".

I'd become a problem to that community, and the problem was solved - to rejoicing all around.

It was about what I deserved.

Labels: apology, lgf, misanthropy, personal

posted by Zimri on 20:29 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Layout changes

As you can see, I've reposted my blog under a new template.

I wasn't sure how much I still believed in any of the political stuff I once believed. I'll start slow. I remain as misanthropic, suspicious, and anti-democratic as I always was. So we'll put Mencius Moldbug on the blogroll. More links can join him "organically".
We'll keep the greenish-on-black theme I'd inherited from Carlene the "Misanthropic Bitch". (Remember her? No? Get off my lawn!)
This version should be a little easier on the eyes. The other colours should be less glaring.
Words are on the left now, links on the right. This is because of smartphones.
I finally figured out how to use Blogger for archives.

As to why I took down the blog: At first, I was trying to switch jobs and I didn't feel comfortable with people seeing what was here. While that was going on, my own political stance went through the wringer. I contributed to Little Green Footballs, mostly, and you might find some of my stuff there; although I expect my contributions are deleted by now.

As to why I'm restarting this thing: I've been steadily posting more and more substantive comments on other sites, concerning how I understand the world. People are taking offence to these comments. The comments are creating enemies: defined as, people willing to take the time to follow my screenname around the Internet, to dig up past comments, and to discredit me everywhere. Now, I don't have a problem with enemies. (I'm not in control over someone else's emotions; and I'm not important enough in the scale of things - I expect the enemies to find something better to do in the long term.) My problem is that I can't easily clarify a comment that I leave somewhere else. If you think I'm dangerous enough to warrant an expulsion off teh internets: at least make the case based on my comments here, and not on someone else's interpretation of some dashed-off troll-post I dropped weeks ago (or longer) elsewhere.

Labels: enemies, layout, lgf, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 16:31 | link |