Cocoons

Over on Gab, a recent post by Judge Dread @judgedread encapsulated a point I know I've made in the past:

Cities breed liberalism because cities are the only place where you can survive with absolutely no contact with the realities of the natural world, and liberalism is above all else a denial of nature.
#Science

 What I find funny is that it's liberals who insist on passing on trite stories about how helping a butterfly out of its cocoon basically kills it, because it needs that struggle to properly expand its wings, to grow, to blossom as it were.

CAs an aside, perhaps that's why they wear every petty slight and setback on their shoulders like a badge of honor? No, because then they'd realize it's part of life and get on with it.

I've pointed to it again and again, and I think it bears repeating, as it has lessons even for those who don't believe in carrying firearms. Eric Raymond's "Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun". There's a fair amount of explanation, go read the whole damn thing but the core of it is this:

The first and most important of these lessons is this: it all comes down to you.

No one's finger is on the trigger but your own. All the talk-talk in your head, all the emotions in your heart, all the experiences of your past — these things may inform your choice, but they can't move your finger. All the socialization and rationalization and justification in the world, all the approval or disapproval of your neighbors — none of these things can pull the trigger either. They can change how you feel about the choice, but only you can actually make the choice. Only you. Only here. Only now. Fire, or not?

A second is this: never count on being able to undo your choices.

If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead. You can't take it back. There are no do-overs. Real choice is like that; you make it, you live with it — or die with it.

A third lesson is this: the universe doesn't care about motives.

If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot. I didn't mean to may persuade others that you are less likely to repeat a behavior, but it won't bring a corpse back to life.

These lessons can be extrapolated to any environment where day to day and moment to moment decisions can have fatal consequences, as a matter of daily, ongoing reality. The ocean doesn't care if you really wanted to put that o-ring in correctly or not - it just cares that in a sub at 400 feet, there's an opening it can squeeze through.

Time preference also matters. A thug with a gun is still a thug, still violent, and isn't thinking out consequences. In a world with people who have a longer term outlook though, and are just as willing to be violent to protect themselves, the thugs tend to get weeded out.

We in the west live in cocoons - and those in the cocoons are too ignorant to easily distinguish between the wolves and the sheepdogs. We're isolated from the impersonal nature of the universe, from the realities of death to even feed ourselves, and anything that makes people uncomfortable is suppressed, the sheepdogs vilified instead of more raised.

Molyneux had a recent discussion with Vox that covers how r/K selection can be manipulated by those rabbits in their warm little burrows and cocoons.

The problem is one day the fences break down, the cocoons are ripped away, and reality comes to bite those who have not learned to govern themselves hard.

#Coincidentally There is No Truth in Pravda

The Didact recently brought up yet another recent case of "flash mob" violence where the article is strangely.... quiet... about describing the perpetrators.

Short version, 50 or so "youths" were arrested , with hundreds running around in groups from 20 to 50, ganging up on and beating up people in northern Philadelphia over the course of an evening. Just from the headline alone one would guess, based on who actually does these kind of things, as to the cultural or ethnic background of the perpetrators.

And as he points out, amazingly, somehow, it's never mentioned.

I've cut down on listening to Colin Flaherty anywhere near as much, not because he's wrong, but because though the names change from week to week of the victims and the perpetrators, the stories remain, sadly, year after year, the same. Frankly, if you haven't read at least one of his two books on the subject, White Girl Bleed a Lot, or Don't Make the Black Kids Angry - both based on actual quotes by people using or excusing violence, then do so, or dig through several months of the podcast.

Remember when I said that "three times is enemy action" means that there is a systemic problem? It could of course be a campaign of lies as the Trump-directed allegations of sexual impropriety, but it nevertheless means something is systemically wrong.

Colin mercilessly documents case, after case, after case, and the relevant statistics of crime vs population, of degrees of behavior. He darkly jokes that when people tell him "white people do it too" he'll challenge them to post articles of the same behavior by whites, and then when they run out keep posting. "White people do it too" - yet in white neighborhoods people are less cautious, take fewer steps to secure their valuables, because empirical experience shows that their stuff is far less likely to get stolen there.

Even Jesse Jackson would rather be followed by a crowd of rowdy white teens than black ones.

Also worth looking at is an Eric Raymond posting, Press silence, black privilege, and unintended consequences. Especially relevant line:

I’m here to say what that article could have but did not: suppressio veri, when performed systematically enough, itself becomes a code that can be read. What the press is teaching Americans to assume, story after story, is that if “youths” commit public violence and they are not specified to be white, or hispanic, or asian — then it’s yet another black street gang on a wilding.

The article and its comments are worth a read.

On Chronic Kinglessness

Free Northerner has some interesting thoughts on how today, nobody has power:

This is the secret of politics and modern society: nobody is in charge, no one has power, and nobody is running the show: not the people, not the corporations, not the politicians, not the bureaucrats, not the courts, not the military, not the journalists, not the bankers, not the white male patriarchs, not the SJW’s, not the Jews, not Davos, not the Bilderbergs, not the Tri-lateral Commission, not the Illuminati, and not the lizard-people.

Everybody likes to posit that some bogeyman composed of people they dislike is in charge and running, ruining, things behind the scenes because that is comforting. Even if a conspiracy is leading to disaster, at least we’re being led. Even if they are evil incarnate, at least they know what they’re doing and are leading society in a specific direction. It is comforting to know someone is in charge, even if we hate them.

But we’re not that lucky. There is no one who really knows what they’re doing and no one is in charge. Everybody has just a little bit of power, some have more some less, to accomplish tiny things, so nobody has any real power to accomplish anything. Our system is vieled anarchy.

Society’s moving the way it is not because anyone is willing it, but because society’s movement has taken on an inertia of its own, and continues moving along this inertial path whatever actual people may desire. It has almost become a will of its own, some have taken to calling it an egregore, but it’s not really mystical or mysterious. It moves because that’s the way it has moved, so people follow it along and continue to move it, so it moves.

We have the rule of law, but the law is unknown and unconstrained by man.

Go take a look....

Not At ALL Surprised - NYC and Free Internet

Well - NYC is disabling web access on the "free" internet kiosks provided (at great expense) to allow people to look at maps, make calls, and browse online.

The tablets will still offer free phone calls, maps, and access to emergency services. New Yorkers can also continue to connect their own devices to LinkNYC Wi-Fi hotspots. But browsing on the publicly accessible tablets is being restricted after some disturbing reports.

"A Murray Hill resident was horrified when she witnessed a vagrant masturbating" at one of the kiosks "while walking her dog Sunday morning," the New York Post reported Sunday. The Post report said that "horny homeless men have been plaguing the [LinkNYC stations] since they debuted in January."

Maybe it's just because I've worked at providing kiosks and access on a much smaller scale at various sites, but I'm trying to figure out how someone got a project this big through the government of NYC and no- one thought "hey, we might need porn filtering?"

Seriously - I've seen bored High School kids hire botnets to take down their school internet connection, and had to put content filtering in place at another client that provided a couple "internet kiosks" because visiting customers were surfing NSFW sites - with kids hanging around a fairly public space.

Libraries also have to deal with this kind of crap.

Seriously, it's not an unknown problem or a new issue... what kind of  idio....

Nevermind, I forgot who is running the place there these days.

9/11

We already are forgetting.

Some of it, I know for a fact, are the rabbits, the R-selected liberals, who want to turn away and forget that there are wolves, that death waits. Who find remembering what happened "too morbid" or "too sad" or "you're just stirring up anger against muslims" as if that's a trump card.

I don't remember because I want to feel pain. I remember because I must - so the people who died that day are not forgotten. So that we don't forget the systemic malfeasance that led up to that day, the shoddy advice to just give hijackers what they wanted (and maybe they'll go away). 

To remember the fucking embarrassment of panicked legislation that - despite over a decade of the left screaming at conservatives was passed with bipartisan unity, over the objections of the left, and much of the right. The rights stripped from us.

These people want us to turn away from the memory of the jumpers, the falling man (1), the collapse, the debris, the bodies, flight 93, and even the one bright moment of "let's roll". They've systemically stopped showing the damage, the destruction. Pulling back to ever more distant and sterile views where you could not see the bodies, the debris, the apocalyptic dust cloud rushing toward the pedestrians on the streets. They edited out the sounds of the bodies hitting overhead from the video of the firefighters.

They want to forget, and they want us to forget, to be tranquil. To live a life dulled without the responsibility of memory. I refuse. I choose anger. I choose pain. I choose sadness - so I can know who 

The only other memory as stark, flashed and burned deep into my head in a moment of accelerate time, was the "oh shit" moment of learning about the Challenger explosion. 

I was detached from my usual command to learn enough about rigging operations to help out with pierside evolutions. We were in class, shooting the shit just before 9am, when someone came into the room, had just hear that a plane had hit one of the towers. We looked at each other, wondered what kind of horrible accident it could be. Was it deliberate?

Then we heard of the second plane, and looked at each other, and knew, just knew it was not an accident. We didn't need a third time to know it was enemy action. Gone for me was the illusion that the Cole, or even the first WTC bombings, were just flukes. Add to that the certain knowledge similar to the Cole - that the lack of negotiations, hostages, political demands, made that an act of war and not old-fashioned terrorism. 

We were dismissed, told to try to come back after lunch. I couldn't get on base - waiting an hour to move half a mile and the base still a mile away. Called my chief, and with permission took the rest of the day, and part of the next, off, to come back and help supplement the swing shift.

I joined my friends, and watched in shock the smoke, the debris, the few shots of the jets approaching and striking. Tom Clancy taking the human intelligence community to task - and not returning to the air after the break. 

Well, I thought they were my friends. We were talking, and I pointed out that we now had a very limited set of choices. That the attackers, and their compatriots, were only allowing us the choice to die like sheep, or be willing to kill them before we died, as they were perfectly willing to die either way just to get the chance to kill us. 

I lost a lot of friends that day, and one girl I was probably better off not dating but it hurt at the time. A fairly liberal crowd, but events will show who can face simple, stark, reality, and even then, people couldn't, were afraid to.

They want to forget, and they want us to forget, to be tranquil. To live a life dulled without the responsibility of memory. To not be reminded of the wolves and demons and monsters in human guise. I refuse. As I recently said elsewhere, I choose anger.  

(1) - Go read the esquire article on the falling man. 

Stefan Molyneux and Scott Adams on Youtube

It's been a long time on this rock, and I'm sure in five or ten years, I'll think I'm even wiser. Or at least learned a few more lessons the hard way. Nevertheless, I was watching an interview with Scott Adams and Stefan Molyneux, and I was floored by the number of threads that came together for me that I'd been mulling a while.

First - background - I've been through most of the political spectrum at one time or another, in search of truth. I've left most of it as well for the same damn reason. One truth I hold close is this: life is not perfect, there is no perfect choice, there is no ideal, failure modes are a constant, and that people are emotional. All of that has to be factored into whatever decision that one tries to make.

The "people are not rational one" was perhaps the hardest to suss out for me, and "failure is constant, good enough is good enough" the most difficult one for me to accept.

So I found the interview fascinating - especially Scott's discussion of systems vs goals - and my immediate thoughts of how that ties into antifragility, especially given his stated position that we are not rational (in many ways he's right). I also found fascinating his recent articles on persuasion in the light of Aristotelean Dialectic vs Rhetoric, and the greater importance in most cases of addressing the emotional state.

While it is often a broken and incomplete rationality – see again the observation that people are generally irrational – you find more of it, more often, in engineering disciplines because those require yes or no answers that are either true or false no matter how you feel. Of course, those people then can sometimes be more, compensatingly, irrational in completely different areas. Often in the belief that people are just as programmable and malleable as electronics. This last has been around since the industrial revolution.

It's interesting that Scott Adams, Eric Raymond, and yes, even Stefan Molyneux in discussions on atheist versus religious people, have now made similar points. Namely: religion in general having a self-governing set of precepts that restricts both the amount of human evil and its scope, as well offering a higher standard to live up to and judge by than "law".

I'll also be commenting more, later, on "systems", and other factors, later. In the meantime, go watch the video.

What Happens Nextdoor is Racist! (and White Girl Bleed a Lot)

There are a lot of people who are not, by self-description, "Alt Right", who nevertheless are kindred spirits. They search for truth. And because the truth simply is, there may be disagreements over what exactly it means, but at least they live in the same world, and not one of lies and delusion that we children of the 70's were raised in.

Some are aggressive, others take a more passive approach, staking out their territory and saying "here I stand, this is true." One of the latter well worth paying attention to is Colin Flaherty, author of the books White Girl Bleed a Lot, and Don't Make the Black Kids Angry. The former is also the name of his podcast on iTunes and stitcher, and he has a YouTube channel. 

His most recent episode on Aug 28th with Willie Shield covers a lot of the usual ground, but also delves into the phenomenon of "neighborhood" social networks and crime tracking apps, and how racist they are for making clear the disparity in white and black crime. 

The app/ network in question is "Nextdoor.com" - a geographically based social media app for communities. The people programming the app noticed a "disturbing" pattern - people reporting crimes would often report the skin color of the suspect, and of course, all to very frequently, the color was black. So the creators took it upon themselves to help guide us to a more tolerant future -  by making it more difficult to describe the suspect.

Per an interview, they decided to add a new feature. If you describe the skin color of a suspect when reporting a crime, it will automatically ask you to provide several more pieces of information such as height, clothes, etc. On the one hand, they're not preventing you from completely describing a suspect, but they're also making it more difficult to report it by upping the level of friction.  Not because a more complete descrition is inherently better when available, but because criminals are more than their skin color. 

#Coincidentally - another old lady killed....

Colin Flaherty - always worth listening to - posts another example of Black on White violence. Motives of course, are unknown. "Maybe they shouldn't have made that black kid angry"

His podcast and book, "White Girl Bleed a Lot" are worth digging through. So is the followup "Don't Make the Black Kids Angry".

Wait, They Invaded Geek Culture?

If it weren't for leftist papers, would England have any? Anyway, we have the latest dreck at the "Independent".

One really has to try, or be profoundly ignorant of ones ignorance, to be so consistently wrong.

We've always been here - and only someone ignorant of the background of computer culture, gaming culture, Sci Fi culture, etc. would think otherwise. The "invasion" they see is a backlash - some articles in the past have even used that term. Hugos? Larry proved his point about it being a clique.

Then there's this gem:

The movement is a nebulous online community whose values are almost indistinguishable from the far-right racism and sexism of Europe's National Front or America’s Klu Klux Klan. They openly call for ethnic purity, believe in the inferiority of women, and treat all alternative sexualities as aberrant and illegal. The Alt-right hates "Libtards", but it hates "Cuckservatives" more, a play on "cuckold", for what the Alt-right see as their infidelity to true conservative values.

I'll leave aside the strawman mischaracterizations in that paragraph. I've got news for them - not only do they display profound ignorance of everything outside of their little bubble, but in some ways, we're worse.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. And we. don't. care.

If anything, most alt-righters would gladly take black nationalists up on their desire for an independent state - and leave them to their own devices.

That may be far worse, for them, in the long run.