Let’s Be Moderate: Blue Pills soaked in Red #14

Extremism gets a bad rap in the press.  It’s become a slur for anything that’s too far gone or too partisan.  So in honor of sanity let’s explore being moderate.  Obviously if the wrong thing to do is be extreme the right thing to do is be moderate, right?  To start off, a clearly moderate thing to do is compromise.  Moderates should not allow partisanship to stop things getting done.  In any dispute if you want to establish trust you must compromise in good faith.  Occasionally there are binary situations but those are few and far between.  Often you can find a work around.  Why then is compromise so hard?  Well some people have principles, no goes for what they believe in.  I know it’s hard to understand in 2015, but some people tend to act based on those principles.  Sometimes even people without principles act on principles.  Why, because not compromising might cost them little, but give them a gain in signaling to their chosen audience.  There are a number of incentives for not compromising but let’s take the principled path (the principle that moderation and compromise are preferable to extremism).

Dear Kulak,

In the glorious year of 2015, I write to you as a fellow traveler a bit scarred by modernity.  We were all raised in a strange time in history and to some extent it has touched us all.  It has affected some of us more than others, but we are all children of Massachusetts.  This post is a confluence of thoughts: how we deal with the external world AND writing a sort of summary of some of the ideas from the book Anathem.  Now more than ever it seemed appropriate to share both Neal Stephenson’s fantastical conception of a scientific monasticism and my own suggestions what is to be done in the real world in the near term.

Caligula’s Council Episode One: From the New World

See my co-host HERE: https://countnothingface.wordpress.com/

See my co-host HERE: https://countnothingface.wordpress.com/

What if We are Wrong? Blue Pills soaked in Red #13

Welcome to the glorious year of 2015.  Humanity has progressed so far in the past 200 years and especially the last 50.  So much of how we judge our progress has actually been thanks to government, but how much does that really matter to you?  Do you show up at a government building every day to receive your daily dose of fun?  Do you bring your life sized Uncle Sam doll with you to the movie theater?  Does the government raise your kids and give them lessons in morality and how to be a good citizen?  Despite our poverty of interaction with the government we recognize it as the great good that has pushed us forward past many of our issues and inequities.  There is still more to do but maybe it is time to reflect on our awkward, meandering, strange, benevolent beast we call government and observe all that we have accomplished. The first step to any honest analysis of the state of things is to try and prove ourselves wrong.  After all if we cannot defend ourselves, what are we but bumbling chimps that just happened to strike gold?  Worse yet, what if our luck runs out and we hit a vein of carbon monoxide?  So what if we are wrong? Let’s take a look at this bizarro world and see what we can learn.  What hidden risks might there be, is the canary still breathing?

Rehabilitating the Slippery Slope

The slippery slope is an often derided phrase in the modern vernacular.  It is commonly asserted as a fallacy though even La Wik will admit that there is nothing inherent to the concept that is fallacious.  The unpopularity of the argument probably has more to do with who tends to make it than what is being said.  After all one of the most pervasive explanations of why we can’t have nice things ( ethno-nationalism, persecution of communists etc.) in the West is if we do this one thing it will lead to Nazis.  As per the usual inherent dishonesty of the Cathedral, the slippery slope metaphor is never invalid for the things they want to push.  The slippery slope argument is fundamentally a conservative one.  It is an argument made on when a party is attempting to preserve the status quo.  The left often uses it to preserve the status quo of the anti-nationalism, while the right often utilizes it in attempts to prevent further popularizing of various perversions.  Once something has become canon in a nation’s civil religion making the slippery slope argument about it is no longer even considered.  To make an argument that social security is a slippery slope would be absurd.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, but that anything uphill of the present state of society is reactionary.  The chain of the events of a slippery slope argument is almost always prefaced from the present state.  It is therefore in practice conservative.

Cultural Memory and the Unprincipled Norms

As much as human society in the past century has attempted to be humane, it seems that one cannot excise human nature from the humans.  Problems which some have imagined have been removed from human history crop up at inopportune times as often in the enlightened countries as in the dark backwards corners of the earth.  For all our pretensions what if those aspects of human nature we thought to have banished to the back of our culture become a necessity again?  What if those aspects of human nature are unleashed but this time we can no longer control them?

Jews, Puritans and Whites OH MY!

Recently Kevin MacDonald gave a lecture at the London Forum.  While it does give a wonderful overview of some of the reasons Europeans are the way they are ( read super unique ), that is not even the best part about this video.  Kevin MacDonald is most famous for his book the Culture of Critique.  In the process of writing, what would become a quadrilogy, on the history of the Jews, Kevin became increasingly critical of the Jewish Elites.  Culture of Critique is the culmination of his criticism of Jewish Evolutionary Strategy, though the third book in the series.  Kevin is one of the most commonly cited authors when it comes to the Jewish Question.  If you are looking for more of Kevin’s views of the JQ this is not the video for you.  What the video does however allude to is the Puritan or Ultra-Calvinist hypothesis.  Funny that Kevin MacDonald author of THE Culture of Critique citing that the Jews were not the first to erode western ethnocentrism.  He describes the early anti-western elites as being WASP particularly Puritans and Quakers.  He does go on to say that the 20th century saw a decline in the influence of the WASP and an increasingly Jewish character to the anti-western elite.  Its nice to see someone of such authority added to the list of people who say “its not *JUST* the Jews!”

Selections from a Puritan Diary

I recently finished “Village Life in America 1852-1872, Including the Period of the American Civil”  By Caroline Cowles Richards.  This is the published diary of a school girl growing up in Canandaigua, New York.  She was raised in a Puritan household though it seems that she attended many different denominational services.  I have included some selections below that I found interesting.  Certainly the perspective of a schoolgirl starting at 10 years old isn’t the most deep perspective but I think this book gives some color to the American Puritans.  Caroline’s family is quite pious and seem like nice enough people.  Keep in mind these are selections I found worth noting and not necessarily representative of most of the book.

What is interesting about this quote was the title of the book given to Caroline: “Noble Deeds of American Women”.  There is probably nothing to this but it strikes me none-the-less as interesting.

I, Government: Blue pills soaked in Red #12

If you’ve ever taken an introductory economics class you’ll likely have heard some rendition of I, pencil. While it is not always presented in full essay form the discussion none the less is a common subject. It begins with the teacher making the claim that no one person knows how to make a pencil.  To which some unwitting student usually challenges him on. The teacher then explains that one person might know how to manufacture a pencil, but they wouldn’t know how to make the machinery or mine the ore to make that machinery or know how to log the wood etc. One can go on with this line of thought for quite a while. You can read the original essay here. The conclusion from the original essay was that knowledge is distributed. But I’ll take a different direction with the same line of thought.

This post is part of my Blue Pill series as and as always please see my sharing policy and disclaimers.

Also huge thanks to @CountNullFace without whom this post may never have seen the light of day.  Go read him at https://countnothingface.wordpress.com/

Liquidity, Aristocracy and Serfdom

We see an extended conflict in the wake of capitalization. Capitalism selects for certain types of behavior and people.  These selection effects are starkly different from the selection effects illiquid forms of capital, which before capitalization were not even considered capital.  The essence of older forms of illiquid capital is violence.  Whether direct violence in the forms of men with swords or the protection of fortifications.  The serfs, the farm and the fort are the archetype of illiquid capital.  As the cost of defense decreases, there begins a divergence between defense ( both active and passive ) and capital.  Liquid capital, especially other forms than currency, is only widely possible when one does not have to protect property passively or directly employ protection to prevent theft ( there will always be a minimum level of protection needed though).  During the early middle ages even merchants, who are usually the archetype furthest from violence, formed bands to defend themselves from raiders, barbarians and robbers.  Italian merchants even formed navies to defend themselves from pirates.  Certainly in the absence of security, trade becomes an occupation only for the brave, bold and armed.

     Separating capital from violence creates a distortion in the market.  Where before property was only maintained via defense by property owners.  Now free men can utilize generated safe zones to protect their property.  This means their incentives in the short term, their lifespan, lie with maximization of capital.  Not all actors will desire or achieve wealth but eventually a form of wealth generation will emerge that was previously unavailable to illiquid capital owners.  Of these capitalistic methods some will come into direct conflict with the goals of those who maintain defenses. Some of these methods will eventually hurt the average person. Many will describe this subversion as evil, but in practice both illiquid capitalists and liquid capitalists are amoral actors.  The difference is that illiquid capitalists have more incentive to maintain the commons.