Monday 21 May 2012 at 6:38 pm
A society with a manic need to invent "meaning" comes up with trite and sometimes fatal solutions:
Climbers are advised not to attempt to reach the summit after 11 a.m. The area above the last camp at South Col is nicknamed the "death zone" because of the steep icy slope, treacherous conditions and low oxygen level.
"With the traffic jam, climbers had a longer wait for their chance to go up the trail and spent too much time at higher altitude. Many of them are believed to be carrying limited amount of oxygen not anticipating the extra time spent," Shrestha said.
...
Lamba said Shah-Klorfine mortgaged her house to pay for the Everest expedition, at a cost of nearly $100,000.
She trained by walking hills around her home near Dufferin Street and Eglinton Avenue, while wearing a 20-kilogram backpack. - CBC
She didn't train on other mountains? Er...
But this is typically. She has a dream; she mortgages her house, in denial of reality and plausibility.
And then, lacking the requisite experience to make her dream a reality, she dies and possibly takes out others with her.
Monday 21 May 2012 at 11:24 am
Late Stage societies tend to be very social, which is why they turn to democracy. Does this make them blind?
People who rate themselves as having high emotional intelligence (EI) tend to overestimate their ability to detect deception in others. This is the finding of a paper published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology on18 May 2012.
...Although EI, in general, was not associated with being better or worse at discriminating between truths and lies, people with a higher ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI) were not so good at spotting when people were telling lies.
Professor Porter says: "Taken together, these findings suggest that features of emotional intelligence, and the decision-making processes they lead to, may have the paradoxical effect of impairing people's ability to detect deceit.
"This finding is important because EI is a well-accepted concept and is used in a variety of domains, including the workplace." - Science Daily
It could even lead to a soulless, empty society drowning in lies that are substitutes and imitations of once-meaningful activities:
London's Hayward Gallery will gather together 50 ''invisible'' works by leading figures such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Yoko Ono for its display of works you cannot actually see.
...Also in the exhibition will be Warhol's work Invisible Sculpture - dating from 1985 - which consists of an empty plinth, on which he had once briefly stepped, one of many explorations of the nature of celebrity.
Another, 1000 Hours of Staring is a blank piece of paper at which artist Tom Friedman has stared repeatedly over the space of five years, and another by the same artist Untitled (A Curse) is an empty space which has been cursed by a witch. - The Telegraph
For us to be equal, we must call retardation genius and genius retardation. Flipper for me!
Monday 21 May 2012 at 04:15 am
Infanticide is an often overlooked way of ensuring the survival of the fittest. It has been recorded in a number of species including mammals such as rodents and primates, and fish, insects and amphibians.
Scientific research shows it can provide benefits to the perpetrator, such as increased reproductive opportunities, access to limited resources, direct nutritional benefits, or the prevention of misdirected parental care.
Infanticide is often perpetrated by adult males. - The Soviet BBC
Idiots are a threat to the survival of the species. They become mental zombies. Better to crush their abdomens when young than suffer their effects on the population at large.
Sunday 20 May 2012 at 09:58 am
Where vestiges of local and ethnic identity existed and resisted the hard power of Colonialism, the soft power of Modernity now seeks to homogenize all national and ethnic identities by sublimating them in an egalitarian and Universalist system. - "Rethinking Colonialism," by Siryako Akda, Alternative Right
That's what equality means: destruction of the higher so the lower can feel safe.
Sunday 20 May 2012 at 09:49 am
First, the interesting concept that fiction influences us more than we think:
I think it is likely that the stories available in our mass media do have a left-leaning bias, which one may or may not see as a bias toward a desirable morality. But my guess is that this bias has to do primarily with the fact that the people most likely to opt into creative careers are unusually high in “openness to experience,” a personality trait highly correlated with liberal political sympathies. - "Fiction Isn't Good For You," by Will Wilkinson
The whole piece is worth reading. In essence, we position ourselves between past and future by telling ourselves stories. We are influenced by other stories. Normally, we pick stories for only a few traits, such as being minimally interesting. We thus program our brains with a range of propaganda.
The biggest story of our time is the social revolution, which rests in the equality of all people and the deposition of hierarchy including monarchy:
The opposite of genetic determinism is social determinism, or “blank slate” theory, according to which every trait of the finished human personality is molded by parenting, schooling, or life experiences. Tweak those molding forces—on the assumption that you are wise and learned enough to do the tweaking correctly—and you can end up with any kind of human being you like. Social determinism is naturally popular with social engineers, careerist bureaucrats, and every kind of busybody who wants to tell us how to live. Such people include “progressive” economist Glenn Loury:
I rejected then, and still do, Murray and Herrnstein’s claim that profound social disparities are due mainly to variation in innate individual traits that cannot be remedied via social policy.
People sometimes tell me that my own genetic determinism is a darkly fatalistic recipe for despair. I don’t see it, and people who know me testify that I am quite cheerful and busy in person. As a poet said: “To enter in these bonds, is to be free.” Social determinism, by contrast, is for commissars, bullies, and slaves. So it seems to me. - "It’s My Column and I’ll Write What I Want To," by John Derbyshire, Taki's Magazine
It's socially correct to reject the idea that genetic traits determine who we are. Yet all of the evidence points in the other direction.
Why social determinism? Because proclaiming equality means that we live in a human world, and not the natural, objective world.
I've got to go with the traditional means/ends analysis. Conservatives focus on ends, where liberals focus on means. This does not mean conservatives are ignorant of means, but only that they consider ends more important. The goal of equality itself is a means and not an end, unless we consider equality a utopia complete in and of itself. For conservatism to be ends-focused however it must be focused on human actions as they translate to reality, which means it must be realistic in attitude. Liberalism focuses on how its actions look to others, what John Derbyshire calls "social determinism." It seems to me that from this division all others spring. - Brett Stevens comment at Orthosphere
(Note: I will never be a Christian. However, there is an eternal truth called adualism which manifests itself in many spiritual disciplines. Those Christians who can follow along will be welcome. However, I will never condone the pacifism and Crowdist sympathies of Jesus Christ, and would probably shoot him on sight and spell out
FUCK EQUALITY with his entrails, preferably on the side of a diversity center, holocaust museum (including the Armenian holocaust), women's studies building, multicultural enforcement bureau, gay rights embassy, or the nearest subsidized Section 8 housing.)
How did we get to this stage?
Doesn’t civilization always advertize itself as concerned with the betterment of humanity and progress? Isn’t there something fundamentally dishonest about a system that repeatedly delivers the opposite of what it promises?
In my opinion, highly organized and long-lived civilizations are the worst offenders in this regard. What did greco-roman civilization really deliver to its unwitting followers? What has Chinese civilization really done for its followers? How has Indian civilization made the life of the average Indian better? Didn’t western civilization only start delivering in the aftermath of WW1 and WW2?
The unpleasant truth is that civilization, as we know it, is incapable of making the life of an average person better. It is, if anything, a hindrance to making the life of such people better as most of what you call civilization is essentially a series of endless zero sum games involving continual strife, conflict, lies and bullshit. Nobody wins in the end, as even the so-called “winners” pay a much higher cost for their lifestyle than they otherwise would have.
Civilization, as we know it, is a disease. - "Highly Organized Civilizations Lack a Purpose for Continued Existence," by Advocatus Diaboli, Playing the Devil's Advocate
I think he's got it entirely backward. Civilization rewards everyone, but at some point, it penalizes the productive by subsidizing the unproductive. It does this because it loses sight of purpose (ends) and replaces those with upkeeping-the-status-quo (means), which includes buying off its citizens with benefits including equality (means) to keep the peace, stability, etc. Civilization only works when it's a manic warlike drive toward a goal, and then it gets fat and lazy and tolerant, and allows the idiots take over. The idiots promptly import more idiots from third world countries (poorer = by definition dumber, and third world nations have lower average IQs than first world nations; no one disputes these facts, but many people try to explain them away).
This is how nations die. In addition to the death-grip of diversity, there's also a rise in promiscuity, cluelessness, bureaucracy, etc. all stemming from the breakdown of a common goal and agreed-upon values system, or consensus.
2.7 metres square with 1.4m high walls. The ‘Universe’ was surrounded by 16 tunnels leading to food, water and burrows. No predators, no scarcity, the mice would have to be blind to not see the utopia around them. At least it began as Utopia. Four breeding pairs of mice were introduced into Universe 1. After 104 days they adjusted to the new world and the population began to grow, doubling every 55 days. By day 315 the population reached 620. Then is stopped. The population grew much more slowly as the mice came against the limit of space, their only limiting frontier.
Society broke. Young were expelled before they had been properly weaned and were arbitrarily attacked by excessive aggressive male mice. Females became more aggressive, non-dominant males became passive, not retaliating to attacks. The last healthy birth came on the 600th day. Then there were no new mice. Then there were none. - "Death by Utopia," by Alexandre Coates, Mostly Odd
The message of this is simple: society needs a goal other than itself.
This goal must be ongoing and transcendent, or it relapses into having its means be its ends.
Liberalism is a symptom of this decline and afflicts the weak-willed first. Like a zombie movie. You can shoot a lot of them, but ultimately you need to get The Remnant who aren't insane to a place of safety. Because like zombies, liberals seek to consume all that's happier than they.
It starts with stories. Our story right now is that our society is the BEST EVAR because it takes care of us all equally and we have freedom.
A new story: a society always needs a struggle and imperfection, or it becomes entropy. Allahu ackbar!
Saturday 19 May 2012 at 10:26 am
The basic laws of stupidity:
1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons, while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. - The Guardian
The people under 120 commit most of these. Some, who should know better, commit them even when over 120 IQ points. These are people with past trauma or mental problems.
Prole-Run Society (PRS) has been a massive failure because it insists a stupid person is equal to a smart one. This is a sabotage of the basic process of selection, and removes our choice to have something better than permissive anarchy and dominance by markets.
Saturday 19 May 2012 at 08:47 am
But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat. When the egg hatches, the confused larva does not develop into an adult in the human’s intestines. Instead, it acts as it would inside a pig. It burrows into the person’s bloodstream and gets swept through the body. Often those parasites end up in the brain, where they form cysts.
The tapeworm larvae often get stuck in ventricles, or fluid-filled cavities, in the brain, sprouting grapelike extensions. In this way the worm actively cloaks itself from immune cells. Protected and well fed, its cysts can thrive there for years.
As a tapeworm cyst grows, it may push against a region of the brain and disrupt its function. - Discover Magazine
Liberalism, SUV driving, etc. explained.
Saturday 19 May 2012 at 07:04 am
Those who think they're doing something "good" often become self-righteous:
If cyclists want to share the road, they need to follow the same rules as cars, many said. Obey traffic lights, go in the same direction of traffic and ride single file when traveling in a group.
"Bikers need to follow the rules of the road, too. I cannot tell you how many times I'm at a four-way stop, etc., and they fly right through," Michelle Having said. "Also, keep in mind if you're biking, you're not Lance Armstrong. Watch out for pedestrians. I'm sick of seeing walkers hit by bikers." - PNN
Also: stay on the sidewalks if you're going slower than traffic.
Friday 18 May 2012 at 12:37 am
But some of the planned talk, at 5 p.m. in Chapman's Irvine Lecture Hall, will focus on one of his other strange results: that a long series of gentle or "weak" measurements can reveal information many physicists consider off limits, forbidden by the nature of physical reality.
These weak measurements, Aharonov said, suggest that the present is a kind of collision between information from the past and from the future.
And it could well explain another bizarre effect in quantum physics. Subatomic particles can appear to be in two or more places at once; in reality, Aharonov said, a given property of the particle, say, its spin, might be separated from the particle itself.
He calls it it the quantum Cheshire cat effect, a reference both to Lewis Carroll and to a famous physicist, Erwin Schrodinger. - OCR
If an order exists between impetus and event, it might well look like a bridge between past and future.