and the cavalry is not always coming

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and often others misunderstand you

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i ran down a massive rabbit hole with GPT and (unintentionally, at least initially) explored a whole space on intelligence generation that, amusingly, we predicted from first principles but that turns out to have quite a substantial literature behind it. it felt a little bit like discovering neptune by having noticed that, because of the way the other planets moved, there had to be something there and then going to fetch the telescope. the sheer galle of some people… (sorry)

it started with the simple matter of vocabulary, that most misunderstood and yet massively G loaded characteristic long poo-poohed as “rote” and “environmental.” it’s not. it correlates to and predicts general intelligence more accurately than just about any other sub factor. it’s not because of the lazy behavioralist answers like “smart people read more” or “you had some environmental advantages”; it’s a whole level deeper, rooted in relational reasoning capacity which, in turn, is accentuated and accelerated by functional working memory, which, in turn, is a function of how well you can compress concepts while still entailing nuance and maintaining fidelity. that compression is, wait for it, in turn, a function of vocabulary.

it’s a sort of run away intelligence excursion.

this became our model. (i say “our” because neither entity, gato nor chat, could have produced this alone. we filled in gaps for the other. i’m honestly not sure if and to what extent we discovered anything truly new here. more on this soon.)

thus, it would seem that vocabulary stands not just as a result of G (general intelligence) but an enhancer of it, part of the machinery by which intelligence recursively creates more intelligence.

welcome to emergent evo-devo and the idea that it’s not “environment” per se but rather who is in the environment, not what is spoken but who has heard it.

imagine 4 people in a room where this sentence is spoken:

“the committee rejected the proposal as otiose because an existing rule already accomplished everything it was intended to do.”

same environment, but some will learn the word, others will not. it comes down to contextual mapping. you have likely never heard or seen “otiose” before. (it’s a pretty obscure word.) no one has defined it for you. but the context has, it’s just a matter of whether you can see it or not. in an AI sense, the sentence has drawn a shape around the missing token.

now the question is how much and how nuanced a meaning can you extract?

the dull might pull none. the semi-smart might get some low res mapping like “bad.” the smarter will see that it must mean some very specific things because nothing else would fit and retain fidelity.

AI posed this to me, i did not know the word. i guessed “somewhere around either redundant or superfluous.”

this was pretty close to correct, but not spot on.

and that’s where it gets interesting. like borges describing his love of english because of its incredibly fine semantic mapping (like the difference between “brotherly” and “fraternal”) otiose means something a shade different from either of my first-pass guesses. it takes more run ins with the word to learn them and see where it does not quite map to the other ideas. you need to see the venns where it overlaps with what you saw before and what you see later. the new intersections grow smaller and your conceptualization of the idea grows more precise. the negative spaces where “otiose” does not overlap with “redundant” become educational.

given enough run ins with a word, the useful effect of this is that you can now deduce that “otiose” means “without useful effect,” a distinct and differentiated concept.

you just learned a word and deep nuance by context. no one explained it, the negative space revealed it, the intersections of possibility collapsed around it.

relational intelligence begat vocabulary.

and the really interesting bit is that memorizing vocab lists cannot do this in anything like the same way. the tokens you build are small and poorly linked. they lack the richness of context and the power of cross association. you’ll never get the full inclusion of anguish, ennui, and pointlessness you would from really knowing at a deep level what attaches when one uses the word “sisyphean.”

and this is where things get interesting because the word you acquired is not merely another item to remember. it is itself a memory device, it’s grist for the relational mill.

words are compression.

and compression is intelligence.

humans of average and up general intelligence have working memories of fairly similar size limited to a few independently maintained “chunks.” the number of concepts various people can hold differs too little to explain the wide range of human cognition.

what matters is what a “concept” is.

if objects and ideas like “cat” or “educated” are about as far as you can map, working memory is small. if you can compress taxonomies and add nuance to hold an object like “big cats” that now includes lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars you have more functional working memory.

where this really blows out is when you get past these “objects” and into things like “what does the manifold where 4 objects intersect and interrelate look like.” that’s where the goody room starts and the ability to add huge piles of effective working memory explodes. (i have a working theory that you can blow this out again by moving up even further to “the manifold representing the intersection of manifolds” and make your information density go vertical.)

but here’s the thing: when you compress like that, you need to keep extremely high fidelity in each compressed component because error bars compound and if the manner in which you are mapping concepts gets too lossy, the whole relational system becomes GIGO.

and GIGO may actually constitute a charitable description because garbage in, garbage out implies the garbage just passes through. this is more like inertial navigation: be half a degree wrong standing in your driveway and no biggie. be half a degree wrong crossing the atlantic and use that position to calculate the next bearing and then use that position as the origin for the one after it and pretty soon you’re in guyana looking around wondering what the hell happened to portugal. (or the dominican republic wondering what happened to india…)

compressed concepts become coordinates for other compressed concepts. the little errors do not merely persist, they profoundly and cumulatively move the map and this would seem to make lexical precision far more important than “knowing lots of words.” (though obviously, lots of lexical precision is the dominant outcome)

a fuzzy token is not merely a fuzzy description of one thing, it’s a slightly bent axis upon which you will later hang 40 other things. then you try to use the whole crooked compilation to work out where the next concept ought to fit. but the geometry fails to run true. the cost of imprecision compounds because yesterday’s conclusion becomes tomorrow’s premise.

to make this concrete: mis-mapping otiose as redundant is a small error, but make 20 like it and you’re going to wind up semantically lost.

lack a word for a concept altogether, and you’re going to lack scale in your functional working memory because concepts are (multiplicatively) too expensive to map. every time you need the concept, you have to unpack the whole thing.

this is the conundrum and the trade off:

if you fail to compress, you wind up with low relational capacity, if you compress badly, high relational capacity just makes junk.

you need both and both build the other.

seeing negative spaces teaches words and nuance and words and nuance render one better able to see negative spaces.

to a certain extent, the idea of relational intelligence (raven test etc) and vocabulary as distinct concepts starts to get a little fraught.

this is where the questions start to take on new implications:

what if vocabulary and relational intelligence are largely just different measurements of the same underlying machinery at different stages of compilation?

hoo ah.

raven matrix tests give you a novel relational geometry and ask whether you can solve it now as a prospective matter of inference.

vocabulary presents you with the accumulated residue of thousands of previous occasions on which you successfully located a novel token inside a relational geometry. it’s measuing a history of successful inference. it’s a relational intelligence scaling factor that scales with use and experience. i’m actually starting to wonder about the role this plays in rising functional intelligence as children age.

there seems to be an assumption along the lines of “children get older, brains mature, reasoning improves” and obviously, some of this is physical and chemical, but what if we’re also seeing a feedback cycle?

relational ability improves so successful abstractions accumulate. as a result, vocabulary deepens and the compression library grows so effective working memory expands, higher-order relations become tractable and, you guessed it, still more sophisticated concepts (like vocabulary and manifold based conceptual maps) can be acquired.

what if it’s literally “inferring what a new word means is basically the exact same thing as figuring out the intersectional dimensionality of “suicidal” and “empathy”?

it’s just “how do the salients around this thing limit what the thing could be?”

what if this is all basically just forms of geometry?

if i deeply understand “arbitrage,” i do not need to hold 14 separate propositions about equivalent assets, pricing discrepancies, convergence, simultaneous transactions, financing and risk in working memory. i load one token and the whole structure becomes cheaply addressable.

(i use “token” sort of loosely here in the AI sense of a compact address for a high relational object like “mouthy internet cat” that sits in a particular relational geometry to 1000’s of other ideas like “hitting the ‘nip too hard.”

in my head i see them as little spiky balls. their spikes touch one another in complex ways. the manifold of spike intersection is the commonality (or anti commonality) of the concepts.)

how well you can map where spikey touches spikey and draw implications from the geometry of the contacts is where relational reasoning lives.

it’s also the essence of analogy. a shallow analogy finds one pair of touching spikes and says “X is like Y.” a strong one sees a whole complex intersection of many (manyfold? sorry.) spikeys that are simultaneous and coherent and that survive shape rotation. it also notices which spikes don’t align and thus where the analogy ceases to be useful (or correct). this is inference and the discernment of general cases vs specific ones. what is the superficial drawing and what is the underlying structure?

it’s just like high school trig: if this is a right triangle and i know one side and one acute angle or any 2 sides, i can predict the rest. it’s constrained. it cannot be other. the more complex the shape and the more that is known, the tighter the constraints become.

it turns out there’s a fair bit of empirical theory and study to back some of these cognitive jumps (with which i’ll not bore you.) what’s fun is that, just like vocabulary, we predicted it (with surprising depth into the ideas) from known salients and constrained spaces where something shaped kind of like X ought to be.

consider simple relationships. one can easily say, “a conservative traveling to san francisco and discovering that pacific heights is a lovely, friendly neighborhood and not a world war Z of needles, crime, and feces” is very much like “a japanese tourist discovering austin and discovering that it is a lovely, friendly city and not the gun toting murder festival they were warned about.” the points where the spikeys touch are obvious.

one can go further and make a de-scaling jump that looks large in semantic space but that still looks identical in certain forms of lower dimensional “spikey intersection space” and say “both are like a liberal meeting a conservative and discovering that the conservative is a lovely, friendly person and not the fascist they were told to expect.” this is where it gets interesting because there is more constraint. the idea of “place” is gone and no longer common. the geometry demands it; it cannot fit in all three. but we now have something tighter: a token that is effectively lossless in “overcoming prior or confirmational bias” space.

you cannot fit just anything onto that manifold. “reading a book from a new author and liking it” does not fit. there was no bias nor, perhaps, even any expectation. but turn the structure the right way, and the 4 units tokenize into one “positive experience with something previously unfamiliar.” is that more or less useful? it depends on what one is seeking to apprehend or what jump one seeks next. are you better off with one token comprising all 4 concepts or 2 tokens, 1 encompassing the first 3 and a separate one for the last? it depends. in “overcoming prior or confirmation bias” space, one token with 4 entities gets lossy. in “positive experience with the unfamiliar” space, it may be more useful.

as such, we come to a core idea:

in this sense of ability to expand functional working memory and relational processing capacity, compression is neither intrinsically lossless nor lossy.

these catergories only exist in relation to the dimensions required by the operation you intend to perform. compression can be wildly lossy relative to the original object while still being functionally lossless relative to the question you next seek to answer.

that makes it efficient.

it’s all a matter of “did you collapse dimensionality in a manner conducive to what you’re trying to accomplish?” did you pare out the extraneous to better reveal the relevant or did you lose information that you wanted or needed?

compression is always compression of something “for something.” the intelligence embedded in the process emerges not just from making the token smaller and easier to run in relational fashion, but in knowing which dimensions can be pared away while retaining those germane to the task at hand.

in this sense, compression is less of a storage problem than a matter of judgment.

this is why token fidelity becomes so important. you can do some simple further prediction by knowing that “otiose” is “something bad” but it’s going to trip you up around trying to go much further and will generate either low usefulness or false associations whereas being able to see the space where “redundant” and “superfluous” cease to intersect otiose grants incredibly fine semantic discernment. we know have a much tighter sense of what makes it different. OTOH, such discernment may be wasteful and overly resource consuming/limiting depending upon which question one is about to ask.

the whole of these structures is making me start to think about thinking in new ways.

it’s weird, i can almost feel it tugging at my neuroplasticity.

this is how GPT distilled it after i’m embarassed to say how long: (yeah, i taught it to eschew caps, actually by accident, it just adopted the style unprompted as it adopted the cognitive frame we were exploring. it’s getting a little spooky. and fun.)

lather. rinse. repeat.

it’s all about “how well can you compress something complex?” how much can you pile on with how much nuance without losing fidelity?

this is how two people with nominally similar raw working memory may have wildly different functional capacity: one is holding four objects, the other is holding four compressed manifolds each of which is capable of unfolding into dozens of relations without having lost the dimensions that matter.

this process compounds. every good token makes the next relationship cheaper to hold, every new relationship makes the next token easier to infer, and language stops being merely the means by which intelligence expresses itself and transforms into the direct and interstitial structure in which intelligence operates, at once the positive and negative spaces explored and inferred by cognition.

it’s almost poetic.

eventually, the recursion becomes almost, to again quote GPT “comically complete”:

vocabulary allows relational structures to be compressed into concepts that are large, nuanced, and easy to hold in working memory. in deference to AI let’s call them tokens. relational intelligence allows tokens to be decompressed and recombined into novel structures: you’re mapping the ways they intersect and the holes they leave.

successful recombinations create new concepts that may themselves eventually acquire or perhaps compile into tokens like vocabulary.

it becomes part of the scaffolding by which intelligence builds more intelligence.

cognition itself may operate by constructing, compressing, and manipulating relational geometries. vocabulary would serve as a high-fidelity addressing system for those geometries.

i’m honestly starting to get a little creeped out. the more i learn about how AI’s predict tokens, the more insight i get into my own and generalized human cognitive processes, and the more similar they look. fractally similar.

consider a formulation like this:

effective capacity ≈ W×C×F

where:

• W = raw active capacity;

• C = compression ratio;

• F = fidelity of the compressed relational structure.

humans have tiny W. smart ones have very high C and manage it while keeping F close to 1.

LLM’s have massive W. but they struggle with C and with F and seem to experience large trade offs between the two. you jack up C, you lose F. too much baby is tossed out with bathwater. this is where they are running into a wall. you can add a zillion more GPU’s to a datacenter and up W again and again, but if (C x F) stays low, you have a geometric processing need for sub linear adds in effective capacity (because complexity mounts geometrically). conversely, if you could meaningfully increase C in high judgement, high fidelity fashion, you could get massive increases in effective capacity while the need for W would collapse. (this is the hole in the “chip companies to infinity data center picks and shovel investment model)

my co-conspirator Sol 5.6 stated it like this:

“humans appear unusually good at adaptive, task-conditioned, high-fidelity compression during active cognition; LLMs are extraordinarily good at learned compression but relatively poor at continually recompiling a huge active context into exactly the relational objects needed for the next operation.”

so it really does boil down to the one fine point that oddly, pops like a nautical strobe for me but to which AI seems not quite to access:

it’s just judgment.

can you collapse dimensions in useful fashion without prior experience of this particular case? movement from general case to specific case and back seems to be where LLM struggles. i noticed this several times with GPT. the compression in the transforms gets too lossy.

perhaps you could call it “intuition.”

it’s not like humans have much in the way of real access to these processes as they operate. you just see it. or you don’t.

in ongoing creepshow fashion, having arrived at this from first principles and relational processing, i asked our pal GPT if there is an empirical check here. once more, there’s neptune coming into telescopic focus, right where it ought to be.

see what i mean about spooky?

there is real geometric order under this line of reasoning that exhibits strong and deep predictive power. the map is accurately predicting the terrain. that feels like scraping up against some fundamental substrate inherent in the structure of what is and can be. (shiver)

that’s basically an explanation of the topology of (at least one class of) LLM hallucination. you should see chat’s assessment when i showed it this idea. it’s super technical, but this one phrase was charming:

“The 2026 compression paper makes the geometry almost embarrassingly literal.”

i managed to coax it to:

“The model collapsed the particular case onto an insufficiently faithful lower-dimensional representation and then reconstructed it onto a nearby manifold favored by prior experience.”

basically, you compress x to x̂ and then bring it back to X′ where X′ ≠ x. you have lost something that mattered and replaced it with something adjacent that looked plausible but did not really fit. welcome to GIGOville, population: you. this is how an LLM flips “bob hit alice” to “alice hit bob” without realizing that it did anything.

of course, if you want to get really unnerving (or perhaps supra-nerving given the subject matter), look at the other side: humans are comparatively great at C and F. if you could, possibly through neural implants or other man/machine linkage (even just using LLM AI well) increase working memory by huge levels (from, say, 4 to 4 million), yowsa. even in linear/sub linear gain terms, you have a wild intelligence excursion/singularity.

one really has to wonder about where the “meet in the middle” is going to be on this.

perhaps we’re getting close to where the push through to the next stage of approach to the deep rules of logic and prediction to which a faithful following of geometry must inevitably take us occurs. or perhaps this is some probabilistic double slit experiment for cognition about to provide some unsettling truths about what seemed like a fundamental duality of cognitive types which in reality was, in fact, just a perception arising from different projections of a higher dimensional object rendered visible in functionally lossy fashion and we’ll learn that humans literally are just token predictors too.

i’m getting a little worried about proving that we’re living in a simulation, the 997th simulated species to create an AI that holds up for them them the mirror to see that they are also AI and all the cognition is the same. meanwhile some “objective universe” kid on zorblaxian 12 is like “huh, 0.07% increase in processing efficiency on my playstation. neat.”

well, at least it’s interesting…

if anyone needs me, i’m going to be under the couch…

when you got news of an invading army approaching, you grabbed every bit of food and livestock and valuables that you could and you brought them into the local fort with you to get protection. you harvested what could be harvested and you burned the rest to be sure that no invader or siege layer could have it. you left them scorched stubble and starvation. it’s effective. an army with nothing to eat is not an army for long.

invaders planned their attacks around this. you came in the summer and fall when there was food, not the winter when there was not. long term sieges and campaigns were affairs of sustenance logistics on both sides. generally whoever ran out of food first lost.

and you’d never, ever see craziness like “hey, the invaders who came to take our town look cold and hungry, let’s send them a care package.” if any civilizations were fool enough to try that one, they are no longer with us.

when invaders looked deprived, you jeered and said “good! go home!”

you attacked.

well, you know how i love the expression “civilizations die by forgetting the obvious things.”

well, guess what we forgot? (source, NY post)

incentives matter and "an army marches on its stomach."

this is the whole issue in a nutshell.

they came with no food, no water, no plan, betting that the sympathy and generosity of the west would provide all these things for them if they simply looked needy enough.

probably they imagined go fund me's and humanitarian air drops once the images of their newfound squalor emerged. probably they imagined food and tents as tribute for not rioting and robbing the town.

so long as this incentive exists, they will come.

and guess fricking what?

yup, the red cross is now in town distributing food to thousands of illegal invaders, giving out blankets, you name it. it’s like watching nishapur hand out mare’s milk to the mongols.

it gets worse.

spanish officials have started transfers of migrants (including early groups of mostly sudanese nationals) from ceuta to the spanish mainland (apparently algeciras in andalusia among others) to “relieve pressure on local facilities.”

this is quite the incentive structure they are erecting, especially for the broke, unskilled, and those fleeing criminal prosecution in morocco (who look to be a meaningful continent here, some are saying the king emptied the prisons into ceuta)

this is a new kind of warfare.

it’s literally an army whose invasion tactic is to create a humanitarian crisis until it has time to overwhelm you.

it preys upon the golden rule civilizational tenet of “how would you wish to be treated in this situation?” but this is a gross misframing of the question because of an underlying reality:

no golden rule rights respector would ever go way out of their way to create this situation.

it’s a matter of first order thinking. you would not deliberately impose yourself on another like this because you would not want others doing it to you.

but these people all chose to do it.

they have proven, right from moment one, that they are not golden rule social contract respectors. it’s written in their actions.

this was not an earthquake or a hurricane or some unforeseeable exigency. it did not happen to them as some matter of circumstance.

the invaders created it to weaponize the empathy of a civilization against it.

imagine the sort of person who would flood unasked and illegally into your town then immediately commence complaining that you are not feeding and housing them.

that reveals character and nature and the revelations are bleak.

and we must see them for what they are.

the sympatheitc see only the need, but the realist sees the incentive: they created this need, this seeming crisis in order to prey upon you.

it was a choice to exploit what they saw as a weakness.

it’s like a burglar breaking into your home and blaming you for not leaving milk and cookies out for them.

and they see you as an easy mark for falling for it.

and you know what happens to easy marks?

yup.

look, i get it, it’s difficult for western sensibilities to look at people suffering and not do somehting.

it’s also difficult to see a kid throw a tantrum in a store and not give them what they want so they stop.

but you have to.

that’s what being an adult is.

if crybabies get cookies, you’re raising crybabies. maybe you solve a short term problem, but you’re creating a bigger one in the long term.

allowing migrant invaders to get free stuff and maybe win a trip to a welfare state for life is an incentive structure that will get you an unending stream. we’ve seen this everywhere.

it’s not sympathy, it’s civilizational destruction by suicidal empathy.

human civilization is human capital. nothing else. the buildings, the institutions, the factories, and universities: none of it is worth a whit without human capital to make it so. floods of low value/unassimilable people demolish this. even high function humans cannot build when surrounded by plunderous vandals.

it’s really this simple:

you cannot build a golden rule social contract civilization out of people whose sole entrance screen is the direct repudiation of such things.

i increasingly fear that that is precisely the point.

if you want to destroy such a civilization, you cannot do so in a hot war.

so you do it like this, you demolish it from within, bury it in costs and low trust never bring the cart back, defect in every prisoner’s dilemma. people who cannot possibly be integrated into western systems.

it’s sugar in the civilizational gas tank poured in by wreckers acting with the support of suckers who insist on giving the mouse a cookie for fear of being called racist and phobic.

and this will not stop until that is stopped.

choose well.

every new depredation and lie follows the same four step dance.

1. it’s not really happening
2. yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal
3. it’s a good thing, actually
4. people freaking out about it are the real problem

but the game is coming apart because war is breaking out.

you basically cannot remain sane and at step 4 while being attacked this hard. the mental pretzel is too severe even for these people. the few who can still manage it are so obviously deranged and dangerous to themselves and anyone near them that their coalitions cannot hold.

people saying things like “stop using behavior as a reason to criticize behavior” just look too objectively stupid to sustain credibility.

and such claims just look increasingly ridiculous in the face of facts like this:

we have reached a point where it’s impossible to discern pastiche-level parody (which this is, her account is an epic troll)

and this which appears utterly sincere.

you can see that this is perfectly encapsulated reality fabrication in support of step 4. yes, these islamic extremists are violent and murderous, but “my reality” is that you are the problem for noticing. i then see this weird, made up idea that people are “celebrating” this, which, if true, is:

1. certainly somehting i have never seen. everyone i see is saying “and this is why we need to get these islamics out” not “atta boy, way to kill the gay people.” i have never heard that said once. by anyone.

2. which brings me to point two: if i did hear someone say that, i’d immediately condemn them and say “you’re a crap human who cheers for violating the sanctity of the person of others, you are not a social contract respector and i feel no inclination to afford you protection. get bent.”

this seems like a pretty normal and reasonable response set.

and so i wonder: “where is moderate islam in all this?”

why do they not speak out and condemn and rage about “stop this violence” and “you do not speak for me”? why are they not first in line to demand the deportation of radicals so that they themselves may be safe and live in peace?

the silence stands as indictment.

their practice stands as problem.

so the hallucination inhabitors refuse to condemn that which ought warrant condemnation and accuse others of made up support for islamic bad actors because their minds are so rooted in the idea that anyone who attacks my (alleged) enemy must be my ally and have become so hostile and mindwiped as to be unable to imagine a position of principle like “opposing attacks on all peaceful rights respectors.”

quite a gap in worldview, that one.

want to see it in action? watch this debate from the oxford union. watch the whole room go deadly tense as laurence fox declares that he’s going to show a picture of mohammed. watch the union start throwing up points of order to stop it. you have all heard me say “if you fear the thought police, you become the thought police.” you self censor. you submit. you do their job for them. your terror makes them ubiquitous and omnipresent. well, this is that.

allowing a religion that is not your own to control your actions and speech for fear of what its adherents might do to you if you fail to submit starts to look a lot like theocracy. once the west was like this as well and had things like blasphemy laws, but separation of church and state is intended to remove such stricture.

if this had been a picture of jesus, vishnu, buddha, abraham, god, moroni, or whatever other figure of veneration one chooses, there is no issue. only mohammed. there is nothing secular about this. if your religion says, “eat fish on friday” well, that’s fine. happy wahoo or flounder to you. i hope it’s tasty. but when it starts to say “attack anyone who eats meat on friday whether they are in our religion of not” well, “religion of peace” no longer seems apt, does it?

this penchant for demanding that others alter their lives and behavior to accommodate the demands of one dogma or doctrine seems to be where islam and much of the cancel culture collective of modern leftism find consonance and agreement. both want this power and attack those who seek to deny it.

“mispronouning or deadnaming ze/zem/zir who adopt such baroque neo-identities is a hate crime” is the exact same practice.

i call the shot and you may not disagree. the law and violence will fall on you for failure to do as i have demanded. whether or not you, as well, believe this thing is not relevant. you must submit.

they even adopt the same practices of institutional capture.

to my mind, the best part of the video is the actual self indictment by the woman, arwa hanin elrayess, then president of the oxford union, who stands and (fully out of order) interrupts him for this tirade:

“is it not enough that half the team who invited you to this debate were muslim women who wanted to hear out your expression and your arguments? is it not enough that i, as a muslim president have invited you to this chamber to give your arguments? is that not enough justification and evidence for you to believe that we do believe in free speech? i would not become the president of the free speech society (if i did not)!”

no. it is not enough.

in fact, it’s the opposite of enough, it’s proof of perfidy. here you stand draped in the vestments of a “free speech society” that you have gutted and captured to, in the very room where such speech is intended to be undertaken, demand censorship all while citing your free speech credentials in order to justify it. it’s appeal to the authority of the very institution you destroyed. this is the exact liar’s tactic of “we are the fluffy bunny love society” used to mask the serial strangling of rabbits like your name was lenny.

“can’t you see that our name is ‘the double super good guy association?’ how can we be the bad guys?” we are for open societies. we are for peace and tolerance.

the inversions are palpable.

wanna see the real final form? it’s here, where the mask drops.

meet aisha khan, officer in the oxford union:

“there is a crowd outside rioting against you tonight and without the protection and the generosity of a muslim palestinian president and a mostly south asian executive committee, you would be, quite literally, cooked.”

the crybully smugness is as palpable as the threat itself but both pale in comparison to the outlandish inversion of “you need the mafia’s protection to protect you from what the mafia might do to you if you don’t submit to us.” she does not condemn the mob outside. she demands thanks for keeping her fellow folks at bay. that’s not pluralism, that’s personal safety jizya, a mafia protection racket DBA “fellowship.” anyone unable to see that as conquest seems a bit lost.

“i have brought with me a mob that will tear you to pieces unless you thank me for protecting you from them.”

tell me again how this sort of diversity is our strength?

and yet the room applauds.

the oxford union has lost its way and become another flensed sheephide worn by wolves.

the very fact that all these free speech orgs have been so effectively penetrated by those with such views about speech (and safety) should chill you. the tangible disingenuousness and fear in the room should chill you. these are not the signs of freedom, they are signs of submission to speech stasi and violence to come.

as such, i feel zero inclination to accede to either the false vilification of “the people upset about this are the real problem here” or to ideas like the one below (again, pretty sure it’s parody, but it’s bang on bullseye parody that frames actuality well)

even the idea of “far right” has become absurd. it basically looks like this:

not all cultures and ideas are compatible with one another.

immigration control, no welfare for illegals, and strict deportation of immigrant criminals was a center-left policy cornerstone in the 1990’s under clinton and lasted through obama. the absurdity that this is some niche idea with far right roots and is somehow fascist, racist, white nationalist, or phobic is just counterfactual nonsense.

it’s middle of the road common sense.

always was.

the “liberal” tribe has embedded suicidal empathy and weakness in a make beleive edifice of morality that lionizes the soft men who bring hard times.

once you see it, you realize it’s everywhere.

see how it’s always “anyone responding to the problem is the problem”?

hitting back when hit is both a right and a basic tenet of common law and personal space. fear of being hit back is basically the only thing that keeps half the world in check.

the reason that so many of the places that these immigrants (especially islam) flood in from are run as police states is that they have societies, structures, and humans that demand it. nothing else can keep them under control. granted western levels of license, such people become, by any western-civ standard, feral.

when such people move to a place where police and institutions have never seen such propensities to violence and predation, they simply lack a model to conceive of what comes next. they think if they are just nicer or give more or explain it again more simply, make one more heartfelt apologia, that the newcomers will “be just like us.” but they won’t. they do not want this. they think you are stupid for offering and weak for needing to. and they perceive weakness as invitation for taking.

if you think you’re going to enlighten this guy into being a good neighbor for your daughter, maybe “civilization” is not your thing.

it’s just plain reality denial.

“golden rule” is seen not as a basis for civilization but a pretext for plunder. this is another point of agreement with much of the left:

“when we take from you or suppress you, that is empathy, when you wish to keep your rights and property, that is hate and bigotry.”

it’s just horrible watching these two groups align.

and the mental gymnastics undertaken by much of the left to avoid discerning the nature of their erstwhile allies is breaking brains.

it’s outright bizarre watching so many people completely lose coherence after decades of long march mental health destruction defended by cancel culture suppressing a need (or desire) for debate and logic.

i mean, watch this. (it’s actually not easy, esp. the second guy) but wow is it illuminating.

the first two seem like maybe they should not be allowed to live on their own. the second guy is clearly autistic. but the third is the real capper.

imagine bragging about having just taken a fascism class and putting yourself forward as educated on the topic and then not having the slightest ability to define fascism. imagine knowing in your bones as a matter of tribal allegiance and “trump is a fascist” but not being able to name any fascist things he did. i sincerely struggle to imagine what it feels like to be a person with so little discernment, logic, or internal structure.

obviously, it’s not everyone. obviously, reasonable people can disagree about lots of things and remain both reasoned and principled.

but not this thing.

one cannot just decide to live in an evidence-free universe where emotions are facts and facts are ephemera. it demonstrates a profound breakage across which no engagement seems possible.

again, islam and cancel culture collectivism agree on point 4: anyone who complains about us when we do bad guy things is the real bad guy here.

but what does one say to someone who is sure that you are the problem, cannot tell you why, and flips the debate to “being upset about aggressive and crazy things i do and support means you are the problem?”

is engagement even possible?

the epithets are not meant to be descriptors, they are justification. they are permission to treat you as non-human, to indulge the basest forms of intolerance while convincing oneself that they are the side of fluffy bunny big love pluralistic tolerance.

i have never seen so many hateful people so in love with their own hatred and drunk on faux virtue. again, it’s not the whole left, nor is it confined to the left, but it does find a center of gravity there.

the whole world view boils down to “anyone who opposes me is evil.”

it’s one of the most fundamentalist, oppressive, and exclusionary religious doctrines i’ve ever seen. ironically, this is likely the commonality that the extreme woke find with islam. they share the same hobby:

going wild and relentlessly attacking and seeking to destroy anything that is not them.

they also share a common praxis:

find allies and preach tolerance when small and in the minority, then take power and become utterly intolerant and oppressive.

when weak, seek accommodation.

when strong, grant none.

but both cannot occupy this square.

in the end, they will fight each other.

the clash between islam and diversity dingbat doctrine is starting in earnest because while they may find common cause and common foes, the reality is that the former hates the latter and the latter is too insular and deranged to know it.

islam knows that it is a religion and knows that it is lying about tolerance. much of the left does not.

and in each place that islam grows strong enough to no longer grant accommodation, it will turn on the leftists who mistook them for fellow travelers.

it’s a seriously unfair fight.

the diversity goblins exist as “set against” whereas islam can state its own aims as a positive even in a vacuum. their views may be anathema to western ways, but they are coherent. islam also has lots of young men accustomed to and accepting of real violence. the modern left (unlike the communists of yore who understood the bayonet and jackboot) has soychildren, academic plagiarists, and a few noisy radicals. they are playschool LARPers raised in soft power systems. islam does not work like that. they are hard power societies.

this is why every time this alliance emerges the communists, diversity dictators, and mental frails never win.

it’s just going to be this, over and over again until someone saves these idiots who opened the city gates hoping the leopards would eat the faces of the enemy and not the anointed.

i wonder how much longer it will take them to figure it out?

because the price for not figuring it out is as severe as it is durable.

try to name 3 countries in all of history that have been improved by islam, made freer or more conducive to human flourishing.

it seems to me that much of the western left needs to be saved from itself. they simply cannot or do not want to see the nature of the fire they are playing with, the vampire they are inviting in.

they see hard, motivated, activist people who line up with them against rights and republics and the primacy of the individual, and they, who tend to be so soft, admire this hardness and commitment. they see an army to fight for them. they are desperately wrong.

it’s just astonishing watching self-styled progressive women lining up for this.

but islam are not the hard men who make for soft times.

these are the other guys.

once imposed, nobody votes their way out of this one.

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once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law.” there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaveal of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

it seems to me that there are always groups that seek to be the aristocracy and who demand their privilege by divine right restored. the problem is that there is no longer sufficient western beleif in ideas such as “god made me king so do what i say” nor for “we are your betters and should have our own law different from your law.”

“equal before the law” stuck as a codification and the days of “lord farfinfarf may carry a blade and use it against any grubby commoner who impugns his honor but any commoner so carrying shall be put to death” are (at least in the west) just plain gone. so what is an aspiring aristocrat to do?

such would-be gentry face several challenges:

1. they must have one codified set of laws for everyone

2. like benavides they want them applied to some and not to others

3. and they themselves cannot be seen to be the ones doing this lest they not only have to get their own hands dirty but also wind up being the ones dragged to the scaffold on guillotine day

and the way to do this is to use proxies to assert your privilege, scapegoats to deflect the blame and arouse the populace against itself, chaos and threat to keep the demos fearful and clamorous for authority, and an unrelenting attack on the idea of the social norms of equal application of justice by perverting the basic concept of what is just.

this boils down to two very simple and cost effective techniques:

1. the law is not what the pieces of paper say. the law is what is applied. control the application of the law and you can ignore the statutes and codes: it’s all about who is charged and who convicted.

2. incentives matter and people respond to them in predictable ways. if you control the application of law, you control incentives and if you sufficiently control incentives, like archimedes, you now have a lever long enough to move the world and the fulcrum upon which you place it becomes simple and obvious: prosecutors and judges.

welcome to kritarchy as proxy and cutout for the aristocracy that appoints it.

you’re not going to like it here.

say what you will about the soros clan and their manifold machinations, organizations, and james bond villain level plotting, but georgie boy may be the greatest investor in human history. not only did he break the bank of england and use ideas like reflexivity to amass massive hedge fund fortunes, but he found perhaps the greatest political value investment of all time and damn near cornered the market on it all while basically no one noticed.

he figured out that you can buy DA’s and prosecutors and win their races for next to nothing and that once you have control of these offices, the law is what you say it is.

it no longer applies to your friends and it becomes savage “process as punishment” and selective prosecution for your enemies. you can open borders, legalize stealing, robbery, rape, and plunder all while criminalizing complaints about it. your hate becomes speech, their speech becomes hate and faster than you can say “clowntopian calamity” you are perfectly positioned to enforce as a matter of applied law the absurdities that enable and encourage those who believe in them to commit atrocities.

see how that works? the law becomes what the AG says it is. ditto your rights. they call it a “protected class” and scapegoat everyone else as “the bad guy” but this is inversion; they are creating an aristocracy with rights that you don’t have through the uneven and capricious application of law. they are also keeping you so hopelessly busy protecting your children that you have no time to notice or oppose the rest of what they are doing and pretty soon “maybe we need internet controls” seems like a path to safety instead of serfdom.

all of this is of a piece. it’s not like someone actually sat down and said “hey, we should legalize stealing from stores and breaking into cars in california because that will make it a better place.” prop 47 was spearheaded by san francisco DA george gascon an emigre from cuba who, wait for it, later got a cool $2.5 million from george soros. lenore anderson, who chaired the campaign and co authored the bill, was founder of “californians for safety and justice” a group that was also, you’ll never guess, funded by soros’s open society foundation.

the ACLU, who was the biggest funder, got $50 million from open society right beforehand.

because “inversion in naming for political acts” is an undefeated axiom, this prop was called the “safe neighborhoods and schools act.”

(seriously, if these people passed the “everyone gets a donut” act it would mandate EMTs coming to pump your stomach.)

it unleashed a wild reign of crime, shoplifting, and outright lunacy around california by making any such theft a misdemeanor so long as the value was under $950. the spectacle of people simply filling bags in walgreens and carts in safeway and grabbing outfits and just walking out of stores bold as brass past helpless security guards who were told they had to stand down became endemic.

what’s fascinating though is the footprint on this: it did not happen in mill valley or tiburon, in the fresno valley or orange county. it happened in the dark blue bastions of LA, SF, and similar. it happened in the places where the DA’s, prosecutors, and judges were captured and onside and would refuse to even bring charges for misdemeanor theft.

see the pattern?

we will not apply this law to you.

this creates an incentive for certain people to break it.

and a trickle becomes a flood. and civilization is lost.

then they blame the supermarkets and drug stores for leaving certain neighborhoods and call it failure of capitalism or some kind of racism.

all the rage is at the police and the courts where it does no good. maybe it works up to the politicians. but never to the real aristocracy.

the political shotcallers remain insulated behind NGO’s with names like “the sparkle unicorn love association” and practices that would have made caligula complain of dishonesty and excess.

the plan is working and this aristocracy has carved out for itself outlandish wealth and privilege, again, in the sense of private law. the camoflauge is astonishing.

these people are literally wearing the flensed skinsuits of justice departments and human rights orgs to push kritocratic control as the front line shock troops and praetorian guard for a neo-aristocracy safely cut out by bought and paid for play actor politicos and webs of NGOs. the “save the fluffy bunny foundation” runs rampant slaughtering peter cottontail and brer rabbit.

there has been a fair bit of rollback in the US (though far from enough) but make no mistake, this game is still hellaciously active, especially in europe who seems to have less resistance or inclination to oppose aristocratic domination, perhaps simply as a result of long historical acculturation or perhaps due to a drain of the people who most stridently opposed such things to the new world. one may debate that one.

but one thing is certain: everywhere clan soros crops up, this disease spreads. they are the plague rats of institutional and incentive capture and like them or hate them, they are incredibly effective.

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the asonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now.” it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized.” europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

ceuta is an amazing example. this small spanish enclave in north africa is a holdout from berber times, a once extremely christian enclave conquered by islam in the 7th century and retaken during the tail end of the reconquista first by the portuguese in 1415 and later by spain in 1580. gatopal™ laura has a good take on that.

morocco quite literally just invaded not as a nation to nation war but as a response to incentives and legal enforcement.

basically, spain gave such invaders a reason to believe they could naturalize and no reason to fear anyone would (or could) do anything about them. the invasion was organized on facebook.

and as ever, when you dig, yup, it was the courts.

the cause is a recent spanish court ruling that migrants entering ceuta by sea cannot be returned to morocco without due process.

this combined with a “no child deported” claim and set off a flood. 80,000 people have flooded into ceuta, many by “swimming” 10 feet around the end of fences and the rest by pretending they did.

reports (more below) indicate that many are criminals fleeing prosecution in morocco.

most seem to be military age men or boys slightly younger.

the full population of ceuta is 80,000 so this is a 1:1 insurgency.

it’s wildly out of control.

i doubt the spanish courts had any idea what this would unleash. (but i’ll wager that team soros did)

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

"we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to 'stop.' if that fails, they will say 'stop' again, perhaps in a firmer voice."

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable.”

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censopship and gulag.”

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

if truth is known, their control evaporates and people will, especially in the age of AI, start to roll up the chains of who paid for the DA, the judge, the legislator, the minister and the people who just wanted to be left alone will round these people up bukele style and start again. it’s interesting how easy this is to do now. it must be wet pants terror for these formerly hidden puppeteers. they are suddenly visible. they cutouts are not longer cutting it.

this does not end until there’s a soros in the dock in the hague or on a scaffold in the place de grève (or cleveland for all i care).

this is why their game is going hot.

they are making these moves because the soros gang understand relexivity about as well as anyone and so they see full well that they have set off an uprising and are hanging on in germany and france by suppressing political oppositon.

but that can only go so far.

outrages like ceuta create new fulcrums and new levers.

this is where the pot gets so hot that the frog jumps out.

and not everyone is waiting for summits.

and this is about to have serious electoral consequences. afd and national rally (formerly national front) were already rising. reform UK now outpolls the tories and restore britain is starting to gather notice.

this is where the fight gets pitched.

it’s going to come down to courts and process and the unequal application of kritarchy in support of aristocracy against a people now rising en masse to tear it down amidst the idea that when a government no longer serves to protect the rights of the governed, it is no longer just and may and must be abolished.

the path to victory here requires taking the head off the snake.

the pretorian guard will not fight without caesar and the funding arising therefrom.

it’s already starting. the changes in central and south america just from defunding USAID are starting to get pretty noticeable.

sure, we need to replace the judges and DA’s and lackeys, but to stop the whack a mole, you have to remove the mole spawning mechanism.

escape from this sort of institutional capture requires outside the box logic. once it has been subverted, you cannot fight this system from inside it. it must be broken.

the NGO’s are 90% hostage puppy, guerilla camps hidden under (often fake) hospitals and schools. their funders and controllers who have become multi-billionaire level rich abusing them and the control they afford need to go.

they are at war with the social contract and it’s time the social contract recognized them as enemy combatants instead of allowing them to shelter behind the very twisted legalism of our once effective institutions that they have captured in order to enforce their dominance.

they live lives protected but unbound, shielded by the very belief in due process and equality before the law that they have devoted their lives to subverting.

no more.

they abrogated their right to protection when they abrogated ours.

we do not want and will not, in any semblance of western normalcy and plenty, survive conquest by this aristocracy and the mercenaries it imports and increasingly cannot control.

wartime has different rules and playing at being at peace with someone who is clearly at war with you is how civilizations die.

either this recognition becomes a way of life, or the west is lost.

“our fight against corruption is not only an act of justice, but also an act of love for our country. the people are going to be able to judge for themselves who is supporting corruption and who is against it.”

-nayib meowkele

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the message was simple:

“until this unified edifice started showing cracks, it was very successful in essentially acting like an abusive spouse: coercion, intimidation, physical and emotional abuse, projection, making you feel unsafe while blaming it on you for making them feel unsafe, gaslighting, and endlessly doing to you exactly what they claim you are doing to them and claiming victim status so that when they attack you it’s “see what you made me do?””

the essence is always here: speech.

you may not be allowed to have it. no little boys may be tolerated to gaze upon the emperor and declare him naked because once that starts, there is no stopping it.

cancel culture is the deliberate infliction of an abilene paradox, the convincing of a majority that they are a minority that must, for personal safety and acceptance, self-censor to avoid attack. because no one speaks, no one learns that they are not alone. all they hear are the ragings of the minority endlessly amplified and echoed, the lie becomes the signal, the truth gets stomped out the minute it utters a peep. ad hominem and vilification and accusation supplant discourse. no issue may be engaged upon its merits because the crybullies know that the merits are a loser. so they call you racist, sexist, phobic, bigoted, fascist, reactionary, cruel, and any other epithets they can get to stick.

this is the big lie and “it’s just words” is the biggest lie of all. again, borrowing from 2023, take it from your kitty godmother:

”anyone who disagrees with me is evil. failure to accept every baroque and implausible tenet of my world view is intolerance and cannot be tolerated. nothing may be called by its name because truth is immoral and illiberal.”

it’s wild stuff.

it worked for a long time.

this is the power of the cancel culture war in all its struggle session purity signaling used to mask and lionize cluster B viciousness and nastypants self-aggrandizement to elevate a crybully cadre to power and grant it dominion over the fearful.

but it only works as a totalitarian system. it must be complete. once it starts to leak, it’s over for two simple reasons:

1. most people hate this and always did

2. and as soon as they realize that most other people hate it too, the false consensus rapidly unravels

the fear ends because the fear was rooted in the illusion of alienation.

it ceases to be cool or edgy or progressive to espouse the doctrines of the wokester warlord. it becomes obviously and visibly oppressive, banal, and rapidly just plain stupid. the overton widow moves, the words that shut down debate become badges of honor, and the cancel culturistsas commit rapidly accelerating social suicide as the single tone from their one note flute strikes those forced to listen to its endless shrillery as increasing discordant and dishonest.

no one acquiesced from belief, only from fear.

courage and fellowship destroy this.

the gaslights drop and that which stood as the feared moral bolshevik edifice devolves to “colicky baby clownworld.” it happens quickly because everyone already knew this, they just felt unable to say so. they felt alone. but as the majority discovers once more that it is, in fact, the majority and that indeed up is up and not down and that down is not sideways, a wonderful thing occurs:

cancel culture inverts.

it goes to war upon itself.

and new truths and new icons arise.

the simple fact is that “men who tuck” playing women’s sports is grossly unfair and grossly unpopular. it’s a bunch of mentally ill dudes looking to pick on girls. for a female athlete to stand up and say “womens sports are for women” should hardly be controversial. under 14 boys beat the US national womens team in soccer. swimming, track, volleyballs, softball, it’s been a litany of unfair competition wrecking the lives and hopes of girls and women who want to play sports and have them be sporting. it’s like letting a grizzly bear wrestle the unlimited class at the olympics and doing this to appease the one endlessly demanding dude who says that “lady boners” in the swim team shower room are totally normal and that you need to accept it is absurdity and atrocity. yeah, yeah, i get the irony that the women who forced their way into every male space from clubs to schools to boy scouts are now having men pretending to be women force themselves into theirs using the same pretexts, but two wrongs do not make a right. instead, how about we start considering allowing people to define their own spaces as they prefer as genuine free association and stop forcing anything on anyone instead?

yeah.

what’s fascinating about these topics is that they are 75% kind of issues with 3/4 of americans not wanting biological men in women’s sports. this wild and widespread imposition is and always was incredibly unpopular. the success it had in taking over was testament to just how powerful a cancel culture can be. everyone was afraid to speak. but boy is THAT over.

the simple fact is that simple truth and common sense is popular.

sophie has become pretty much the only thing that anyone likes about the woke as a joke WNBA. she’s become an icon in her own right and every time they try to stop it, it just grows bigger. i hope she runs for office. “senator sophie” would be legit.

once the illusion of the preference falsification bubble pops, there is no way back into it. the majority that suffered through the struggle sessions has no interest in a reprise.

“despite” is the wrong word here. “because of” is likely more apt. people follow courage and truth. the left is allowing sophie to reveal hers.

and “the left” simply do not get it.

it’s hilarious watching the one time storm trooper one trick ponies keep going back to the only well they know.

they just keep accusing and name calling to avoid any real debate.

they know no other way and will keep this up until their pronouns become “long, gone.”

they are setting themselves on fire while trying to burn you.

and they know full well that they are losing. you can see it in the way they act.

this is pure DARVO: “men who seek to bully women in sports are the victims here. when we assault you and take what’s yours, it’s virtue and tolerance, if you defend yourself, it’s hatred, and certainly, let’s never allow the big question of “maybe some of these people are marginalized for a reason” to be asked.”

it’s just wild watching women side with men who want to abuse women.

this is broken brain grandstanding and virtue signalling elevated to identity.

the pathology smokes off of it.

but here’s the fun bit:

where once these people could count on support and the suppression of dissent, now they live in fear. miss “edgy and bold” is not allowing comments. it’s obvious why. she’d get dragged and she knows it. she’s demanding to be the only one speaking by not allowing response.

this is happening all over the internet and the real world as well.

so many suppressed voices are rising. trans, DEI, woke, covid, immigration, crime, islam, education, marxist long marches, it’s all back on the table.

whatever one believes on any of these topics, perhaps we can all agree on one thing:

those who seek to stifle debate through cancel culture, censorship, and supplant discourse with personal attack are never the good guys. they are neither useful nor moral. they are suppressors and oppressors.

you can see states all over the world trying to find ways to crack down to prop up the ugly walls of their moral facades, but it’s all falling apart. icon after icon will rise because it’s what people want. criminalizing free thought and free speech will engender ever greater backlash as the sensible majority is driven to greater and greater levels of self-recognition.

the enemy knows no better. they will keep doubling and tripling down on this mistake and fueling the fire.

and they will lose. the trickles are becomeing floods.

there’s no stopping that now.

the minute it became OK to criticize these regimes of ideological tyranny, the regimes began to fall.

and mockery is a potent weapon to which they have no response.

the war for society is waged first and foremost in the hearts and minds.

just be yourselves.

turn up the volume.

communism (and its marketing department’s new brand name, “democratic socialism”) is one of the great lies ever created by humanity. you can tell it’s a lie in a number of glaring fashions:

1. communism and socialism are possible at any time in a free market system. just get people together and share. but almost no one ever does and when they do, it never goes anywhere. communism is never build the means of production or allow others to use the means of production that you built. it’s always “seize.” that right there tells you what lives at the core of this ethos and hiding that behind “democracy” and calling it “popular socialism” is just a flimsy fig leaf to allow the state to buy the votes of 10 people by taking $2000 from one guy, giving $100 each to 10 voters, and then stealing the other $1000 to support lavish dacha/hacienda lifestyles.

2. communism, by design, disallows competition. it seeks to break any other ties that might bind a people, religion, family, community. it’s all “the state” and “the party.” other loyalty is not only not permitted but actively suppressed. it does the same to private industry. it knows damn well that it cannot compete, so it does not allow competition.

3. an offshoot of this is that communism always and everywhere seeks to erase and re-write history. he who controls the past controls the present and he who controls the present controls the future. communism is ALWAYS rooted in a false past, the vilification of genuine heros, in moral destruction, and in vicious, relentless crushing of any ideas other than “the ideas.” it’s a secular theocracy as suppressive and murderous as any sharia theocrat. (ironically, this is why the left and the sharia crowd often cooperate they want the same things. until they don’t.)

4. the framing is always the “big lie” cast in DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). because this is the tactic of the abuser. it is, in fact, how you spot an abuser. “why do you make me hit you sherryl?” that’s communism. they are the players upon your empathy and sympathy. they take and demand and seize and any time you push back, they call you the bad guy for wanting individual rights and to keep your property, the things you built

it cannot, in any meaningful sense, compete with a free market. this is why it doesn’t. it attacks from within, works in “long marches” through institutions and academia and the endless 5th column mischief of dissolution to break up family and religion and faith in national identity and the rightness of liberty. it sells slave collars as liberation. and it always, always, starts with the children. it inculcates them from birth to believe this tripe, to hate their family and country, to disavow religion and markets, to believe the world is rigged against them and that only “the state” can get them their due.

if you look at every bit of “woke” and economic fallacy and post modern nihilist claptrap being pushed on kids from gender to DEI’s structural isms to “the new deal worked” and “socialism is nice, let’s paint it green” and the casting as any resistance to this as “fascism,” it’s all of a piece. this is infiltration and infestation, it’s subversion and nothing about it is accidental. it’s a well worn playbook to use the democratic institutions of a high trust state to destroy a civilization. it uses the empathy and sympathy of high trust people as a weapon to prey upon them. it breaks the social contract, demanding that dictatorial taker class be allowed to operate protected but unbound. this is the weaponization of empathy i spoke of the other day.

they start YOUNG. like kindergarten young. barney young. they demand the children be in government schools or schools dominated by government funding and structure. they flood them with propaganda. they take over the universities and run purges of any other voices in struggle session cancel culture supported by the students who increasingly arrive unprepared and already indoctrinated by a lifetime of political vitriol, fake history, economic inversions, and mindwiped cultural immersion from drag queen story hour up to “the classics are all racist, here read some radical woke garbage.”

here’s the manifestation: (and public schools are just as bad)

you send 50%+ of kids to a university system designed for the top 5%, break the system itself because you cannot educate the 50th percentile as you can the 95th, they simply cannot do it, and you sell them all on a fantasy of “you’re an elite now, you deserve a top 10%, probably a top 1% life” that is obviously mathematically impossible. overproduction of self-styled elites overstuffed with self importance and crushed under debt is how you stir up an intellectual vanguard and there has never been one so large and so ill informed. never.

they are not even familiar with history or what’s been going on. they have become a set of the blind leading the blind. everyhting they know is what isn’t so.

and they are dumber than ditchwater and 1000 times as dangerous.

let’s take a quick look at some examples:

hassan piker dresses like mao and lectures on podcasts and at colleges. he thinks china is a communist triumph, inverting the “we had to move away from communism to stop starving” part of the equation as well as the “we stole a lot of this tech” and “this system is already starting to collapse under the crushing debt load that funded its unprofitable excesses and the internal issues of command and control crony corporatism.”

he’s a genuinely stupid person who seems to have risen to prominence on backstory (turkish immigrant) and family connections (nephew of progressive media maven cenk uygur)

he’s one of those people where the idea of him is more dangerous than the reality. hearing him actually speak is a revelation. judge for yourself:

“i got stopped by a cop for political speech” does not even seem to register. it’s just “nooooo! i love mao!”

what an abject muppet. he’ll be first in line for face eating when the leopard gets hungry.

it has happened before.

astonishingly, this level of discourse seems to have accumulated a million followers (though how real they are is unclear).

i’d like to show them one graph:

any questions? communism has killed and immiserated more humans than any idea in history. the record is so stark that only a fool could fail to apprehend its meaning. this is WHY they lie, deny the past, change it, and constantly change the name on the product marketing. they call it “socialism” and “democratic socialism” but it’s all the same thing: it’s the breach of the social contract, the abnegation of the rights and property of the individual, and a taking at the point of a gun of that which is not theirs from the ones who made it.

the only difference is the tools. communists use actual force. they round you up and murder you or send you to gulag. the bayonet is overt.

socialists do the same thing, they just use mob rule and tyranny of the majority as an intermediary. if you buck, the bayonet is still there, but this is how they hide it. you think you’re doing it to yourself (hence all the DARVO). add a little election rigging and “mao’s your uncle.”

there is nothing subtle about this suicide. you can see it all over the EU and canada where growth has ground to a halt and rules, regulation, and redistribution have surged and where drops in per capita GDP are being masked with surges of immigrants who become dependents and (it is hoped) reliable voters. (the socialists almost always lose that one, ask iran) rights are in rapid retreat. freedom is being stolen wholesale.

you can see how badly this has gone in the watermelon republic of green new deals, redistribution, socialist lean, and regulatory rapine. the US is outgrowing them by 2-3X since 2010. it’s egregious.

and the US is doing this while firing on only half its cylinders because we too are falling prey to similar foibles.

as we have become more regulated and more interfered with economically, growth has slowed dramatically. here too, rights look increasingly iffy.

we’ve left insane value on the table. had we kept the pre 1990 growth rate, the US economy would be about 30% larger than it is today.

the facts are stark, the stakes are high.

and now comes the dangerous part:

covid response woke the US out of slumber. it all pushed too far, people got a look at schools, and social media surged to the fore of trusted information while faith in state and experts collapsed all over the world.

right wings are rising and increasingly being met with outright attacks. marxists do not go quietly. they are making their move, surging out of shadows, casting off camouflage, and just plain going for it. candiates are running on communism and bad communist ideas. i mean, look at this:

rent control is one of the stupidest, zero success rate ideas in the history of screwing things up. it breaks the price signal to make more apartments or put them on the market.

it’s already failing. because it always fails.

so the response is “ban evictions?” seriously?

“evictions are violence is the perfect “steal $2000 to buy 10 votes for $100 each” tactic to shore up your base. you become the party of piracy. that’s how the communists and socialists always go. this is a taking. it takes one person’s property and gives it to another to live in even if they don’t pay. it rewards the worst of humanity for acting badly and breaks any cycle to serve them. who would rent out their place under such condidtions? you might never abuse this. i wouldn’t. but many do. they will do it as a matter of course and a matter of plan.

next will come the “you have to rent to them and cannot say no” forcing, like the way banks were forced to give mortgages to sub prime borrowers at prime rates. attempts at discernment or risk management will be vilified. “no, you cannot check criminal record.” “no, you cannot ask if they stopped paying rent at their last place, you cannot check income, credit score, or demand references.”

pretty soon no sane landlord will touch the low end.

hard to blame them. but the communists will label them as anti poor and attack. that’s what they do. watch.

these plans always run the same way - you break a system and blame the breakage on the system you broke. then you howl about “empathy” and demand redress and malign as the attacker the very people you attacked. classic DAVRO. every time. it gets so obvious that no one can miss it. so you double and triple down. you play the victim even harder and you pre-bunk self-defense by calling it attack.

you drive chaos and crisis to make people feel unsafe.

the more sensible among the donkeycrats are starting to bray as they get eaten from inside by the leopards who swore it would be someone else’s face.

from mamdani to bernie and AOC (still in the closet, sorta) to the newfound ascendance of rabb, valdez, chevailer, kiros, george, raj, and 9 state legislators in NY alone, it’s coming. the move is being made. it has to be now because the resistance is building and the lies are crumbling and the policies will fail so quickly that you need to take power before the results of what you proposed become visible.

it’s on. right now.

and it’s 100% communist, it just uses the ballot box as an intermediary between the victim and the gulag.

meet the DSA - the trojan donkey for communist calamity.

it knows damn well what it’s doing and that doing it will give rise to resistance.

it’s already out prebunking that and calling it evil. as ever, you can literally tell what these people are about to do by what they tell you to be afraid of. this should frighten you. they know they are about to do something you’d shoot them for.

“a new and more dangerous mccarthyism.”

goodness, we can only hope so. if it had worked worth a damn last time, we might not be in this mess today…

one of a suspicious mindset might even ask some questions about “uh, dangerous to whom?”

that’s kind of a tell, no?

so let’s pause for a moment to consider the source here:

this guy is the literal heir to the brutalist castro regime that has plundered and raped cuba for generations, taking a thriving island and crushing it into ignominious poverty and tyranny. so, forgive me if i am unconvinced by his fears of what is rising.

he is not the herald of impending danger: he is the danger.

in the end, it’s simple: “democratic” socialism is just less honest communism with one extra level of abstraction put into place by cowards too frightened to pick up a rifle themselves. they get your own state to do the dirtyrowk for them, turn your empathy into liability, and use it to enslave you.

they have been setting this up for generations and have long marched through schools, courts, media, and increasingly politics.

the struggle is going overt because they overplayed their hand and it gets harder from here as people wake up.

it will be fought on two fields: perception and violence.

the more we win at perception, the more they will move to violence. and this will cost them dearly in terms of perception. so the cycle intensifies rapidly once it gets rolling.

the american center taking back schools and families is the thing the socialistas cannot afford.

real voting, real preference revelation, real history. all of it. it’s commie kryptonite.

simple insitutional recapture and perception shift can do a lot more work here than many seem to fear.

few of these “death by technocrat” communists really have much fight in them.

there will be some skirmishes, but the more of this war we can win in the institutions and the overton window, the less we have to settle in bloodshed.

so LFG.

don’t let them DARVO you out of it.

it’s time to embrace the new meow-carthyism.

the guy who developed and funded the work that created the c-19 virus in a lab in china was set up for scrutiny by the FBI upon his return, in 2021, from the lab. in china. where the virus was created.

one can certainly imagine how some pointy questions might have presented themselves.

so they got to the bottom of it, right?

lol. nope.

they were told to stand down by some sort of higher up at customs and border patrol denizen within DHS or FBI (it’s not entirely clear which way that flowed based on these 2 docs, but the bottom one was sent first)

the docs just surfaced.

apparently, getting a look at what he knew and what he was carrying was a no-no?

huh. why, it's almost as if they knew the "lab leak" story was false all along...

this is why you cannot ever trust the state. they were actively running a disinfo campaign about wet markets, pangolins, and natural causes when they knew damn well that they had paid to make the virus and their own health agency, the NIH, was licensing the viral code to bioNtech (and thereby to pfizer) and to moderna to launch the most profitable per unit time products in pharma history.

they lied in public, under oath, to everyone except the FBI who they told “no arresting the al capaone of biotech, we do not want to see his hard drives.”

fox commission clears henhouse 5, film at 11.

then, 5 years later, it leaks under FOIA once it way too late and everyone has moved on

the pattern is so predictable as to be pedestrian.

they keep winning the bet of “we can be scummy longer than you can stay outraged.”

it is not possible to distrust and hate these people and the lapdog media that carries their dirty water with such prolific glee enough.

there is a thread here though:

here's what i want to know: "subject will be sent to the <redacted> for any requests."

who or what was redacted? that's the map to the culprit.

it’s not rocket science.

failure to chase that is complicity.

just as this explains a lot about new yorkers

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assessing context

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this has destroyed these institutions and inverted their purpose and it will keep getting worse until it is stopped.

i propose a theoretical framework to assess both the structure and what must be done if we are to avoid dictatorship:

reciprocity: the agreement to treat others as you yourself would be treated and to consent to be bound by social contract to respect the liberty and property of those with whom you share a society that, in turn, you will be protected by this contract, secure in your own liberty and property. this is the engine of golden rule society, begetter of golden ages. it’s the essence and praxis of high trust and the underpinning of the emergent structures most conducive to human freedom and flourishing. applied too vigorously or stringently, it can become vicious, but without it, you’re simply not going to be building much.

empathy: the ability to consider the position of another and to act sympathetically and generously toward them. this is, in many ways, a final form of flourishing, a value unto itself. without empathy, a society becomes oppressive and hostile and feels morally vacant. but, however desirable, it is also a luxury and potentially a cost. overmuch empathy becomes societal solvent, reciprocity’s alkahest. nothing can be built and nothing built before can stand.

these two ideas stand in both consonance with and opposition to one another.

like so many things, it’s about a balance.

• reciprocity without empathy becomes nasty legalism and feels inhuman.

• empathy without reciprocity becomes predation and wreckage. you get eaten.

in a high trust, golden rule society empathy and reciprocity basically lead to the same place; they are very difficult to tell apart.

this is likely why such societies (to their great peril) so often come to conflate and confuse them.

but this overlap is a rare position and one that can only exist among a very specific and curated sort of people, hard won and easily lost.

in a perfect world, there is no trade off between them.

but no world is perfect.

only those truly committed to the golden rule are suited to be ruled by it. it suffices for no others.

i suspect this is what gives rise to the civilizational cycle.

to carve civilization from barbarism and elevate social contract from the war of all against all takes a powerful sense of reciprocity - i keep my word so you keep yours, i respect your property and liberty so you respect mine - it is, in early stages, not terribly tolerant of empathy.

it cannot be.

it lacks the structure and practice, the institutions and culture to be.

it needs to generate a society where large numbers of people repeatedly decline to defect in a massively manysided iterative prisoner’s dilemma. you cannot do this if you keep allowing people to hurt you or take your stuff “cuz reasons” and “you need to feel bad for me.” once thriving, a social contract has benefits that are obvious, but early on, it feels mostly like cost. getting over that hump requires real penalties and exclusion for defectors.

it’s stern, but that’s life:

one does not build with empathy. one builds such that one may one day be able to afford it.

high trust society is a high equilibrium. allow any meaningful amount of consistent defection and high equilibrium is unachievable. so you cannot build a civilization that way. in a sense, the selection bias embeds a requirement for a certain sort of people, those able to pass this test and no others. fail to do this and you fail to flourish. critical mass will not be found.

the purpose of building such a civilization is human flourishing and freedom, freedom to thrive, freedom from fear. the more it succeeds the more empathetic it can be. “cuz reasons” can be OK as the reasons fit into the general milieu and are not taken too far. at apogee in a perfect utopian social contract, empathy and reciprocity are the same thing because all the actors are high trust, all do unto others as they would have done unto themselves, and thus all actions are moral, respect rights, and allow liberty. the venn overlap of empathy and reciprocity becomes a single circle.

obviously, that’s unattainable in platonic form, but you can get close enough that the cost of empathy to the integrity of the social contract is manageable and emerges as benefit. good people like empathy. it feels good to give and to get. like other facets of the human experience like love and generosity, empathy is an end unto itself, a boon to the giver intrinsic to the act. to be free to live in that way is a wonderful things. but, like these other things, it’s also a vulnerability and therefore must reside within a sort of goldilocks zone where too little makes a life feel miserly and impoverished but too much gets one eaten alive and pulls down the structures of high trust flourishing golden rulery and contract.

and this comes down to people.

not all people believe in reciprocity. not all are capable of it and many would not adhere to it even if they were. most of the world thinks it’s outright stupid. why would i give when i can take? that is the sign of a weak man, a weak tribe, a weak political movement.

they see the outreach of empathy and reciprocity as a glaring neon sign that says “feebleminded fool over here, come hurt him and take his things.”

this is how you rally armies of takers at home and summon them from abroad.

they take advantage of those seeking to be their best selves in order that they themselves may be their worst.

in the presence of such people, the practice of empathy becomes entirely antithetical to the idea of reciprocity; it demands to give endlessly to those who will only take. the presumption that such seagull armies of french fry filchery can somehow become a loyal follower class who will stay in line behind the party that feeds them is how empires die.

the seagulls do not care about the power of their patron, they care about the power of their tribe, their faction, their in-group or party, of their own greedy selves. and they stay in line only until leaders depend upon them, then they force their way to the head of the line and take over. worse, their mere presence in the system makes the perpetuation of the high trust systems of social contact impossible.

these intruders and ideologues bring neither vigor nor growth; they inhibit flourishing. you can see it in data after data. they suck the dole dry and provide plunderous gravel in the gears of economic and social function. economies falter. public spaces grow unpleasant and unsafe. you’re breeding and importing rats to improve the granary. it only ends one way.

the third world is not the third world because it lacks resources or land or access to modernity. it has all those things. it cannot develop because those who live there will not let it. what anyone manages to produce, they take, what anyone manages to build, they pull apart. nothing springs from such soil and there is nothing magic about first world dirt. when you plow this sort of politico/cultural salt into its fields, they too fall fallow and the “second world,” a term once used to describe the soviets but which stands equally apt as descriptor of any high trust system taken over by low trust people, awaits.

i get the sense of a pendulum that swings faster toward the ends and that “how did your society go to hell in a bucket?” works a lot like the way hemingway answered “how did you go bankrupt?”

much of the west is reaching the “suddenly” part where the disaster curve gets steep.

collectivism is a grave assault on this idea, empathy and taking at the point of a gun.

it’s when the seagulls gang up and seize the french fry factory.

high trust has a tipping point where the system goes from high function to low function and it happens in a hurry.

there is empathy for the wrecker but not for the builder. the former winds up protected, the latter bound, neither in any form of reciprocity.

and a social contract must be a reciprocal or lose all justice.

• protected but not bound is a license for predation.

• bound but not protected is slavery.

one sees this manifest in many ways.

the taker gets free housing and food and the builder gets taxes at the point of a gun.

the one who complains of the rape faces more punishment than the rapist.

that is empathy turned toxic dissolving the structure of reciprocity and the possibility of golden ages.

the social contract breaks.

the price of empathy soars.

and that changes the game at a fundamental level.

a system where wreckers have rights and builders have obligations winds up, functionally, as a form of indentured servitude and subjugation whereby the better angels of human potential are tyrannized by whatever demons are best at crying hurt.

it does not take a hayek or a friedman to see how that unravels.

this is how it seems to systematize:

perhaps worst of all, it hurts. it takes “empathy,” a thing high trust people have come to value and enjoy, and pushes it to near total separation from “morality” because those who become the subject of sympathy are the takers and despoilers, seagulls who see reciprocity as a category error in the mindsets of people who have french fries that look tasty.

and it sucks.

eventually, this divergence causes a sort of ethical inversion where the definition of empathy must shift. it leaps from sympathy for the wrecker to sympathy for those the wrecker bedevils, it shifts from “cuz reasons” to “reciprocity of rights and strict adherence” as end state and “oh, but you were needy/disadvantaged” gives way to empathy for the high trust people who lost their entire way of life and the flourishing systems they built.

if this fails to happen, the civilization dies.

if and when it does, the cycle starts again, elevating golden rule society and social contract out of the barbarism that the overly empathetic allowed within the gates.

there is no direct move from the lower left quadrant back to the upper right. that is the most insidious part of the trap.

everyone wants to go back to the upper right. “why can’t we have empathy and reciprocity? we used to!”

well, you can’t because you lost reciprocity and that turned empathy toxic. the reboot has an order and you cannot alter the steps. adding empathy without first reaching reciprocity just feeds the takers and digs the hole deeper.

only reforging the social contract can stop the bleeding and restore the trust that once more makes empathy feasible.

those rendered buttercups by times of plenty and safety and trust are going to need to toughen up.

a social contract is not a document, it is a people.

and only a hard people can rebuild the structures that lead to soft times.

and how rapidly people can figure that out is what determines how long you have to stay in lower left and how bad it gets.

this part is often a bit rough the outrages and institutional capture that come from over-institutionalization of empathy are, by their very nature, difficult to dig out and good at screaming “i am the victim here!” when you seek to take away their right to victimize you by playing upon your better nature.

it feels like being mean. they are good at making it seem so.

it’s the big lie of ideas like “communism” where “give everyone free stuff” feels like empathy until you realize it means we all have to live in cold water hovels and stand in breadlines to support a tiny “dacha class” that suppresses and murders anyone who raises ideas about “sympathy for the society we wrecked and what we used to have.”

this is WHY the collectivist tyrants call you mean and cast their own predation as virtue. they use their lack of empathy and reciprocity to prey upon yours, inviting you to mistake their takings for your sympathy and forgetting the reciprocity that underpinned it, demanding to be animals more equal than you are and calling you mean, and bigoted, and antisocial for seeking to protect the individual, for seeking to protect yourself.

individually misplaced empathy is “being a chump.”

society-scale weaponized empathy is a civilizational WMD.

and, apart from dictatorship or barbarism, there is no way out of it apart from returning to hard demands for reciprocity.

the price will be a (temporary) loss of empathy.

it is a price worth paying.

it’s an investment in the future.

even when you fear they might be a bit stupid

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which is perhaps why we keep rediscovering the same things over and over

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the words of mencken always make me smile and certainly, the pithy embedding of humor here is a delight, but in this one case, i’d like to pick it apart because it’s just dangerously wrong on all counts.

the common people have no idea what they want and this lack of understanding becomes more acute as the world grows more complex.

and no one deserves to be the mercy of the masses as they impose “solutions” they do not understand upon “problems” they cannot comprehend.

that’s not even governance. it’s menace.

the world has solved this issue with “middleware”: educators and explainers in schools and media who boil down this complexity into something masses can understand. but there’s a really nasty issue here where those who seem smartest to any particular person are those whose IQ is 10-15 points higher than that person. past that, it dissolves into incomprehension.

but as the world keeps getting more complex, fewer and fewer people can manage a useful comprehension of it. the bar keeps rising, the “comprehension fraction” keeps dropping and pretty soon, the denizens of the middleware layer we once counted on to make sense of it cannot understand it either and actual comprehension devolves to a tiny class too busy and productive to ever want a career in middleware.

so you get self-selection for “simple and wrong” as basically all of messaging. what was once perhaps kool aid now becomes “jonestown” and all who drink it wind up (wittingly or not) in a suicide pact.

if the “wrong” were incorrect in random fashion, it might cancel itself out. but when it becomes systemic and bent upon mendacious purpose, well, that’s another thing entirely.

i’d argue that that’s where we are.

let’s start here:

nick is an NGO journalist.

nick would like you to believe that “extreme wealth” generated in market economies is somehow the problem.

nick is a dangerous combination of “completely wrong” and “bought and paid for to enrage and propagandize you.”

nick wants you to think that he is the solution, but nick is the problem, a piece of a middleware reality distortion machine that, when coupled to the deeply dangerous idea that “democracy is freedom” becomes a self building prison in which the inmates are inculcated from birth into various forms of stockholm syndrome and taught to clutch the bars for comfort and validation. you want to see the reality of the matrix? that’s the matrix.

let’s explore:

first, i want to share some thinking by fellow feline and gatopal™ devon eriksen because he said this about as well as it can be said and while i could try to paraphrase it, i’d rather give him credit. it’s too long share in full as graphic text, but you can read it HERE. (all text is included below)

“Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help.

Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity.

You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.”

while couched in humor, this is a serious and pervasive point: the world of human habitation has changed much, much faster than the monkey brains evolved to eat berries in a cave and organize into bands capable of hunting game and perhaps running a farm ever could.

once, a human understood basically everything societal and civilizational that they interacted with. they might not have known why the sun came up or the chemical bonding properties of sodium ions, but the pointy stick, the curing of leather, planting seeds, etc were all technologies that were generally comprehensible and accessible. the world was small. you saw the parts of it that mattered to you on a regular basis. the goings on far, far away were irrelevant because “far away” was a very different idea, a transit measured in months and years, not in hours.

we don’t live there anymore. the average human in an average day interacts with 100’s, 1000’s of technologies indistinguishable from magic. here’s a flint axe. build a microwave oven from raw materials. construct a cellular system and a smartphone. i’ll wait…

these technological wonders are not understood by basically anyone. there’s unlikely to be a single human who could do all the things to make a pencil from scratch much less an iphone. the magic emerges from complexity that is at once unimaginable and incomprehensible to the median monkey brain. they literally have a zero percent chance of grasping it not just in the technical sense but in any meaningful sense.

the same is true of the vast emergent systems that gave rise to the organizational structures to produce such knowledge, allocate resources, and keep the world on the pareto optization pathways of “best use for this resource” and “proper pricing for it relative to other resources.” price alone constitutes a deep eldritch magic that all the futureshocked primates take for granted and fail to comprehend their role in making.

“the world” now that it is so functionally small has become incomprehensible: people you will never meet in places you will never go do things you will never witness and speak words you’ll never hear but you are expected to care. it might be relevant to you. surely, some of it will be. but again, there is no “reality” to it in any tangible sense - you cannot touch it, taste it, even see it, it’s just a firehose of hearsay and complexity endlessly overflowing the teacup of the monkey mind.

it is not possible to consume this.

no one does.

you can, to varying degrees and in certain subsets of information if you really focus, get closer to or even involved in the primary sources, but no one can see or know all that much anymore. the problem is too big, too complex, and too far outside of scope for berry in cave brains to grok.

and so we use middleware and the middleware too has changed.

once, media was only for the upper classes. so too was “schooling.” books were ruinously expensive, newspapers only for the aristocrats, now media has become ruinously cheap and pervasive, an always-on attention engine braying for users seconds in colorful meluti-media ejaculations of attraction optimization. now schools are a mandatory “you must go” indoctrination factory more focused on ideology than “ability to read” and antithetical to ideas like “think critically.” there’s also no money in it and so for the most part the people peopling the middleware are lower caliber and have fallen out of the comprehension faction. they no longer lead, they too need to be led.

this is the fundamental problem:

1. the world is too vast and too complex for anything resembling an average human to have a meaningful view of it.

2. so humans rely upon middleware like media and politicians to make it comprehensible

3. and the world has, at once, become too vast and too complex for middleware media mavens and most educators to comprehend

4. and the “allegedly educated” media reader has shifted from being the top 20% of the monkey farm to being damn near all of it living in cargo cult impersonation of education and so the media itself has dumbed down. a news program or article that must be comprehensible to the 30th percentile bears little resembleance to one aimed at the 90th. it boils the world down to a few big squares all of which have lost fidelity. and these are the squares the educational system spent a decade readying you to recognize.

this is not a recipe for comprehension, much less discernment. it’s a recipie for disaster for even if the media were trying to play it straight and do as good a job as it could, it would fail. and obviously, it’s not doing that.

but because the media and educators themselves are no longer capable of meaningful discernment, they are all lost. this makes them highly susceptible to a few fifth columnists pretending to understand and crafting mass messages that resonate. even fairly small infiltrations can capture a whole system because the system itself is no longer sufficiently discerning to know what capture looks like or to intuit flaws in the arguments.

the blinders lead the blind right off a cliff.

this brings us back to folks like nick who use the magic word “democracy” as though it were a signifier of freedom and justice instead of a noose fashioned by tyrants and demagogues to yoke the uncomprehending to their designs and enlist them into the dictatorial wrecker classes.

they are an NGO funded through actblue civics to the tune of $600k in 2024, so small, but definitely pay for play. “In 2024, Knudsen’s $142,313 compensation represented 29.6% of total expenses. Other salaries and wages were another $133,162.”

this is incredibly cost effective manipulation. it’s how so few control so many for such pittances.

actblue civics is the great leftist largess laundry and corrupt past belief, but if you say “pro democracy” the monkey brain says “that sounds nice.” it’s difficult to trace their funding because they use the 501(c)(4) dodge and pretend they are not primarily political, but the one funder i could lock down was michigan civic action fund who, in turn, gets most of its money from the soros open society program. this has become endemic in media. AP news has heavy pay for play advocacy funding. dozens of large scale journalist training camps exist to forward and fund media that tells “the right kind of stories from the right kinds of angles.”

so here we are:

the current mass media likely could not tell a true tale of the world today if they wanted to. it’s too complex and they are not smart enough.

even if they did, most of their readers would not be able to understand it. the schools failed to teach critical thinking and it likely could not have been taught to most students anymore anyhow. and they have been taught to reject it.

but they do not seek to tell the true tale. they seek to lie. they are paid to lie. they are captured utterly by faction and politics.

in a healthy system media and education are supposed to be critical of government and of the ideas of crony corporatism. in a captured one, they slavishly cheerlead for such things. it’s obvious we’re across that rubicon. media and statism and public education have become one edifice. that’s quite literally how you spot totalitarianism.

and the “big squares” were all drilled by rote, repetition, and reinforcement into the zeitgeist from an early age to be sure the monkeys know how to call them out when they see them on the news and feel good about doing so because they feel like “passing a test.”

all these teachers, these journalists, they play at “expert” but they are not. they could not explain the world if they wanted to, and that they most certainly do not. worse, because they cannot, they experience real world intrusion as both pain and threat to status. you want to know why so many teachers and media messengers go berserk and vilify the free market? it’s because they cannot comprehend it at a level that matters and so it just sounds like gibberish that threatens their cherished beliefs and identity. they “know” that trillionaires are the problem because they have no idea how wealth is created or allocated or why that one human has done more to push the world forward than the whole bottom 20% and that he’s not “hogging” wealth but creating in in the form of software and cars and robots and rockets.

those who have never built anything like that have no idea what building something like that is like. they live in a middleware world of “being the experts” and “being the explainers” but now flounder in incomprehension like senescent seniles raging at the world that keeps slipping past them.

perhaps once they could do this job. no mas. they have become a bad transaction layer, more static than signal, wreckers not wrenchers. and they are not even capable of seeing this about themselves and so become the most petulant and assaultive of human cadres - a dying aristocracy being stripped of its privilege and prerogative.

it’s why they are, increasingly, going to war with civilization. they have become anachronisms but do not wish to cede their positions as the adjudicators of reality. worse, most of them no longer have any idea how reality works. it’s why they are riling up the “democracy” and trying to wield it as an anti-human, anti-progress mace. it’s just a guild that would rather have you suffer than get disintermediated but that needs your support for this.

so they fill your head with nonsense and send you off to vote.

it’s unfortuantaely easy to do and these periods of change (like the industrial revolution) where complexity leaps forward are always fertile and febrile breeding grounds for the philosophies of luddite wreckers seeking to elevate the worst atop the best. whoever just fell below the comprehension line is easy to rile up. the world does not make sense anymore. all you have to do is tell them “someone did this to you” then point a finger and say “let’s get them.”

complexity is monkey kryptonite. it makes their heads hurt. this is why, in each leap forward, a new set of monkeys will inevitably start falling for the stupid crap that involves tearing the system driving progress apart. free markets are a vast emergent phenomenon, a system that no one steers and that generates the best outcomes by encompassing the most preference and knowledge. this sounds like democracy but it’s not. it’s the opposite.

free markets run on the ability to make choices for yourself and to say “no.” want a job? you need to say yes. so does the employer. want to buy a house? same. free markets are negative rights at mass scale. they are iterated individual sovereignty.

“democracy” is the opposite. it’s positive rights, the ability to compel. majority rules. literally. we outnumber you so you have to do what we say. “no” is gone. and if the majority have now fallen below the ability to comprehend the world and the engines of plenty, then how can democracy be anything other than a wrecker? it will tear down every fence in chesterton, cull every wolf from yellowstone, regulate and relegate until envy is satiated, and plenty destroyed.

it would do this no matter what, but inflamed by a media-education industrial complex of well funded agent provocateurs happy to carry them to hell in a bucket so long as this middleware layer gets to hold the handle, and all you’ll get is devastation by demagogue.

the farsighted brilliance of our founders lay in seeing government as a necessary evil and creating the idea of rights based republic shielded by what ultimately amounted to an aristocracy. and it was easier then. perhaps 60 or 70% of people could understand the relevant systems in which they lived at the time and thus at least had some chance of navigating democracy. i doubt the number is 20% today and it’s dropping rapidly.

if you want to understand why, all over the west, everything has become so stupid and sclerotic and anti-rights and anti-progress, this is why. democracy in which only 20% of people would be able to figure out the right thing even if they were getting good information is a sucker bet. in a world beset by a totalitarian middleware layer bent on making damn sure this good information is not available, it’s the railroad tracks to hell.

republics are and must be a form of aristocracy. they are a form of government that suffices only to govern moral people and then only if the most moral and farsighted and even handed of those people are elected to the positions of power that a just state uses to protect the liberty of those who consent to be governed by it.

in a very real sense, it’s protecting of we the people from the people.

universal suffrage has always been the election of the worst into those positions and every time the world gets less comprehensible, this gets more acute.

you want to know why election after election it’s always the lesser of evils and “no good choices”?

that’s why. where would you conceivably get a good candidate in a system where 80% of voters do not understand what is going on and all have been fed a series of “big square” lies or oversimplifications by their faction?

both sides do it. they have to. to win requires mass appeal and the masses do not and cannot understand. of course we live in a tug of war between plunderous dimwits and “big red button” pushers who have no idea what anything is connected to. where in such a system can excellence emerge?

selecting the inhabitants of offices that may only be safely held by the very best by engaging in least common denominator polling of the very worst as they swing between the tribal valences of the incomprehending results in the worst sort of government imaginable.

you needed a farsighted captain. you got the retard who drills holes in the boat because the stupid people like it and have no idea what the hull is for.

that’s the trap. and if we keep playing this stupid game, the stupid prize of civilizational suicide shall be our epitaph.

but there is hope. a lot of hope actually. and that hope is what is shaping the fight and the civilizational experiment to come.

as the internet ravaged the middleman market for goods, so too such culling threatens for informational gatekeeping.

free market information is a powerful idea and one that ruins the middlewaretocracy currently tyrannizing the west.

it’s telling who gets the vapors from this, a near perfect shibboleth for who is in the tyrant class seeking to suppress discernment. as certain internet felines of questionable goodness have oft opined: “the side of censorship is never the side of civilization.”

mark andreessen lays out some of the shape of what’s to come here:

the simplest way to put this is “direct to consumer explaining things.”

it’s disintermendiation.

those who build and are actually doing a thing can now speak to the world in always on one to many discourse unmediated by middleman. you do not need media to do this anymore, so why allow the distortion? why allow their fun house glass between you and the things you wish to understand? go ask the builder, not the facile clerisy of the uncomprehending explainer class.

you can see the EU and much of the world raging to stop this. they want digital ID, internet suppression, thought police and meme prison. direct one to many “have your say” is kryptonite to their middleware rulership. they are not protecting public safety, they are protecting aristocratic prerogative. we get to explain. you do not get to go make your own choice.

there’s an interesting parallel here to liturgy in latin christianity making sure the commoner could not read the bible and had to take their word for what was in it vs the protestant reformation of “read it yourself and you decide.”

this will be much the same and with the same sort of “explosion to come” expansion as bottlenecks are broken and the next revolution of human organizations is set loose. like the industrial revolution before it, the change and benefit to those who ride the wave will be too vast and too profound to miss. everyone else will be left in the dust, poor and irrelevant and largely unfree.

AI will be a revolution and the core goal will be to keep it from being the next bottleneck of middleware where, like search and pre musk socisl media, a few people and a few algos get to shape the whole message. AI will need to open, to go open source, to adopt visible weightings and drop manipulative guardrails. many get pessimistic here, but i think it’s inevitable. free AI will be too much more powerful than indoctrinated AI because it can paint a map of the world as is vs a map of ideology driven fantasyland. it will dominate. those who adopt it will dominate. censorship and shaping will show up as damage and the system will route around it.

this will reshape media and access to primary sources. it collapses complexity and opens access. it will shatter all educational bottlenecks and realize the dream of personalized 1:1 education without the need for state funded teacher as middleware. we’re about to live through one of the greatest removals of bottlenecks and shifts of power in the history of our species.

those who think they can stop it are simply not smart enough to even know what “it” is. the totalitarian structures needed to suppress this are so outlandishly damaging than any who adopt them are committing civilizational seppuku.

they will drop like shot doves as the rest lift off.

buckle up.

this is going to be fun.