Snowden

A while has passed after Edward Snowden went public with his defection from USG’s espionage apparatus. I was quite harsh with him at first, but now I am more inclined to cut him some slack.

First he was so kind to give a new online interview through the Guardian again. I must admit he doesn’t sound as smug and stupid as I had thought, and he’s handling his PR quite alright. I also happened to see Kim Dotcom in Twitter hinting that it was him who told Snowden to seek refugee in Hong Kong. Kim used to have Megaupload’s servers in HK so he must know something about it.

To go to Hong Kong was an excellent move by Edward Snowden. I wonder who gave him that genius advice? ;-)

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) June 15, 2013

Then Snowden goes on and leaks that the little bro of USG, i.e. UKG was spying on everyone during the G20 meetings. So here I was thinking, hey maybe this Snowden guy knows what he’s doing. His revelations have also fomented a lot of interest in encryption software to bypass USG’s spies, and things like Cryptocat or GPGtools are seeing increased interest.

Then I see a profile of him in the Japan Times, writing about his teenage years as an Otaku tribesmen obsessed with Japanese cartoons. Nothing wrong with that per se, although I am perennially annoyed by how young teenage males disguise getting hooked with teen angst porn (people in Japan call it the “middle school sophomore disease“) and yellow fever with a fascination for Japanese culture. But I don’t blame the guy, you can’t just go on telling your friends that you like Dragon Ball, videogames and asian pussy. Yet for all his online Otaku life he didn’t have what it takes:

• Right, anyway, it is pretty far-fetched, but I’ve always dreamed of being able to “make it” in Japan. I’ve taken Japanese for a year and a half (they only offered 3 semester-levels) so I can understand a little, but I’m not even close to thinking about dreaming about wishing I were fluent. Damn those Kanji!

Well he now has plenty of time to learn Kanji in their original form. It seems he’ll stay a while in Hong Kong. While I rushedly called him stupid for putting himself in the hands of the Chinese Leviathan, it is increasingly looking like he made the right call. See the Global Times, the official spokesman of the fascist wing of the CCP.

June 17 op-ed: 

Extraditing Snowden an unwise decision

Washington must be grinding its teeth because Snowden’s revelations have almost overturned the image of the US as the defender of a free Internet. After losing this image, which has been abused by the US government to boss others around, there is no way it won’t want Snowden to be extradited.

However, it would be a face-losing outcome for both the Hong Kong SAR government and the Chinese Central government if Snowden is extradited back to the US. Unlike a common criminal, Snowden did not hurt anybody. His “crime” is that he blew the whistle on the US government’s violation of civil rights. His action supported “human rights” as defined in the UN Charter, and has been applauded  worldwide.
Snowden believes in the democracy and freedom of Hong Kong. His whistle-blowing is in the global public interest. Therefore, extraditing Snowden back to the US would not only be a betrayal of Snowden’s trust, but a disappointment for expectations around the world. The image of Hong Kong would be forever tarnished.

Diplomatically, Snowden has cast a shadow over the new Sino-US relationship right after the Xi-Obama meeting. The sooner the incident is wrapped up, the better the ties between the two countries will be.

Cyber attacks, a weapon frequently used by the US government, have turned out to be its own Achilles’ heel. China is generous enough not to hype this incident in consideration of the Sino-US relationship.

The Chinese government has no responsibility to help the US quench the fire.

(…)
China’s growing power is attracting  people to seek asylum in China. This is  unavoidable and should be used to accumulate moral standing.

I’ve written before about the Global Times. These guys are hardcore. They know what they want, they say it clearly, and they mean what they say. It’s not too much to say that they speak for half the party. And these guys just said that Snowden will not be extradited.

And if any doubts remained, they doubled down today:

June 18 op-ed:

Framing China would only hurt US more

(…) global public opinion already says the US is in the wrong. Any attempt to frame China would be an overestimation of  US ability to control public opinion.

Both the Hong Kong SAR government and the Chinese Central government need to fully consider China’s interests while addressing this issue. The hurly-burly of American politicians should be ignored. Their voices have little impact on the Sino-US relationship.

Aside from the pressure Washington is imposing on the Hong Kong SAR government based on their extradition treaty, other aggressive voices have little impact. On the one hand, the US does not have evidence to launch new claims of a “China conspiracy.” On the other hand, Snowden has drawn worldwide sympathy. Hong Kong will not lose the high moral ground if it does not extradite Snowden back to the US.

Chinese media should have more contact with Snowden, spreading more valuable information to the world. By doing so, Snowden will continue to be the centerpiece of public opinion, and denunciations by American politicians will be overlooked. The US will flinch at the sight of pro-Snowden public opinion.

(…)

This incident should make China more aware of the importance of defending itself from the pressures of the US online. Snowden blew the whistle on shady moves by the US in the cyberspace. Having this matter unfold without interference meets the expectations of world public opinion.

Oh my. Unless USG has something very tasty to give to China, it seems to me that Snowden is going to have a good time in Hong Kong. Hong Kong and Shenzhen have a thriving IT industry, much better than Japan’s, and plenty of yellow pussy for him to savor. Good for him I say. If I see him in Lan Kwai Fong I’ll buy him a beer.

By the way I’m running a @neoreaction chatroom in Cryptocat, please feel free to come in and chat freely without fear of Cathedral snooping.

Holier than you in Hong Kong

One of the things that I’ve learned through foreign languages is that insult words in every language fall into two types. One is words to insult someone’s moral integrity, calling them bad people. E.g. asshole, son of a bitch. 混蛋. Mostly have a “how could you do this to me?” meaning. The other type are words to insult someone’s intellect, calling them stupid. Idiot, dumbass, 傻逼. Mostly mean “you aren’t useful to me and I resent that”. Note that I’m talking about meaning, not etymology. Many insults are about family honor, son of a bitch, bastard, motherfucker. They are mostly used to call other people bad people though. The corollary is you can’t be good if you don’t have a proper family.

Being evil and being stupid are both bad things, and you would mostly want to avoid anyone who is like that. Being very smart but evil makes you want to really avoid such a person, he might be very dangerous. But what about a very nice but extremely stupid person? How would you feel about a total dumbass who has done a lot for you?  Stupid people are target of insults because the assumption is they are useless by definition, you don’t lose much by not associating with them. But what if one stupid guy helps you big time. Should you cut him some slack?

I guess you should but I find it very hard to do so. See this Edward Snowden guy. He’s a fucking hero. He has made public how USG has backdoor deals with all major tech companies to collect your data at their discretion and how they spy everything all the time. His leak has served to make people conscious about privacy issues, which is going to make a lot of smart people start to take measures about that.  I finally have an argument to make my girlfriend quite Facebook or my friends to stop using Gmail. The PRISM leak is a net good, no matter how  you see it.

And it was all perfect until this Snowden dude came out in the open. With pictures and all. What the fuck? Why would he do that? Why would he put himself, his family and all his friends at risk like that? And he chose to hide in Hong Kong? Of all places? Hong Kong is administered by China, a country which not only collects as much personal data as USG, they actually block you from accessing content, and they throw you in jail depending on what you tweet (although the UK does that too). Hong Kong itself is censorship free, but does he honestly think that the PLA isn’t going to grab him and tie him to a chair until he tells them all he knows? Best-case scenario China already knows everything about the CIA’s operation and doesn’t need this guy. What they’re going to do is grab him and make a deal with USG in exchange for something they want (the Senkakus, lower tariffs, exchange with Chinese spies, you name it). China is a sovereign country but it isn’t as sovereign as, say, Russia. China does need some degree of USG favor to operate in the world economy, and right now China is desperate to curry favor with the US.

Snowden is screwed, big time, and he knows that!

Q: Does your family know you are planning this?

A: “No. My family does not know what is happening … My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with …

I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.”

(…)

Q: Do you think you are probably going to end up in prison?

A: “I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.”

Well why would you put your family at risk by making your face public in the fucking internet? Good Confucians in Hong Kong are surely scandalized at this sort of unfilial behavior. But Snowden is not a Confucian. He has other sort of morality code. And under his morality code, he is now holy. Oh yeah. He’s holier than thou.

I’m holy. Fuck yeah.

 

This guy has put his family, friends and his own damn life in danger, and for what? To be able to get that smug look on his face. Oh yeah. Look at that expression. That’s the face of the angels. A holy face. This guy has outflanked USG from the left, and he wanted you to know about it. He wanted everyone to know about it. Because everyone knows, bragging is half the pleasure of anything. The same way PUAs aren’t about banging hot chicks, they’re about talking about it afterwards. Not worth the trouble if you can’t brag about it. Yeah, men are like that.

What is this holy martyr going to do from now on though? Surely he has a plan to become another global Julian Assange, giving talks worldwide about State oppression and civil liberties to fringe leftists across the world. Systems engineer for NSA, he surely has a plan, right?

Q: Do you have a plan in place?

A: “The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me … My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom. I have no idea what my future is going to be.

“They could put out an Interpol note. But I don’t think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the US. I think it will be clearly shown to be political in nature.”

Orz. Shared values! You’re seriously looking for a country to the left of USG? Iceland huh? Well he does look Scandinavian.

Dude, I’m really grateful for what you did, but you’re the worse kind of dumbfuck there is. He could have just shut up and be smart about it, but no, he had to give a video interview to the fucking Guardian. When you think about it, maybe affirmative action, preferential hiring for minorities in USG is not such a bad idea. Diversity for the government workforce means there are proportionally less white status strivers looking to undermine government operations in order to be holier than thou. If there is something non-whites do better than white people, that’s loyalty.

Ethnic policy in ancient Japan

For all the modernity-hate and past-worship in the Dark Enlightenment Community, there are very few historians around. Interest in history is also pretty low considering the circumstances. Sure there is a lot of interest and good scholarship in the immediate past, i.e. the evolution of the Cathedral, but little interest to ancient or foreign history.

That’s a shame, because you can learn a lot from history. Perhaps it’s because of HBD, the cornerstone of all our ideas. We are lately finding out that people have evolved faster than we thought, so the idea that we are different from our ancestors is spreading a while. That’s mostly true, but don’t believe the hype. We haven’t evolved that much. Human power dynamics aren’t based in gut adaptations, or even in the distribution of altruism genes. Power dynamics are wired deep, deep into our lizard brains, or at the very least monkey brains. Check out this video and tell me it’s that different from our world:

One thing that liberals often say to us (like that Scott Alexander dude) is: what’s so wrong about modernity? We got antibiotics and stuff, right? Well feminism or homo liberation can be dismissed as a matter of taste, so what’s the big deal? Well surely the biggest deal is ethnic policy. The Cathedral is hell bent on bringing every single tribal people on earth into the West, give them perks and let them run wild without even trying to make them behave. See the Pakistani grooming scandal:

the victims are not with their mothers, they are held by social services in local authority ‘care’ homes. These ‘care’ homes operate as free brothels for the Pakistani rape gangs. The girls are under the control of the authorities, mostly white women social workers, who in some cases actually forced them back into the hands of their abusers and called them racist when they complained.

This just didn’t happen before Progressivism. It was understood that multiculturalism was a bad idea, different peoples should not be mixed around. And you don’t favor savages over civilized people.

Well what does history tell us? Let me tell you a funny story.

Japanese history is fascinating because of how short it is. The Japanese imperial house is the oldest of the world, dating to around 500 AD. But the funny thing is that the imperial house was the first historical polity to arise in Japan ever. That’s right, Japanese history starts after the Roman Empire fell. Actually the first evidences of agriculture only date to around 300 BC, i.e. after Alexander the Great. For some reason farmers only came to Japan 7000 years after they began farming next door in China. 7000 years to finally round up the courage to cross the Tsushima strait.

Before farming, Japan had the Jomon culture, a fairly sophisticated hunter-gatherer culture known for their pottery and semi-sedentary lifestyle. Oldest pottery in the world actually. It seems Japan was so full of food that hunters could just stay in a place and hunt (mostly fish) their food from home. The Jomon had their fun for around 10,000 years until rice farmers came over from Korea and brought agriculture and metallurgy with them in 300 BC. The Yayoi culture they are called. These farmers moved eastward, and slowly built their own megalithic civilization, with massive tombs at all.

 

Japanese take on pyramids

 

By 700 AD you had a modern kingdom, with writing, a Chinese style bureaucracy, international trade, overseas expeditionary armies and everything you can think of. They Yamato court based itself in the central plains on what’s today Osaka/Kyoto, and even had the balls of calling themselves Heavenly Emperor and tell the Chinese behemoth they expected equal treatment. The actual territorial reach of the Yamato court wasn’t that big though. They had reached the Kanto plains (where Tokyo is today), but had some trouble expanding further north. If you check Google Map’s Terrain layer you can see that the terrain north of Tokyo isn’t very inviting. And it’s cold too. But there was something else.

Someone else actually. Remember those Jomon guys? Well they didn’t just disappear. While the Yayoi farmers mostly took over and replaced the Jomon culture in the West of the country, the eastern Jomon had one thousand years to learn some tricks to defend themselves. They had adopted horses, and became experienced horse-archers. They also learned some horticulture, and even to work metal. By the time the Yamato court armies reached the Northeast, they had a fierce enemy to deal with.

The imperial documents call these people Emishi, or sometimes just “hairy people”, for their long beards and body hair. Time after time they sent armies to go out to get these people to stop raiding their farming villages. These battles more often than not ended up in failure, the Emishi having the home turf advantage, and being quite adept at ambushing and hit-and-run tactics. Once in a while though, some Emishi tribe would surrender to Yamato armies, and swear allegiance to the emperor in Kyoto.

What’d they do with these people? They couldn’t be left in their place to go on raiding farming villages, so the merciful imperial court had the great idea of rounding up these savage tribes and settling them West, in the Yamato heartland. They were settled in good land, put under the care of the local sheriff, and given free food and clothing, and exempted from taxes until they learned to fend for themselves. That is correct, enemy combatants were put on welfare.

 

Hairy prisoners

 

These surrendered Emishi were called Fushuu 俘囚 (prisoners). As you can probably guess, they didn’t just became productive farmers and renounce welfare in a generation. They mostly hang around, keeping as much of their culture as they could, and causing trouble to everyone around them. You can imagine that local officials weren’t very amused with their new subjects. As it happens, civil order was declining too, the Yamato court’s hold on power started to loosen, taxes started to be collected through tax farmers, etc. You get the idea. Peasants were having trouble and complaining too much. The old centralized armies were disbanded after decades of peace, so local officials had to take care of civil order in their domains. They had to raise troops though. Then it struck them: what about these Emishi prisoners? They are fit, adept horse archers, go on practicing their craft all day. They’d make very fine soldiers. And so the Barbarian tribes became the official police force of Japan.

 

Upward mobility!

 

The Japanese government was using foreign barbarians to screw with their own people more than a thousand years ago. Why would they do that? Because the court didn’t give a shit. Emishi tribal leaders stayed in the imperial capital, hang out with the Yamato nobles, and used their government-given riches and patronage to meddle with their old kin in the Northeast, which had grown a taste for Yamato culture, eventually taking Yamato names. The Emishi nobles got Yamato peasants to farm for them, and their tax-exempt status as “allies” of the court made them very rich. They also traded in fur, horses and gold, with little official oversight.

So you have the Emishi having a blast inside and outside of the borders. What happened then? Peace and prosperity? Hah. The “prisoners” became internal bandits preying on trade caravans from the provinces to the capital, and soon afterwards started rioting against the court. The second half of the 9th century was plagued with Emishi riots, which threatened to destroy the polity. Finally in 897 the court had had enough, and ordered that the Emishi were rounded up and deported back to their homeland in the Northeast.

The rioting stopped, but the Emishi did leave a long lasting influence in Japanese military history. The Yamato learned horseback archery from them, and the Emishi sword eventually evolved in the world-famous Katana. Katanas, horse-archery, local armies… the Emishi basically created what was to become the Samurai military culture of later centuries. After imperial rule collapsed in 1185, a military government was established in Kamakura, in the East country, and one of the first things they did was sent over a bunch of Samurais to the North to deal with the Emishi. The Emishi were obliterated, and were never heard from since. Their cousins, the Ainu, held up north in Hokkaido, where rice couldn’t be farmed, so they were left alone by the Yamato until the 19th century. But that’s another story.

Game

Years ago I used to read a blog by an obscure linguist (he’s still around, but the old archives disappeared), and remember him saying once: Language is everywhere, I don’t understand why people can not be fascinated about it. I feel the same way, and the strange quirks of everyday language bug me to no end. A fascinating issue is meaning. People seem to accept that words have different meaning without giving much thought to the issue, but how does that work? Originally all words had one meaning and one only, for obvious efficiency purposes. Then time passes and thins get messy, but a word doesn’t get new meanings just like that, there must be some logical connection that makes people brains accept a new usage for the word. See for example the word “game”.  A game is a rule based competition done for amusement. Take the article away, and it’s a set of principle useful to have sex with women. Add ‘theory’ to it, and it’s a science that studies the strategy of conflict.

I don’t write much about Game, nor preoccupy myself with feminism or other issues. That’s not because I’m not interested or think it doesn’t work. I discovered Roissy 5 years ago and it changed my life forever. I just don’t see the benefit in spreading Game to the wider society. While Game has helped me attract more women, have sex with them, and more generally just to deal with women more effectively, that’s all there is to it. My knowing game hasn’t benefited the girls I’ve dumped, it hasn’t benefited the men without game who have to deal with  those women after having tasted good game. Women before Game were annoying enough, wide adoption of Game is just going to raise the hurdle to attract women, unleashing a Game arms race of ever more effective tactics to short-circuit women’s “slut-defense” long enough to take your pants off and insert your penis into her vagina. Is that a good thing? It looks like the introduction of marketing insights into sex relations. Marketing is also about short-circuiting the better part of your brain who is in charge of long term financial planning and making you spend money because of some instant impulse you didn’t know existed. We are all now magicians in charge of screwing with the precarious, recently evolved parts of the brain that makes us civilized.

I’m actually not very good at the finest manipulation techniques that fool girls into your bed or old women into buying insurance. I’m a bad manipulator, and while I could say it’s just because I’m holier than thou and refuse to do evil, I’ll just admit that I just suck at it. What I do quite well is understand what makes Game a game. Game is about competition, and in any competition, you need to understand your own position and that of your opponent. A good understanding of why men and women behave like they do is probably the best contribution that the PUA crowd have left for human wisdom. Centuries from now people will think that Game Theory was invented by Roissy.

It’s a dark science though, and I’m also not very sure if its wider adoption is or not a good thing. To put it in concrete terms: I was talking with a friend of mine a while ago. He’s a player, a very, very horny man who just can’t help himself from spending half of every day chasing tail. You could call him a natural, he has his own method devised through trial and error, but he hasn’t read any Game literature nor has any scientific understanding of why it works. Now every once in a while the guy gets burned because some girl is playing tough to get, or he fucked her but she’s a cold bitch, or he just gets plainly rejected. Of course, he has an official girlfriend of his age (late 20s) who he loves very much, and feels mildly guilty about (episodes of guilt curiously always coincide with intervals of burnout).

He was bragging on how nice his girlfriend is, and how he’s gonna marry her. Some day he promised her to take her to some place early in the morning, but went out the night before, so he was half dead when she got there to meet him. Instead of shouting and nagging the shit out of him for breaking his promise, she let him sleep, washed his clothes, cleaned his apartment, cooked some food for him, and woke him up at noon to eat lunch. She’s an angel! She’s perfect? You see?

A normal person would say, OMG she’s so nice you gotta marry her and you’ll be happy forever. But the dark knowledge has corrupted my soul, and I couldn’t make myself feel happy for the guy. I promptly reminded him of the power unbalance of their relationship. He is a man on his prime, getting all the tail he wants, which she surely suspects if only slightly. He’s freelancing and could flee and have the same lifestyle anyway he wanted. She has a soul crushing corporate job that she hates. She likes the guy very much, and she’s in her late 20s, and trust me she’s not likely to find the same kind of man if he were to look for a new one. She’s a smart girl and she knows that she has a horrible hand, and he has a fucking royal flush. She of course wants to marry. Been saying it for a while.

Well she better be nice then. She better wash, clean, cook, and not nag you even if she catches you screwing her best friend. Of course my friend wasn’t amused at my comment. “Can’t you just fucking say she’s nice?” All I can say is that she’s smart enough to know what hand she has been dealt with. Many women don’t.

People have two contradictory beliefs about behavior. In one hand, we are all a blank slate, and through education we can an all be made to do skillfully whatever is required from us. On the other hand, what people do depends on their character, which is fixed. Nice people are always nice, and nasty people are always nasty. Well to some extent that’s true, nice people are nice, but incentives matter. And before making a big decision like, say, marriage, you’d better be very sure that whatever behavior from your partner is part of her character and not just responding to incentives.

But of course most people aren’t unconditionally nice or honest. Most women get fat and unloving after marriage, most men fuck around if they have the option. And there’s nothing we individually can do about it. Having this kind of knowledge helps when you’re the only one who does, and can be two steps ahead of everyone else. But what if everyone knew? What if everybody could see each others hand? What kind of game would that be?

Diversity > Religion

Mormon Mom Arrested For Allegedly Smuggling Drugs During Trip To Mexico

without HBD

The mother, Yannira Maldonado…

with HBD

Reality is boring when you know how things work.

Average Mormon Mom circa 2050

The rightist singularity

Statistics is what you use when you don’t know what’s really going on, so you’re reduced to see patterns in data. It is useful, but it’s not an ideal situation. Ideally you want to know exactly what mechanism is producing that data.

But of course data is in many cases infinitely divisible, and you can always go more micro in searching for causes. You want to know why society is changing so you do sociology, then you want to know the mental processes of the individuals so you do psychology, then you want to know what the neurons are doing so you do neuroscience, then you want to know what the neurons are all about so you do biochemistry, then you want to know how electrons move so you do physics, then you go into quantum physics, and then you realize that you still don’t understand why engineer schools have so few women. Must be evil spirits.

To avoid the reduction treadmill humans use labels, or what we call names. Most names are quite accurate, some cause more problems than what they tried to fix. Say the political labels, ‘left’ and ‘right’. We all know that they were just a convenient shorthand for the physical location of the different factions on the France National Assembly in 1789. The naming was very arbitrary, and nobody before the time had thought of studying politics through such a simplistic framework, yet it has become one of the most productive frameworks in the history of mankind. As it happens, in almost all human polities, before and after 1789, the struggle for power usually produces two big competing factions. The reason is that power is occupied by one faction, and contesters of that power naturally tend to group together to have a better shot of grabbing power for themselves.

And that is exactly what the Left and Right sides of the French Assemblée were, those in power, or at least supportive of the status quo, and those who were out of power and wanted power for themselves. It follows that the Right is for keeping things stable, and the Left is for stirring things up. That’s why the actual contents of the policies advocated by self styled leftists and rightists change in different times and places, Left and Right isn’t about what you stand for, they are merely references of position in the political spectrum.

But of course, as all things language, meanings are never that clear cut. While the common Left and Right today can be identified as those supporting the status quo vs those wanting to change things, the Far Right and Far Left aren’t those who really want to keep the status quo and those who really want to change things. Arguably the Far Right wants more change than the Far Left does. Far Left and Far Right aren’t positional labels, they stand for real political positions, i.e. the are the accelerationist version of their moderate namesakes. The Far Left wants more of whatever the contemporary Left wants, and the Far Right is the logical conclusion of whatever the Right stands for at the moment. It doesn’t really work like that today, what we call the Far Left and Far Right are fossilized labels of the actual extreme rightists and extreme leftists of the 1930s. In the 1930s the status quo was that of a strongly nationalist nation-states, and the left wanted more socialism and less nationalism. Back then the Far Right was just an extreme Right, they wanted to go all the way towards nationalism, i.e. fascism, and the Far Left were just extreme leftist, i.e. internationalist communists. Today the Right isn’t nationalist any more, but today fascists are still called Far Right. That’s the way propaganda and journalism mess with language.

This idea that the Right is for the status quo, and the Left is for change, has very important ramifications, one of which was Jim Donald’s theory of the Leftist singularity. If the Left is for change, and you have a political system in which change is not only not fought against, but actively facilitated, then people looking to grab power will always try to subvert the existing society with whatever positions they can think of, begetting an accelerating mess of chaos and insanity that can only end in a bloodbath and societal collapse. As Jim puts it:

The French Red Terror, the Soviet Great Terror, the Cambodian autogenocide, and many others were all examples of what I call left political singularities.

Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression, which makes things even lefter, which …   The process only stops when the latest despot starts to realize he is not left enough, he is being outflanked on the left, is going to be overthrown by those even lefter than himself, and promptly executes everyone important who is even lefter than he is.

As it turns out, the optimal engine for leftism is egalitarianism. The physical properties of DNA itself mean that individuals from the same species can never be equal, so egalitarianism is necessarily unattainable. But millions of years of hunting in small bands mean half of the human brain is optimized for envy and hating those who attempt to be better than you. Actually is even worse than that, envy is hard wired deep in the brain since we were monkeys.

So egalitarianism is both appealing and impossible. There is always space further on the left. The perfect match for a subversive ideology.

As such, over time leftism came to be associated with egalitarianism, and rightly so. But that doesn’t mean that egalitarianism is the only way to subvert a political system. The leftist singularity is based on claiming higher status by being more egalitarian than anyone else. So you get a status arms race in which everyone tries to be more egalitarian than the others. That works because people (and monkeys) take equality to be a good thing. But it’s not the only good thing, and the singularity mechanism also works with other methods of assigning status.

Jim recently wrote that in an ideal reactionary polity, the official religion would make envy a capital sin. Ironically, this is how things work presently in China. The recent economic boom under the crony capitalist system has made China an outrageously unequal society, in which Ferrari’s sharing roads with rusted bicycles is a daily occurrence. Obviously the common people are extremely envious, green with envy, or maybe red, their social networks are full on all kind of hate of those rich, which are universally regarded as the root of all evil. If you go to China and want to make friends with the common folk, just complain about nouveau riche and corrupt officials. It’s easily 80% of all people talk about.

But of course the Chinese government, as the target of all this resentment, tries to deflect it with all their (quite substantial) means, so officially it is taught that envy is not a good thing. People are exhorted not to fall into 仇富 (hostility to wealth), and have a positive attitude towards money and entrepreneurship, that with effort and conscientiousness anyone can become gloriously rich. Of course the people aren’t stupid, so the government does pay lip service to their concerns, and occasionally crack down on the most egregious examples of cronyism, but going the way to show your commitment to human equality in China is not a good way to gain power and status. You might get followers on Weibo, but go too far and you’ll get sent to reeducation camp, and have your dang’an soiled for life.

So how do you get status in China then? Well the idea of course is that you should join the Communist Party, but there’s 80 million people there already, and once there it’s just a bureaucratic mess of clans and factions, where success depends in decades of very fine politicking. The Party is effectively isolated from society, and the internal status system has no effect on the wider society. So what are the masses to do? People crave status the same way the crave food and sex, it is a basic human need. A human right if there was ever one. If people don’t have access to the political system, and they can’t really make much money, how are they to cope with their need for status? The Chinese government, in their heavenly wisdom, knows that the people need a release mechanism, some means of attaining status so they can impress their neighbors and feel good with themselves. As I said above, most of the world uses egalitarianism. Actually China used to play that game too, but it produced the Cultural Revolution. Something else will have to do.

The Chinese not being known for their innovativeness, have settled for a European import. Nationalism. Ever since the Leftist Singularity showed it’s fangs yet again in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Communist Party leadership decided that enough was enough, and cracked down on envy-based religion. Communist ideology was de-emphasized, and the (very substantial) propaganda apparatus was redesigned to focus on making the people proud of the glorious Chinese nation. Chinese nation which had been bullied since 1840 by evil foreigners, and especially by Japan. Yes, Evil Japan. Half the history curriculum in schools was made on the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945), the “8-year resistance” against the evil neighbor. For 20 years the people have been instructed to work hard to attain the glorious Renaissance of the Chinese Nation (there’s a government department in charge of calculating how far China is from achieving the objective, currently at 62%), and 60% of soap operas on TV (which make 70% of all TV shows on air) are about brave Chinese soldiers fighting evil Japan during WW2. Of course after 20 years, the poor show producers have run out of plausible stories to write, and have increasingly being making hilariously over the top anti-Japanese shows. Here’s a clip on a show where a hot female Chinese Communist beats the evil Japanese with her mad archery skillz:

The official backing of nationalism and anti-Japanese-ism gives ambitious people a good way to earn status. Just hate Japan! Or the Philippines, or Vietnam, or India, or whatever country ever that has any conflict with China. But hating Japan gives you extra points, as seen in the periodical anti-Japanese riots that happen in Chinese cities whenever China runs out of diplomatic cards. Not that the people really give a shit about Japan, but they have sensed that being anti-Japanese gives you status points, so status-conscious people smell the cues and act accordingly. That’s why you have people going ballistic over the Senkaku islets dispute. See this illuminating exchange at a Chinese forum:

网易福建省福州市手机网友：

A bunch of stupid pigs, what do the Diaoyu Islands have to do with you? Aren’t Hong Kong and Macau China’s now? But what does it have to do with you? Every year Macau gives money, and you? If the Diaoyu Islands were to return, would you and your entire family move there? Keep dreaming! Why not go curse the Russians? The Kuril Islands are so large, Taiwan is just 1/3 of their size, were they not China’s before? A bunch of fools. What more, Japan may even be the descendents of Chinese people, the language is almost the same. Whoever it is given to is the same. Of course, if everyone can split it, then go ahead. Stupid cunts, going crazy over what politicians do.

aptx2161608 [网易中国手机网友]： (responding to above)

If you don’t know history, then don’t talk, you garbage. You’re just begging people to laugh at you.

网易山西省手机网友： (responding to above)

Fuck you Fuzhou City netizen [网易福建省福州市手机网友]. I’ll keep it short, you’re just fucking human scum. Your family’s women better be careful of being raped, and the men better be careful of being run over, motherfucker.

ig0226 [网易广东省深圳市网友]： (responding to above)

Although I hate the current government, and hate it to my bones, but for the territorial integrity of a nation, I must say that the Diaoyu Islands belong to us.

All the media in China are controlled by the Communist Party Propaganda Department, which gives and takes licenses for newspapers and website operators. And while every week they send top-down cues to all media companies in the country about what news are to be talked about and what to avoid, their leash is not as tight as it once was. For one, it’s not like they’re sovereign, the Propaganda Department also has to report to the Politburo and other higher committees. And once Pandora’s box has been opened, it’s hard to close it again. After all there are 80 million party members with an official right to seek power, and a huge, oversized academic establishment that also seeks upward mobility by seeking fame and status points.

So how do you get status points today in China? Easiest way is to screw with Japan. And soon enough, people are coming up with ways to screw with Japan. Since last month, China is buzzing with talk about how Okinawa doesn’t really belong to Japan. We’re not talking about some rocks in the middle of the sea, we’re talking about a whole province of millions which has been controlled by Japan for 400 years. Okinawa was a small island in the middle of nowhere, which emerged out of barbarism around the 14th century, and started trading with China and Japan. China wouldn’t let you trade if you didn’t kowtow in front of the emperor and send him tokens of your infinite inferiority (“tribute”), and so they did. Japan back then was in the heyday of Samurai culture, and once they found there was some small island in the south seas that was making good money trading with China, they sent an expedition, invaded and took over the place. Of course they didn’t want to disturb the lucrative Chinese trade, but as Japan and China didn’t have the best of relationships (has to do with centuries of piracy and a full scale invasion that kinda helped kill the Ming dynasty), the Samurai overlords kept a low profile and went on sending tribute and kowtowing messengers.

It doesn’t make any sense to argue that Okinawa isn’t Japanese territory because they used to send shipments of Bananas once a decade into Beijing, and any sane person in China is more than aware of it. But it’s not about sanity or historical truth, this is about politics, and as long as Japan is a convenient enemy to rally the populace with, anti-Japanese rhetoric will be profitable in China. And of course like all profitable things, everyone wants to get into it and get a part of the pie. 20 years ago people started talking about the Nanjing massacre in 1937. At first it was 30,000 dead, then it was 50k, then 100k, then some academic said he had proof for 200k, and recently the number has been hiked to 300k. One wonders if any of the city inhabitants was able to escape. Not that it really matters, the evil of killing 100,000 civilians and killing 200,000 civilians doesn’t register as different in most people’s brains. But of course the more dead you can make up, the worse Japan looks, and as making Japan look bad is a good thing, the incentive is to come up with ever more outlandish claims about Chinese victimization.  Ditto of the surprisingly round numbers for Korean comfort women.

Jim wrote that the essential difference between the Left and the Right meant that while the Left was prone to always spiral out of control into a murderous leftist singularity, the Right only cares about order and stability, so a Right singularity is impossible. That makes some sense, but it is simplistic, because it doesn’t take into account that the mechanism of the leftist singularity is by no means exclusive to the Left. Egalitarianism, being based in the universal envy instinct, can easily spiral out of control into a murderous Reign of Terror, but nationalism, which is based in the also universal human trait of tribalism, can also easily spiral out of control into irredentist warmongering. What was Nazism if not a Right Singularity, where? Saner voices were shut down and ignored, while supporting ever insaner schemes for the eternal glory of the Aryan Nation, no matter how stupid, would always get you higher status. That was Hitler’s genius, he unleashed the Right singularity in his own persona.

Right now China has a strong enough government to control the nationalism singularity from spiraling out of control, and even if some random academic or army general comes out every month saying that China should just go to war and teach those barbaric neighbors a lesson (or just pushing for nuclear war against the US), the government is usually able to have sanity prevail and control the limits of public discourse. Of course the same could be said of USG, that as much as leftism is the supreme religious principle of the country, and ever more outlandish leftist schemes are the easiest way of upward status mobility for most people, USG has been able to stop leftism from spiraling out of control, leading to outright communism and other steps of the leftist singularity. But that doesn’t mean that slowly, step by step, leftism aka envy keeps pushing the West leftward, and perhaps in some point in the future, the powers that be lose control of the situation and the singularity unleashes its destructive force. In the same way, rightistm aka tribalism, even if contained by China as of now, may in some point in the future overwhelm the government’s control, and unleash an irredentist total war, aka the rightist singularity.

I do think that the leftist singularity today is more powerful, because at the end of the day, envy is stronger than tribalism, for obvious evolutionary reasons. But not by much.

On shits and fans

Neoreaction is neo because it is new. There has always been a reactionary movement, descendants of De Maistre fiercely opposed to leftism, or modernity in general, but they were based on a defense of the past. In a way, old reactionaries behave in a sort of territorial way. If the past is a foreign country, reactionaries are patriots of that country. The further the culture changes, the more your country becomes a foreign one, and you naturally want to fight the invasion. So old reaction was (is) a sort of tribalism that cut across space-time.

Neoreaction is distinct because it has modern science behind it. It has HBD, which tells us that people are physically and irrevocably different, ergo societies must also be different. It naturally follows that any society that bases itself in denying reality will collapse. But of course neoreaction also feeds on cognitive science, which tells us that peoples brains are wired with dozens of cognitive biases with cloud our thinking. Perhaps the most famous one is confirmation bias, which says that people tend to find more likely to happen the things they want to happen.

Confirmation bias is so pervasive that you can find most people do it every single day, and those on the Dark Enlightenment Community (H/T to Handle) are no stranger to it. In politics, confirmation bias mostly presents itself as prophesies of doom blamed on your enemy. Doom that must surely happen during your lifetime; it’s no fun if you aren’t there to tell everyone ‘I told ya so’.

There’s an interesting discussion at our dear friends at Outside In precisely on the topic of collapse. Mr. Land has a very low opinion on the Cathedral’s ability to sustain itself, and he is partial to theories of financial collapse. Now theories of financial collapse have little to do with the DEC itself, who mostly envisage a dysgenic/moral shock a la Fall of Rome. But the Internet is home to a much bigger tribe called the Austrians, and they have been preaching on evil bankstas and the Dark Lord Bernanke for 5 years already. As Land, Handle and Vladimir discuss, for 5 years we have been hearing of hyperinflation, widespread bank runs, currency collapse, debt defaults, and societal collapse. Doom, I tell you. But for 5 years nothing has happened. Well, there’s a huge youth unemployment crisis all over the world (20% in South Korea!), but that’s about it. So what’s going on?

The short answer is that nobody knows. Macroeconomics is *the* science precisely because it’s not a science. Nobody really knows what money is and how it behaves, so all you can do is develop an arcane theology about what you thing sorta makes sense. People who agree in their monetary theology, or have to suck up to their superiors to get tenure or hold their jobs will form academic tribes, and then go on for decades engaging in tribal warfare, which is the ultimate human pastime. The discussions on fiscal and monetary policy in the last 40 years are most lively and vigorous theological battles since 14th century Oxford. It is precisely when you don’t know, and there’s no real way to know, that cognitive bias kicks in. Humans have a hard time understanding agnosticism. Truth and beauty are fine things, but sometimes there is no truth to be found, in the same way sometimes there’s nothing pretty to look at. But you never accept that, so you make up a truth by browsing your old assumptions, and you start to find that the fat girl with glasses is quite cute when you look closely. It helps that she’s the only female in the office.

But of course the fact that we can’t know doesn’t mean that some theories aren’t better than others. Some things just don’t make sense. Say, Islam. Or that Diversity is our Strength. It just doesn’t work like that. Ever increasing diversity combined income redistribution is not sustainable. Afghanistan’s fertility rate is not sustainable. It will crash. It has to collapse. Right? There are different scenarios out there in how the Cathedral is going to evolve in the next decades. I’ll  use the framework of my Trichotomy to see what different opinions are:

1.- Moral collapse. The state collapses as heathen hedonists fail to breed and be productive.

2.- Ethnic war. As the economy deteriorates from leeching from foreigners, whites awaken from their false consciousness and stand together to fight the NAMs in their midst.

3.-Financial collapse. Bernanke gets off his mask and reveals that he’s actually Mugabe in disguise. Of course Collapse #3 is the most attractive. It is shared with libertarians (which outnumber us 1000 to 1), the blame would fall completely in the Cathedral’s incompetence, and you can hedge your risk by buying gold or Bitcoin.

Of course there’s another scenario, which is that collapse doesn’t happen. Esteemed commenter Vladimir, who has this habit of going into people’s blog and, quite intelligently,  dispute everything they say (he’s the only real neoreactionary dissenter, how hardcore is that), has been feeding our thoughts with his thoughts on how the Cathedral works. His take is that the Cathedral has uncontested religious hegemony, and as long as it has it, the fabric of the state, and the serfs we call society, cannot collapse. It might deteriorate, it might become a supremely dysfunctional thing, but it won’t go anywhere as long as there’s no alternative that people find superior. So what we are looking at isn’t the Fall of Rome, but the USSR under Brezhnev. Stable madness.

‘Financial alchemy’, as he calls it, will more or less solve the financial mess, the EU won’t disintegrate, and people worldwide will continue to put up with diversity, feminism, homos, transexuals and any manner of disaster. This is until there is an ideology (or let’s just call it a religion) that captures more hearts and minds than progressivism. While you have to admit that all the prophecies of doom are starting to sound like prophesies of the Second Coming, which seems to be taking a while, I’m not at at all sold in the idea that the Cathedral might be a permanent institution. People used to say that the USSR was here to stay, and could last 1000 years, and yet look at what happened.

Letting aside questions of arcane macroeconomic alchemy, there is one big theoretical argument against the Brezhnev in Washington scenario. Jim Donalds leftist singularity. The very nature of progressivism is not stable, and the way that leftism assigns status always tends to accelerating madness, whose end result is invariably mass murder and societal collapse. The usual examples are the USSR in the 1930s, China’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s self-genocide. But even if somehow USG is going to manage that the leftist singularity doesn’t kill us all, surely modern progressivism is even less sustainable than the USSR was. The USSR had a shitty economy, but it wasn’t getting any worse than it was, and people are much more tolerant of economic stasis than they are of downward mobility. Not to say that the USSR was not importing tens of millions of low IQ migrants from around the world while accommodating their native cultures. In fact the USSR was a might force of Russification, spreading Russia’s language and general nastiness to far away and unrelated nations such as Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan, who to this day still use Russian as the language of higher discourse.

I don’t know if I’ll see Harvard declare bankruptcy, the US dollar collapsing and my gold and bitcoins growing 10000% in value making me the smartest smartass among my peers. Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that the Cathedral is stable. The Cathedral is subsidizing dysgenics all over the globe, and the shit seems to be slowly approaching the fan, with hardly anyone trying to push it back.

Egypt birthrate increasing just as the economy collapses and 75% of grain is imported.

Youth unemployment skyrocketing worldwide

Blacks killing British soldiers in the middle of the street.

NAMs rioting in Sweden of all places.  

Nothing of this is going away unless the Cathedral gets its act together and starts cracking down on NAM behavior. Brezhnev didn’t have to deal with this shit. Of course Brezhnev had a stellar law enforcement apparatus and had no qualms about using it. The Soviets weren’t about anarcho-tyranny, they focused on the second half. If the Cathedral is to survive even at Soviet levels of dysfunction, it has to start letting go of the anarchy thing and double down on good old tyranny. Parts of the establishment are surely working on that, as seen by the huge surveillance apparatus that is being built in every country, and the incarceration rampage in the US. There’s just so much you can do with that though, given that prisons are bursting with prisoners all over the West, and leftist judges are starting to order prisoners to be sent home. The Cathedral is not yet ready for widespread GULAGs.

It struck me that what’s likely to happen is not a Brezhnevian stagnatopia, but something that came up during my first chat with Nick Land and I had forgotten since. He approvingly talked of the cognitive elite gathering in select global metropolis, tightly policed and self-quarantined à la NYC from the surrounding hinterland which will be semi-abandoned to NAM barbarism. I had envisioned the abandoned wastelands as starving into medieval densities, but that was over the top. The Cathedral is not about giving up land, and the wives and daughters of the elites need poor people to care about to justify their NPO jobs. Think of the Reservation in Brave New World,  but instead of being a zoo-like small parcel of land surrounded by Civilization, think of it the other way around, as a mass of pettty barbarism surrounding small techno-commercial enclaves. Some sort of economy will still go on in the hinterland, but besides physical resources extracted by big corporations, the rest of the populace will be mostly let to their devices.

Perhaps the model is Russia, where esteemed commenter Candide III tell us:

Very bad, especially in Russia proper (Moscow is separate from Russia). Alcoholism and drug use are rampant, no jobs, everything is neglected, prison terms and inmate-derived behavior confer status, everybody listens to music glorifying prison experiences. Imagine black inner cities spread over the Russian hinterland.

As he told me once, Moscow is rich, clean, nice, classy and well policed, but drive 100 km away and the roads are collapsing from lack of maintenance, and most of the country is like that. Everyone with half a brain is either in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or out of the country altogether. The rest is the realm of vodka, meth and hilarious car accidents.

So I think it’s clear that we’re seeing a gradual, generalized decline, subject to black swan shocks such as 100 million Egyptians or Nigerians suddenly deciding to all move to Sicily to avoid starvation. All while the elite keeps isolating themselves in their urban bubbles, air shipping to each other the next fad in conspicuous consumption.

Witch hunts, East and West.

It seems the US is immersed in yet another witch hunt against a heretic troublemaker who dares contradict the foundational dogma of the Cathedral. I’m more surprised by the balls of the man who made a dissertation on Mexican IQ on freaking Harvard, than in the totally predictable crackdown when his views came out in the news. Of all the stupid, irrational, me-too denunciations that have denounced Richwine all around the media, the one that caught my eye the most was the one from Will Wilkinson in the Economist. I thought of making a thorough fisk of the piece, but it’s all over the place already, and I doubt I could say anything that anyone doesn’t know.

I’ll try to be original and talk of something else. While the US was busy depriving Jason Richwine of his livelihood, something much bigger was going on in Japan. A which hunt of larger scale, and larger consequences that what any naive researcher might do in Cathedral HQ. Right now Japan is in one of the most important times in their history. Anyone who reads the news might have noticed that Japan is all over the news, with its new central bank governor, massive currency printing, Abenomics as Keynesianism done right and all that. It seems to be working (for what they wanted it to work for), but Abenomics is not what Abe is about at all. Abe is for redefining Japan’s constitution and its international standing. Japan has for 68 years been a defeated nation, remade into the main American satellite in East Asia. Japan has done good under American suzerainty, but the status quo is not sustainable any longer. Japan is losing population, Korea is every day more hostile, the US is more dysfunctional every day, and China has become very, very big. At this rate, China’s growth will make Japan irrelevant, and the US will abandon its satellite to make good with the new regional boss.

Gimme your islands

It’s not hard to see why Japan is not keen on becoming China’s bitch. Actually nobody wants to become China’s bitch. China is like an ugly, smelly, foul, repulsive  old rich man in a brothel. He might be boss, and he has money, so everybody plays nice, but actually everybody hates him and doesn’t want him close. Everybody hates China. Why do you think North Korea got nukes? They don’t like depending on China. Hell, Myanmar prefers risking national suicide than go on depending on China. China is a huge behemoth of 1.3 billion poor, immoral people. Smart, poor, immoral people. Not the neighbors you want to have.

So what is Japan to do? Well first it needs to jumpstart the economy. Done. Then it needs to stop being yet another USG satellite. Which means it needs to become a real nation. A nation proud of its history, with patriotic people and a big ass military. The army requires a reform of the constitution, particularly article 9 which states very clearly that Japan renounces the right to have an army, becoming for perpetuity the Cathedral’s bitch. Constitutional reform requires a majority in both legislative chambers, so any move depends on the Senate elections due July 28th. So what Abe is doing is paving the road until the elections by drumming up popular patriotism.

But how do you drum up popular patriotism in Japan? How do you make them feel independent? How do you unite again the nation? The most powerful, and arguably only way of making a stand for the freedom of the Japanese nation, is talking about WW2. Changing the prevalent Cathedral narrative of good vs evil. War is war, Japan went to war for a reason, and it lost for a reason, but that’s all there is to it, and we refuse to accept the sole blame, and to be labeled as evil. That is the narrative that the Japanese right has been fighting for decades. And Abe think it’s time to give it official support.

Of course that puts Japan in full collision course with the Cathedral. And it also pisses off its neighbours, who have comfortably spent the last 70 years enjoying Cathedralist sanctimony as the holy victims of the nasty Japanese. South Korea, which not only is also a USG satellite, but has also internalized Cathedralist ideology much deeper than Japan, to the point that most people are leftist anti-Americans (not ironical for us neoreactionaries), has long been lobbying USG to chasten Japan for being evil rightwingers, and this late show of balls by the Japanese leadership has put Koreans in a borderline panic attack. The (female!) President, Park Kyun-Hye, lately reminded Obama that Japan is evil and should repent. Which is just part of the general effort towards demonizing Japan in the US, generously paid by South Korean tax wons.

Japan’s conduct during WW2 and the war with China was notoriously brutal in an already brutal age, so there is no shortage of issues to grab and chasten Japan’s past with. But South Korea has been focusing on the best, most marketable war issue of them all. It’s really the perfect PR material, they are pushing it real hard, and it’s working like a charm. The comfort women.

Korean woman circa 1905

Now before you go and browse the heavily edited Wikipedia article, I’ll summarize the issue very simply. Basically since the old days, the Japanese Army, wherever it was stationed, home or abroad, organized brothels so that the soldiers could bust a nut regularly, for army morale and all that. South Korea argues that the women in the brothels were kidnapped by the Japanese army and forced into having sex with the soldiers, and they argue that most of the women were Korean. So Japan is guilty of slavery, and of women! It doesn’t get any more evil than that. Maybe if they were black.

Japan’s right wing argument is basically that all that is bullshit. The Japanese Army had better things to do than to go out of their way to kidnap local girls. Japan, at least since the Edo times, has had a famously active prostitution industry, and what the Japanese Army did was to go to the red-light district closest to base and reach an agreement with the local pimps to get some prostitutes to visit the soldiers. And that’s all they did. During the war, they did that wherever their army was stationed. And in case there weren’t enough hookers around, they shipped them from home. “Home”, back then, meant Japan and Korea, so hookers were also procured from Korean towns. Nobody went around hunting local Korean girls because 1st. the Army has better things to do, 2. Korea wasn’t enemy territory, but part of the nation. All the army did was outsource hooker provision from local pimps. If they went around kidnapping or fooling local girls, that’s nobody’s business.

You may choose which side you want to believe, the evidence of course is sketchy. I know what sounds more plausible though. Clean, good vs evil stories tend to be false, especially when one side has all the incentives to lie. Yet, the narrative of the evil Nazi allies enslaving the daughters of the poor has strike a nerve in the Cathedral’s consciousness. That and all those Samsung profits that are being conveniently funnelled into American politician’s pockets. The New York state senate just passed a resolution supporting the plight of the (mostly dead) Korean comfort women. The NY state senate?

Obviously Japan’s politicians are very worried about this trend. It’s not good when the New York Times doesn’t stop writing about sex-slaves this and sex-slaves that, pushing you to apologize to a neighbor who is hell-bent in destroying your native industries and who you suspect is selling out to the Chinese. Japan had a honey moon 10 years ago when Korean food and Korean soap-operas became popular (with official support, of course), unleashing the so-called Korean Wave with captivated so many undersexed housewives. But enough is enough, and Korea’s leftist agitation must not go unanswered. So thought Hashimoto Tooru, a young lawyer and TV commentator who cashed in his TV fame, and became the most momentous politician in recent history when he captured Osaka in 2008. For last year’s elections he founded the Japan Restoration Party, and went into national politics.

In a country dominated by political dynasties which often have their roots in the pre-war aristocracy, Hashimoto has a very interesting history. He kinda sounds like the perfect poster child for liberalism, one of the exceptions that leftists like to use to deny HBD. Hashimoto’s father was a Yakuza goon of Burakumin ancestry. His father killed himself when he was a child,  so his mother raised him and his sister. Eventually the kid went to college, and then passed the national bar exam to become a lawyer. Becoming a lawyer in Japan is like getting the Nobel Prize. It ain’t easy. Which means that the very few lawyers that work in the country have a very nice income guaranteed for life. Hashimoto has used that money to father 7 children.

Well, back to the point, contrary to what his upbringing would make you think, Hashimoto is not a leftist hustler, but has become a renown figure of the right. His Japanese Restoration Party mirrors the Meiji Restoration, where Japan pushed the colonial powers back and became an awesome international empire in its own right. Hashimoto owns his political fame to trademark showbiz style. He speaks his mind, fights the journalists when they disagree with him, and has a popular Twitter feed where he makes his opinions open to all. That is very uncommon in Japan, where you’re suppose to talk Victorian, be nice and polite, and then do whatever  you do. Hashimoto, being an outsider, tried to be cool. With dire consequences.

Now that the elections loom close, and Abe seems posed to win big, people have started talking on the new Constitution. Hashimoto, as a supporter of changing Article 9, and establishing a proper national army, has been talking on Twitter of his positions on why Japan has a legitimate case to reestablish a military. That legitimacy depends also greatly in defusing the comfort women issue. That’s what he said. It’s really something:

-As a result of losing the war, Japan has to accept that what it did is considered aggression. That’s what it means to lose a war. That’s not an issue with China and Korea, it’s an issue with all the victors of the war. If you deny that Japan was an aggressor, you have to start a world war again and win it. That’s ridiculous.

-As a defeated nation, Japan must accept to be deemed the aggressor. Of those who deny that Japan was an aggressor, there are many who value Bushido. Well, a defeat is a defeat. You have to accept it graciously. And it’s also a fact that we caused great suffering and damage on our neighbouring countries. We have to reflect, and apologize.

- As part of that, Japan can’t just say, it’s been 70 years since our defeat, now we’re even. The appraisal of the victims and third parties is important. The solution must come from Japan’s behavior and time.

- Having this big principle in mind, still there are important misunderstandings that are causing Japan to be unduly insulted, and we must respond to them. And we also have to have a proper understanding of the historical conditions of the time. That is not to rationalize our conduct, but to avoid undue insults.

- The fact that through aggression and colonial rule, we caused great damage and suffering to our neighbouring countries, as a defeated nation, we must accept, reflect and apologize. However, the fact is the powers of that time all had colonial possessions. And on the comfort women system, the fact is all the militaries around the world had systems to cope with the sexual urges of their soldiers.

- Obviously, the fact that it was OK back then, doesn’t mean it should be applied today. However, we should understand properly the conditions of the time. Not to rationalize our conduct, but to avoid undue insults.

- The fact that humans, and especially men, need a way to cope with their sexual urges is an undeniable fact. In modern society this is mainly done through marriage, or through relationships, but in other historical periods, there were other ways. It is a fact that in countries other than Japan, the unmet sexual urges of soldiers were met through a system of comfort women.

- The criticism that the world is making about Japan’s comfort women system, is because it  is presumed that Japan, as a matter of national policy, went around kidnapping women with violence and extortion and forcing them into being comfort women. I am not a historian, so I do not know all the specific facts, but on a 2007 Diet resolution, it was established that there is no evidence behind that allegation.

- Of course if evidence were to come out we should apologize, but as of now, the government official position is that there is no such evidence. Some days ago, a resolution was made about some new evidence that might come up soon. That’s why people go on saying that there were forceful kidnappings, and related organizations should go on collecting evidence.

- There was an incident about Japanese soldiers in Indonesia forcing Dutch women into prostitution. That is obviously unacceptable. This incident in particular went on a war crimes trial and death sentences were pronounced. If you asked me today whether comfort women were good or bad, well of course I don’t think they were a good thing, but if you look at all other countries in the world, it’s a fact that they all had ways of coping with sexual urges of their soldiers.

- There are many ways of coping. You can use the local brothels, you can set have the military administer the brothels like Japan did. When the US military invaded Japan, the Japanese government set up the Recreational and Amusement Association (RAA). I am sorry for those who became comfort women against their will. Administrators might have lied to women when hiring them.

- That’s part of the tragedy of war and that’s why we shouldn’t go to war. Just because reparations have been legally addressed between Korea and Japan, it’s not becoming of a politician to shut up old comfort women with legalese. Even if the legal problems have been addressed, there are other ways of speaking and dealing with people.

- But it is also an undeniable fact that there is no evidence to say that Japan, as a matter of national policy, went around kidnapping Korean women and forcing them into prostitution. If the world is misunderstanding the issue, Japan must speak out to avoid being unduly insulted. I mean, bringing the US into the picture isn’t fair. USA has always denounced prostitution, even today.

- But it’s still a fact that in the surroundings of US military bases, the sex industry flourishes. When the US invasion army arrived, Japan set up the RAA. But McArthur’s GHQ banned it. Nonetheless, private prostitution flourished. Even if you officially ban it, the fact is the soldier’s sexual urges don’t go away. You need to think of ways of coping with that.

- When I recommended the commanding officer at Futenma base to use the local sex industry, I didn’t mean for him to do anything illegal. According to Asahi Shinbun, the US military spokesman said “We wouldn’t do anything illegal, Hashimoto is ridiculous”. What I told him was to use the legal sex industry. To stop being a phony.

[Prostitution is illegal in Japan since McArthur, but officially only penetration is illegal, and there are tons of different venues where you can get every tiny different sexual service you can think of. That's why there's a sex industry, but not prostitution. Legally, of course. ]

- The US military forbids its personnel to use even the legal sex industry. Even if you ban them from suing it, their sexual urges don’t just go away. If US soldiers use the local sex industry, not necessarily it would solve the sex crimes they commit in Okinawa. We haven’t proved any causation. But please just stop with the Victorian facade.

- Thing is instead of dealing seriously with human’s sexual urges, they just close their eyes. Even in developed countries, it happens that women do that kind of work against their will. We must fight that. But in Japan, people are free to chose their profession, so why do you deny the sex industry?

- As I see it, to denounce the legal sex industry in Japan, is discrimination against the women who chose to work there. There is no problem whatsoever in US military personnel making use of the japanese sex industry.

 

Translation is mine.

You can imagine Hashimoto being very careful with every word he wrote, thinking he is just right, reasonable and logical. He even allows himself to criticize old politicians treatment of Korean comfort women, telling them to be nicer in how they speak. He basically said two things: The comfort women were not slaves, and the US is full of shit. Both of which are pure and pristine truth. So what kind of reaction did he get to that?

Japanese mayor sparks outrage with sex-slave remarks

Sex-slaves! But he just made the point that they weren’t slaves? Who cares, go get him!! Burn him at the stake! Every little Cathedral-ish minion in Japan, every lesbian, every feminist, every mangina, every Korean, every Chinese, every religious figure has trashed him. “Why don’t you tell your daughters to be hookers!” The poor man went on trying to justify his points in Twitter for 3 long days. Heroic, really. I’d translate more but it just gets repetitive. But today, lastly, he gave up. Abe told him to shut up, and he was even forced to cancel a planned trip to Washington, where he surely would have met with high ranking officials and be treated as what he was always thought to be: future prime minister.

Now, even his own minions, delegates at the Osaka city council, have told him to shut up. Sic transit gloria mundi. All for telling the US Marines to stop raping local teenagers and bang some hookers when they get horny, like everyone else. But you can’t talk sense with the Cathedral. The Cathedral *is* being phony. The Cathedral mandates that it’s better to rape a 12 year old now and then, than to allow soldiers to use prostitutes. The Cathedral mandates that you can trash an entire country, if someone puts forward a compelling narrative about victimized women, and pays politicians to promote it. The Cathedral isn’t being phony. The Cathedral *is* phonyness. What is the Cathedral if not the hypocrisy processing parts of the brain running amok? What is the Cathedral if the purposeful denial of reality in order to feign holiness? Hashimoto told a Cathedral officer to “stop being phony”. I’m sure it didn’t compute.

He just can’t get enough

What is the supreme personal virtue for liberals? Tolerance. You have to be nice and accept others and their opinions. Voltaire wrote a whole Traité sur la tolérance to argue that we are all humans, sons of the same god, and should tolerate each other. It doesn’t get any more liberal than that. In 1763.

Funnily though, tolerance is very polysemic, and it has another well-known meaning. In pharmacology tolerance is the progressive loss of reaction to a given dose of substance, meaning that you need to increase the dosage to get the same effect as before. So you need a gram of cocaine to get a dopamine high, you keep doing that every day, after a week you need 2 grams to feel anything.

But surely this stimulant-brain chemical correlation is not limited to physical substances. After all there are many things that can cause to get high and happy, and only very few of those involve putting refined chemicals into your bloodstream. You can get high after climbing a mountain, while screwing a hot girl. Or you can get the most sublime high after giving an interview to the media trashing some racist scum. Oh, the sanctimony high. That one’s awesome. It’s like a female orgasm. It’s the best thing after Soma.

So Stephen Hawking is in the news for joining an academic boycott on Israel.

I need to get high too

Now I have no technical expertise to trash his output on physics, but I don’t think it’s controversial to state that the man is well known because his illness has made him one of the ugliest, most unpleasant physical specimen in Western academia. And in today’s world, that’s a plus, because it makes you a victim™. Being fucked, whether by birth or by accident gives you extra holy points, because having a handicap makes you automatically better than normal people. The meek will inherit the earth, and all that. Mr. Hawking is lucky to live in this era. In the old days, with the medical technology they had,  he would most certainly be dead, and in the remote case he survived, he would have to hide in some dark basement, lest his appearance reminded people of demons and goblins.

But not today, he is the voice of wisdom, and his own existence is supposedly a monument to bravery and courage. He gets all those awesome perks, gets to travel around the world and people get out of their way to go look at him. I mean listen to him. anyway, he is a saint. Surely the sanctimony he gets by virtue of his illness gives him a lot of sweet hedons, which keep him content enough to focus on his science.

But you see, sanctimony is addictive. It creates tolerance. You can never get enough of it. Hawking doesn’t feel holy enough just by struggling against all odds and working at his job. No, he has to strive to be more holy. So what does he do? He boycotts some conference in Israel. “Based on advise from Palestinian academics”. Note that he doesn’t mention Palestinian scientists. Because there aren’t any. They’re “Palestinian academics”. But he had to heed their advice. Palestinian academics are the drug dealers of Academia, they dispense sanctimony for a profit. And the white kids get high with it. They can’t stop buying it.

Before the usual crowd comes on, I don’t give a shit about Israel and their conferences, but don’t tell me Hawking is a white nationalist who hates the Joos and what they have done to England. Hawking is a sanctimony addict, and he can’t get enough of the stuff.

And people complain of the porn addiction.

Hypergamy

When I first started this blog, I predicted that I’d run out of things to say about politics quite soon, and could carve up a nice niche by talking of East Asian issues from a neoreactionary perspective. At the moment I’ve been lucky enough to find a good audience just by speaking my mind on politics in general, and I don’t intend to stop just yet, but I sometimes think I’d be more useful by bringing forward some real data on what’s going on in this part of the world.

Jim’s been making a series on women and why they shouldn’t be treated as adults. It goes without saying that I mostly agree. I myself did a post long ago on the issue. Allow me to introduce a data point.

Jim linked to the hilarious video of a fake celebrity generating gina tingles in an American mall. Seeing all those hot teens swooning for a fake alpha. Yet alpha is alpha, and a fake alpha is better than a real beta. A lot of oldies and game denialists say that that’s modern Western society that has changed women into inmoral skanks. The women of old were more virtuous, as are women in other, more traditionalist countries, such as those in Asia.

Hah. It always cracks me up. So those Asians don’t swoon over Alphas? Well allow me to introduce the supreme Alpha male in Japan. Fukuyama Masaharu. Some singer with a grave voice. 44 years old. Unmarried, thought not known to be gay. He’s come out as a TENGA user, so perhaps he doesn’t care about women anymore. Anyway, see what happened when Fukuyama went live on a popular noon TV show.

See all those women? All those shrieks, all those faces of excitement? You can even smell their vaginal fluids flooding out of their pants. And you know what’s funny? This show, Waratte ii tomo, starts as 12:00 PM, noon. Who watches TV at that time frame? Single women in Japan are overwhelmingly either on school or employed. So 12:00 PM means it’s housewife time. Yes, I’d bet my house that 80%+ of those tingling bitches going to that studio are married and have children. And there’s no doubt in my mind that they would throw everything away for the chance to sleep with Mr. Fukuyama.

So yes, hypergamy is a basic, universal component of the female brain. Given the existence of mass media, this kind of mass gina tingling madness is simply unavoidable. And given the overwhelming alphatude of Mr. Fukuyama, statistically only a small fraction of men will be able to control their wives’ and daughters’ instincts. We can’t all be rich, and we can’t all be alpha.