The BAP Trap

There’s a lot of odd, deeply odd, profoundly strange things about modern society. Things that would make any hypothetical man traveling through time to our day from the past to have their heads explode in bewilderment. Perhaps one of the most salient characteristics of modernity, if not the most, is the presence of sexual identity groups. Sexual orientation, as they call it.

(This essay will be sprinkled with some completely random pictures and quotes I found on the internet to support my argument)

Traditional societies, according to the information they have, believe there are men, and there are women. Man and women marry and have sex (sometimes in reverse order) and have children and so on.

There are obvious differences in average behavior between men and women, which we can call masculinity and feminity. But there’s also quite a lot of variation there, as in every single human trait, from size, to eye shape, to smell, to metabolism speed, you name it.

Some men are quite extreme in their masculinity. Some are rather closer to the middle of the spectrum. There’s even some (a very little) overlap there. A woman in a million has a thicker beard than one man in a million. But still. Men are men, even effeminate men, and women are women, and that’s it.

Now and then there are freaks who are *way* out of the spectrum. Again it happens in many other traits. Some men are taller than others, on a Gaussian distribution. Then a tiny few are midgets. Some people have more powerful legs than others. Some are born with a limp. Some men are manlier than others. Some are really girly. Some even pretend their are women or try to have sex with men. We call those homosexuals.

Now that’s quite of a problem. Sex is very important. Sex is the basis of society, the prime motivator, especially for men. Sex must be channeled and controlled if a society is to stick together.

Human societies reacted differently to the existence of homosexuals. Some ignored the issue, taking care of individually troublesome cases but generally ignoring the phenomenon as a whole. That’s the case of East Asia. They’re good at that. “If it stinks, cover it”, as they say in Japan. 臭いものに蓋. It worked for them.

In others, perhaps a majority of human societies, behavior was given priority. So if a man insisted in having sex with men; well that’s what women do. So you’re a woman. Yeah, you might look completely like a man. Have male genetics, we’d say today. But if you behave like a woman, the looks aren’t what matters the most. We’ll take care of your appearance. And so in Iran, for example, homosexual men are forced by the state to undergo “gender reassignment surgery”. That is, they try to shape them as much as possible into women, then given legal female status. And out they go. They aren’t very good looking women, but there’s plenty of unfortunate men around who will be happy to tap them now and then. They can’t have babies of course, so marriage is not likely, but they’ll have to accept their lot. The same way midgets do.

I do wonder what they do with obstinate lesbians, if there’s some creative Islamic solution to have them to have penises. I suspect that given the legal environment, women who are into women find a way of not being too obnoxious about it. But I digress. Muslims, Indians, Southeast Asians, to my knowledge all take this sort of strategy. And it works for them.

In the modern West, for some reason, we chose to give appearance priority. So if you look like a man, you are a man. You may be very girly. You may like to wear female clothes. You may like dolls and make-up. You may talk like a fag. You may have sex with men. But if you look like a man, you are a man. A different sort of man. A gay man. Certainly not a woman!

The same applies to women who happen to behave like men. They aren’t men. They are women. Just odd women. Lesbians, we call them. This way of categorizing outliers on sexual behavior slowly crystalized in the West around the liberal revolutions. So in a way it grow exactly with modernity, and as I argue here is indeed perhaps the most characteristic aspect of modernity.

The operating principle here seems to be that choice of sexual partner is this one part of one’s character, some kind of taste, not dissimilar from taste on food or drink. That men who have sex with men (MSM, as the medical bureaucracy puts it) happen to be effeminate in pretty much every aspect of their lives was not noticed very strongly, especially at the beginning. I guess it just happened that when gay men became a thing in 19th century England, middle and upper class homosexual men were socialized strongly enough into English masculinity that they just didn’t come out as women trapped in male bodies. Oscar Wilde was homosexual, and he was kinda odd, but he didn’t come out as being girly. For all the people of his time, he was just this bloke with weird sexual taste.

So perhaps because of this empiric lack of correlation among the elite (i.e. the people who shape the culture), or because Christianity doesn’t contemplate sexual change, or because of Benthamite liberalism determining that all human behavior is about taste and pleasure and the most evil thing is to notice strange things about people’s behavior (Bentham had good reasons to dislike people noticing his behavior); or perhaps because 19th century elites had low fertility and didn’t want to lose the few boys they had even if they happened to behave like girls; at any rate, we in the West alone decided that homosexuality is about sexual taste, and not fundamental gender dysphoria.

Now this was a momentous decision. Never before in the history of the world, homosexuals, men and women, were given each a name, an identity. Names are no laughing matter. Names are socially approved categories. They are a social license to exist. Gay men now exist. Lesbians now exist. They never did before, but now they do. And since we gave them a name, Western society created categories of people where none existed before. And that has had very notorious consequences. Perhaps fatal consequences.

I should add that interpreting homosexuality as a sexual choice and not inborn gender dysphoria doesn’t fit the scientific evidence we have, nor the historical evidence of what most of humanity has thought of the issue. For a very informative, and extremely readable book on the issue, look to Michael Bailey here. Here’s my take on the book.

Whatever your take on what homosexuals are and how they came to be, one thing is clear, by their own admission. Gay men generally want to have sex with heterosexual men. But heterosexual men by definition won’t have sex with men. So homosexuals have two choices here. They can undergo a sex change, either surgically complete (as they enforce in Iran), or some half-way (as its easy to see in Thailand), and try to convince heterosexual men to take them as women. Or they can give up on heterosexual men and have sex with fellow gay men.

Neither choice is very satisfactory. Most homosexual man can’t pass as an attractive woman, even after extensive extensive surgery. And sex with fellow effeminate gay men requires industrial amounts of LARPing, having to make oneself look like a tough man when they really want to wear dresses, and empirically not a small amount of drugs. It is a tough life either way. No good solutions. It must be irritating, which is why gays tend to look irritated and often driven into extreme self-harming behavior.

Lesbians have it easier, if only by women having a much lower sex drive. Pretty women are out of reach, which sucks, but heterosexual women are much more open to persuasion in general, so it’s orders of magnitude easier to get an average girl to date a lesbian than it is for a normal man to have homo sex. Women are just more into LARPing as a general rule, and as real manly lesbians tend to be much fewer than homosexual men, lesbianism seems to be an out of control mass-LARP game of women trying to play a game that nobody remembers who started and has actually very few real players in it.

Again, the key point here is that homosexuals don’t want to have sex with each other. They want to have sex with heterosexuals. Which won’t, by definition. The logical solution here would be for homosexuals to change their sex, which is again a very old and empirically attested solution practiced in many societies.

But mandatory sex-change has its drawbacks. You look like a freak, for one. And letting homosexuals keep their bodies unchanged also has many advantages. Not in the sexual realm, sure. But gay men in modern society get to choose whether to share their sexual choices. They may not come out of the closet, as we say, and just pass as a normal heterosexual man. That has many advantages. They get thus to dwell among heterosexual men; which they supposedly enjoy. And they also get to function as an effective secret society, helping each other covertly, promoting each other in jobs, giving each other businesses, covering each other’s backs. Blackmailing each other. The Gay Mafia. It’s a real thing.

They also get to influence men, persuading them into behaving in ways advantageous to homosexuals, while ostensibly offering advice as just one more man, one who happens to have a peculiar perspective on things.

It is by no coincidence that gay men are extremely overrepresented in political parties or in the mass media, or as public intellectuals. Perhaps the enjoy the rather effeminate nature of the jobs’ activities (talking a lot, sounding pompous, frequent parties and public gatherings, gossip and conspiracies, etc.). At any rate they are everywhere, in a way which would not be possible if they were forced or strongly induced to change sex. Although ladyboys are everywhere in Thailand too, so who knows. But still, stealth obviously has some advantages, enough advantages to make the rather unnatural and contradictory gay-man lifestyle be bearable for them.

Note that the same applies for lesbian women, perhaps even more so. Lesbian women have been extremely active in influence operations since more than a century ago. The case can be made that every single feminist movement was started by lesbians, for two purposes. One, to push society to allow them to behave as men, which is what they crave by their own nature as women born with masculine brains. The second, perhaps unintended consequence, is to push women, by persuading them to advocate feminist causes and raising their standards of acceptable male behavior, to become so unfeminine, annoying and obnoxious to men that no men can bear their companionship, and thus drive what were perfectly fine and fertile women into the arms of lesbians.

Note that women weren’t just fooled by a small bunch of tiny lesbians. Well, they kinda were, but they were fooled for a reason. It’s like the old argument about the Jews hijacking Western society with their socialism and other destructive theories. Well, yeah, but you need two to dance. Jews sold a product because there was a market to it. Lesbians too sold their feminism because there was a market of eager buyers. The arguments were quite compelling, and they came with perfect timing, just as the modern industrial economy was giving women more economic opportunities, and thus more bargaining power versus men. And the lesbian feminist arguments were very useful for women at a moment they wanted to increase their bargaining power. And you can’t blame them for it. Everyone wants to get a better deal.

On hindsight, the war has been extremely destructive to both sides, but that’s the nature of war. Humanity has been waging war forever, knowing perfectly well that it is destructive to both sides, but we keep fighting, because one side at the beginning often think it has much to win.

Now of course this this doesn’t absolve lesbians (or Jews) from blame from selling toxic ideas. Every society has conflicts and contradictions of some sort. But the infighting tends to be limited by traditional norms of conduct which go by the personal ties between people. A highly motivated, hostile outside group can break that traditional balance, selling ideological drugs in a market which might be open to it, but also traditionally expected some restrain from the suppliers. When the suppliers, not being an integral part of it, are motivated to destroy society in their benefit, that breaks the traditional balance of debate, and chaos ensues.

You might be asking yourself now: sure, there is a stealthy Gay Mafia, notoriously in politics or the Catholic Church. But while lesbians have been indeed obviously (if not quite openly) agitating for feminism in academia and literature, what have gay men been advocating for? Sure plenty of them have been openly advocating for gay rights, “pride”, sometimes even for legal changes to allow pederasty and other abhorrent behavior. But where have gay men been stealthily nudging heterosexual men into their camp, using cleverly packaged rhetoric that seems to increase the bargaining power of men, the way lesbians have been trolling heterosexual women into feminism as a pathway to lesbianism?

I will elaborate on the next post. On the meantime there are some hints hidden here, somewhere.

Black Swans of Common Knowledge

As I write this, the news are coming out that the 12 boys trapped in 4km inside a cave in northern Thailand have been rescued, after having trapped in a cold, damp and pitch black cave for 10 long days until they were discovered, and another tense week when nobody really knew how to get them out. The rescue operation has been smooth, amazingly so.

The whole thing has been like a perfect movie. The setting is completely absurd. What were the boys doing there? Apparently the coach (apparently it’s a soccer team) had a habit of taking the early teen boys hiking and exploring and doing boy-scouts kind of stuff. Which is fine; but why on earth did he get into 4 damn kilometres into an unexplored cave in the beginning of the raining season? What was he thinking? In some other place or time the coach would have been left to rot inside, and his whole family beat to death. In Japan today he would probably have to kill himself after he and his whole family are completely ostracized. The Japanese are quite amazed at how nice the Thais have been in general.

But again, like in a movie, the setting is not important. The drama afterward is, and this cave-rescue story has had all the necessary elements. The long search, eventually finding the kids. The kids being in good health, because their mysterious coach has taught them meditation (to 13 year old boys? come on). The international teams coming in, all rushing to find a solution. Discussing for several days what to do, with many giving up and saying the rescue could have to wait 4 months. Then the rains coming up, forcing everyone to find a solution right now. And the pressure worked; they found a solution: getting the kids full-face oxygen masks and bringing them out with two divers per kid, one pulling and one pushing them out. While looking for a solution one heroic diver tragically died, providing the necessary tragic scene to the movie.

There’s even Elon Musk using the event to, of course, shamelessly promote himself, doing more harm than good, but of course any publicity is good publicity.

And now the kids are out. Happy ending. Which is good. Not because of the kids, mind you. Yeah sure, good for them. It wasn’t easy to endure all that, and they came out safe. Good for them. But let’s see the great picture. But 12 dumb boys and their dumber coach in Thailand are not something important. But the cave rescue story was so big, it attracted so much national and international attention, that everybody was talking about it. And when everybody is talking about the same thing, that tends to have political consequences. That’s how politics work, especially in our unfortunate era of mass communication.

“Thai authorities are trying to use [the rescue] for political gain,” said Rangsiman Rome, a pro-democracy activist and leader of the Democracy Restoration Group. “Whoever saves the kids is going to be seen as a hero.”

Thailand right now is in a tough spot politically. For over a decade the country has been torn between the traditional elite, based in the monarchy and the rich families from the capital, and a new movement led by some weird provincial guy called Thaksin who run a very smart political movement in which he pays rural peasants to vote for him, and he sticks it to the traditional elite in exchange. Every time the elite gets fed up with Thaksin and his party they stage a coup, rule for a few years, then run elections. Which Thaksin always wins. He will always win them. Why doesn’t the Bangkok elite just pay the peasants 5 dollars more than Thaksin, I don’t know. I guess they are cheap like that. Think they shouldn’t have to. Schools are so expensive these days, you know.

Since 2014, a military junta rules the country, and it has wisely chosen not to hold elections just yet. As China becomes the largest trade partner of all countries in the region, USG has been losing control of Southeast Asia, so Thailand figured they could get away with that. In the Philippines they elected Duterte which has been telling America to fuck off since he got the job. Cambodia is an outright Chinese satellite. Myanmar has gone back to China since USG tried to force them to let themselves get killed by a local Muslim army.

But China hasn’t been playing its hand too well. Its tourists are now everywhere, and well, nobody likes having too many foreigners around. Especially the Chinese, which are rude, crass, loud, and think they are hot stuff because they have money. They spend well, they don’t screw the local women, they don’t piss on the king’s portrait… but they’re kinda annoying. Most importantly, they move themselves and run the travel agencies, the bars, the hotels, the boats; basically every money that there is to make from the business, the Chinese will try to monopolize, and not let a single dime fall into hands of the locals. They do that in every business. The Japanese and Koreans do it too. It’s good business, of course, but it’s bound to anger your business partners. Especially if they are low-IQ , easy-going kind of people you find in Southeast Asia.

That was easily seen in the recent Malaysian election, when the party which had been ruling since independence lost the election, mostly because of anger against Chinese investment in the country, and the corruption it had enabled. The election upset of course galvanized all Westernized opinion. Democracy at work! Democracy is back! All that momentum is looking for a new target. Who is it? Not Vietnam, that’s a communist regime. Not the Philippines, the guy just won, and he was the upset candidate in his time. Cambodia is now also using Chinese money to build a competent dictatorship. The obvious target is Thailand, which is formally a democracy, and a pretty lively one. The military junta has committed to holding elections next year, and opposition forces are mobilizing. The most promising candidate is a young 30-something billionaire. Which also looks totally gay. Of course, the business of the Cathedral in 2018 is exporting Bioleninism.

Which brings us back to the 13 boys trapped in the cave. Who cares? Yeah, it’s a good story. But let’s say that Gnon rightly punished their stupidity and the boys had died the third day, and so been found dead after the long search. What would have happened? Absolutely nothing. Sad story, sure. The government would have made a statement, lamenting the news, calling for people to be more careful and not going to deep into caves. And that would have been the end of it. In a country where everybody drives fast motorbikes without helmets, 12 boys dying in a single day is not something uncommon.

40 people died on a boat accident in Phuket last week too. The news was huge in China, because most of the dead were Chinese, and yes, the operator of the boat was also Chinese. The Thais weren’t interested in Chinese deaths, besides laughing at them, and the Western press isn’t interested in Chinese deaths either, so that news is not consequential. It’s not interesting, and so its not common knowledge. The 13 boys in a cave, though, that’s a good story, and so it spread. It spread so much that it became common knowledge. And when something is common knowledge, people must have an opinion on them. You gotta talk about something, right? Conversation is a way to convey information, but there’s only a real need for so much information most of the time. 90% of conversation is just a way of testing your peers and see if you can pick up some status from them. And that’s the most basic form of politics.

The most important invention of the 20th century wasn’t antibiotics, or the airplane. It was TV. The dumb box made everybody sit down and watch the same stuff, all day, every day. Why? Precisely because it gets everyone to watch the same thing, to have the same common knowledge. Suddenly everybody had something in common to talk about and play politics, big and small. Of course it’s better if the TV has good, thrilling stories, like the Thai cave kids. But even if it hasn’t. Or if the stories are fake, like all those soaps we love to watch. The thing is to have something in common to talk about, to coordinate around. Fuel for our social instincts.

And so as everyone in Thailand was worrying about the kids in the caves, opposition political parties such as the one quoted above starting salivating. If, just if, the Thai government botches the rescue attempt. Either through incompetence, or just because it’s impossible to do; doesn’t matter, only results do. If the government can’t deliver and rescue those 12 dumb kids in the cave; a massive blame campaign could be launched, painting those 12 kids as innocent boys who were left to die by an evil dictatorial government. Many people would have agreed with that; after all they had been glued to their TVs and chatting non-stop about the cave kids for 2 weeks straight. Surely if the kids had died they would’ve felt compelled to reach some conclusion about it. Even if it had absolutely nothing to do with their lives, or with the quality of their government.

If the Thai government hand’t delivered in rescuing the kids, it may very well have fallen. Which is crazy. Think about it. How many things are the responsibility of a government? Governments employ millions of people. They manage huge heaps of affairs, many of them extremely important. Food supply, the military, industrial policy, education, trade; you name it. A government should be judged by how it does the things it’s designed to do. Not by how it manages to save 12 dumb kids and their dumb coach who in some fateful day as an election campaign was getting started, decided to go 4 km into a damn flooded cave.

Not that they can say anything like that, of course. Oh no, the government had to keep up good spirits. Thais, as one of the few peoples of the world which avoided colonization by Western powers, have kept much of their traditional culture, based on Theravada Buddhism in their case, so they are no strangers to public displays of nonsense. Everybody was praying for the kids, trying to be positive, lest one bad thought summon demons and cause harm to the poor boys. The government just announced that the kids, which were remember a soccer team, will get lifelong free tickets for their local soccers stadium, and a cash stipend to be paid immediately. Rewarding reckless behavior, you say? Shut up, you eeyore. Gotta be positive. The government’s reputation depends on it.

You can see what happens when the government reputation is not on the line, even if the incident is arguably more serious. The Phuket boat which sunk killing 40 tourists; well that’s pretty damn serious for a country where tourism is a big chunk of GDP. But the incident was Chinese people running a substandard operation, and the country’s vicepremier said it openly. This is Chinese people killing Chinese people; it does not concern us Thais. He was pretty angry at the whole incident, and he showed it. He could do so, as there was little domestic attention on this incident. He later apologized, however, as I guess the Chinese embassy wasn’t keen on the Thai government shitting on the source of half his tourists. Who do spend some money in the country after all, even if their countrymen try their best to capture all they can and ship it back home.

How does a government prepare against sudden black swans, random compelling stories which can draw the attention of a whole nation? You can’t, really. You can do like China, and have a few million people controlling the whole media, and seeing that no story goes on TV or gets retweeted too many times before they’ve found a spin that makes the government look good. But that’s a huge effort, and even China has chosen to co-opt stories instead of shutting them down as the irrelevant trivia that they really are.

But this instinct, the idea of using random events to test the mettle of a government is really quite ancient. Hell, the ancients actively sought random events, run them themselves, in order to test if a government was doing a good job. We call that divination. And of course there were always omens; particularly in China, any random weather or celestial event was thought to be a signal of Heaven’s displeasure with the emperor. That’s the psychology of common knowledge: if we have to take decisions in common, we must use things we all know about, such as the weather, or some ritual in which we all participated, as data for that decision.

People also want status, which makes any government inherently unstable. Everybody, or at least many people, want the king’s place. Even if there’s libraries upon libraries of law and custom saying that you can’t take the king’s place, the temptation is always there of trying to find some good reason to bring him down. Like, say, some big random event. Rulers after all, in our ancestral environment, when we spent time hunting and moving around, were not stable positions. Leaders in primordial human society exist because of a completely utilitarian calculus: rulers are there because they deliver the goods. They bring more meat, they defeat our enemies. Or they have awesome spells that make rain fall. Which don’t always work if you think about it, but everybody believes them. That’s what charisma is all about: the commonly acknowledged ability to deliver the goods, either proven, suspected or induced by propaganda. Biological variation and the nature of social animals make it so that having a leader to help the group coordinate and engage in collective action is incredibly useful, and some people will be more naturally suited to that leading role than others. But people will accept losing status to some guy only under very strict conditions. They must feel affiliated with him in some way, so that they can consider the ruler to be their guy. And he must deliver the goods.

Thankfully in this case Prayut and his guys delivered the goods, and Thailand will be spared of further turmoil at least until next year. The opposition of course cries “they’re using the kids for political purposes”. Of course! They were forced to, else that very opposition would use the kids in order to bring down the government. I’m sure neither Prayut not anybody in his government was happy about the huge problem the dumb kids had given them. In any pre-mass media society, the kids would have been left to die, and nobody would have cared, besides some locals who would have come with legends of cave demons one shouldn’t disturb.

The Past and Future of Korea

So Trump just met Marshall or Chairman or whatever Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

I don’t have any opinion on the meeting. Nothing substantial was agreed on. Seems to me nothing real happened at all. North Korea isn’t going to give away its nukes. And USG isn’t going to withdraw its troops from South Korea. Thus, nothing is going to happen.

The reasoning is quite simple. At the end of the day, North Korea is a small, poor, fairly inconsequential country 25 million people. It’s birth rate appears to be close to 2, more than double that of South Korea, but still, it hardly matters at all.

Yes, it has nukes. But why would it give them away? Gaddafi gave them away. He was killed shortly after, as the evil fat women USG likes to employ laughed about it. No way North Koreans with their 105 IQ are going to surrender their nukes. Not a good idea.

Unless USG packs and leaves South Korea, leaving the degenerate land of barren K-pop whores and their long legs achieved through horrendous surgery open to domination by Kim Jong Uns soldiery. That would be a reasonable deal.

Which is not going to happen. The US military, or more precisely the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower put it, is today about half of the US power structure. It funds the larger part what Moldbug called Redgov, the Republican party and its appendixes. Redgov is the Pentagon and its friends. The US military being in South Korea means a lot of public money, a lot of budgets, a lot of salaries that US generals do not want to lose. These guys aren’t going anywhere. The US military just doesn’t leave unless forced to.

And certainly not today, when official doctrine is that China is America’s Strategic Rival. We are in Cold War 2. Google it, it’s already a thing. America is preparing for decades of juicy budgets to counter China and fight it in all fronts, so long as nukes aren’t involved. Having troops in Seoul, 900 km from Beijing is just too good to just leave. It’s an amazingly good strategic position. Not a single GI is going to leave, even if Trump really thinks he’s getting a Noble Peace Prize, Which he isn’t. Trump does not rule over the US military, and that is that.

So again, my prediction is: nothingburger. China will lift economic sanctions over North Korea, the US won’t, after Trump is gone USG will pressure China over North Korea’s failure to denuclearize, and we’ll be back to square 1. I really hope Temasek is getting some mining concession in Hamgyeong or the 20 million spent on this summit are going to look bad in Singapore’s tightly held accounting books.

So all that said, I figured I might as well write a bit about how Koreans talk about themselves. We all talk about North Korea and South Korea. But surely you don’t believe North and South Koreans talk of themselves like that? Of course not. North and South are just geographical adjectives we, ignorant foreigners use to make sure we know where each government is located. But the guys in the ground have access to millennia of history to come up with nice sounding words to justify their claim to power. After all, both Koreas claim to be the legal government of the whole territory. So of course they don’t call themselves “North” or “South” anything. They call themselves the whole thing.

What thing, though? Surely they don’t call themselves the same name? In English they do. The South is “Republic of Korea” while the North is the “Democratic People’s… Republic of Korea”. But that’s not how it works in Korean.

Or may I say in Chinese, as Korean political words are almost exclusively Chinese words adopted in Korean, and that includes their own toponyms. All place names in Korean, North and South, with the very overt exception of Seoul, are Chinese derived words. That includes the name of the country, the names of all provinces and all cities. Most interesting of course is the name of the country, as that changes the most. Chinese-inspired polities tend to change the name of the state every time the dynasty changed. Modern Republics kinda count as dynasties, a fact which is often a matter of jokes, especially in China. The name of the country thus says a lot about the people who founded the government.

South Korea calls itself 大韓民國, 대한민국, Dae Han Min Guk. The first letter, ‘dae’ in korean, means big. The second, ‘Han’, is a proper name. Min-guk here is literally “common-people’s country”. It’s an early Chinese rendering of the concept of “republic”, and a rather elegant one. So South Korea is, literally “Republic of Great Han”. On everyday speech it is shortened to 韓國,한국 Han Guk, Han Guo in Chinese, Kan Koku in Japanese. “Han-land”, sorta.

What is ‘Han’ though? Note that this Han has nothing to do with the Han of China’s main ethnic group. That one is written 漢. South Korea is 韓. Zoom in, you’ll see they’re different. 漢韓. Tones are different in Chinese. No tones in Korean, so they do pronounce them the same, but such is life in China’s area of linguistic influence.

So anyway, the Chinese letter which is now used by South Koreans to refer to themselves goes back to the Han state in warring-states era China, which was born of the dismembering of the Jin state in 403 BC. The Han state was somewhere between southern Shanxi and northern Henan in today’s China, and while it wasn’t one of the powerful warring states, it did give us the great philosopher Han Fei.

Actually one can track the word back to an even earlier state, or rather a small fief given by the early Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC) to one of the many sons of the Zhou founder (the Warrior King, Wu Wang), which was located in… 韩城, the city of Han, which still exists to this very day, a small mountain town on the west bank of the Yellow River. Shaanxi province. Small towns having the same name for 3,000 years is one of the joys of the Chinese writing system.

So what does a Bronze Age walled town in the middle Yellow River have to do with post-WW2 South Korea? Their names are written exactly the same, 韓國. But that’s about it. Obviously China’s Bronze Age river town has precedence. 3,000 years worth of it. So why did South Korea took its name from it? That’s a bit complicated, and fairly stupid if you ask me. Let me explain.

Korea is one of the countries with the least complicated history on earth. The country adopted Chinese statecraft early on, but Korean dynasties on average last longer than Chinese ones. Chinese states if lucky lasted at most 250 years. While the last two Korean dynasties lasted 500 years each (!). I think that’s a record.

So anyway, as a unified kingdom Korea starts being a thing in 668. The first kingdom was called Silla 新羅 (668-935), ruled by the Kim family, then came Goryeo 高麗 (918-1392),obviously the origin of the Western name, ruled by the Wang family. And then came Joseon 朝鮮 (1392-1897), ruled by the Li family.

As in China, a new dynasty changed the name of the country. So where did those names come from? Silla was the original name of a state in the South-west of the Korean peninsula. It then grew, and a smart alliance with Tang China got him the rest of the peninsula by 668. Nobody knows the origin of the name, nor much at all besides that it was probably pronounced as “Sila” or “Sira” back then. Perhaps it meant something like “big city”, which links to modern Korean “Seoul”.

Silla was replaced by Goryeo, which got its name from the great kingdom of Goguryeo, a kingdom which was born in today’s southern Manchuria in 37 BC, but eventually grew to conquer most of the northern Korean peninsula. They also founded Pyongyang, such as it was. As it happens the little evidence we have of Goguryeo’s language suggests that it’s more related to Japanese than to Korean, but it was a kickass warrior kingdom that everybody remembered fondly. And so when Silla was overthrown, new Wang family dynasty, who claimed descent from them, chose to recover the name for their new state.

So then after a good and eventful 500 years the Goryeo dynasty collapses, and it is replaced by a coup launched by this guy called Yi Seong-gye. The background here is that as the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which ruled both China and Korea, collapsed, the recovered Goryeo dynasty tried to take advantage of the civil war chaos to win more territory from China. Yi Seong-gye was a Goryeo general, and he received the orders to attack Chinese armies. He thought it was a pretty stupid idea, so he came with a better one: he’d make peace with the Chinese armies and go invade the Korean capital instead. So he crossed the Korean Rubicon, and installed himself as new king in 1392.

Then he asked the newly founded Ming dynasty China if they’d recognize him, which of course they did gladly. He was the nice guy who had chosen to ally with them instead of attacking their armies. He then asked the Ming emperor to choose a name, out of a couple ideas, and the Ming First Emperor chose for him 朝鮮 조선 Joseon. Which is the name of a small kingdom, theoretically located around today’s Pyongyang, which had payed fealty to the Zhou Dynasty way back in 1046 BC. So Bronze Age, again. The name was both ancient, Korean, and it symbolized the good relations with big bro China, and so Joseon it was.

So let’s go forward again 500 years (how did Korean dynasties last so long I really have no idea). It’s 1897, and the Joseon Dynasty is still around. Yi Heui is the 26th king in a straight line of Joseon kings. But it’s 1897 already, it’s the apogee of Western Imperialism, and it’s also 2 years after the First Sino-Japanese war. That war was launched by Japan explicitly with the aim of making Korea ‘independent’ from China. And Japan won, so it behooved Korea to take concrete steps to cut its traditional ties with China. Ties which had given it its name back in 1392. It took 2 years to convince the Korean king, who thought like many in Korea thought it was absurd to pretend to be diplomatically equal to China. Those 2 years included a series of coups, the murder of his queen, and an escape to the Russian embassy. But eventually in 1897 the Korean king made his mind. Same dynasty, of course, but new regime. And so new name.

What name to take, though? He couldn’t ask China for one again. And he was still the king of the old dynasty, so he couldn’t use his family heritage or something. He had to choose a new name out of the blue. And so after a while the Korean king, or I guess some of his ministers, came up with some old historical name which could fit the bill.

The original name, Joseon, had come from a Bronze Age Kingdom. Well, “kingdom”, more like some chieftain and a couple hundred serfs. Way later in Korean history, around the first century AD, Chinese historians talk of a series of small chiefdoms in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Specifically they talked of three: Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan. The “han” part of the names was written phonetically, using different Chinese letters which sound like /han/, but eventually, and for no good reason, Chinese historians settled in using the letter 韓, which as I mentioned before refers originally to a fairly old Chinese fiefdom, and later a middle sized kingdom. It also happens to be a common surname. As for why those Korean kingdoms were called ‘something-han’, it’s anyone’s guess. The best scholarly theory seems to be that ‘han’ comes from the same root as Mongolian ‘khan’, i.e. boss.

So anyway, the reasoning here seems to be that the Korean king wanted a new name, he looked at the history books, couldn’t find any name which hadn’t been used before or that had any bad connotation, so eventually settled with this word which was kinda Korean so “anyway let’s get done with this already gentlemen I didn’t want to do this on the first place can I go home now?”. The name chosen was 大韓帝國,대한제국Dae Han Je Guk, “Great Han Empire”. ‘Empire’ being also the formal titles of China and Japan and the time. So, equality, independence.

That was 1897. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea anyway and thought the whole thing was stupid. Under Japanese rule Korea was used by its previous name, Joseon (Chosen in Japanese). North Korea, being communist and down to earth, also calls itself Joseon. Well, the Democratic People’s Republic of Joseon. China calls North Korea Chaoxian, which is the Mandarin pronunciation of Joseon.

South Korea though as a liberal democratic country had to do the virtue signaling thing, so they chose to signal that South Korea was a return to how things were just before the Japanese invaded. Just without the king. So South Korea chose the exact same name chosen back in 1897. Just changed a letter, “emperor” for “people”. So instead of 大韓帝國,대한제국 it’s 大韓民國 대한민국.

And that’s the name today. South Korea has this weird ahistorical name, born of lazy Chinese historiography two millennia ago, but with a rich narrative of independence and victimization. North Korea just keeps the old name of the 1392-1897 dynasty. China and Japan call each country by their chosen names. But of course North and South Korea *themselves* don’t recognize the other’s right to exist, so they call it by their own chosen names + north or south. South Korea calls North Korea, 北韓 북한 Buk Han “North Han”, while North Korea calls the South 南朝鮮 남조선 Nam Joseon “South Joseon”. China used to follow North Korean usage, not anymore.

Amusingly Taiwan and Hong Kong mostly follow South Korean usage, as good fellow USG vassals.

And yes, the Korean script, “Hangul” is Han-gul, Han letters. In the North is, you guessed it, Joseon-gul.

Long story short: history is fun, languages are different, and the difference allows for different ways of doing what everybody wants to do anyway: fight.

The State Religion

This is David Irving. A man famous for writing a hagiography of Adolf Hitler. And by heaping untold amounts of scorn to Winston Churchill. A man with all the balls in the world, the probably most prominent denier of the narrative that underpins the international power structure, the world order of our day.
A man who has suffered dearly for his ideas, a man who was thrown in jail for being too jealous in his labor as a historian.

That man, the man who was thrown in jail and lost much of his fortune because he denied the Holocaust. That man asked God for forgiveness because he said a mean word to a feral black in Florida.

The Incel Question

A couple of interesting things happened on Twitter last week. One was this:

The issue of sex inequality seems a “loose thread” of our social fabric, that could be pulled toward our unraveling. Were the right to embrace it, the left seems even less likely than usual to seek compromise or offer appeasement. https://t.co/jcgOCG0Tld

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) April 29, 2018

I’m a great fan of Hanson from years ago. Not of his weird sci-fi stuff, that I don’t get. But his socio-psychology writing is top-notch. After an incel unleashed his Beta Rage killing several people on a van attack, the very word “incel” has reached the mainstream. And the normies are flabbergasted. What’s an “incel”? Involuntary celibate? Like, some people aren’t having sex? Well most male journalist aren’t having sex either, at least by the soyboy-on-pajamas look of them. But they’ve been domesticated enough that they aren’t unhappy about it. The thing about incels isn’t that they can’t get laid. It’s that they dare to protest about it.

Mr. Hanson as usual didn’t get the progressive joke. That’s part of his charm, of course, it is his very cluelessness that pushes him to write, and to analyze well this kind of thing. But he’s looking at things that the Left doesn’t want him to look at; so he got burnt pretty badly. I won’t link at Slate as a matter of principle, but Hanson is lucky that his patron is the dilettante, and secret Roissy/Heartiste fan, Tyler Cowen, and not some other normie academic.

Which brings us to this.

CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?

— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) May 2, 2018

As I was saying the problem that normies have with incels is not that they are losers for not getting laid. The problem is that they organize, that they gave themselves a name. That they have class-consciousness of a sort. Liberal states have “freedom of association” in their constitutions as a relic of the time they were fighting the old monarchies which wouldn’t give it to them. And they wouldn’t give it to them because “associations” are a hidden-in-sight form of political conspiracy, and any state which wants to survive doesn’t admit political conspiracies. Try to gather 50 people in public in China and see how long it takes for police to ask what the hell you’re doing.

Of course liberal states, i.e. Western states have freedom of association as a symbol of their revolution against the old order; but they aren’t stupid. They don’t really allow freedom of association. Ask Roosh what happened when he tried to organize a meetup of right-wingish PUAs. Ask any club or association of size that denies access to women; or accepts only white men. The liberal state understands that only white men are potentially disloyal, and so any association of white men is illegal de facto.

Which brings us to incels: it’s no coincidence that incels are now being discussed so widely. There’s a huge question about incels. The current-year liberal state is based, as I’ve written at length, on the loyalty of biologically low-status groups of people. Bioleninism. White men, in white majority countries, are thought of as potentially disloyal given that their natural high-performance gives them other avenues of status-seeking.

What about incels though? Actually incels are a huge unsolved question in the Bioleninist framework. Many asked it in the comments of my Bioleninism essays: what about white leftists? What’s their deal? I had actually meant to insert in the original essays a sizable analysis of the demographic represented by Scott Alexander. In the end I left them out because I didn’t want to distract from the general theory; but now that incels are in the news, I’ve seen some people on Twitter discussing how to fit them in the Bioleninist framework. Which fills me with joy. Yes, that’s exactly the thing that people should be doing. Bioleninism is out there, clearing people’s minds, making sense of the world. Well, allow me to keep on helping.

Incels are, by and large, leftist. To the extent that some incels have organized qua incels, some of them have showed some mild disapproval over the progressive society which, well, prevents them from having sex. Something which 100% of their ancestors, every single one of them, was able to do repeatedly. But again, more broadly, the continuum that goes from 40 year old virgins to incels to married incels to literal cucks to average chumps, that is the Beta Masses of our societies are all loyal followers of the state religion. They are progressive.

And the smarter part of that demographic, the nerds, are enthusiastic progressives. It wouldn’t be completely accurate to equate nerds with incels, but a vast majority of nerds are incels. Scott Alexander, which is a fairly representative member of that demographic, has been an incel for all his life, at least until his choice of medication rewired his brain to make a biological fact what was just a sad social circumstance.

Now this is an important point. Why are incels (or nerds at least) progressive? Where do incels fit in the Bioleninist structure? They are high-IQ white (I’ll ignore the few Asians for simplicity) men after all. But… they are also nerds. Nerds are not high status. To they extent they existed in the past, they were never high status. The pre-modern world didn’t have high schools, but extraverted early-maturing boys have been abusing the hell of introverted out-of-shape boys since social mammals first evolved. Probably since lobsters, someone ask Jordan Peterson about it. He won’t answer my calls.

So anyway, a shortcut to understand Bioleninism is “a coalition of people who don’t want high school jocks to rule the world”. Which is the natural state of mankind, for better or worse. I wasn’t a high school jock, but as a white man I’d rather they rule than the girls rule, so I am not Bioleninist. For the more awkward nerds in class though, they probably prefer the girls rule, out of some extremely misguided hope that the girls will be somewhat nicer to them. That’s the vibe I get from Scott Alexander.

Or maybe it’s just that nerds are awkward, know they are powerless, and so tend to obey whoever is in power, and since Bioleninism advanced after the 1960s nerds have just bent the knee and dropped to the floor and kissed the feet of Women and Africans and Muslims and whoever the fuck they’re told to kiss. That’s the vibe I get from Scott Aaronson. I think I’ll regret defiling my blog with the following quote, but I guess it’s better if you don’t have to read the whole thing at his blog. I did write about him before after all. Anyway, this is what Aaronson just published, in an hilariously misdirected defense of Robin Hanson.

Before going any further in this post, let me now say that any male who wants to call himself my ideological ally ought to agree to the following statement.

I hold the bodily autonomy of women—the principle that women are freely-willed agents rather than the chattel they were treated as for too much of human history; that they, not their fathers or husbands or anyone else, are the sole rulers of their bodies; and that they must never under any circumstances be touched without their consent—to be my Zeroth Commandment, the foundation-stone of my moral worldview, the starting point of every action I take and every thought I think. This principle of female bodily autonomy, for me, deserves to be chiseled onto tablets of sapphire, placed in a golden ark adorned with winged cherubim sitting atop a pedestal inside the Holy of Holies in a temple on Mount Moriah.

Well, little chump, I don’t think Robin Hanson is your ally.

At any rate, incels are leftist, either through mistaken affinity to the project of disempowering their chad tormentors, or out of sheer lack of spine. But none of this matters, and this brings us to Ellen Pao’s tweet, who in case you are blocking embedded Tweets by some blocking extension said:

CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?

If you’re not blocking tweets on your browser, here’s one funny tweet of mine.

They're not sending their best. https://t.co/Jy7BsKFwzX

— Spandrell (@thespandrell) May 6, 2018

The Bioleninist coalition is made of many parts, some of which are really hard to reconcile. Say, Muslims and homosexuals. But there’s one combination which is way worse than every other. Two groups which just can’t coexist. Women and incels. Women hatred to incels is orders of magnitude greater than that of Muslims vs homosexuals. It is not just some vague disgust, or some religious commandment. No, women want incels dead, annihilated, out of the way, and they want it now. You see, the point of power is to get more of it. To get what you want. And what women want is hypergamy.

Hypergamy means that all women want the top men. The top 20%, the top 5%, definitions vary. Here’s some data. But even with the most generous definition, women see 80% of men as being completely out of consideration for sex. They just won’t sleep with them. If they do (and they do every now and then for money or other motives), and other women find out, well that automatically means they’re lower status, certainly lower status than women who sleep with better men. Not even sex really, the mere company of undeserving men is like a skin disease for women. It’s like an old rag worn by a leper. The attention of mediocre men is low status itself, it defiles women in their own eyes. So it follows that if possible, mediocre men should disappear. Just die.

Incel men being the most mediocre among the mediocre, they are at the top of the list for things women want to eradicate. They just don’t want them to exist. Wherever they meet them they try to make them disappear. You might have heard about “women in tech”; i.e. women trying to get nerds out of tech. Nerds protest. “We were here first! We built this from scratch!”. Yeah whatever. There’s money to be made, so women want in. Then they saw nerds there, and they can’t help their instincts. Nerds must go. Women just won’t live close to them; the same way humans don’t like living close to snakes or rats. That getting rid of the nerds would destroy the whole ecosystem is secondary. When tech collapses after women chase the nerds away, women will just migrate to somewhere else, as if nothing had happened.

Robin Hanson got screeching calls to lock him up when he suggested that men with no access to women perhaps have good reason for being upset. Seems to me he doesn’t understand how hypergamy works. He was accused of promoting rape and slavery. Which he denied of course, but feminists had a point. Women want hypergamy. For a woman to sleep with a man below the top 20% is by definition not consensual sex. It is thus rape. For a woman to work for or live with a man below the top 20% is by definition not consensual work. It is thus slavery. This is no joke.

When men get what they want; you get, well, Gengis Khan. What is best in life (for men)? Killing enemy men and taking their women. That is not a very stable situation but when men have all the power, which has happened now and then during history, the result is understandably not very agreeable for women. After all sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive. The optimal strategies for males and females are adversarial. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how evolution works: conflict.

Well, what is best in life for women? What do women do when they have all the power? What is the female equivalent of Gengis Khan. We are finding out lately. It includes, obviously, complete privileges in every area of life for women. These two recent tweets were very illuminating. One complains that 19% of journalists killed were women. The other that 1 in 4 homeless are women.

Every once in a while, you come across a post so perfect, so flawless, that, like a golden sunset, words become worthless, commentary uncalled for, all one can do is take its cosmic bigness. pic.twitter.com/QHTmbv36zO

— Frame Game Radio (❤️) (@FrameGames) May 6, 2018

🤔 pic.twitter.com/Lg4M7uPX28

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) May 7, 2018

Well, say cucks, that means 81% of journalists killed were men! And 75% of homeless were men! What the hell are women complaining about? Well obviously they complain that there is even a single women being victimized, when it should be 0! When an Englishmen said that 10% of victims at something in colonial India were Englishmen, he was right to complain. We fucking rule this place, why should even a single of us have a rough time? That’s what Indians are for. Well that’s how women think. We are women; why should a single women have trouble? That’s what men are for! There is no irony in this. It is only the cold logic of power.

And women have more power than they ever had. As I mentioned before; much of the power distribution between the sexes depends on the birth rate. The sexual targets of a man are, generally, women of his age or lower. The opposite for women; they are attracted to men their age or higher. Well, a declining birthrate means there’s increasingly fewer amounts of women younger than any given man. Which raises the bargaining power of any given woman. Because every year there are fewer women being born to compete with her in the sexual marketplace.

When did men had a good time? In the 1950s to 1970s, when the birthrate was increasing and so every year more women were being born than before. Any woman had to shut the fuck up and be nice to men if she didn’t want to be outcompete by the younger hordes being born every year. Now, though, it is the opposite. Women have the advantage. And they are using it. It won’t be pretty.

Making Japan Great Again

The blog has been slow lately. Part of that is me being on Twitter, wrecking my long term IQ with short term dopamine hits. But man, those dopamine hits are good. If you’re not following me yet, there’s a link at the sidebar.

So anyway, one of the places I rely most recently for commentary is the online mag The Diplomat. It’s some Cathedral foreign policy rag, apparently with some close relation to the Indian government. Lots of Indians shitting on China there, which is funny. But by and large it’s a pretty standard Cathedral foreign policy rag, so if you want to know what USG, i.e. the compromise between the Redgov empire (the Pentagon and its foreign satellites) and Bluegov empire (the State Department and its foreign satellites) are up to, it’s not a bad resource to follow.

Yesterday I took a look at their feed and they had this tweet, which I found hilarious.

Using education to make Japan great again?: https://t.co/ImoWUL8X9Q

— The Diplomat (@Diplomat_APAC) April 24, 2018

Seeing a picture of a woman academic I didn’t bother to read the whole piece; I assumed it was a piece about the Abe’s government long-discussed plans to nationalize college education. I thought some USG-supported feminist QUANGO had joined the plan and was salivating at the possibilities of extending Bioleninism in Japanese colleges. As it happens there’s a #MeToo assault on Japanese politicians right now, and weaponized-vaginas agitating for leftist politics have been increasing a lot in the last year.

But I was mistaken. I got it backwards actually, the article is not about celebrating leftist agitation in Japan; it’s panicking about that evil fascist Abe’s early education policy. On hindsight it should have been obvious. “Make (country) great again” is Trump’s phrase; as such it is tainted. Cursed even. Clueless provincials like Emmanuel Macron might have tried to appropriate it but that’s not how the imperials in America do things. Puritans are about purity. You are not to talk about making things great again ever, as long as the English language exists.

So by all means read the article, which is interesting, as it does reflect a reality in Japanese schools. They have some low-profile Bioleninist academic in Japan, who says it quite bluntly: “Totalitarianism is a common feature of Japanese school education”.

Of course throwing words like “totalitarianism” around means little, and it’s not like this broad knows what totalitarianism is about, being a “sociologist” her job is not to read books. She’s a political commissar, and as such her work does have value. Japanese education indeed has been moving right in the recent years. A couple decades, perhaps. And that is worrying if you work for the Left. It’s her job to worry about losing power. Well, it’s everyone’s job. I can’t think of any human trait more universal than worrying about losing power.

And yes, the left in Japan is losing power in Japanese early education. It used to be commies everywhere. And I mean real commies, actual card-carrying members of the Japanese Communist Party. They’re still around, and still prominent in many school districts, but they don’t own the school system as they should do. As I was saying, in the recent decades there’s been a slow but steady pushback from the government, backed by some rightist organizations which have been lobbying for changes in the ideological orientation of early education.

On the face of it it’s quite odd. Cthulhu always swims left, right? The history of the world, certainly the history of the modern world, is the history of the left waging war against the status quo and by their relentless vigor and sheer determination winning once and again. The Left always wins. The Left has been so victorious that you could make an argument that Left *is* what wins, it is change itself, the “Right” being just the hapless forces of reaction standing althwart at history and yelling “stop!”. Not realizing that even if it stopped right there, the Cthulhu-truck had been driving left for centuries already. The position where it stopped would just happen to be wherever the Left was 5 minutes before. But that is the mainstream Right for you; those Leftists from yesterday who don’t want to go further left.

It is of paramount importance to dispel the fiction that the Left and Right are both equal forces, armies fighting for their respective causes which are different in content but generally equivalent in size and culture. No, that’s not how it works. There are no causes. There is only power. The Left is where the people who want (more) power flock to, and their ideas are contingent to that ultimate purpose. The Right are the people who do not want more power, either because they have some already or because they’re just not into it. Risk-averse, perhaps. Whatever ideas people in the Right believe in are contingent to that ultimate purpose. To put it in military terms. Doctrines change. Strategies change. Weapons change. But the basic nature of war is universal.

That’s the general theory, of course. I’m not a Platonist, but the above refers to some abstract, Platonic essence of Left and Right. Particular political groupings in the real world which get called “Left” or “Right” may differ somewhat from the definition; but that’s just how language works. People put names to things, and somewhat the names stick through inertia for so long that the name doesn’t refer to the same thing. But over time definitions tend to correct themselves. People learn words just once, then usage gets fixed and it changes much more slowly than its referent. As such people tend inevitably to associate the labels “Left” and “Right” which particular sets of ideas. And sure, there is some correlation. Some ideas do tend to universally to facilitate turnover of people in power. Say, universal rights to all humans. Other ideas tend to facilitate the Right’s mission: stability of power. Say, the patriarchy. But that’s all relative to the local language customs of a place. That’s how words work; they are tools, who get made for a purpose, but then over time they are given other uses (“definitions”) if the need arise. Problems happen when different people use them differently or when small groups develop their own idiosyncratic uses. That we call “jargon”.

So to rephrase it again: In my theory, which you could call “neoreactionary theory” to give Moldbug his due credit, the Left is the forces of chaos, led by sociopathic status maximizers (SSM), while the Right is the forces of order. Outside the theory, the Left is whatever gets called the Left, and the Right is whatever gets called the Right in a particular place and time. There is of course correlation between the theoretical Left and Right and particular Lefts and Rights, but that correlation must be disentangled in every individual case.

So back to topic: does the Left always win? The theoretical always wins, at least since modernity, but in real world history, the left often loses. They lose the battle and go on to win the war. But battles they do lose. Particular real world Leftist movements do lose out every now and then. The death of economic communism in the West in the 1980s is a good example. Neoliberalism gets a lot of hate but there was a real danger of having state-planned economies and rationing in much of the West not that long ago. The Left did lose that battle. Or gun rights in the US: God knows the Left wants that gone. And yet it hasn’t been able to.

The culture war in Japan is another example of Leftist failure. As I’ve mentioned before, many years ago when I first went to Japan I used to comment in the expat blogosphere there. There was this cool blog by American hipster types called Neomarxisme, written by a guy called David Marx. I wonder what became of him. I guess he’s still in Japan; hipsters love Japan. Nobody else does. Anyway, as a hipster which loved the hipster side of Japan, Mr. Marx was quite worried about what he saw as a resurgence of Fascism in the Japanese internet. As it often happens Japan is the precursor of social trends that happen later in the rest of the world. A full 10 years before Trump, Japan had a full-fledged internet Alt-Right movement. And nobody understood why. David Marx and his friends surely didn’t get it.

I did, though it did take me some years to understand it. Now of course I can fit my understanding in a wider framework, and relate it to general trends happening also elsewhere. The basic trend here was that the Japanese internet was full of people who were very nationalistic. In Japan a big divide between Left and Right is the question of patriotism, similar to Germany and for basically the same reasons. The Left thinks Japanese nationalism is this evil force which unleashed World War 2 which was this epitome of evil thing; thus modern Japanese must renounce their love for the fatherland and become all atomized universalist hedonists. Well not really hedonists, the Left would rather they all became lovers of communism and the Great North Korean Leader; but if hedonism keeps them busy enough consuming stuff to forget natural tribalism, then hedonism will do. The right in its most extreme form is for old-school chauvinism. Japan is the greatest nation on Earth, it’s a Great Moral Power (yes they actually say so), and Japan dindu nuffin wrong in WW2.

While Japan didn’t exterminate the Right like Germany did, the cultural consensus until the 2000s was quite firmly in the Leftist side of this divide. Your average Japanese in the 1970s, the prototypical Japanese boomer, didn’t give a crap about the fatherland and didn’t even know what this WW2 had been about. They were busy making money and listening to American music. Murakami Haruki is a fairly typical example of that milieu. If you have been unfortunate enough to read some of his novels you’ll know his kind of braindead hedonist pervert. That’s actually quite representative of his generation. If you have been fortunate enough to read some Mishima Yukio, you’ll have noticed that he was desperate with how his beloved country of Samurais had become cucked to that extent. Mishima took a good look at the next generation (Murakami and his friends) and choose to stab himself with a samurai sword in front of TV cameras in a military base. That started to change in the 2000s. The mainstream media, TV and publishing industries and academia were 90% staffed by leftist boomers, so you didn’t see any change over there. You only saw some of it in increased outspokenness of rightist politicians. And by far most importantly, in the internet.

The Japanese Internet is a really strange world, or it was in the 2000s. Japan never developed a blogosphere. The idea of writing for free just doesn’t cross their mind; most people have neither the leisure nor the inclination of writing as a hobby. Why would anyone do anything for free? Those who can write and do not belong to a major media organization tend to issue mailing lists and charge $5-10 a month for them; which gets them some income if they’re any good.

So where does one go to consume free content? 2chan. “Nichan” in Japanese. Absolutely everything interesting and funny to come out of Japan in the last 20 years has come from 2chan. So what is it? A website? Nope. 2chan is an obscure network which can only be accessed through a purpose-made Windows program. Think of it as a sort of reddit but much uglier and convoluted. There are many forums on a lot of topics; but you can’t your start your own. It is completely anonymous, but the network generates temporary IDs; it also requires payment in order to post in some but not all the forums. It’s really weird and I was never able to make sense of it myself. The Japanese relish in this sort of closed systems with weird rules to keep out outsiders. People think of Asians as bee-like collectivists, but they’re not. Asian societies as a whole are by and large worse run than White societies. Asians don’t work well in big groups. What they love is small groups; and to make sure the group stays small they come up with all sorts of bizarre and arbitrary rules, made up just on purpose to keep outsiders away and keep insiders loyal and invested. The Japanese are in my experience the worst in this. Even Japanese card games are abstruse. But hey, it works.

In a way it parallels the way that Thomas Kuhn said science works: first you establish a closed community of insiders. You make a lot of weird jargon that only insiders get. And once you have a coherent community of invested people, does progress happen. I don’t know about that, but back to 2chan: it’s the funniest place in Japan. It’s jargon has been trickling down to wider society for years, a cottage of industry of blogs lives off exclusively of copying discussions from 2chan and putting them on the web; their traffic is huge. 2chan is, as everything in Japan, a closed network with bizarre rules, but it is free and anonymous. It is the only place where a Japanese can speak his mind. And what they say in 2chan is…

Fascism. Pure and simple fascism. 2chan is overwhelmingly a rightist place. Nationalistic, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist. In foreign policy the Left loves China and Korea and their domestic lobbies, while the Right hates them and wants to break relations, officially if need be.. They love anime  and porn and prime minister Abe. They think that WW2 was awesome and that Japan should get a new Army right now. They get real mad whenever the Imperial army is slighted. Anyway, I could go on, but you get the point. It’s not like they’re all reactionaries who think democracy is a Western conspiracy agains the Son of Heaven. But there’s enough red pills around in 2chan that saying women should marry at 15 year old and stay home like they’ve done since antiquity is not an uncommon opinion.

The funny thing is that only 2chan is like that. Japanese media is completely pozzed. Not to Western levels, of course, but they support leftist parties, argue against WW2 revisionism and for paying tribute to Chinese and Korean lobbies, have lots of homos around, and basically follow the slow attrition model of Cthulhu left-swimming that they always have. Japanese TV is like that: newspapers are mostly like that, with one exception (the rightist Sankei) and two typical cucks (Yomiuri and Nikkei). Academia is overwhelmingly leftist, often outright communist. And while there are many weird sects and associations in Japan forming a distributed conspiracy lobbying for rightist cultural points (the famous Nippon Kaigi et al.), they have close to non mainstream influence. They do have political influence and have managed to put some of their people in government, which is what the article linked at the beginning here was complaining about. Between 2chan and this weak conspiracy of housewives and retirees, the Japanese right has been slowly winning the culture war.

Now, don’t think that these rightist masses populating the Japanese internet are nothing like the Western alt-right. They are not. I remember quite clearly when Satoshi Kanazawa, the evolutionary biologist in London became famous for writing in 2011 that by any objective measure black women are not attractive. I used to read 2chan back then and I expected the Japanese internet to come out in the defense of their countrymen who was so unfairly demonized for saying what should be an obvious truth.

But they did not. “You just don’t say that. Why is this racist shaming the Japanese people abroad? Somebody get him shot or something, we don’t need that”. That was the almost universal tone of the responses, Some 10% or so did come out and say he was right. Japan does have its shitlords. But they are quite few of those who would expose any non-progressive ideas about race, individualism, or their Amaterasu-given right to not marry, not have a social life and spend all their money in anime-figures and Tenga masturbation-aids.

These are thus no trad masses defending the Japanese spirit. No. They are just as hedonistic and individualist as anyone else in Japan. But there are two things which they disagree on with the Left, and they will give no quarter about them. Women, and Immigration.

These are the only things in which Japan is at all different from any Western country. Japan has capitalism, brutalist architecture, alienated masses of hedonistic consumers with no religious affiliation whatsoever. What it doesn’t have is feminist education, women doing slut-walks, fat women demanding to be complimented on their looks 24/7. And Japan doesn’t have millions of dumb and hostile immigrants taking menial jobs from teenagers and filling up their prisons. And precisely because Japan doesn’t have that, the Left has made its mission to introduce them in Japan. And that’s where those internet masses, the 30-50 year old bored men in their bizarrely-structured internet forums have stood up, and said: No. Stop, right there.

Not that they will achieve anything. The National Review conservatives also stood up athwart history and yelled: “Stop!” It didn’t. It just slowed down. Changed tactics. Turned down the fire burning the frog. Learned salami-slicing tactics. Japan doesn’t have slut walks. But in just 10 years it has come from a country where a majority of married women were housewives to one where women work at Western levels, are increasingly present in high-level politics, and, who could’ve guessed it? are starting to agitate against sexual harassment. Big #metoo demonstration in Tokyo these days, I’m told.

As for immigration, Japan has more than 2 million foreigners working there, and it’s steadily growing. They won’t bring the yearly 200,000 brown men that the Japanese Business Association has repeatedly asked for; but they’ll get there. To their credit, working conditions given to foreigners are so nasty that most of them end up leaving by their own accord way before their contract expires. US State Department reports, and those of their affiliated NGOs have been loudly haranguing Japan about this, so it could change with time, but I don’t see Japan starting an immigrant welfare bureaucracy like Western countries have. They don’t have the money.

Interestingly the most strongly held idea of the Japanese Internet is not opposition to feminism or immigration. Those are held-strongly but you can always feel a sort of defeatist mood, where they kinda understand they’re fighting a losing battle. But the one thing they just love discussing is how Korea and China are evil and Japan should break relations with them. They are right about this. South Korea and China have been extremely hostile to Japan in recent decades: and their lobbies in Japan, especially the Korea one, has been very influential. 10 years ago you couldn’t watch Japanese TV without being lectured on how nice Korea is and how everybody should love them.

That has changed: the mood these days is extremely negative. Again, for good reason. But the thing is China’s GDP is now more than double that of Japan. And Korean per-capita GDP is closing up with Japan’s. Korean semiconductors have obliterated the Japanese electronics industry. Diplomatically Japan is without friends in its neighborhood, and its fading economic power means it is fast becoming a negligible actor internationally. Japan might hate China and Korea. They do hate them. But they won’t, they can’t stop 15 million combined tourists which come spend money in Japan. Oh, they complain a lot on the Internet about how nasty and smelly and rude they are. But they need their money. And that stings.

So you have a combination of revolt of the masculine masses against further encroaching by the International Left on the little pleasure left in their lives, and a generalized feeling of decline and powerlessness that leads many people to chauvinism if just to compensate. To this grassroots rightist mood, a small conspiracy of neotraditional cults has very effectively lobbied top politicians, bringing Abe and his ilk. Who have tried to deliver and bring up a Rightist movement. But their hands are tied. Japan is still a military occupied vassal of the United States. When the USA wanted Japan to sign TPP, they did, against the universal opposition of the Japanese economy. When USG asks for more feminism, Japan turns more feminist. Abe wants to restart his nuclear plants, but USG wants him to buy LNG from Qatar, so Japan spends all their trade surplus on that.

So what can Abe do? Change the school curriculum. That he can do. Tell babies left on kindergarten by their mothers who can’t take care of them because they know have #metoo jobs that the Emperor is awesome and the nation is eternal. But can he do what he really wants to do? Reform the Constitution and establish a legally proper army? No. He’s been trying for 5 long years, to no avail. He will likely step down this year, a defeated man.

The imperial thing is a good analogy for the whole endeavor, as I wrote before. The Japanese right wants to reform the Constitution and give some more meat to the Emperor’s position. But the man didn’t want it! He is stepping down next year, and his successor is world-famous as the cuck of all cucks, a crybaby liberal with a spendthrift and lazy wife who wouldn’t even give him a son. And the Japanese government is cucked enough that they won’t jump over him and give the crown to his brother, much more appreciated by the right. Oh, muh line of succession.

Abe has been trying to get his Rightist street-cred by being tough to China and Korea, but so what? Japan had 970k babies last year. China has 17 times that. North Korea has nukes; Japan doesn’t. The only way Japan could recover even a little hope of being a rich and independent nation would be if Japanese women had more babies, but the trends are the exact opposite. Japanese feminism is growing partly as a result of USG pressure, and partly out of the increased bargaining power that women naturally get in times of decreasing fertility. I’ll expand on that in some other post. But at any rate sex relations in Japan are getting worse, not better. Fascist education won’t solve that. Because fascism is, at the end of the day, just the leftism of two weeks ago. Well, 90 years.

Mistakes happen for a reason

So the news from last week were how China changed the constitution and abolished term limits in the only thing that had term limits; the presidency. This was followed by the USG propaganda apparatus (AKA the press) going into fits of panic. “We got China wrong”, they say. It took China changing its constitution without American permission for Americans to notice that they got China wrong.

What did they get wrong? China was dirt-poor in 1980. Really, really poor. It would have likely remained quite poor if USG hadn’t decided to open trade relations with China, having them join WTO and all that. The theory, now stated openly, was that economic growth would eventually lead to the formation of a middle class, and that middle class would then agitate for democracy; a democratic China would naturally be a jolly good thing, aligned with USG’s interests (also known as “Western values”).

I don’t quite see how that last line follows. Democratic politics doesn’t correlate with “Western values” well at all. Look at Turkey or Iran. What does correlate with Western values is proximity of US military bases: that correlates pretty damn close. It also happens that proximity of US military bases correlates to some degree with democratic politics. But the causality starts with US tanks, not with democratic politics.

At any rate, Scientism on Twitter had a good elaboration of what it means that “we got China wrong”. What did USG really think? Was it just the latest iteration of the Whig theory of Democratic Development, whereby democracy happened because of the rising incomes in the 19th century empowering the bourgeoisie into fighting against the royal houses of Europe for political rights? No, of course not. Nobody reads history anymore. Certainly not people in the American corridors of power. Whig history is stupid; but our ruling class today doesn’t know Whig history anymore. What they know is a degraded version of Whig history as remembered by the guys on Wall Street, who have some faint recollection of reading about it in Harvard; but that was a long time and many many hangovers ago.

If you read between the lines of the numerous reports on China that have come out over the years, the real idea was this: the US could use it as a place to manufacture cheap goods because 'authoritarianism' would ensure it'd never produce competitive companies.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) March 7, 2018

So the idea is that trade with China was a good idea because it was thought that China would always be poor, so the USA could always enjoy a sort of advantageous colonial relationship with Chinese factories. I can totally imagine some Goldman Sachs guy selling that to Clinton-Bush-Blair and those guys believing it hook, line and sinker. And the State Department QUANGO apparatchiks who had actually read the Whig theory of history could, on their end, support that thinking on all the opportunities for bioleninist missionary work. 1 billion souls to save organize!

That, of course, didn’t work out. China grew richer than anybody thought it would, it didn’t quite open up politically as fast as people thought it would, since 2012 it has instead closed up quite fast, and this closing up has not affected its economic might in the slightest. Yes, guys, you got it wrong.

The interesting thing about the recent media trends pressing for hostility to China is that it’s a completely bipartisan point. The Left is extremely disappointed that China won’t let them preach the supremacy of women, Africans and homosexuals in China; and the right is just pissed at the loss of American supremacy. See Pat Buchanan in this article.

The article is pretty lame; first in how it makes an analogy to WW2 in order to peddle more of Buchanan’s book shitting on Churchill. We get it, Pat, you want us to buy your book. It is also lame in the whole tone of the article. It just states, in very strong terms, that We Got it Wrong. We Got it Wrong guys! Very wrong! Mistaken we were!

Well, ok, but why? How did this mistake happen? He of course does no attempt at explaining. Because his job, the job of Pat Buchanan is to be a conservative, and the job of conservatives is not to understand a thing. The job of conservatives is, and has been for decades, to state their confusion with a tone of strong indignation. I don’t understand this! Hmm! I am angry, yes I am, this makes no sense, and that makes me angry. Join me in my indignation, oh and buy my book. Hmph!

Well as I often say, if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing.

That is of course my instinctive reaction, but I of course also do understand the meta quality of these kinds of statements. Speaking as a linguist, most instances of the string “I just don’t get it” are not meant to state a lack of understanding; they are a way of signaling a political position. The underlying argument is “I just don’t get it because I don’t think that way, and I don’t think that way because I am a proper person whose thinking only works inside certain limits, as is proper and just. I only think as people in the ingroup think”. Understanding how the outgroup thinks is evil. You’re not supposed to go and try to know what’s going on. You’re supposed to just not get it. And to loudly proclaim it.

This incidentally is a human universal. All languages I know have “I just don’t get it!” as a short-hand for ingroup allegiance signaling.

Which leads me to this article by Scott Alexander. He elaborates on an idea by one of his ingroup about their being two ways of looking at things, “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”. Mistake theory claims that political opposition comes from a different understanding of issues: if people had the same amount of knowledge and proper theories to explain it, they would necessarily agree. Conflict theory states that people disagree because their interests conflict, the conflict is zero-sum so there’s no reason to agree, the only question is how to resolve the conflict.

I was speechless. I am quite used to Mr. Alexander and his crowd missing the point on purpose, but this was just too much. Mistake theory and Conflict theory are not parallel things. “Mistake theory” is just the natural, tribalist way of thinking. It assumes an ingroup, it assumes the ingroup has a codified way of thinking about things, and it interprets all disagreement as a lack of understanding of the obviously objective and universal truths of the ingroup religion. There is a reason why liberals call “ignorant” all those who disagree with them. Christians used to be rather more charitable on this front and asked for “faith”, which they also assumed was difficult to achieve.

Conflict theory is one of the great achievements of the human intellect; it is an objective, useful and predictively powerful way of analyzing human disagreement. There is a reason why Marxist historiography revolutionized the world and is still with us: Marx made a strong point that human history was based on conflict. Which is true. It is tautologically true. If you understand evolution it stands to reason that all social life is about conflict. The fight for genetical survival is ultimately zero-sum, and even in those short periods of abundance when it is not, the fight for mating supremacy is very much zero-sum, and we are all very much aware of that today. Marx focused on class struggle for political reasons, which is wrong, but his focus on conflict was a gust of fresh air for those who enjoy objective analysis.

Incidentally the early Chinese thinkers understood conflict theory very well, which is why Chinese civilization is still around, the oldest on earth. A proper understanding of conflict does not come without its drawbacks, though. Mistakes happen for a reason. Pat Buchanan actually does understand why USG open the doors to trade with China. Yes, Whig history was part of it, but that’s just the rhetoric used to justify the idea. The actual motivation to trade with China was making money short term. Lots of money. Many in the Western elite have made huge amounts of money with the China trade. Money that conveniently was funneled to whichever political channels it had to do in order to keep the China trade going. Even without Whig history, even without the clueless idea that China would never become a political great power, the short-term profits to be made were big enough to capture the political process in the West and push for it. Countries don’t have interests: people do.

That is true, and should be obvious, but there are dangers to the realization. There’s a reason why people dislike cynics. People don’t want to know the truth. It’s hard to coordinate around the truth, especially when the truth is that humans are selfish assholes constantly in conflict. Mistakes happen because people find it convenient to hide the truth; and “mistake theory” happens because policing the ingroup patterns of thought, limiting the capability of people of knowing too much, is politically useful. The early Chinese kingdoms developed a very sophisticated way of analyzing objective reality. The early kingdoms were also full of constant warfare, rebellions and elite betrayals; all of which went on until the introduction in the 13th century of a state ideology (neoconfucianism) based on complete humbug and a massively unrealistic theory on human nature. Roman literature is refreshingly objective and to the point. Romans were also murderous bastards who assassinated each other all the time. It took the massive pile of nonsense which we call the Christian canon to get Europeans to cooperate in a semi-stable basis.

But guess what? Conflict theory also exists for a reason. And the reason is to extricate oneself from the ingroup, to see things how they actually are, and to undermine the state religion from the outside. Marxists came up with conflict theory because they knew they had little to expect from fighting from within the system. Those low-status workers who still regarded their mainstream society as being the ingroup they very sharply called “alienated”, and by using conflict theory they showed what the ingroup ideology was actually made of. Pat Buchanan and his cuck friends should take the message and stop assuming that the elite is playing for the same team as they are. The global elite, of America and its vassals, is not mistaken. They are playing for themselves: to raise their status above yours, to drop their potential rivals into eternal misery and to rule forever over them. China, Syria, and everything else, is about that.

China doesn’t care about your opinion

Well, the news is out: Xi Jinping has become dictator of China for life. He’s the new Mao, a totalitarian ogre who will destroy human rights across the world.

Or so would the Western media have it. But that’s why you’re here reading my blog, of course, because you want a better take. Well this is mine.

What just happened? Well, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the de-jure highest power of the land, made by 205 members, has proposed a series of changes to China’s constitution. Amongst them are the abolition of term limits for the 主席 President and 副主席 Vicepresident. Previously, since 1982, there was a limit of two consecutive terms for both offices.

What do the president and vice president of China do? The offices have no power. The constitutions, and any other law, give them no power. None at all. They are completely ceremonial.

So what’s the point? That’s a good question. China has a weird double structure, where the party and state are distinct entities, but have completely mirror structures. For every province, city and county, there is a government, with its governors and mayors and vice governors and vice-mayors. And then there’s a Communist Party committee for the same province city or county, with a secretary general. The secretary general calls the shots. The mayor isn’t an entirely ceremonial office, but it is completely subservient to the secretary general of the local committee. There has been lots of calls for abolishing this nonsense and just unify the administration, but the system remains in place.

The central government, the 国务院, has a “prime minister”, today Li Keqiang. That guy’s not ceremonial either, he wields substantial power. But for some reason, Deng Xiaoping in 1982 decided to put a President on top of the prime minister. I guess for diplomatic reasons. Foreigners don’t understand how Chinese politics work, not then and not now, so he wanted to make it easier to understand.

There’s this funny anecdote about the Second Opium War in 1860, when the British invaded Beijing and burnt the Qing Dynasty’s Summer Palace, but didn’t occupy the capital and left the Forbidden City alone. The Summer palace was the real place of government, had been for a century. The Forbidden City is narrow and urban and hot and hell, it was built by the previous dynasty. The Summer Palace was a country palace, away from the city, full of nice gardens and European buildings. But it was where the emperor lived, where all decisions were made. The British didn’t get it; they thought it was this country garden, so they burnt it, but left the Forbidden City alone so the Chinese government could get to work. He was a gentlemen and wouldn’t interfere with that.

So anyway, knowing how Westerners are, he having lived in Paris, Deng Xiaoping made the figure of the President, which has also coincided with the Secretary General of the Central Committee, i.e. the actual boss. So the actual boss and the fake boss have since 1982 always been the same. (ETA: Sorry, I got that wrong. During Hu Yaobang’s reign the President was Li Xiannian, a figurehead).

Well, not quite since 1982. Interestingly enough, Deng Xiaoping has never been Secretary General. Nor president. He was “chief advisor” of an “advisory committee” he came up with. The secretary general during Deng’s period of rule were Hu Yaobang and later Zhao Ziyang. Both renown liberals; Hu Yaobang is today hated by the nationalist right for ordering minority criminals to be treated lightly; Zhao Ziyang of course famously sided with the protesters at Tiananmen, for which he was sacked and detained. He died in house arrest.

Oh, there’s this other piece of power which Deng did actually hold formally. The People’s Liberation Army. He was chief of the Central Military Commission, which controls the military. He didn’t leave that for Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang. He kept that for himself, apparently forced by the army itself, who was not willing to obey those pesky liberal reformers he had put in charge of the civilian government. In 1989, after Tiananmen, Deng Xiaoping somehow decided to formally retire and give the whole package, the Secretary General of the party, the Presidency and the Secretary of the Military Commission to Jiang Zemin. Jiang took the three posts by stages, and soon controlled all formal levers of power. Deng was still calling most of the shots until his death in 1997, but Jiang had formal, and soon real power over the whole country.

Henceforth the idea that the same man must control the three offices has become an institution in China, which they now call the “trinity”, 三位一体. Yes, that’s actual Christian vocabulary. I really hate this part of CPC rhetoric, but anyway. In the 1990s Jiang Zemin controlled all levers of power, the real one, i.e. the Secretary General of the party; the fake one, the President, and the military one. The Secretary General has no term limits. It’s not in the constitution, of course, that’s about the state. The party has its party statutes. And no, no term limits. Same for the military commission. No term limits. So the only term limits are those for the Presidency, which is the fake office. Of course it’s prestigious and all; but it has no real power.

This was some weird legal magic that Deng Xiaoping had done there. Jiang Zemin had the three offices now, again, party, state and army. True, fake, true. He kinda liked this idea of having it all. Jiang also spoke some English and loved, loved with a passion to hang out with foreigners and just brag with them on how cool he was. Go check it out, the guy’s funny. So anyway, Jiang Zemin could have it all, but only for two terms, 10 years. After that he had to surrender one, but not necessarily all. He could keep the actual offices of power.

So what did he do? He was quite smart. He was Secretary General from right after Tiananmen, in 1989. But he delayed access to the Presidency until 1993. So he could hold onto the three offices until 2003, 14 years of actual power. And that’s exactly what he did. He could have found some toady, some Medvedev, and give him the presidency. But he didn’t do that; he chose Hu Jintao, a boring but competent guy, and put him as successor. In 1998 he was made Vice-president. Then in 2002 gave him first the office of Secretary General, then the presidency in 2003. And in 2005 (he was in no hurry), he gave him the military command.

Hu Jintao was no match for Jiang though, and it’s widely acknowledged that Jiang Zemin till call the shots during Hu Jintao’s time in power. But then another 10 years passed. Jiang Zemin was getting old, very old. He’s 91 now. And people were getting fed up with his rule. The idea that Hu Jintao could play some game and hold onto power was just not in the cards. He wasn’t that kind of guy. Hu Jintao followed Jiang Zemin’s precedent, and in 2008 put his successor as Vice-president. That’s Xi Jinping.

Now you’d read a lot about who Xi Jinping is, whose faction he belongs to, how he got the post, etc. Most of what you read is probably complete crap. He was often called a “princeling”, a member of a faction made up of the children of old high-ranking politicians from the 60s and 70s. That’s not important. What’s important is what he’s been doing since he took office. In 2012 he took the office of Secretary General, then immediately the military commission. Hu Jintao wasn’t allowed to play there for a few years as Jiang Zemin had done. He surrendered it immediately. That gave signs that Xi Jinping was the real deal. Then in 2013 he took the presidency.

Since then Xi Jinping has unleashed a massive crackdown on both Jiang Zemin’s and Hu Jintao’s protégés. And he’s also jailed a big bunch of those princelings he was supposedly the leader of. Most famously Bo Xilai, who was this handsome, well-spoken guy who tried to outmanouver him out of sheer charisma and a very smart practice of making sure his friends were making a lot of money. Well, Mr. Bo is now in jail. Apparently writing daily (!) letters protesting about his outrageous treatment.

Besides cracking down on corruption, which he has undoubtedly done, Xi has also done a lot to tighten up the country. Most foreign journos would have you think that Xi is undoing the liberal legacy of his predecessors. But that’s fake news. Xi Jinping didn’t start internet censorship. He perfected it. Xi Jinping didn’t start the crackdown against restless minorities (there’s only two, Tibetans and Uyghurs). Hu Jintao started that as Governor of Tibet. Yes, that guy. Xi Jinping is only building on that legacy. China hasn’t had a liberal in government since Zhao Ziyang in 1989. What China had were timid leaders of few words, who outwardly seemed to accept the superiority of Western democracy. They then cracked down on human rights and whatever, but without talking about it. Very subtly and with the lights off. Western politicians liked that; it meant that the Chinese Communist Party wasn’t quite confident of its rule, and after a few time all the contradictions between rhetoric and reality would explode, giving USG and the Cathedral an opening into a market of 1.3 billion potential bioleninists.

That completely changed with Xi Jinping. He has completely changed the internal and external rhetoric of China. Now China has its own system of rule, which is different from Western democracy, and that’s a good thing. China does not believe in separation of powers, in freedom of speech. And human rights, well yeah, but China interprets that as for example, having low crime rates, area in which China can claim wide superiority over the West. Xi Jinping is also making bold claims for (maritime) territory and influence. It is taking no shit, and giving plenty.

It should be no surprise that this drives Western politicians crazy. China is now fairly rich, it’s buying property and high-tech companies across the world. China has made Southeast Asia it’s diplomatic backyard, made a strong relationship with Russia against the US. It’s practically vassalized South Korea, and eaten up so much of Taiwan economy that it’s independence-minded government is limited to approving gaymarriage and bringing Muslim immigrants in order to beg for some Western sympathy.

All while internally the party’s rule is tighter than ever. The standard narrative of Western democracy is that a developing economy creates a middle class, who then agitates for political rights. That may or may not be an accurate representation of the European experience, the revolutions of 1848 and all that. But it most certainly doesn’t apply today. Today we have the internet. The internet creates monopolies by network effects. And governments just can’t help themselves from merging with these monopolies. In the West, Google, Twitter, Facebook, are all arms of the cathedral. They censor, control and gather data for it. In China, Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, are all arms of the Communist Party. The only difference is that in China, they are formally so.

And so Xi Jinping has now decided to do away with the term limits for President. Changing the constitution isn’t unprecedented. The 1982 constitution has been ammended 4 times already. Some changes were quite big. Recognizing private property, for instance. The changes this time though have a very obvious theme: controlling the damn party. Enforcing discipline. They say Xi Jinping is obsessed with Gorbachov and the fall of the Soviet Union. On why the CPSU dissolved itself. It won’t happen on his watch. He has created a new State Supervision Agency, a state-level agency, answering not to the government, but to the central committee, only to investigate illegal activity by public officials. That’s a very, very old Chinese tradition, but let’s leave it at that. The rationale is clear: all civil servants in the country must behave, obey orders, and stop trying to push for more power for themselves. It won’t happen.

The Communist Party of China has close to 90 million members. That’s bigger than the population of Germany. Coordinating and organizing 90 million people is no easy feat. Making sure they all obey order is borderline impossible. Civil servants in China have developed every way you can imagine to ignore the law and use their power to enrich themselves. The amount of money that civil servants in China have embezzled is in the trillions. And plenty have now families abroad, and many now kinda like liberal values. Everybody in China hates these people. Everybody in China has been scammed or cheated of victimized by some asshole politician. Well, if Xi Jinping wants to re-establish the legitimacy of the Communist party, and his personal rule, it is quite easy to see what his rhetoric is: People, I will protect you from evil politicians. I will jail them and get them out, and replace them with good people. That he has been doing, or he says he has been doing, and most people are quite content with it. The re-disciplining of the party has required cult-levels of ideological repression. The party media openly talks about the need for party members to have “faith”. It’s unseemly, but that’s how large organizations work. Or isn’t Facebook a cult? Have you seen Zuck talk?

Now, those local embezzlers are not happy. And those more or less honest business people who have fallen as collateral damage of the investigations are very much not happy about it. And everyone who just got used to liberal values, talking politics, and all that, are scared as fuck by internet controls and media censorship and talk of “faith in the party”. All these people have endured 5 years of Xi Jinping, and probably were thinking they only have wait 5 more years until Xi’s term limits come in. Then they could keep on embezzling money to buy Vancouver real-estate. Or go on gay-parties with drugs bought from Nigerians in Sanlitun. Well, tough luck. Xi Jinping is not going anywhere. That’s the message of the constitutional change.

People should have figured that out when talk started to come of “Xi Jinping thought” going into the party statutes and the constitution. Xi Jinping thought doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a badge. A badge that says: as long as Xi Jinping is alive, his “thought” is one of the guiding ideologies of the country. So even if he’s not Secretary General, any potential successor must follow his orders. His thought is in the constitution! Go ask the guy about what he thinks.

But it also happens that Xi Jinping is a formalist. He doesn’t believe in tricks. He wants everybody to know that he’s in charge, that he will be in charge as long as necessary, until he makes the Communist Party a disciplined organization without political machinations. No liberals will take power on his watch. China will not fall while he’s there.

This may or may not be scary by itself; but it has nothing to do with being “a new Mao”. Mao was not a dictator until 1966. And in order to become one he had to unleash the Cultural Revolution, where he physically killed every single enemy he had, and physically tortured about 90% of the party leadership. Mao did that precisely because he was not secure in his power. After 1959 he was removed from power due to, well, causing the starvation of tens of millions of people with the Great Leap Forward. He thought he would be purged and disgraced; and so he threw everything he had against the party. And he won. That’s what Mao did. Xi Jinping is in a completely different situation. He has comfortable complete power over all the country, and in an orderly and formal way. He has nothing to fear.

As many of us now, it is not from secure power that bad government happens. It is due to insecure power, which leads the powerful to mess with society in order to secure it. That is what the Chinese historical tradition calls 乱, “disorder”. Mao’s time was a disorderly time. Xi Jinping’s time, you may like, or not like, but it is most certainly orderly.

Now, a lot of people in China are kinda freaking out. Mostly liberal-ish college grads. If only because having a president for life does cut off some potential avenues for upward status mobility. And people hate that, of course, people want more status, more every day. If Xi is smart, he’ll open up the economy a bit, so that status-maximizers can put their energies in making money and not in selling their country to USG’s bioleninist outreach department. We’ll see.

Tales from the patriarchy

The way of properly learning a language is to do what languages are made for: use it. Ideally, live your usual life, do whatever it is you like doing, and just try to find a way to insert that language you’re learning into your daily routine. So if, say, you like movies, and you’re learning Persian, well, stop watching Hollywood crap and go pick up some Persian movies.

I get asked about books on Chinese history, and I tend not to know what to say. I haven’t read a lot of Chinese history books in English. Certainly not any general ones. I read China in World History by Adshead after Steve Sailer recommended it. It’s a fascinating book, not very accurate, but a fun read for beginners, so I do recommend it too. Generally speaking most English books on China are pretty bad, and badly written. With the exception of Frederick Wakeman’s, which are awesome.

What I often do to read up on Chinese history is watch a historical TV show, then stop anytime something bugs me and go check out the primary sources out there in Wikisource. If the thing is interesting I check out 知乎, China’s much improved version of Quora, where they have detailed explanations and book recommendations. If the topic is interesting enough I get the (Chinese-language) book.

There’s a recent TV show in China about 司馬懿 Sima Yi, one of the most important leaders of the Three Kingdoms period. The whole period, which lasted about 100 years, 180 to 280 AD, is the most written about in the history of China, mostly because of the sheer force of personality of the men of the time. Dozens upon dozens of great warriors and statesmen. Sima Yi wasn’t the most colorful of them, but arguably he was the guy who won the game. He was a quiet minister of the northern kingdom, Cao Wei, where he served and outlived three emperors. The guy was so good at anything he did, so influential that part of the imperial family decided to get rid of him, lest he took power for himself and made a puppet of the imperial court. He let the court take away all his power for 10 years. Then out of the blue he run a coup d’etat, where… he took power for himself and made a puppet of the imperial court. At 72 year old he executed thousands upon thousands of imperial kinsmen. Then he died. His soon took over, then died. Then his grandson decided to do away with the charade and took the throne for himself. He then started the 晉 Jin Dynasty.

So anyway, the show is pretty good. But it’s of course adapted to modern sensitivities. But not so much, I was very surprised to see a scene where he kills the whole family of his main rival in the coup, 曹爽 Cao Shuang. The usual penalty for treason in China was 夷三族, “leveling of the three families”. There are conflicting records on which three families this referred to, but basically it meant killing the whole extended family, clients included. So all wives, brothers, children, parents, uncles and aunts. All beheaded, if possible together. The scene in the series shows Cao Shuang’s 3 year old son, tied up in white clothes, in front of the beheading platform. They don’t show his head being cut off, of course, but the mere sight of a 3 year old boy in front of a beheading platform would get most housewives in the West calling for their smelling salts and yelling at social media.

Anyway, kudos for China for their accuracy in that front. Shame on China for their lack of accuracy in what remains, in my view, the still biggest and most encroached area of progressive influence in modern China. Women. I write a lot about how Islam is a better deal for Men than Western culture, which is why Muslim immigrants refuse to integrate, and in fact radicalize further in their faith after moving to the West. But if Islam is a good deal, old Chinese culture was the freaking lottery. Polygamy among the gentry in China was not only legal: it was expected. And there was no limit to the number of wives you could acquire. Girls were sold as property at 13-15 years old, and no self-respecting men would not get a new wife every 5-10 years if he could afford to.

Of course having too many wives was frowned upon. It was a sign of lack of seriousness. Women are something men like, but men should like other things more, manly things. Warfare and government. Reading and the arts. Women were entertainment, who also happened to produce children, which are always nice to have, as they make heirs, and daughters which you can give to you friends’ sons.

It is unconceivable that a man of the stature of Sima Yi would not have a handful of wives. And indeed he had, four of them in total. His first wife, Lady 張 Zhang, is said to have had a temper. That means that… she had a temper. In the TV show though, tailored to modern sensitivities, for commercial reasons if only, as most TV show viewers are women, Lady Zhang is a kung-fu master who accompanies her mild-mannered husband at war, does ninja work to help him in his conspiracies, and basically runs the household with an iron clit. Amazingly (progress!) the show has Sima Yi welcome a second wife. The show makes it look like the emperor forces upon him a second wife, Lady 柏 Bai to spy on him, and that makes his first wife, Lady Zhang, to flare up in outraged fury. How dare you get a second wife! A good 5 episodes are dedicated to this story. But she eventually accepts the fact and they get along together, the second wife being super smart or something.

Which I guess it’s great fun for modern housewives, who like soap operas of women fighting for status. But as a historical show, the whole premise is ridiculous in the extreme. First of all, Lady Bai was his fourth wife. That’s 4 women. Second, Lady Zhang was just some boring housewife with a temper, no super ninja. Third, while Chinese wives were indeed never happy about their husbands getting another wife, there was nothing they could do about it. Ancient China didn’t recognize divorce, but wives nagging about concubines was one of the few cases where it was granted. Lady Zhang, first wife, may indeed have given shit to Sima Yi about it, but only so much of it, and the idea that Sima Yi would be apologetic about it, that he would feel sorry about getting a younger and hotter wife, is just preposterous.

Don’t take my word about it though, the official history of the Jin Dynasty says it for me. The historian in charge was funny enough to add this piece of domestic life of Sima Yi.

其後柏夫人有寵，后罕得進見。帝嘗臥疾，后往省病。帝曰：「老物可憎，何煩出也！」后慚恚不食，將自殺，諸子亦不食。帝驚而致謝，后乃止。帝退而謂人曰：「老物不足惜，慮困我好兒耳！」

Sima Yi spent more time with Lady Bai; Lady Zhang hardly ever saw him anymore. One day, Sima Yi was sick, lying in bad, and Lady Zhang went to see him. Sima Yi saw her and said: “You annoying old thing, why did you bother coming out?”. Lady Zhang was so angry and embarrassed that she stopped eating, and was going to kill herself. All her children [note: the elder, most legitimate heirs of him] stopped eating too. Sima Yi was startled and went to apologize, so she stopped (started to eat again). Sima Yi then left and told his men: “the old thing doesn’t deserve pity, what bothered me was my poor good boys!”.

This anecdote is not only funny today; it was funny even then, as it takes 3 lines of the 8 total lines that Lady Zhang, posthumous empress, got in the official history. I love how he called her, 老物, “old thing”. Plenty to comment here: wives being annoying in any time and any social stratum, wives using their children as weapons in order to get what they want. Human nature.

Sima Yi was a huge prick, unlike the mild gentle man he is in this TV show. In previous renditions he’s written more accurately. But hey, he founded a dynasty, he was the towering general and statesman of the most tumultuous and interesting era in 5000 years of China. Of course he was a prick.

The Jordan Peterson movement

Jordan Peterson is an old friend of this blog, which I’m sure he reads, even though for obvious PR reasons he can’t quite admit to the fact. Mr. Peterson is getting increasing amounts of mainstream attention after he utterly and completely destroyed some dumb journo British woman a couple of weeks ago.

 

I won’t pull the hipster move of saying I was into Peterson before he was cool. But I have written quite a lot about the man, his ideas, and why he’s so popular. Do check it out.

In short, the reason why Peterson is so successful is that he’s selling a single proposition. It’s OK to be Christian. More precisely, he’s selling It’s OK to be a White, Christian Man. That is of course a revolutionary slogan, as White Christian men are the officially most low-status people in the West. They’re not even just deprivated, they’re the enemy of the state. Not just low, positively evil. Well,  we know that selling hope and validation to low-status people is very good business. And as it happens, the low status of White Christian Men is not the result of any natural law, but the highly unnatural result of a centuries old political endeavor. Peterson slightly hints at that. Just pull yourselves together, White Christian Men, and you’ll be the ruling class again. Nature Says So.

Anyway, the mainstream media has started to notice our good Dr. Peterson. That is not good. It’s good short term, in that some sympathetic people will find them and give him money. But mid term it’s very bad. The hornet nest won’t allow anyone to give hope to White Christian Men. Some trolls in the US printed some fliers across the country saying: It’s OK to be White. It went to every single Cathedral outlet and the response was unanimous: Nazis! It’s most positively NOT OK to be White in the Current Year. So it follows that someone is going to come down on Jordan Peterson like a ton of bricks. And eventually someone smarter or more resourceful than the Channel 4 broad will be put in charge of taking Peterson down.

I wonder what it will be. Some fabricated (or not) #metoo scandal? Surely plenty of nubile co-eds have thrown themselves at their handsome alpha professor over the years. Accusations of racism? They’ve already found an old Tweet of him making a (pretty accurate) race joke. Maybe that sticks.

The question is what he will do later. Apologize? We all know where that leads to. Instant death. Mr. Peterson is walking a very thin rope here. Conquest’s Second Law is very clear: Anything that isn’t explicitly right wing turns left-win over time. Will Peterson cuck down and submit? Or will he stand on his feet and fight back as the leader of the deprived young Christian masses?