I plan, over the next few days, to remove or hide some blog posts. None of the ones any of you value, I hope. I may also soften some of my more colorful language. If you wish to preserve the unredacted corpus, now’s your chance.
Analysis and expansion of the Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy
The beta in Vox’s socio-sexual hierarchy is completely and totally different from the beta as understood by most of the rest of the reacto-sphere. No beta in the Vox system is actually a beta in the Roissy system (for lack of a better designator). Vox-betas would be called alphas by Roissy et al.
That this is so is largely Vox’s responsibility; I won’t argue with his categories (indeed I think he’s on to something deeper than he has presently analyzed), but he did co-opt the term “beta” for his own uses.
Most men do not understand Vox’s hierarchy, as indicated by the number of Gammas who want to be Sigmas. Women are even less likely to comprehend, not having lived and played in that sphere. I propose, however, that Vox’s system can be generated from a small set of axes; of opposing traits that can be understood independently:
* masculine vs. emasculated
* self-oriented/narcissistic vs. other-oriented
* socially-embedded vs. socially-detached
I’ll hint you three permutations:
* Masculine, self-oriented, socially-embedded: Vox Alpha
* Emasculated, other-oriented, socially-embedded: Vox Delta
* Emasculated, self-oriented, socially-detached: Vox Omega
Questions:
* given these axes, how do you make a Vox Beta?
* what would you term an Emasculated, other-oriented, socially-detached man?
* Masculine, other-oriented, socially-detached?
Meta-question: can you help me better define or better name these axes?
Filed under Well Spoken
The impetus to open source software
Take, for example, the shareholder model of corporate ownership. Despite their theoretical status as “owners” of the corporation, shareholders have little genuine control over management. In fact, management’s responsibility to shareholders is a legitimizing myth comparable to the claim of the State industrial bureaucracy in the old Soviet Union to represent “the people” or “the workers.” The management of most large corporations is actually a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a mass of unowned capital. But their claimed status as representatives of the shareholders, as little basis as it has in fact, serves a useful purpose in insulating management from internal political challenges–especially from internal stakeholders.
As organization theorist Luigi Zingales has pointed out, the main source of corporate book value is shifting increasingly from physical capital to human capital. That means that an increasing share of profit and equity results from the contributions of the workforce–specifically, their tacit, job-specific knowledge and skills. Whether workers are willing fully to invest these skills and knowledge in the firm depends, to a large extent, on whether the governance system recognizes their stakeholder status and rewards them for their contribution to the bottom line. Without contractually defined stakeholder claims to the revenue stream that reflect their contribution to value, workers know it’s quite likely that in a mixed economy with State impediments to free competition, management will expropriate whatever productivity gains result from their special situational knowledge and skills via management bonuses, downsizing, or both. Consequently they are likely to keep to themselves any knowledge that might increase efficiency.
Emphasis mine.
Filed under Civilization
Self-reported Lies of Lying Liars
Gucci Little Piggy cites a study on lying in which Science Proves that men lie more frequently than women. Examination of the study suggests the opposite of its putative results, if anything. It’s like the old logic puzzles where one of your interlocutors always lies and the other always tells the truth.
Say we have groups P and Q, and that we somehow know that members of group P lie significantly more often than the members of group Q. If you survey these groups on how often they tell lies, which do you expect to report accurately? Unless you expect the liars’ group to refrain from lying on surveys, you should assume that the liars will lie about how often they lie.
Such a survey may result in three general outcomes:
1) Group P claims more lies than Group Q
2) P == Q
3) P < Q
I think these assumptions are warranted:
A) Group P under-reports the amount of lying
B) P’s motive in doing so is to lay claim to socially acceptable behavior, not merely to mitigate a high lie-frequency
On those assumptions, Outcome 1 would require Group P to have an upwardly-skewed perception of how much lying is considered acceptable. Now, liars may believe that others lie as much as themselves, but I think they are quite aware of the extent to which lying is socially tolerated. Call that assumption C. Thus if A, B, and C hold, Outcome 1 is not plausible.
Outcomes 2 and 3 are plausible by these assumptions. With a further assumption, Outcome 3 becomes the most likely:
D) Liars who lie about their lying will claim greater honesty than necessary
The short version is that liars may be expected to claim to be more honest than the honest will claim for themselves.
Now, if groups P and Q lie with the same frequency, you might see a difference in their self-reported frequency based on differing calibrations of social acceptability. Another variable here could be a difference in the proclivity of each group to lie when anonymous, which I suppose to be related to the extent to which the members of the group lie to convince themselves.
Therefore, if a survey shows that Group Q lies significantly more often than Group P, these are plausible causes:
* P & Q have similar frequencies, but P has a lower assessment of what is socially acceptable
* P & Q have similar frequencies, but Q is more willing to accurately self-report in anonymous situations
* P actually lies more frequently than Q, and P lies about lying
I reject as a plausible cause the linear explanation: that Q lies more than P. We are discussing relative rates of lying about lying, after all.
The aforementioned Science Proves It! survey, however, reports that men lie 3 times a day, and women only 2. Statistical significance be damned; a difference of two or three lies per day is trivial and uninteresting. We are, thank Odysseus, free to continue with the prejudice that women lie more than men.
I have refrained from introducing some further factors until now because they pertain to the sanity of the individuals.
1) the person is not aware of consciously and intentionally lying, while still perpetrating falsehoods.
2) the person consciously and intentionally lies, but has an extremely poor model of social norms.
3) the person consciously and intentionally lies, understands and can imitate social normality, and simply does not care. This is psychopathy as depicted in The Mask of Sanity.
In my experience, (1) is the base experience of most females. Even fairly well-tamed women do this. The subconscious has some sort of interrupt routine whereby it can pause the consciousness, emit an egregious falsehood, and yield control back to the consciousness, which does not recognize that anything out of the ordinary has occurred.
(2) is characterized more by the extreme poverty of the social model than by the willingness to lie. In Vox Day’s socio-sexual hierarchy, (2) is the experience of the Sigma or Omega when practicing to deceive.
(3) is outright freakishly weird. You should read the case studies in The Mask of Sanity. The author’s tentative attempt at explaining the behavior of the subjects is interesting, but not necessary, and I recommend skipping over any of his attempts to elucidate until after you’ve read all the case studies.
Filed under Feral Females, Reason
A Logical Progression to Swearing Fealty?
Mucius Scaevola asked, in response to my comment on his blog, “would you then believe that human faith has a logical progression, or is it so manifold as to be fully indescribable?”
I can answer that question on my terms, but you wouldn’t find it helpful. Faith, as I’m defending it, is simply the fact that I have sworn allegiance to some person. This isn’t merely splitting hairs: if you go through the Greek scriptures and replace every instance of “believe”, “belief”, and “faith” with the appropriate variant of “fealty” or “loyalty”, you end up with a very different form of religion. The line of human demarcation is not (parable of the sheep and the goats notwithstanding) whether you did good or bad, it is whether you swore and kept fealty to Jesus of Nazareth.
N.B.: Some brands of Christians have funny arguments about whether apostasy is even possible.
If you’ll accept those terms, I think the question you want to ask is more along the lines of: “Is there a logical progression that gets a human to swear fealty to a notional Valfather and creator?”
There can be. By their accounts, the gradual conversions of atheists Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Clive Staples Lewis followed a logical path until the tipping point, where they each report receiving some sort of nudge over the edge.
The conversion of a modern atheist writer, John C. Wright, also led down a recognizably similar path, except that at the edge he got snarky and dare-prayed God to give him a sign of His existence. Upon which, Wright writes, he had a heart attack, at the hospital was relieved of pain by his wife’s prayers, and received a series of visions that convinced him of the truth of not merely Christianity, but of full-blown Roman Catholicism. It could be regarded as convenient that he is under orders not to disclose the content of the visions to the public.
Thus in my cosmology, vehement atheists can find their own damned way to water, but they have to get splashed (if not dunked) before they’ll take a drink.
I suspect that merely dispassionate unbelievers don’t require the surprise wetting at the end. Reason, enough skepticism to doubt even your doubts, and an honest approach to ancient history can get you quite a long way down the narrow path.
Filed under Odysseus
Harding University encourages miscegenation
Attention, white Church of Christ parents: Harding University wants your daughters to mix with Negroes.
Try Abilene Christian University instead. They’ll hook your girls up with guitar-playing Nordics in flip-flops. 
Filed under Race
Moldbug quotes Skinny Puppy
In a discussion about communism. Hands up who’s reactionary and likes Skinny Puppy?
Filed under Well Spoken
Perfect Injustice
A free paraphrase of Glaucon, in The Republic:
The extreme of injustice is to appear just when one is actually not. Thus our idea of a perfectly unjust woman must include this perfection of injustice: she must be allowed to do her worst and yet to cloak herself in the name of innocence. Whenever she stumbles, she always lands on her feet. Should any of her unjust deeds come to light, she can easily explain them away. She has force on her side, to any extent force is needed, because the rich and powerful will defend her.
Filed under Uncategorized
Whorish, despondent, and defiant
In the comments to my favorite personal work of cruelty, a woman asks:
Just out of curiosity, is there any way, in your cosmology, for a single woman to be acceptable at all, ever? Or is one simply doomed to being whorish, despondent, and defiant?
“Whorish, despondent, and defiant” is a great turn of phrase. Pity that the rest of the question is such a quintessentially feminine mess.
I’m very pleased with my response, and I hope you will be, too:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman who is a writer, must be whorish, despondent, and defiant.
That should make some pretty little heads asplode with incomprehension.
Filed under Well Spoken
Whiskey is up to no good
In case anyone’s still listening to Whiskey, note this bit of buffoonery:
Jews are about 2% of voters in the 2008 election according to Fox. Jewish “control” is laughable….
Filed under Uncategorized
A Gristly Metaphor
Marriage is a joint. Man and woman are the bones. Their affection for each other forms the articular cartilage. Copulation is the synovial fluid.
Resuscitating dead words
Our enemies, the progressives and looters, have destroyed many words. But not in a dramatically sinister, Orwellian way; no, these feckless twats are transparent and screechy. Men of the Right have long amused themselves by pointing out how silly the Lefties are in their use of words like “racist”, “bigot”, “fascist”, etc.
The situation with “rape” is similar, but worse, but comical. In Mala Fide published a piece today about the 20 different varieties of rape. In this list, the author distinguishes actual violent forced sexual penetration from the other flavors by calling it “rape-rape”. I suppose this construct arises from the same instinct that has teenage girls asking each other whether they like-like a boy, or just like him.
Whatever the source, this is a useful tool for resuscitating the original meanings of words. Rape-rape we have already seen. I propose these others:
gay-gay: lively or merry
“You know, the coal miners didn’t feel so gay-gay during the Gay-gay Nineties.”
“I love your new sundress! It’s so light and gay-gay.”
fascist-fascist: authoritarian nationalist with socializing tendencies
“Reactionaries may be fascist, but inside every progressive is a little fascist-fascist waiting to emerge like Athena from the head of Zeus.”
slut-slut: a woman who fornicates. As opposed to “slut”, which is a woman who fornicates with an order of magnitude more men than a slut-slut.
“Summer’s not a slut! She’s only had sex with ten men, and none of it was anal. Sure she’s a slut-slut, but who isn’t these days? Ugly Christian prudes, I suppose.”
racist-racist: someone who believes that other races are inferior and should be violently subjugated, if not wiped out. As opposed to “racist”, which is someone who has noticed that Negroes smell different than whites.
curvy-curvy, voluptous-voluptuous, junoesque-junoesque, etc.: describes a healthy, non-obese woman with a pleasing curvy shape and a large rack
pervert-pervert: a homosexual, peeping tom, or secret transvestite; as opposed to “pervert”, which now refers to furries, coprophiliacs, and other denizens of deviantART and livejournal.
pearl-necklace-pearl-necklace: a string of pearls intended to be worn around the neck for decorative purposes.
Filed under Well Spoken
