Jim's Blog

With assistance from Gamergate.

Hugo awards controversy

(Actually they dominated the short list, so it is not over yet, but the final outcome is pretty much baked in now)-

Politically correct science fiction simply is not science fiction, none of it, not a single recent Hugo award winner until now, because it continually lectures us on the latest issue, even if those delivering the lecture are supposedly martian elves, thus is always about the present place and the present time, and the martian elf costumes are less than skin deep.

All recent Hugo award winners have been boring tedious lectures spitting on their audience as racist and sexist, which is why Hugo award winners of fifty years ago are still today massively outselling recent Hugo award winners.

By the way, we don’t drag gays to death behind pickup trucks. That is a completely false and malign accusation. That would be lower class, demotic, and democratic. We take them out to sea, till we get to where the currents run offshore to the middle of the pacific, then blindfold them, and make them walk the plank to celebrate the traditions of our colonialist predecessors who so gloriously founded the British empire. It is much more dignified. (Were you wondering why there are so few old gays? Now you know.)

Moldbug is a big fan of Carlyle. Carlyle is a big fan of Cromwell.

Well I am a big fan of Cromwell also, but Carlyle takes Cromwell’s Christianity seriously. If Carlyle was around today, I would have the exact same quarrel with him as I have with B.

Reading Carlyle on Cromwell, Carlyle takes it as simple fact that the Puritans were very sincere and strong believers in God, which obviously they were – but declines to inquire as to why this sincere and strong faith in God increased dramatically with every election, until Cromwell made himself supreme, whereupon it evaporated like Marxism in the Soviet Union.

A striking thing about this simple and strong faith is that Carlyle shows us that they are always talking about the goodies, about who gets Church of England sinecures. Being simple and strong believers in God, they believed that the goodies should go to simple and strong believers in God, like themselves, and were homicidally indignant when the goodies went to more worldly men, men they indignantly accused of being interested in mere goodies. Carlyle enthusiastically endorses the passionate and angry language with which they expressed this indignation at the worldly concern of those who wanted Church of England sinecures merely for the money and power, rather than wanting them for the greater glory of God.

The Puritans focus on the next world resulted in remarkably passionate and intense focus on the distribution of state and quasi state jobs in this one. Carlyle reports, approvingly, a bunch of incidents where puritans acted like a mob of apes. One expects leftists to act like animals, since they identify with subhumans, but it is disturbing to see Christians act like leftists. Puritanism, to judge by the activities described by Carlyle, was almost entirely about jobs for the boys, and to the objective of getting jobs for the boys, they brought out the mob, made alliances with far against near (Englishmen using Scots against Englishmen) and became startlingly enthusiastic about equality and social justice.

The social justice puritans were outflanking Cromwell, being holier than he. But he put a stop to that.

A religion is a synthetic tribe. (I use the term religion broadly to include things like Marxism and progressivism.) Being a synthetic tribe, useful for shaking down smaller tribes and those less cohesive, thus religion and state naturally become one. A state can hardly exist except it propagates and enforces an official belief system, in other words, something suspiciously like a religion.

Membership of the state apparatus for propagating its official beliefs is lucrative and high prestige, thus if the official belief system is not already a religion, it will be taken over by an organized group of sincere believers in one thing or another, taken over by a religion. If you have open entry into the priesthood (also known as community organizers), you wind up with the most sincere and extreme believers organizing against the slightly less sincere and extreme believers, an endlessly escalating sequence of conspiratorial takeovers by ever holier people, endlessly taking over the State system for propagating official beliefs – in our case, high status universities are endlessly turbulent, endlessly going further left, and endlessly dragging the rest of society along with them.

Stable long lived states have some mechanism against this. The Hebrews had a hereditary priesthood. Japanese shrines were and are private property, even though it is a state religion, and you cannot easily whip up new and competing shrines. Pagan Icelandic shrines were private property, and again, new shrines were not permitted. You could buy your way into the cartel, but you were not allowed to out holy them.

A lot of reactionaries daydream about the dissolution of the universities. It is plausible, indeed likely, that the universities will be dissolved in the quite near future. When the tail wags the dog, surgical tail removal becomes increasingly likely. Leftism can go on getting ever lefter for a while longer, but universities cannot go on spending ever more money, becoming ever more expensive, taking up ever more of people’s time, and becoming an ever greater pain in the neck for the Pentagon and the State Department.

Such dissolution would not necessarily in itself result in the abolition of state supported official belief, and abolition of the wealth, privilege, status, and power that comes from controlling the system of state supported official belief. Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries, but a hundred years later the problem was back and worse than ever.

The system for propagating official state belief is an attractive nuisance, and attractive nuisances need to be fenced. A libertarian would like to abolish it, but fencing is easier. I would like to see true separation of information and state, which is to say, true separation of Church and state no matter how religion redefines itself to be not religion, but this is utopian. It is a lot easier to have an Archbishop and a Grand Inquisitor to stop the process of mutation to ever greater holiness. We also need to make positions in the system semi hereditary or private property in order the bribe the indolence of the clergy. We need clergy to have the power and the incentive to keep out those holier than themselves, just as we need a King to keep people out of politics.

B complains that I use the word “Holy” to mean “Screaming mob of chimpanzees hurling their feces and biting anything they can bite, including themselves”, but no one was holier in B’s sense than the puritans, as Carlyle quite correctly tells us, yet when goodies were in reach, they became a screaming mob of chimpanzees hurling their feces and biting anything they could bite, including themselves, as for example the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in the prelude to the Bishop’s wars.

Japan is decadent and is committing suicide with impressive grace and style. This is intentional Cathedral and MacArthur policy.

It does decadence very well, and decadence is attractive and entertaining. A little poison, every now and then, makes for an agreeable life, and a lot of poison, in the end, makes for an agreeable death.

In the course of watching more anime that I should, I have observed that the ideas projected in anime are invariably corrupting and self destructive, and probably a major cause of Japan’s epidemic of shut ins who live in their mother’s basement, watching hentai and playing video games all day.

Been watching various Japanese anime which increasingly indicate a terrible testosterone deficit in Japan, and probably are part of the cause of the deficit.

I recently randomly sampled an episode from the anime series Cat Girl Planet. Science fiction harem anime about cat girls. Sounds good.

Episode five, starting in the middle. Big pirate battleship whose all female crew wear a cross between sexy maid costumes and sexy pirate costumes.

They are under attack by umpteen different and mutually hostile groups, among them a couple of pirate girls wearing bunny costumes and teensy weensy itsy bitsy bikinis, two girls wearing powered battle armor suits, with almost identical uniforms but belonging to different and opposed factions, a bunch of identical robots, and probably maybe some more factions

Oh, I forgot, also under attack by the male protagonist and his super powered cat girl friend.

Unfortunately, her super powers, and her mind, are gone, because she is in heat. To restore her to normal, she needs to be laid, but the protagonist, the only male around, fails to take the hint.

Maybe I forgot them because they fail to do anything brave or manly unlike all the other teams.

Much dramatic action girl combat ensues, action girl on action girl. Finally the big confrontation.

Whereupon the male protagonist, the only male on the entire ship, and if he was not surrounded by extremely feminine girls, you would think him a girl also, proceeds to lecture people with moral lesson of the day – which moral lesson does not seem particularly relevant, but everyone is so impressed by this that they stop fighting.

The protagonist fails to do anything brave or manly, fails to hit on any girls, and fails to respond appropriately when girls hit on him.

The story line requires that the cat girl be restored to her normal self by the end of this episode or the start of the next. I suppose a bad guy is probably going to wind up servicing her off screen, demonstrating that manliness and hitting on girls is bad, but was not inclined to watch the rest of this series to test this theory.

Watched Btooom!

The protagonist has never hit on a girl, never intends to attempt to hit on a girl, lives in his mother’s basement playing video games all day. Never intends to get a real life woman or a real job. His single mum is getting increasingly pissed with this.

We see a flashback to his schooldays:

Evil horrible oppressive to women horrible sexist horrible bully at school learns that the protagonist loves some schoolgirl from afar. From very far. Evil Bully tells protagonist that evil bully is interested pumping and dumping that same schoolgirl, but he will hold back so that protagonist can score some sex.

Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to man up and hit on the girl. You will get no sex if you take no action he tells him.

Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to get moving or evil bully will hit on girl.

Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to get a move on, damn it.

Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully hits on girl, pumps her and dumps her. She cries a lot. Oh the horrible outrage.

Protagonist savagely attacks evil bully. Evil bully declines to fight back, even though he could easily beat the crap out of the protagonist. This is probably even more humiliating for the protagonist than being beaten up. The girl beloved from afar never has any idea why the protagonist attacked the evil bully.

It is perfectly obvious that the evil bully is going to become a successful man in a high status job when he grows up, and the protagonist is going to grow up to be a total loser. Further, the evil bully is not evil at all. He is mentoring the protagonist, trying to give protagonist a little bit of the fathering that he has never known and desperately needs, to help the protagonist to not become the total loser that he is growing up to become.

In the Btooom! universe fathers are invariably evil and a bad influence, and children are better off without them.

In the protagonist’s video game universe his player character has an in game wife. His fellow players tell him there are no women on the internet, and the player playing his wife is probably a fat fifty year old male. His in game wife declines requests for her real life identity, leading the main character to suspect “she” probably is a fat fifty year old male.

By an extremely improbable plot contrivance, he gets thrown into a real life adventure with the player playing his wife, who turns out to be an incredibly hot chick very much resembling her in game avatar.

Aaaand – still won’t hit on her. In fact, despite having completely heroic adventures, he remains the total loser he always was, never growing an inch.

I originally decided to watch Btooom! because of an online review that it oppressed and degraded the female love interest, though in fact the male protagonist is horribly castrated, and is incessantly bullied and oppressed by the female love interest, on whom he never makes a move.

Instant girlfriend plot, in that they wind up living together in an abandoned building. He risks his life to get food. She does not cook. Building is indescribably filthy. She does not clean. She treats him with absolute and total lack of respect. And did I mention the lack of cooking and cleaning? Good. I will mention it again just in case you forget.

He never hits on her. She never does any housework for him. The place where they hang out continues to look like a homeless squat. Skipping forward to the end of the series, he still has not grown an inch. At the end of the series, she assumes the position (on a couch that is no cleaner than when they first arrived) but instead of screwing her, or better, telling her to clean the couch so that it is fit for screwing on, he talks to the demons in his head.

Now I can see there is a moral argument for him refraining from slapping her around and telling her “I saved your life umpteen times per episode, so put out, woman” but she desperately needs to be slapped around and told to do some cooking, cleaning, and lose the bad attitude. Just as the protagonist would have been a whole lot better off if evil bully / mentor had beaten the crap out of him, she would have been a lot better off if the protagonist had beaten the crap out of her.

The moral universe of both animes is that masculinity is bad, the behaviors that lead to success are bad, male sexuality is disgusting and evil, while female sexuality is pure and chaste. Fathers are absent and/or evil in both animes.