Red Pill in Fiction: This n That

(1) In Ocean’s Eleven (George Clooney version):

Danny: Does he make you laugh?
Tess: He doesn’t make me cry, Danny.

Oh, this is just pure pussy bait! (*) When they were together, he made her laugh and he made her cry. So two items here: One is, emotional roller coaster. Chick crack. The other is that he’s an asshole. We don’t know why he made her cry— I’m guessing by cheating on her— but it’s enough that he did. He’s no good! He doesn’t care for her! Her treats her badly! You can just see that one line setting off the Bad Boy Alert for the women in the audience, and having them leaving wet spots on their seats. Very deftly done: Two terse lines of dialogue. That’s all that the chicks in the audience need to get that there’s some sort of soap-opera-y relationship backstory.

* I was going to write “pussy crack,” but that would’ve pulled up the wrong mental image.

(2) Random red pill item: Actor Larry Hagman said he rarely got any female fan mail when he played a nice guy on I Dream of Genie, but got tons when he played the total bastard J.R. on Dallas.

(Those two characters were so different that I never even realized they were the same actor until I read that quote.)

(3) Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, a trilogy I strongly recommend if you like Stephenson. It’s the most “Neal Stephenson” of his works that I’ve read, i.e. stylistically dense but always intelligent and funny.

Page 374 et seq.: In 1683 a “vagabond”— that is, a roaming criminal adventurer— named Jack is wandering around in the chaos of the siege of Vienna. In a Turkish officer’s tent he happens upon a young English woman, Eliza; she’d been captured at sea as a child. After some back and forth:

“You talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”
“Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”

Jack prefers not to get bogged down with companions unless they can help out in a fight, but eventually agrees to let her travel with him. But he warns her:

“If we make it as far as Paris… and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble—one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms—cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience—”
“Have you had many women, Jack?”
“—pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal—calculated moods—slowness to get underway—murky complaints about female trouble—”
“Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month…”
“Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”

Stephenson provides a good list of some standard shit tests here.

And on page 389, on one-itis:

Eliza seemed impressed. Jack was gratified by this—a bad sign. No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

Later in their adventures Jack gets outrageously beta— like, after Eliza harpoons him to a mast (long story) and he is still in luuuuurv with her— so this is definitely not an unqualified endorsement of Stephenson on women. But he does display flashes of insight here and there.

(4) In Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, some conversation among Leggy Starlitz, his daughter Zeta, and Viktor, a minor criminal. Starlitz is a gray-market hustler who’s always working some semi-legal scam. His daughter Zeta, 11, has been raised by her mother and her mother’s lesbian lover until a crisis forces them to hand Zeta over to Starlitz. She’s been with him about a week, as he drags her around on various pieces of semi-underworld business. In Istanbul one of Starlitz’s contacts is a young Russian man named Viktor. The three of them are at a cafe and Viktor steps away for a moment:

“Dad, is Viktor a nice guy?”

“No.”

“I knew that,” said Zeta triumphantly. “I just knew it. I mean, I get it about Viktor now. Viktor is the guy that Mom One and Mom Two never wanted me to meet. Right?”

“Right… He’s every mother’s nightmare.”

Gah! Bad move, Starlitz! Should have downplayed Viktor’s Bad Boy cred so that your daughter finds him boring. Don’t confirm the “dangerous bad boy” thing, for fuck’s sake! The correct response is something like, “He tries to be a criminal tough guy, but just can’t swing it. He’s always getting beaten up and outwitted by the real criminals.” Something like that.

Zeta put her elbows on the table. “Dad, can I tell you something? Viktor is just the coolest guy, Dad. Viktor Bilibin is just the coolest, dreamiest, gangster guy. He has such amazing eyes. They look like my pet snake’s.” (LOL.)

Starlitz considered this artless confession. At first glance this was a very alarming development, but she wasn’t his own child for nothing. “You don’t need Viktor,” Starlitz informed her…

Viktor rejoins them. He and Starlitz usually speak in Russian, which Zeta doesn’t know, but she has an uncanny ability to suss out the gist of their conversations. Viktor tells Starlitz in Russian,

“Mehmet Ozbey is dead.”

Starlitz laughed. “I saw Ozbey last night.”

Viktor went pale. “I know he’s dead. I had Ozbey hit,” he insisted. “Nobody could have survived that.”

“Dad,” Zeta said thoughfully, “did Viktor kill somebody?”

“No.”

“He thinks he killed somebody.”

“There’s a big difference.”

Viktor lifted his right hand with two fingers outstretched and his thumb as a revolver hammer. “I killed somebody,” he told her in English, his voice resonant and spooky. “He wanted to kill me, because I know too much. He put me on his hit list. So, I took revenge on him. I had him liquidated. Boom-boom-bang.”

“Wow,” Zeta marveled, eyes like saucers and goose bumps all over her arms. “That’s so corrupt!”

“It was the naked justice of the steets,” Viktor intoned.

“He’s full of it,” Starlitz said.

Much better response.

(5) This wouldn’t normally be categorized as fiction, but I don’t know where else to put it. I’m flipping through this book that my woman has from college: Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, edited by two chicks. I randomly open it to page 77 and start skimming. On page 78 we get this:

Tactile sensations play an important part in Beatrice’s visions: She feels God’s presence passing through her whole body; the Lord pierces her soul with the fire of His love, as with the point of a flamboyant sword, drawing her heart to His. The blood of Christ’s wounds flows into her soul.

As I’ve noted before, women are always being penetrated by men in female-authored material. Interestingly, this happens a lot more than male explorers thrust themselves forcefully into receptive virgin lands or whatever, in material written by men.

(Thus when this crazy bitch claimed that the desire to settle space is just men’s desire to grab the asteroid belt by the pussy or whatever, I think that, aside from garden-variety insanity, she was projecting.)

Index page for my Red Pill in Fiction posts:
https://neurotoxinweb.wordpress.com/red-pill-in-fiction/

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WordPress Bans Heartiste

If you have a Net presence, STREISAND the fuckers.

For those who might not know, Chateau Heartiste, originally Roissy in DC, was the major Game/red-pill blogger. In recent years he became more political, as befits someone who has seen through the poisonous lies of feminism.

And the many, many, other lies that are constantly spewed at us.

For WordPress to ban him is either a very bold or very desperate move by the left. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

In any case, they have their censorship. Let’s Streisand them and make sure they pay the maximum price for it.

Miscellany 14: ynallecsiM gnillevarT-emiT

(6) Where did the name of this blog come from, anyway?

I’m not really sure. Aside from just thinking it was a cool word, and a possible band name (when I was younger), it may have been partly inspired by Anders Sandberg’s comment on his website, on his favorite metal:

“Mercury. Reflective, heavy, quick moving, poisons your brain.”

(5)

Both parties lie and have always lied, but lie for different reasons. Since Democrats represent the left, and the left is the group of the incompetent and undeserving clawing their way to power over their natural betters, they lie pathologically and universally about the world itself in a nonstop attempt to invert or subvert the natural order that would normally place them at the bottom.

—A commenter at Vox Popoli.

(4) A piece of unintentional comedy in the comments trail at aramblingcollective, April 2019:

“We need more self-build collectives, with a government land-fund and a development agency like the old Housing Corporation – but better. That would also require design guidelines to promote aesthetic diversity”

These people are absolutely beyond satire.

(3) Razorfist a.k.a. rageaholic, is hilarious.

Here he is on early 20th century pulp comic hero Solomon Kane:

(Video link hat tip to John C. Wright.)

Razorfist sums up Kane as a “buckle-shoed badass,” a “sunken-eyed pallid Puritan fanatic in a felt slouch hat and form-fitting black Quaker garb, expertly wielding a rapier, a dagger, and a pair of fuckin’ flintlock pistols.” Kane is a kind of “supernatural bounty hunter,” but at least as often he goes up against foes whose supernatural nature is coated in a veneer of pseudo-scientific bafflegab.

Purely natural villains also abound, e.g. when Kane happens across a girl who has been killed, and hunts down the “Franco-Belgian fuckbags” (LOL) who did it.

SolKane1

I’d never heard of Solomon Kane before watching this Razorfist vid, but watching it instantly made me want to strap on a brace of pistols and some sort of blade weapon and stride about the world in a wide-brimmed hat, dispensing justice at sword-point. If it doesn’t inspire the same reaction in you, then check your pulse, because I think you might be dead.

“A damn fine movie” is Razorfist’s assessment of the 2009 Solomon Kane flick. But he’s pissed that it wasn’t released in the US until 2012, and condemns farming out the distribution to “a beret-bedecked gaggle of Euro-trash art fags,” LOL. (No hate to my European readers, bitches.)

SolKane2
Just another day at the office.

You have to watch Razorfist to believe him. He’s wonderfully profane, with a swear-to-non-swear ratio of about 600, which spills out of him because he’s just so fucking enthused, motherfuckers (see, now I’m doing it) about the character, the stories, and the pulps in general.

(2) Red pill in reality: I recently read this 2014 piece on asshole Feinstein because it appeared on Anon Conserv circa September 16, 2018:

What’s of interest is the red pill item in the last paragraph:

A serial killer “whose swagger and looks once garnered courtroom groupies, including one misguided female juror who fell in love with Richard yet voted to convict him.”

Fell in love with a serial killer. Jesus! Well, at least she voted to convict.

(1) In NBC “think piece,” raging feminist loon says space exploration is colonialist rape, etc.

(Via this guy.)

Actual title: The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement

Photo caption: Houston, we have a problem. And it’s the patriarchy.

You really can’t tell any more whether this sort of thing is sincere or just the media organization trying to drum up hits by being as idiotic as possible.

Other quotes:

The desire to colonize — to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will — is a patriarchal one.

And

It is the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything — and everyone — in their line of vision is theirs for the taking. You know, just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the pussy.

If this doesn’t seem to make sense, just take another bong hit. Repeat as needed.

I’m more of a Dale Gribble kind of guy: “Earth First! Make Mars our bitch!”

Bonus: The Author Bio informs us that “Marcie Bianco is a writer and the Editorial and Communications Manager of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.”

Of course she is.

Auto-Generated Wokeness!

Why waste time thinking up rhetoric to prove your wokeness and accuse people you dislike of thoughtcrime? Not only does thinking take time, it violates the entire spirit of social justice warriorhood.

Software to the rescue! The next time you’re getting your ass kicked by logic and facts, just use one of these convenient examples of PC rhetoric, randomly generated by the magic of computers!

The Gauss code is provided below as a public service. Here is a sample of its output:

Victims of Islamophobia are continually raped by frat boys.
Those whose experiences are denied have historically been devalued by heternormativity.
Homosexuals are hyper-offended by institutionalized sexism.
Wymyn are offended by institutionalized racism.
Lesbians are super-offended by fat-shaming. LOL, I’ll bet.
Those with alternative body types are continually raped by white men. They wish.
Transgendered persons are continually raped by those who deny their own privilege.
Victims of Islamophobia are silenced by institutionalized Islamophobia.
Victims of Islamophobia feel threatened by rape culture. Self-hating?
Homosexuals feel unsafe in the presence of frat boys. Believe me, homosexuals, you have nothing to worry about.
Lesbians are victims of genocide perpetrated by self-hatred caused by the broader culture.
People of color are hyper-offended by rape culture.
Homosexuals have historically been devalued by a culture that portrays heterosexuality as ‘normal’. This one actually “makes sense,” to the extent that any SJW rhetoric makes sense.
People of color are silenced by homophobia.
People whose voices have been silenced feel threatened by rape culture.
Transgendered persons are ultra-offended by fat-shaming.
Victims are continually raped by rape culture.
Those whose experiences are denied are triggered by self-hatred caused by the broader culture. This is a great all-purpose piece of SJW rhetoric. Just copy and paste into any comment thread involving identity politics of any sort!
Oppressed minorities are mega-offended by racists.
Victims of Islamophobia are mega-offended by heternormativity. Not really, no.
Victims feel unsafe in the presence of fat-shaming.
Transgendered persons are victims of genocide perpetrated by incursions into their safe spaces.
Wymyn are victims of genocide perpetrated by exclusionary rhetoric.
Homosexuals feel unsafe in the presence of racism.
People of color are super-offended by those who deny their own privilege.
Those with alternative body types are triggered by transphobes.
People whose voices have been silenced are continually raped by exclusionary rhetoric. Another all-purpose one.
Wymyn are ultra-offended by homophobia.

GAUSS CODE:

To use this you must have Gauss, obviously, and you must do a global find and replace to replace each “(lessthan)” with the mathematical symbol for less than. I couldn’t include that symbol here because the html will interpret it as an attempt to open an html tag.

new;
output file=c:\randomPC.out reset;
cls;

maxval=2;

i=1;
do while i(lessthan)maxval;

def=rndu(1,1); @ Generate a random number. @
h=def*1.2;

if h(lessthan)0.1;
“Wymyn”;
abc=9;
elseif h(lessthan)0.2;
“People of color”;
abc=19;
elseif h(lessthan)0.3;
“Lesbians”;
abc=12;
elseif h(lessthan)0.4;
“Historically oppressed groups”;
abc=33;
elseif h(lessthan)0.5;
“Oppressed minorities”;
abc=24;
elseif h(lessthan)0.6;
“People whose voices have been silenced”;
abc=42;
elseif h(lessthan)0.7;
“Victims”;
abc=11;
elseif h(lessthan)0.8;
“Transgendered persons”;
abc=25;
elseif h(lessthan)0.9;
“Homosexuals”;
abc=15;
elseif h(lessthan)1;
“Victims of Islamophobia”;
abc=27;
elseif h(lessthan)1.1;
“Those with alternative body types”;
abc=37;
else;
“Those whose experiences are denied”;
abc=38;
endif;

locate(i,abc-2);

fex=rndu(1,1); @ Generate another random number. @
f=fex*14;

if f(lessthan)1;
“have always been oppressed by”;
qrs=33;
elseif f(lessthan)2;
“are silenced by”;
qrs=19;
elseif f(lessthan)3;
“feel unsafe in the presence of”;
qrs=34;
elseif f(lessthan)4;
“feel threatened by”;
qrs=22;
elseif f(lessthan)5;
“have historically been devalued by”;
qrs=38;
elseif f(lessthan)6;
“have had their culture appropriated by”;
qrs=42;
elseif f(lessthan)7;
“are victims of genocide perpetrated by”;
qrs=42;
elseif f(lessthan)8;
“are continually raped by”;
qrs=28;
elseif f(lessthan)9;
“are triggered by”;
qrs=20;
elseif f(lessthan)10;
“are offended by”;
qrs=19;
elseif f(lessthan)11;
“are super-offended by”;
qrs=25;
elseif f(lessthan)12;
“are hyper-offended by”;
qrs=25;
elseif f(lessthan)13;
“are ultra-offended by”;
qrs=25;
else;
“are mega-offended by”;
qrs=24;
endif;

locate(i,abc+qrs-5);

he=rndu(1,1); @ Generate another random number. @
hf=he*2.4;

if hf(lessthan)0.1;
s4= “white men.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.2;
s4= “the heteropatriarchy.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.3;
s4= “a culture of silence.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.4;
s4= “rape culture.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.5;
s4= “heternormativity.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.6;
s4= “religious bigotry.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.7;
s4= “misogyny.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.8;
s4= “racism.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)0.9;
s4= “institutionalized racism.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1;
s4= “institutionalized sexism.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.1;
s4= “denial of their Title IX rights.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.2;
s4= “institutionalized Islamophobia.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.3;
s4= “homophobia.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.4;
s4= “transphobes.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.5;
s4= “angry white men.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.6;
s4= “a culture that portrays heterosexuality as ‘normal’.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.7;
s4= “fat-shaming.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.8;
s4= “racists.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)1.9;
s4= “those who deny their own privilege.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)2;
s4= “mansplaining.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)2.1;
s4= “exclusionary rhetoric.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)2.2;
s4= “incursions into their safe spaces.”;
elseif hf(lessthan)2.3;
s4= “frat boys.”;
else;
s4= “self-hatred caused by the broader culture.”;
endif;

s4;

i=i+1;
endo;

Miscellany 13: In Soviet Union, Miscellany reads YOU!

(1) This judicial pick exemplifies my concern about some of Trump’s judicial nominees. This one, Bridget Bade, even got the approval of Dianne Feinstein, for fuck’s sake! That’s not a good sign.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-picked-ninth-circuit-judge-clears-last-hurdle-to-confirmation-with-more-in-the-pipeline

(2) That said, it is still true that concern trolls are worthless cunts (see here, for example.). I know, it’s obvious, but here’s yet another point about them:

If Trump says, “I’ll build a wall” and the wall isn’t built three seconds later, the concern trolls start screaming, “He was lying! He never intended to build a wall!”
(This one is particularly stupid now that he has appropriated the funds and declared an emergency to build it.)

But if Trump says, “I’ll invade Venezuela” and Venezuela isn’t invaded three seconds later, they don’t say, “He was lying! He never intended to invade Venezuela!” They shriek “Oh my God! He’s going to invade Venezuela and get us involved in an unnecessary war!”

There are detectable differences between concerns expressed sincerely and ones that aren’t. The concern troll crowd is obviously not sincere. They say we should take him at his word only when they hope it can be used to lower morale of people on the right.

(3) Menelaos Apostolou. Sexual selection under parental choice: the evolution of human mating behaviour. 2014.

There’s nothing else about this available except a short abstract. The point is, people are starting to grok that evolved sexual preference evolved in the presence of parental constraints on behavior. In particular, female mating was a probabilistic function of both what the girl wanted and what her parents wanted. (That is still true in many Muslim societies today.) I have no specific point to assert, just that we need to allow for the possibility that this was significant as we continue to make progress in the evo psych of sexual psychology and behavior.

(4) Amusing gif with Trump as Neo:

Especially apt now that the Mueller report has ended the Deep State-media conspiracy to overthrow the President. They’re still trying, of course, but at this point it’s just because they can’t help themselves.

(5) Beautiful Women in the 1970s and Now

I recently watched Rollerball (the 1975 original, not the 2002 re-make/sequel).

Wow, the music!
Per Wikipedia:
• Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor,
•The Adagio in G minor by Albinoni/Giazotto,
• The Largo from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

And the girls! The brunette at the hero’s ranch… the “I’m not a librarian” girl. She’s fucking gorgeous! … and the hero’s ex-wife, who shows up in the second half. Her cheekbones are like wrecking balls!

Why don’t we see girls like this in movies or TV any more? We don’t. And that worries me. Have endocrine disruptors, the Pill, and various meds in our water actually fucked up our physiology? Seriously, watch this movie (stills on the Net are not the same; don’t bother) and check out all the women, but especially the “not a librarian” girl and the main character’s ex-wife. And tell me if you’ve seen women like this in pop culture any time in the last two decades. I haven’t.

Beautiful women, yes, of course. But beautiful women who look like those girls? No. No time this century.

This is really, I’m not kidding, weird.

(6) People figure out how to steer a “self-driving” car into oncoming traffic. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/researchers-trick-tesla-autopilot-into-steering-into-oncoming-traffic/

“Researchers have devised a simple attack that might cause a Tesla to automatically steer into oncoming traffic under certain conditions. The proof-of-concept exploit works not by hacking into the car’s onboard computing system, but by using small, inconspicuous stickers that trick the Enhanced Autopilot of a Model S 75 into detecting and then following a change in the current lane.”

It’s time to stop the self-driving car thing. Just give it a rest, leftists. We know you want this so you can control our movements. Better solution: Stop being a bunch of totalitarian psychopaths. Then you won’t have to worry about getting strung up on lamp posts in the first place.

International Trade: Oh God, Not This Again

Aright, bitches, the free trade thing.

This is not one of my “issues,” and I incline toward free trade, but the people who create these so-called free-trade deals obviously aren’t setting up free trade, and many of these “elites” (we need a better word for power-mad idiots) have an end-goal of eliminating western populations. They love treaties that destroy jobs held by European-descended people.

But they have much more dangerous ways of working toward that goal, which is why trade is low on my list of priorities. But for those for whom it is a high priority, some advice about debate:

Don’t contest free traders on theory. That’s their strength. Contest them on the thing that actually matters: the practical realities.

Why not take them on in the arena of theory? Because comparative advantage theory is not speculation. Its core proposition is a theorem, like the Pythagorean Theorem. That is, its core conclusion is proven to follow from the premises. We can judge from the amount of chatter that economists devote to it that the core proposition of comparative advantage theory is this:

If two nations have different tradeoffs in production, then there exists the possibility of mutual gains from trade.

(“Tradeoffs in production” means the slope of the production possibilities frontier, which describes a nation’s tradeoffs of one good for another. Like, how many apples they must sacrifice to grow another orange.)

This is the proposition free-traders have in mind when they repeat their mating call, “Ricardo!”

PPF
A production possibilities curve, showing tradeoffs in production.

And how are these gains from trade to be realized? Answer: if two nations have different tradeoffs in production, then it can be proven that they can minimize their joint costs of production… IF they trade in the right way.

The right way is the cost-minimizing way, where “cost” means the cost in terms of other goods you must sacrifice. (E.g., if you switch land from growing apples to growing oranges.) Minimizing costs of output means more output. So produce and export goods of which you’re the low-cost producer. That’s trade according to comparative advantage.

You cannot dispute the if-then statements in bold without looking like a doofus to anyone who is knowledgeable.

So don’t dispute them. If someone tells you, “Here is a triangle that is NOT a right triangle, and the Pythagorean Theorem tells us that…” you should point out that the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t apply if it’s not a right triangle. Don’t dispute the Pythagorean Theorem; you’ll look like an idiot. Dispute its relevance to the matter at hand.

If you want to argue against so-called free trade agreements, here are some points you can make:

1. Verifying what a county’s comparative advantage is, is empirically impossible as a practical matter. Note what the central theorem says and doesn’t say. It says that if countries have different tradeoffs, then there exist some mutually beneficial trading opportunities. It doesn’t say that we know what those opportunities are… let alone that we can guarantee that actual trade is according to those mutually beneficial possibilities.

2. So-called free trade agreements are never actually that. Many people have made this point. They’re managed trade agreements, in which governments tweak the interventions they do in international trade.

Even George F. Will, before he became a contemptible cuck, pointed out when NAFTA was passed that if it were really a free trade agreement it would only be a couple of sentences, not hundreds of pages.

3. The proposition that there exist mutually beneficial gains is a statement about the aggregates of a nation. The theory does not say that all groups within the nation benefit. It leaves open the possibility that one group benefits to the tune of 10 units while another group loses 8, for a total aggregate gain of 2. OK, but if you’re in the group that loses 8 it’s not clear why you would support such a move. This is actually not heterodox, apparently. I once read on some Econo-blog about a (peer-reviewed!) paper that concluded that one group could benefit and another lose, from moving to free trade. I can’t cite the paper(s) off the top of my head, but apparently this has been out there in the literature for years now.

4. The theory says nothing about who captures the gains from trade even on a nation-to-nation level. It could be, in principle, that one nation captures all the benefits from trade and leaves the other nation exactly as well off as it was before. Except that not really, because all the adjustment costs are real costs, and then you never get any benefit. Adjustment costs include e.g. having to move to a new state to get a new job. Ricardian comparative advantage theory totally ignores adjustment costs.

The same point applies if your nation gets a small benefit from adjusting its industries, but the benefit is smaller than the adjustment costs.

* * *

Of course there is a real case against government interventionism in trade. The real case against interventionism is that governments are no more knowledgeable or angelic here than they are in any other area of life. They are ignorant and corrupt assholes, and there’s no reason to let them tell us what we can buy or sell.

Above I pointed out that many of the people who create “free trade deals” hate western populations. Well, giving those same psychopaths power to limit the trade we can do would be even worse than the current situation. In the current pro-free-trade political environment, they at least have to pay some sort of lip service to reducing trade barriers, which has occasionally forced them to actually do such. If we tell them, “Go ahead and control who we can trade with,” they will do exactly that, with great joy and gusto, and it won’t be with our best interests at heart.

If these people ever get the unlimited power they crave, they’ll try to starve us to death, following Stalin’s Ukraine genocide. Part of that attempt will be outlawing food imports. They’re likely to try that anyway, if they think they can get away with it, but for fuck’s sake let’s not make it any easier for them.

But all this is a relatively long-term issue. In the current political situation, worrying about international trade is rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic just after it got hulled by the iceberg. Right now we need to worry about emergencies like immigration and the lawless judiciary. Once we solve those problems, we’ll have all the time in the world to worry about trivia like trade policy.

Holiness Spirals and Wars of Attrition

A crucial concept in understanding our current political situation is holiness spiral. It may be the single most important concept.

A holiness spiral is equivalent, in terms of game theory, to a war of attrition. I know what you’re thinking: “Sure, Neuro, wars of attrition are interesting, but what about all-pay auctions and patent races? Is a holiness spiral game theoretically isomorphic to those also?”

You’re in luck; the answer is Yes, because they are winner-take-all contests.

AttritionWar

Why does that matter? Because once you’re invested in a winner-take-all contest, it is actually rational, in a certain sense, for you to keep putting resources into winning the contest even after the value of winning is lower than the value of the total resources you’ve put into it. No, I’m not crazy; this is well-known in game theory.

A classic example is the “dollar auction.” This can be an auction in which all bidders must pay their bids even if they don’t win (all-pay) or it can be such that only the two highest bidders pay their bids. Business schools have done experiments. A professor of business goes in front of his class and says, “Here’s a dollar bill. I’m going to auction it off. The rules: Highest bidder pays his bid and gets the dollar. Second-highest bidder pays his bid but doesn’t get anything. All lower bids pay nothing and get nothing.”

Some doofus bids a cent. Some other doofus bids 2 cents. And the idiocy has begun! Now that someone has bid 2, the guy who bid 1 is in the following position: If he doesn’t change his bid he loses 1 cent. If he raises his bid to 3 cents he wins the dollar and pays 3 cents, for a net gain of 97 cents. OK, so they’ll bid until one of them has bid 99 cents, then they’ll stop, right?

Nope. Say the bids stand at 98 cents and 99 cents. The guy who bid 98 loses 98 cents if he stands pat. If he bids a dollar he wins and breaks even. So he does that.

OK, now the bidding is done, right?

Nnnnnnnnope.

The guy who currently has a bid of 99 cents loses 99 cents if he stands pat. If he raises his bid to $1.01, then he wins the dollar, for a net loss of 1 cent. That’s better than a net loss of 99 cents.

Hmm. And the other guy? If he stands pat he loses his dollar bid. If he raises his bid to $1.02, he wins the dollar, for a net loss of 2 cents. But that’s better than a net loss of a dollar.

You see where this is going (“To infinity and beyond!”). Not only in theory, but in actual experiments, people do in fact end up paying more than a dollar to win a dollar!

Key features:

• Your outcome depends on where you are relative to the other player. Just knowing your own bid doesn’t tell you whether you’ve won; you have to know the other guy’s bid as well.

• You bear costs whether you win or lose. This is the “all-pay” feature. An all-pay auction is an artificial situation, but consider a war of attrition: some of your soldiers are killed, etc., whether you win or lose. It really is all-pay. Same for patent races: Suppose you spend $0.9 billion on R&D trying to develop a new medicine worth $1 billion, but your competitor is on track to win by spending $1 billion. Win or lose, you pay the R&D costs. It would actually be better to plow another $0.2 billion in, so you’ll “win” the race by paying $1.1 billion.

• Action is sequential: You would never start by bidding $1.02 for a dollar, obviously. But once you’re invested, you have some losses you’d like to recover. So your investment in the contest keeps rising.

So… holiness spirals. If you’re new to this concept, the word “holiness” is ironic here; it means “leftist.” It probably started centuries ago with some totally innocent-sounding thing like, “Let’s expand women’s rights. Why shouldn’t women be allowed to work as secretaries outside the home?” Before you know it, it’s the official position of the Washington Post that no woman should ever go to prison, no matter what crime she commits.

And someone said, reasonably, “Why should it be illegal for men to wear women’s clothes and vice-versa?” (Used to be illegal, apparently.) A century later, male-to-female transvestites are in the women’s bathroom, and a security guard who tries to remove one from the ladies’ room is charged with assault.

What the hell happened? What happened is that some asshole started the political equivalent of an all-pay auction.

Let’s look at holiness spirals in light of the three features above. We want to understand this because that will help us to stop the fucking thing. And a holiness spiral is like an asset bubble: It either keeps advancing or it collapses. So if we stop it, we destroy it.

Holiness spirals:

• Your outcome depends on where you are relative to the other player(s). You can attack people less holy than you, but they can’t effectively attack you. If Fred is the holiest he can say to the mob, “Attack Steve; he’s not holy enough!” But Steve can’t say, “Attack Fred; he’s too holy!” That’s saying, “Attack Fred; he’s too good!” So everyone tries to out-holy everyone else.

• You bear costs whether you win or lose. Say your position is that a man should be allowed to use the ladies’ bathroom. If your policy wins, you (along with the rest of the society, by the way) pay the costs of an insane bathroom policy. But you pay those costs whether or not some other lunatic is saying, “Yeah, AND anyone who objects should be thrown into the hoosegow!” If that guy wins, then there are dudes in the women’s bathroom— as you advocated— plus dissenters are punished. Why did he outflank you to your left? Because while that made the society somewhat more insane, it made him personally safer, since now he is the holiest.

• Action is sequential: You would never start by saying men should be allowed to use the women’s bathroom. Indeed people didn’t start by saying that, historically. But your initial sane position that “There’s no need for laws to enforce gender clothing norms” got outflanked by someone who said something a little more pro-trans. That put you in a less holy position relative to him, so he could attack you, but you couldn’t counter-attack. So you outflanked him with something a little more in that direction. Thus the bidding war. It starts with you saying “I bid one cent for that dollar.” It ends with guards being charged with a crime if they try to keep a man out of the women’s bathroom. Well, that’s not actually where it ends. We’re not done with our holiness spiral yet.

Fighting these fucking disasters.

Above I wrote this: “Say your position is that a man should be allowed to use the ladies’ bathroom. If your policy wins, you (along with the rest of the society, by the way) pay the costs of an insane bathroom policy.”

THIS IS KEY. One of the crucial aspects of all this is that even sane, normal people pay the costs of having trannies in their bathrooms, and women (if the WaPo gets its way) being allowed to commit murder without punishment. (Well, they already are, but the WaPo wants this to be expanded beyond babies.) That means that— unlike the all-pay dollar auction— even people who aren’t participating in the holiness spiral have an incentive to stop it. This mattered e.g., on November 8, 2016 and will matter more as the holiness spiral becomes ever more extreme.

What specific actions can we take? First, we need to spread the awareness of the insanity as far and wide as possible. I do this in various corners of the Net, and everyone on the right should.

Also— and plainly this has already started— we need to ramp up our black knighting. N.B. not black knighting as in Monty Python’s hapless knight, but black knighting as in attacking our enemies under the guise of being holier enemies. For example, when an organization proudly announces on Twitter that it has hired a homosexual female, attack them for not hiring a minority or Muslim homosexual female. This sort of thing happens all the time now, and one can’t tell whether it’s the crazies getting crazier or good guys black knighting. The great thing is precisely that one can’t tell. That’s why it’s effective.

And what is the effect? Simple: It eliminates the safety, and therefore the benefit, of leftward movement. If my proudly announcing that I just hired a white lesbian immediately gets me attacked for not hiring a black lesbian, there’s no safety in that holiness-signaling move, so no reason to do it. Lately, if you just hire a straight white Christian male and don’t say anything, you’re less likely to be attacked by the hate mob than if you’re a leftist who proudly boasts about that lesbian hire. (Leftists seek vulnerability: They go after other leftists because they know leftists (1) care about fitting in with the lefty herd, and (2) must comply with the latest left-wing demand to keep their leftist customers/donors/whatever. In contrast, what will happen if they scream about Vox Day hiring a straight white male for his publishing company? He’ll just laugh at them. His customer base sure as hell isn’t SJWs.) The realization will spread that you might as well just hire the best person and keep quiet about it. That is becoming safer. And to the extent that it’s not safe, it’s not much less safe than trying to appease the SJW mob. And that destroys the incentives that propel the holiness spiral.

Black knighting must be done absolutely straight-faced. Don’t try this in a forum where they already know you’re not an SJW; you’ll just be dismissed as stirring up shit. But: New personality (dox-proof) in a forum where they don’t know you. We can all get to work black knighting.

The beautiful thing about black knighting is that the enemy has no defense against it. If they even try to defend, then you’re like, “Hey! They’re Anti-trans! Anti-wymyn! Anti-gay!” Etc., etc. They simply cannot deny that you’ve out-holied them. This isn’t theory; we’ve seen this happen increasingly in the last few years. E.g., the gay black author who was just SJW-shamed into pulling his book due to accusations of insufficient political correctness.

So, two things everybody on the right can do: Spread news to normies about the craziness. And join the black knighting movement, which is already well underway.