Nomen est omen

People like pleasant things. And they like to talk about pleasant things, avoiding unpleasant stuff at all costs. One way to achieve that is to create taboo words. Because by making some words a taboo, a strong social inhibition is created, which pretty much makes it impossible to talk about unpleasant stuff without being quickly ostracized from the group.

But sometimes there is no escape and we really do need to discuss unpleasant things as well, whether words that we use to label them are taboo or not. That can prove to be a problem since it is impossible to have such a discussion in common language without causing significant amount of social friction. The way around that is to use uncommon synonyms. The less people know what they actually mean, the better. So instead of using nasty words like fuck, we say intercourse. Instead of shit, we say excrement, and instead of a fart we say flatus. As if saying things in Latin makes the reality any better.

What is also interesting is that if one of those words becomes common knowledge and starts being regularly used, it soon becomes a taboo word as well. The reason for that is the fact that we can no longer hide behind the veil of incomprehensibility, saying nasty stuff in a way most people think most people think most people (repeat ad infinitum) won't understand. Interestingly, it is not enough just for most people to understand it, but it must become common knowledge as well. But that's beside the point. What matters is that we can talk about nasty stuff only when there is still a slightest chance of doubt that someone somewhere won't understand us. If that chance is essentially zero, we must reinvent the terminology if we want to discuss the matter further.

Unpleasant stuff is not just what people do or produce, sometimes it is the people themselves. And when a group of people gets a negative reputation, one way to attempt to improve on that reputation is to start using a different label. It does not really matter whether that reputation is earned or not, as changing the hearts and minds of people is a significantly more difficult task than just obfuscating the reference.

The US, as usual, leads the way in this sort of social engineering, renaming groups of people at ever faster intervals. The best example for this is a group of people, forcefully imported from Africa, which became to be known as niggers. Originally imported from Spanish via French, the word simply meant black, and it pretty much described their most prominent external characteristic. As it slowly became an impolite term, in a somewhat unusual twist, the Latin root was replaced by the more polite version which was "colored person". But that term became derogatory as well, and those same people were once again renamed to blacks. While still not quite as offensive as the former two, the term black has eventually given in to "African American". Which is somewhat clumsy, as many people who move from South Africa to the USA are both white and African Americans at the same time. So the most recent invention is "person of color", which is also somewhat unfortunate as it can be quite easily confused with the offensive "colored person". Interestingly enough, black people don't mind other blacks calling them niggers, in fact they seem to take a sort of pride in that name calling, almost as being members of an elite club. And they should be, because they are what they are, and it would be self destructive to try to obfuscate it by reinventing their nomenclature.

Although the aforementioned group had more renamings than any other that I'm aware of, they're in no way unique in that manner. Take for example gypsies which became the Romani people, or the Arabs and Pakistanis who recnetly became Asians. There is also an inverse process, in which culturally favored groups' names are changed in order to obfuscate their identity, in order to prevent any sort of tribal reverence towards them. Hence whites became Caucasians, not because the term was less elitist, but because nobody really knew what exactly it meant.

One thing we can clearly see from all this is that renamings are just temporary measures. The people are not as stupid as the progressive elite seems to believe, and they catch on to new phraseology pretty fast. If someone hates niggers, that person will hate black people as well. Changing the name of the group won't turn those people into a new race. They'll still be the same people they were before the name change took effect. And everyone else will be quite aware of that as well.

If there is a problem with black or gypsy people, that problem won't go away by changing their names. Most likely there is a problem, otherwise the whole concept of name change would never be utilized. We've called Germans Germans for thousands of years, and no one seems to mind. And if there is a problem, changing the reference by which we label it will do nothing but kick the can down the road for a few more years.

Times they are a changin

Imagine a country where only rich males of a specific race are allowed to vote. Then imagine those votes could be accepted or discarded at a whim by people who form some sort of elective assembly. It really sounds more like an aristocracy than a democracy. Yet it is exactly how the US was designed when it was founded.

Contrary to popular belief, not one person in his right mind at the end of the 18th century thought it was a wise idea to allow every single person's opinion to equally matter. Today, we are beginning to see why.

Back when they were founded, the only citizens of the USA who were allowed to vote were white male landowners. And even when they voted, the "nobles" of the electoral college had the prerogative to accept their opinion or ignore it entirely and vote for another candidate. It was actually an ingeniously designed system. Why? Let's take it apart piece by piece.

First, let's talk about the most important parameter, and that is land ownership. Yes, times have changed so now you can be pretty rich without owning any land at all, so let's assume a more liberal version of the idea which would be to have a decent amount of wealth at hand. This is actually quite a reasonable heuristic to separate smart people from idiots. Smart people will have money. They'll know how to make it, how to keep it, and what to do with it. Idiots won't, and that's why they're poor. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but this heuristic will eliminate from the voting process most people whose votes will likely be as irrational as their personal decisions are. Because, really, if you can't take care of your own personal budget, your opinion shouldn't be considered at all in a much more complicated issue of how to take care of a national budget.

Second is the race limitation. While this heuristic may be less accurate than the one based on wealth when it comes to making intelligent decisions, its goals are somewhat different as well. It's basically a crude way to secure that a country created by a group of people continues to be ruled by those same people.

Finally, we have the sex limitation. This is really an issue that could be done away with, although it was the last one to be removed. Even though average woman's preferences of a presidential candidate are pretty much completely based on how the guy looks, I believe the former two limitations would filter out stupid women and leave only the ones who are capable of making a more or less rational decision. Even if you think an average female is less rational than an average male, the fact that they make up a minority of rich people will likely be pretty good at canceling that effect. Smart rational women are rare beings, almost like mythical unicorns, but on a rare occasion, they do happen to be born.

So when we look at what made America great, it's really not democracy in the current sense. Its original version of democracy was a much more elitist and aristocratic system, one where welfare queens would be unimaginable and spiraling public debt would be seen for what it is - a fast track to national ruin. Even then, the US really didn't do that much better than monarchies of the Old World. Most of its relative growth came from the fact that it had huge areas of empty fertile land, and the fact that European countries pretty much destroyed each other in two world wars. Those fertile lands were kept American by immigration quotas, through which population structure and rate of immigration could be maintained at optimal levels. If it were founded as it is designed now, where third world diversity is welcomed with open hands and where every idiot's opinion is not just accepted but revered in direct correlation with its lunacy, it is unlikely it would survive turn of the 19th century.

Zed's dead.

And with Zed, I mean the west.

It's a horrible sad thing. That the civilization that truly changed the world, transformed the Earth from a fairly primitive medieval planet into a highly sophisticated world whose inhabitants managed to walk on another celestial body, managed to completely destroy itself in about a 100 years. Yet it is what it is, and there's really no point in denying it.

Here is just one example from the UK - in 4 years percentage of non-native schoolchildren jumped from 25% to 31%. It doesn't take much mathematical knowledge (though due to today's standard of education, younger pupils may disagree) to realize that in about a dozen years native children are likely to become a minority. It is likely to happen even sooner, considering the amount of illegal and undocumented immigrants that are currently below the radar.

Yes, the UK will still be here even when whites become a minority. It will still occupy the same island, and it will likely use the same name, but the people who will populate it will be different. Same thing will happen to the USA, Sweden, France, and most other western countries worth mentioning. What will really change is the people. And that is the most important change of all, because people are what really makes a state. If you'd somehow move all the Germans to Zimbabwe and all the Zimbabweans to Germany, in a couple of years Zimbabwe would have car factories, while Germany's only product would be treasury bills with an excessive amount of zeros.

While westerners are not being literally exterminated, their low birth ratios combined with extremely high immigration will make them minorities in their countries in as little as 10 or 20 years. And when that happens, the immigrants will be the ones who will dictate state policies. The whites will keep on being a market dominant minority, but as things go with market dominant minorities, they quite often end up being massacred when a rebellious majority decides to put that market dominance to an end.

So basically what we have are two possibilities - If we have luck, we'll end up like Brazil. If we don't, we'll end up like Haiti. There is a theoretical third option, that "extreme" right wing movements will rise up soon enough to stop this self-destructing madness, but as things stand now, that scenario is quite unlikely. We may only hope our new masters will be as benevolent to us as we were to them. Looking at how things look in Africa and middle east at the moment, we'll have a better chance hoping an alien spaceship comes and takes us to a distant uninhabited planet where we can start anew.

Enoch Powell was right. Sadly, it is probably too late to heed his advice.

Soft totalitarianism

Should anyone desire to buy a confederate flag, from today onward it will likely be quite a difficult task, as Amazon and ebay decided to halt selling it. Although I am hardly a fan of the social system the Confederacy had in place, I feel I should mention this story because it's quite paradigmatic for the ever more common social engineering practice that is taking place in the so-called liberal and democratic west. As usual, the US is leading the charge, but the paragons of western Europe are not far behind.

Since it would still cause a sacrilege to repeal the first amendment, the elites have worked hard and found the next best thing, which is to circumvent it. So instead of an outright ban of any symbol, belief, or idea, the government applies an unsurmountable amount of social pressure to destroy it. It does so through a vast network of non-government organizations, which are really governmental in all but the name. After all, an organization that's selected to be funded by the government based on the governmental opinion of its program is really just a more radical version of the government itself.

So when it gets decided that an idea should be removed from the public eye, hordes of paragovernmental groups are activated and basically force all the media and big businesses to commit self-censorship. Yes, freedom of expression is formally maintained, but in practice it is impossible to freely express oneself without dire consequences. Expressing an unpopular opinion is practically impossible to do without pretty much accepting the fate of having one's life completely destroyed, both on personal as well as business level. Am I overreacting? Unfortunately I'm not.

What is important to realize when we are talking about the freedom of expression is that it's specifically the unpopular opinions which are in need of such a protection. Expressing the popular opinions and admiring the emperor's new garments doesn't need any legal protection at all, it is encouraged even in the most totalitarian of states imaginable. It is unpopular opinions that need to be guarded against the attacks of the mob, and by circumnavigating the first amendment and its international equivalents, they are slowly becoming as dangerous to express as declaring oneself an atheist in Saudi Arabia or medieval Spain.

Just as non-government organizations are anything but non-governmental, today's liberal democracies are slowly becoming anything but liberal. One might ask oneself, is there a reason why this has come to pass? I believe there is. True democracies are really not what one may believe after listening to 12 or so years of state propaganda in schools. They have some quite serious drawbacks, which pretty much all sum up to "nothing ever gets done". Some decisions are hard, and hard decisions often irritate people. There's a reason why it took the US years to defeat the Japanese forces in the Pacific theater, while it took the Russians only three weeks to clear them out of China. If you don't want to fight in a democracy, you stage a protest. Or powerfully cry. If you don't want to fight in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany...well, that's too bad. Getting shot and killed by the enemy is way better than what you'd get from your comrades in case you get caught defecting, so you might as well go ahead and run towards the rain of bullets.

Realizing they are intrinsically weak, and also realizing they really can't just turn themselves into formal totalitarian states, democratic countries turned to something which is best described as soft totalitarianism. Yes, you are formally free, but should you ever decide to take the red pill and stray away from the herd, soon you will find informal Stasi officers ruining your life in every way possible. While not really classical totalitarianism, it still gets things done better than a truly liberal society. And when it gets pushed to the limit, as is nowadays being the case, the only thing it really lacks is formalization. All the other pieces are already in place.

Learning

Recently I stumbled upon a quite interesting article, about the horrendous TV channel now known as TLC. What is quite fascinating about it is that it actually started as a quite good educational TV station. Originally called Appalachian Community Service Network, it was founded by the Department of Education and NASA. Younger readers may not realize this, but once upon a time the Department of Education was actually about real education, not about turning children into social justice warriors, and NASA was a space agency unlike today's diversity training center.

Later privatized and renamed "The Learning Channel", it remained a pretty good source of serious documentaries, which were usually a level or two above those shown on competing TV stations. Overall, we could say it was a really good TV channel for education and I'm sure geeks loved to watch it.

But what happened then? Well, it all started with one innocent little show, called "Captain's log". It was basically a reality show about a captain on the boat doing whatever boat captains do in their life. Sounds pretty boring to me, but I've realized by now that my opinions usually aren't really in accord with those of the Average Joe. The show caught on and broke all viewer records on the as of yet still niche channel for geeks and the like. It didn't take much for the management to realize that geeks are unfortunately quite a small minority of the population, and that by going more mainstream their viewer statistics will go through the roof.

Promptly, over the next year or two, the channel sacked all its good stuff and replaced it with TV shows whose common denominator is  "I have a bizarre lifestyle and I want to share it with the world".

And this is, alongside the well known tragedy of the commons, why I'm not a libertarian or a democrat, although I do share some of the views associated with the scene. Because in libertarian view, there really is no problem with what happened here. People wanted to view trash and the market gave them trash. Everyone is dumb and happy, the invisible hand did its job, and now the couch potatoes can laugh at people who are even more worthless than they are. It is a misfortune that an occasional geek or two got screwed up in the process because they are too few to make any sort of serious documentary television profitable, that is true, but hey, the majority is majority, right?

Well, not really. The thing is, good stuff costs a lot of money to produce, and is often not appreciated by the commons. Now, while it is true that the commoners will not really watch the educational channel anyway, it's a mistake to say such a channel shouldn't exist at all. And that's because the common peasants don't really matter. They're not the ones who push the world forward. They just tag along, do their boring daily routines, occasionally procreate, and wait to die. While their satisfaction is economically viable, it is also utterly pointless.

Smart people, those who drag the masses forward, need to have as much education and information as the society can provide, especially during their formative years. Because while smart people are pretty much born that way, environment does play a big role in how much of that potential will ultimately be realized. Limiting their environment to the taste of the Average Joe also limits their development and creates lesser personas than what they could have become.

By having the market do the selection of our education for as, we are basically limiting those of us who are truly great and pulling them down into the sea of mediocrity. While the market often does punish stupid people by taking away their money and thereby reducing their voting power, that is not really the case when it comes to TV and other information sources. What matters there is pretty much just the number of views, or in modern day clicks. Whether the person who performed the view or click is a Nobel Prize winning or a total idiot is really not important at all, just as in a democracy it is not important whether the vote came from a great thinker or a local beer stuffed gullible village idiot.

Education, including commercial leisure education such as good documentary channels, simply can not be put to the market, because most players in the market won't realize the benefits it will bring them, and those who make a wrong decision will not be punished severely enough to make their voting power irrelevant in the long term. It is simply much better when it's guided from the top.

Is there an alternative, a purely libertarian scenario that will provide better results than what we have now? Yes, there is. Eliminate all welfare and let those who chose to watch stupid instead of educational things die of starvation when they realize their experience of watching all the episodes of "Look what plastic surgery did to me!" won't really help them when looking for a job. Now, while such a scenario really does help the procreation of the smart individuals in relation to the rest of the species, it also brings with itself a huge amount of misery and unwanted externalities which really don't seem to be something a society should strive for.

Learning - so much fun!

Old gods and the new

I've recently ran into an article here that recycles a story which may be familiar to some as it has been going on for a few years already. But for all those who are not familiar with it, it seems that atheist churches are becoming something of a big thing in the growing secular community.

Now as an agnostic myself, I must say that I'd find this to be funny, if it weren't sad at the same time. Someone wiser than me once said something along the lines of the following - if you take away people's religion, they won't believe in nothing, they'll believe in anything. And it seems to me that this is exactly what is happening here.

Marxists and the like thought that by removing religion from the equation, the masses will suddenly regain their intrinsic perfectly rational selves and start behaving like clockwork automatons. What they failed to realize is that it simply not in the human nature to behave in that way. Most people are not alphas, which means they require someone to lead them. They'll even go so far to completely make up such an entity if they don't find a suitable person to fill the role in the real world. People also seem to need some sort of ritual tribal bonding, whether it's dancing around the fire or having holy rituals in churches.

So by removing current religion, what Marx's followers have done is simply opening up space for a new one. Christianity is pretty much dead in Europe, and is on its way to die in the USA as well. Aside from a few minor pockets of resistance, the mass media is managing to out-meme them faster than they can procreate, so the left is winning the battle of numbers even though its demographics are near zero.

What will people do once they stop believing in their god? Some will start thinking and eventually realize what religions really are, it is true. But most will simply switch the old god for the new. And the new god, although he doesn't have a name yet, offers some pretty attractive perks. The old god nagged when you were selfish (because, when you look at the commandments, that's pretty much what it's all about), and it even threatened to throw you into a fiery pit for all eternity for more serious transgressions.

But the new god isn't like that. It tells you you're unique. It tells you your opinion matters just as much as that of the next guy. Whatever you do, whatever you want, it's great. There's no universal truth, no strict moral standards. There are many different truths, all equally valuable. The old god is evil. It punishes you for slacking, it punishes you for adultery, it punishes you for greed. The new god is better, it accepts you as you are.

It doesn't have a name, it's a principle. And the principle is called Progress. It used to be linked with scientific method and empiricism, but that is no longer the case. It has grown and evolved, and now it is all about inclusivity and acceptance. Even if the maths don't agree, it doesn't matter. Maths are just one way of understanding reality, and a pretty old fashioned one at that. Other truths, emotional, spiritual, are equally valuable yet more modern, and even more importantly, fit to the liking of the new priesthood of Progress.

What we're witnessing is not mass atheization, it is nothing less than the birth of a new religion. And what a religion it is! Unlike those that came before it, in this one everything is allowed. There is no good or bad, just do what you want and when you want it. To hell with the rules.

There is just one caveat, just one tiny rule. And that rule states that there are no rules. Those who try to make rules, even if they only apply them to themselves, who try to build a new structure instead of destroying old ones are the force of evil. The new devil is not a fiendish creature sitting underground in a fiery pit, it is not a force of destruction, it is a force that wants the good, the beautiful, and the true to prevail. His followers ruin the party because they oppose the idea of absolute equality, they oppose chaos. And by doing that, they show the new god for what it really is. A force of chaos and destruction, pure hedonism that leaves ruins in its wake.

The new god may succeed for a while, but it will never succeed in the long run. As long as there is a single seed of order, it will ultimately prevail. The masses are oblivious, but the high priesthood is not. They know their system is unstable, and they know that the only way to prevent its demise is to ruin everything else. Because only by ruining all that is good can a bad practice stay alive. It is the real reason behind the ideology's aggressive expansionism. Without conquering all the rest before they implode, they can't hope to survive another round.