Indefinite Hiatus

When I started this blog I had a collection of rants in my head for things that I would like to get out. These rants eventually turned into a comprehensive worldview where all parts interlock and support each other. I don't know if my worldview has any contradictions although it feels like it doesn't, or at least like it doesn't have very many. Each and every entry on this blog was crafted with the deliberate intention of creating profound insight into the problems of America. I absolutely hate wasting the reader's time, and unlike your teachers who forced to to write unnecessarily long essays about boring subjects I took it as my mantra never to waste a single word of print, making everything I wrote as computationally dense as possible.

I have done the thing that I came here to do, which was to put in writing the ideas in my mind. Having done that I'm not sure which way to go or if I should go anywhere. I could rehash my old ideas into increasingly comprehensive essays. I could dig into my own viewpoint looking for contradictions and try to iron them out. I have also strongly considered pivoting to fiction. I've also considered pivoting to news about current events. But for now I'm going to do nothing and take a break. This blog will remain idle for the time being and may be reactivated in the future if and when something new comes to me. 

The archives will still be here and you can peruse them at your leisure. Most posts contain a unique thought or insight into a problem and they all more or less reinforce each other and help flesh out a comprehensive worldview. That worldview may still be somewhat of a rough draft but it's now complete, so until then,

On Hiatus

@smolfeelshaver

Got tolerance? The new landscape of warfare

The purpose of a thing is what it does and not what it says it does. This is the basic axiom that can disentangle all kinds of lies and nonsense. The instrumental purpose other thing is the effect it accomplishes and not the words of politicians trying to morally justify things.

Let's first talk about the instrumental purpose of intolerance.

Intolerance makes people straighten up and fly right. It makes people conceal they're inadequacies. It makes people "mask" their mental health issues. It makes gay people lead straight lives. It makes mentally ill people pretend to be functional, get married, and have children. In short, intolerance keeps people with bad genes in the gene pool. Human society did this for reasons that will become apparent in a minute.

Tolerance does the opposite. It baits people with bad jeans into exposing all their inadequacies so that women can judge them and refuse to have children with them. Paradoxically these same women also don't believe in having children and want to lead the "child-free lifestyle." Tolerance is all the runts of the litter encouraging each other to expose their weaknesses and inadequacies so they may be judges lacking.

Males who make the mistake of believing that tolerance is real don't breed unless they already have hot and handsome genetics. Only females get to enjoy the benefits of tolerance, although these benefits are superficial and a false economy. What is a false economy? A false economy is when you buy a cheap pair of shoes that wear out quickly and have to buy more shoes as a result. A false economy is when something looks cheap but actually cost more in the long term. Tolerance is a false economy for females, because in the short term, yes, men will fuck them no matter what—a hole is a hole—but in the long term men don't want to marry a vegan women with two mental diseases, a chronic illness, and a lot of excuses. They don't really want to breed with her and certainly can't stand living with her. The "child free life" becomes a glamorous cope for rejection. 

Why do people do this? Well if you think about it, there are two worlds. There is the world prior to the invention of birth control and the world after it. These worlds operate in two completely different modes. Before birth control life is a death struggle against malthusian conditions. The population is going to constantly grow and you're going to outgrow your resource base. You're going to have to conquer your neighbors in order to get food to feed your growing population. In this situation you want to keep as many people in the gene pool as possible, you want even the most inadequate person to have children. It doesn't matter if they have bad genetics because the next famine or war will take care of that. It's not your job to judge whether they have good or bad genetics. Nature is so harsh, so brutal, so utterly terrifying, that all you have to do is sit back and let nature do its work. Nobody has to organize a regime of tolerance. Everybody is incredibly harsh and expects you to straighten up and fly right and conceal your mental illnesses and this thing and the other thing. Who knows? Maybe that bipolar guy who's occasionally manic will lead his nation to victory. Nature is the one that decides. This is the first mode of human existence, it is Mode 1, and it strives with futility to defeat nature while brutal natural selection does it's work.

But then you invent birth control and the population is no longer growing relentlessly. This means you're no longer outstripping your resources, famine and war are no longer inevitable. For a brief period of time in the 1980s you enjoy a blissful period of complete relaxation of both nature and society's rules. They're still sort of telling you to straighten up and fly right, you're still being encouraged to conceal bad genetics. Women are still normal and don't necessarily have a bunch of mental illnesses. Or at least they don't look like they have a bunch of mental illnesses. Whatever the case, they're more or less tolerable to be around. They are nice, and feminine, and demure, and caring. The men are basically competent, and heroic, and functional with money. You think nature has been banished so you get the best of both worlds, but little do you know you're entering the era of Mode 2.

In Mode 1 they force you to stay in the gene pool and nature kills you off if you're inadequate. In Mode 2 they usher as many people out of the gene pool as possible since nature is no longer doing it. Mode 2 weaponizes tolerance to remove mutants from the gene pool. It baits people into advertising their inadequacies. It kind of makes sense that the baby boomers would sabotage their own mutant offspring. In Mode 2 the whole culture is low-key subversion. 

But Mode 2 suffers from a bunch of problems. One is that because of birth control the population is imploding and subverting everyone is going to drastically exacerbate that. This could lead to extinction if not careful. The second is that it is untethered from reality. How do we know the bipolar guy is genetically inadequate? He might have stormed at the beaches of Normandy in a previous era. He might have been the most effective killer in his Roman cavalry unit. The doctors tell us what's normal and abnormal. But what the fuck do the doctors know? They won't even deal honestly with the subject of eugenics. And what is eugenics other than natural selection untethered to nature? In the Mode 2 subversion era the 1940s are the hidden standard everyone references since that was the last time selection mattered. Therefore you are worthy of breeding with if you would have fought against Hiller. Why? Because that's the last time natural selection mattered and that's what they did. Or maybe it's just decades of Hollywood propaganda, or maybe the Holocaust really is the thing all ideology should be centered around and against, and no new ideological inventions that are indifferent to it should ever be invented, because the liberal worldview is magnificently perfect and explains the entire universe with zero gaps in knowledge, and nothing better will ever succeed it.

Mode 2 is really a secret other thing called Mode 3. What is Mode 3? It is ideological natural selection. In this system society fragments into competing tribes and cults. Natural selection works by favoring some of these cults and destroying others. The feedback loop is all about having the right mindset for navigating the world. Not necessarily even a functional mindset, not even necessarily a sane mindset. Just "right" enough to get you to breed.

Ideology becomes the point of natural selection and this becomes increasingly true as designer babies and genetic engineering are introduced. In fact an ideology might turn out to be a blind cul-de-sac, meaning that for the first few generations you think you're going in the right direction and everything seems to be going well. A cul-de-sac is a point of termination. You are practicing genetic modifications according to your ideology and it seems to be working fantastically. But this process is recursive and maybe you push one trait too far and the result is you get people who don't want to have children of their own, or who insist on designing their children in maladaptive ways. Mode 3 is all about avoiding both visible and invisible cul-de-sacs. It's not enough to have the right ideology you have to also have the right meta ideology, your ideology has to work not just today but after centuries of recursive self modification.

Of course in all Modes ideology is a weapon to destroy others. In Mode 1 you use ideology to hype up your own tribe to destroy the other. In Mode 2 you weaponize ideology to subvert people you hate, even people within your own tribe, even future generations. In Mode 3 you concentrate the most on having the correct meta ideology for your own survival and treat all ideology with suspicion, especially outside ideologies. The goal is long-term survival and reproduction, you must not only have the right ideology, your children must also want to adopt this ideology without being forced, and it must not lead them into a cul-de-sac of self-termination. It's really really really important to get it right. You might barrow from other ideologies when you see something working. You might even have ideological trade secrets and conduct the religious version of corporate espionage. In the beginning of Mode 3 the landscape is pretty relaxed and it's easy to get a foothold since there aren't any competitors. As time goes on this landscape of competition will become increasingly vicious and cut throat, with ideology crafted lovingly to guarantee the survival of one's own tribe, and counter ideologies crafted viciously to drive opponents to extinction, with spys stealing meta ideological trade secrets, and entryists sent in to confuse and destroy opponents. It goes without saying that public school won't exactly work in this landscape since the ideologies taught to children is itself part of the battlescape. Since Mode 2 is really Mode 3 in disguise it already doesn't work and public school teachers are too often high mutational load subversives who hate children.

The formalized version of this system is some sort of meta-election where first voters choose left or right, then with all the voters (or only the subset that has the majority) chooses another category (libertarian or nationalist if right, socialist or social democracy if they chose left), into increasingly smaller and more fragmented niche ideologies.

Or maybe formalization of the process takes the form of start up cities who's governance continuously forms, fractures, and reforms according to a war of all against all. Even when a monopoly emerges it behooves one to run competing city state or neighborhood or ideological experiments least one fall into complacency and be upstaged by a new arrival. When one buys out and destroys the competition the smart thing might not even be to consolidate, but rather to fracture again on purpose by modifying the opponents ideology / city state / neighborhood into a more potent or healthy form and then strategically replacing some of the population with persons more fit to propagate. In this formalized version of Mode 3 the government landscape itself is reconfigured to facilitate the ideological war of all against all and prevent consolidation, since consolidation is fatal by destroying natural selection.

Stop dumping on Erica Kirk

I smell a psy-op.

I don't care whether or not she deserves it. I don't care what the details are or whether or not she's a grieving widow and completely innocent. None of this matters. It's bad optics and it's abusive, it disincentivizes women from joining our side. The relentless shitting on Erica Kirk tells every woman in this country that being a conservative won't save you from being hated by conservative men. It is strategically foolish to dump on the widow of a martyr. It makes me think that Candice Owens is being artificially boosted by the YouTube algorithm and the special tiny hat people who run it. Even if the whole thing, including the murder of Charlie Kirk, is a giant Israeli Mossad psyop it's total effect on the on the right wing is destructive. First it creates a martyr out of a boring moderate conservative. Second, by denigrating his widow it casts doubt on whether or not the Mossad had anything to do with Kirk's murder. For a short time the narrative was going to be that Mossad had Charlie Kirk killed. Now every useful idiot including that psycho bimbo Candice Owens is piling on to Erica Kirk taking the wind out of the sails of that other narrative. It proves of course that all algorithmically manipulated social media is controlled opposition, that the very existence of an algorithm combined with social media means that your feed and your perceptions are being manipulating.

Algorithmic social media truly is the ring of power, because no billionaire can withhold himself from using it, and because it always inevitably leads to left-wing empowerment. Any completely unmoderated social media network rapidly turns into 4chan, since 4chan is the most acerbic, shocking, and (maybe) truth seeking configuration. It might be possible to improve on that configuration by allowing competing moderators to create their own algorithms which users then subscribe to. That would probably be even more truth maximizing and suppress some of the toxic shock that completely unmoderated social media creates, but it would also involve a loss of control by the owner, and that loss of control is too much for the average billionaire to resist. As long as a central single algorithm or AI system determines a person's feed there will always be an incentive for controlled opposition and astroturfing. That ring of controlled opposition is the Ring Of Power that no one can seem to resist, but which always inevitably undermines true democratic coordination because the Ring of Power serves only Sauron.

Nothing astroturfed is ever truly against power.

Perhaps she's just a bimbo who doesn't know how to do social media well. Perhaps she was a beauty queen Mossad plant the whole time. Or perhaps she's being manipulated by her Mossad handlers to make her look weird and discredit Kirk's martyrdom, or perhaps she's under duress and intentionally botching the whole thing in order to disappear from public life. Blink twice Erica if you need rescue. 

Let us think about what this whole situation has managed to do for Israel. First Kirk gets assassinated. This deters other conservatives from speaking their minds on college campuses and raises the security fees which effectively bans them. Censorship works and bullets are the most powerful form of censorship. Then Kirk gets made into a martyr. Then Israel is implicated. Then the narrative pivots shitting all over Erica Kirk and insinuating that she had something to do with her husband's death. So the effect of all of this is that 1. conservatives are deterred and banned from exercising their free speech on campus, 2. conservatives are lured into a trap so they can be called anti-semites, 3. the trap closes and the widow is thrown under the bus, 4. the trap makes all the anti-semites look ridiculous, 5. women who were thinking about becoming conservative see conservative men trashing Erica Kirk and are sickened by it, 6. conservative men become even bigger losers in the eyes of women, 7. the white race is successfully undermined again, 8. and the right is deprived of its version of George Floyd.

And of course anytime Bari Weiss shows up you should be hella suspicious.

Stop giving your clicks and engagement to things that smell like a psyop. You don't have to weigh in on every crisis manufactured to manipulate you. Keep your eye on the ball of your own liberation against the foreign tribe that colonizes you. Whenever you vote, look up whether your politician takes money from Israel. Vote against all candidates that take money from Israel. You don't need to consider any other issue.

Call them cowards; the accusation that stings as much as "racist!"

The best insults are both true and highlight a character flaw to everyone including the recipient. They are really great if they cause introspection. 

Tolerance and equality are the highest virtues of cowards just like courage and truth are the highest virtues of the racist. Aristotle said that virtue was found in moderation but I think that people only have vices, and virtue is the lie they tell themselves and others to cover the turd in perfume. There's no moderation because the extremes are just two craven impulses masquerading as virtues. There's really only the craven impulse underneath it all. Are you a cowardly weasel or a bigot with the will to dominate? Your "virtue"  will be tolerance if the first one and courage if the second one, assuming you have either. 

The mirror image of calling someone a racist is calling them a coward and culturally it is just as powerful as an accusation. It is powerful because it is true. It is powerful because it induces self-reflection in the target. It is powerful because every time somebody quibbles or refuses to understand things like mass replacement it's because they are coward. When they inevitably call you a racist tell them they are a coward. It works, and it's embarrassing, and it's true. 

When you become so communist you become capitalist again

 One of my hobbies is studying how corruption works in different countries. The reason for studying this is that every political system has both a formal structure and an informal structure. The formal structure gets recorded by history books and teaches you almost nothing since the informal structure is what's actually governing a country. In the US, for example, instead of giving bribes to cops, the law itself is the product of bribery. In many countries it does not work this way, with most corruption being extra-judicial (giving some plausible deniability to the politicians in charge). The laws will be reasonable or (morally rationalized but stifling for business) while pervasive bribery and insider dealing happens under the table. Doing it this way gives the people in charge my parents of moral legitimacy while allowing them to remove uncooperative subordinates whenever they want using charges of corruption. I find it fascinating how Russia has an entire pyramid structure to its bribery. In essence they have reinvented feudalism as a workaround to a failed communism. In ancient British feudalism everything was a property right and even a job like tax collector could be purchased from the king. In Russia you get a government job so that you can stifle the ability of anyone to get anything done without paying you a bribe. Every position from the lowest clerk to the highest senior official is collecting bribes from subordinates. In fact you MUST collect or you will not have the money you need to pay off your bosses and keep your job. Your boss will fire you and replace you with somebody who generates more revenue if you don't pay him enough in money or favors.

I have talked in the past about legislative accumulation and how it can destroy a nation's ability to get anything done. Once it is impossible to get anything done one might imagine that the bribery mechanism would become much more important, as a way of lubricating transactions and getting bureaucrats out of the way. This informal structure then becomes the new structure. And this process by which the functionality of a system is destroyed by an inherent flaw that no one bothers correcting might just be the engine of change that causes nations to cycle through the various constitutional forms described by the Greek philosopher Polybius: (Monarchy, Tyranny, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Ochlocracy). But many nations do not cycle through these forms in any fixed sequence and discovering the exact cause for a change of form would be really interesting, and might explain why cycling between forms is so irregular from one country to the next. 

But it is interesting that a nation could become so stifled by its own regulations and past communism (laws they never bothered to repeal) that everything would require permission from a bureaucrat, and the bureaucrats would all wind up taking bribes, and so a form of feudal capitalism would re-emerge.

Update: the video below has been removed but the channel is here 

https://youtube.com/@silenteast1?si=xwfIR9Z309omAddD

We are lucky that most Sci-Fi technologies are nonsense

If you look into it closely the supposed physics behind most science fiction technologies is complete bullshit. This is actually a great thing since the cultural, military, and political implications of these technologies are absolutely disastrous. Science fiction rarely explores these implications instead opting to project current year values into the future. Let's think about the real results:

Teleportation: this is one of the most obvious disastrous technologies. You think immigration is bad now? Imagine a billion Africans having the ability to materialize in your living room, steal everything you own, rape your whole family, and be back to their village in time for dinner. There is no way that humanity operating under its existing genetics and culture could endure teleportation. Imagine a corrupt cop watching a woman sleep, imagine instantaneous movement of vast quantities of lethal drugs. In every conceivable way it would make crime that involves moving things around much easier.

Imagine what it would do to real estate prices. It would cause the cost of all real estate everywhere to basically be the same except for prime locations like buildings that overlook Central Park. One block away from Central Park the real estate prices would instantaneously drop back to the global level since only the views would have value.

Thankfully it's impossible to deconstruct the entire pattern of a person's atoms and then reassemble them. Doing this would also kill them and the person who came out of the machine would not be the same as the one going in. The transporter would kill the ability to keep people out of one's home. Repeated use of the transporter would also probably cause degradation of DNA patterns leading to horrific mutations in the species and the eventual extinction of humanity. Humans would probably create some sort of cult of the transporter that involved human sacrifice, since the machine is killing you every time you go through it.

Technological feasibility: 0%

Cultural impact: totally destructive

Usefulness: extremely useful for crime and moving things

 

Wormholes: these would require "exotic matter," which is just another way of saying something that doesn't exist but can be plugged into a math equation. There's no observable anything with negative mass and so no way these things could exist. Even if they existed going through one would shred everything that entered and what came out would just be a soup of atoms. In a sense most black holes are wormholes anyway that take you trillions of years into the future when they finally evaporate.

Wormholes would create time travel and the implication of that is being invaded by both humans and aliens from the future. Creating the smallest navigable wormhole would require something like the mass of Jupiter.

Technological feasibility: 1%

Cultural impact: none because it doesn't work

Usefulness: pointless, takes too much energy, shreds anything that enters it

 

Faster than Light Travel and warp drive are probably impossible. For complicated reasons it violates causality and leads to time travel paradoxes. Most scenarios require planet size levels of energy or negative energy (which is just a made-up math concept to plug into a formula). Really any kind of faster than light travel does this. Additionally, a warp bubble produces a bomb of gamma rays at the front of the ship as soon as the warp drive is turned off. This would kill all the passengers on board and anything in front of it. It would even fry the electronics. If warp drive existed it would probably serve more as a weapon than a means of transport. It would probably also be limited to less than or equal to the speed of light which makes it no better than really any other form of slower than light transportation. Even if it existed it would probably never be used since there are less energy intensive ways to get around.

Culturally, the implications of warp drive are basically galactic empires and the destruction of planets. Star Trek is presented as utopia but you'll notice in its own fiction various planets get destroyed or almost destroyed all the time. In Star Trek the Earth is almost destroyed when an alien probe shows up and wants to talk to whales. Then it almost gets destroyed by the Borg. Before that it almost gets destroyed by the Xindi. Vulcan and Romulus get destroyed in one alternate timeline. This is a surprisingly grounded scenario for a franchise built on utopian nonsense. A universe without warp drive is a much more libertarian universe where planets are forced to leave each other alone. One with warp drive is one filled with empires, vast political struggles for domination, and the never-ending specter of terror that comes from living on a big target like a planet. In fact in a universe with warp drive it would probably be best just to live in space and to keep moving. People would abandon living on planets altogether. Culturally, any kind of FTL automatically involves being invaded by aliens or at least extraterrestrial immigrants.

Hyperspace and "jump ships" are complete nonsense with no physics to back it up and have all the same military problems associated with them that any other FTL technology does. The biospheres of different planets are not compatible and merely shaking hands with extraterrestrials could do something like transfer bacteria to Earth that would convert the entire atmosphere into nitrous oxide or whatever. If aliens ever landed on Earth the consequences to the biosphere would be even worse than all the various invasive species that have been unleashed by global trade. If you think cats in Australia decimating wildlife are bad imagine something whose DNA is not even compatible with the existing biosphere and thus cannot be digested by predators. Imagine something that is like a walking prion disease and if a buzzard eats its rotting corpse it transmits some sort of wasting disease through the food chain. Nobody knows what horrors could be unleashed by mixing two biospheres and so it's great that this technology is nearly impossible, and even if possible, pointless.

Technological feasibility: 1% probability

Cultural impact: utterly destructive

Usefulness: mostly destructive

 

"Shields" and directed energy weapons for starships. The problem with shields is that once you have these governments will inevitably put them over entire cities. This abolishes the balance of nuclear terror that keeps the world from engaging in hypersonic nuclear warfare. You really don't want to speed up the ability to strike foreign countries since it gives them the idea that they might be able to hit their enemy blindsided before they can react and that's a very dangerous presumption. Hypersonic missiles are worrying in and of themselves but America has nuclear submarines and even if a first strike is possible without missile retaliation it is not possible to avoid retaliation by submarines. Defensive shields potentially change this calculus. In Star Trek they put their shields up and then proceed to tap each other repeatedly with antimatter weapons. This means they are showering each other with gamma rays in space. In real life such weapons would have negative consequences to any planet below the battle. Shields are a pointless escalation of warfare that makes everyone worse off than when they began.

And they are impossible! There is no magic substance they could be made out of. Plasma is the closest thing and it is a superheated material that might vaporize small things that touch it. But even a plasma shield can be penetrated by a big enough object with ablative technology. Just wrap whatever it is you are trying to protect in a giant heat shield and fly through, or fly through fast enough to survive. Making a shield hot enough to disintegrate everything would be pointless since that same amount of energy could be turned into a directed energy weapon. Concentrating that energy in one spot is far more effective than distributing it over a bubble. Navy ships already have Close-In Weapons Systems that defend them far more effectively than any energy weapon or shield ever could. Literally a rain of projectiles will always beat plasma. There is no such thing in physics as a "phaser" either. Antimatter weapons are also kind of pointless since they require trillions of dollars to produce a tiny amount of antimatter and the money could be better spent just building lots of nukes. It is possible to make tiny amounts of antimatter in particle accelerators and capture it but this is totally pointless and expensive. Projectile weapons will probably always be superior so while you might technically be able to make a shield out of plasma controlled by magnetic fields there's no point.

Technological feasibility: 0% for "phasers," 100% for plasma weapons/shields

Cultural impact: politically and militarily negative

Usefulness: pointless, nothing that a gatling gun can't handle better

 

FTL communication or Sophons like those described in the Three Body Problem. There is no way to inscribe an artificial mind onto a proton by unfolding it and then folding it back up. This is pseudoscientific nonsense. Also, quantum entanglement doesn't work over light years and even if it did a single fluctuation could break the connection and then you would have to send another at sublight speeds. "Subspace" communication is also nonsense. There is nothing in the laws of physics that lets you send anything faster than light, and for reasons I won't go into quantum entanglement simply doesn't work that way. Also it would cause causality paradoxes. If the technology worked as portrayed in science fiction it would probably change very little culturally it simply is impossible. All the technologies in the Three Body Problem are impossible except one. The droplet attack is impossible. The dimension folding foil is probably impossible since astronomers would observe two-dimensional regions in space and they don't. "Death lines" caused by "curved space propulsion" (warp drive) probably don't exist because warp drive will undoubtedly never exist. The one technology that is possible is a small amount of matter accelerated to near light speed.

Technological feasibility: 0%

Cultural impact: moderately positive

Usefulness: high

 

Kinetic kill weapons. The "photoid" is the one technology that is sort of possible. The reason it is possible is because the cross section of such a tiny object means that it is unlikely to run into any interstellar dust. But to hit a star you would have to hit it using dead reckoning from light years away since making course corrections is basically impossible. The photoid has no mass to shed and therefore no thrusters to change its own direction. The logistical problem of such a weapon is being accurate enough to hit something from light years away. This is like firing a bullet and trying to hit another bullet traveling in a different direction from the other side of the planet. The most likely outcome is that your photoid simply sails right by its target. But launching these things is cheap so an alien civilization could shower the entire solar system in these tiny kinetic kill weapons and we would basically be helpless to stop them. HOWEVER, you are talking about the amount of energy released by a small nuclear weapon at best and more likely a grain of sand dropped from a few feet up. If the kinetic kill vehicle was the size of a BB it would hit like a small nuke, but also have a much higher likelihood of running into space dust on the way here. Making it smaller would make it more accurate but more pointless, and you are assuming that you could even hit anything at such distances. More than likely such a weapon would just piss off whatever civilization it was intended to kill.

You can make larger kinetic kill vehicles and they are basically impossible to defend against unless you want to live as a swarm of rotating habitats around the Sun. Even then you might take some losses. The KKV will have to be big in order to make course corrections and that means it is more likely to run into space dust (which will explode with the force of a nuclear bomb) this means that it will have to go slower. KKVs will either be tiny and incredibly accurate or huge and slow with multiple warheads. The huge and slow ones are more likely to reach their target. The problem is that if you detect a civilization with radio signals and then launch a KKV by the time it reaches them they probably will have already evolved into a Dyson swarm or gone extinct through technological self-destruction. If you hit them it is actually next to impossible for them to trace where it came from, but it's kind of like, what's the point? It takes hundreds of years to get there. You either won't destroy them completely (because they are now a Dyson swarm) or they won't be worth destroying when you arrive (because they already destroyed themselves).

Technological feasibility: 50%

Cultural impact: devastating

Usefulness: dubious

 

So when you look at all this stuff you realize that science fiction is basically selling us a bunch of impossible technologies that would be absolutely terrible if they actually worked. The fact that physics doesn't allow most of this crap is probably the only thing keeping humanity and any other intelligent species in the universe safe from total annihilation. We're stuck with slower than light travel and kinetic weapons and honestly that's probably for the best since it means we can't immediately destroy ourselves or get destroyed by aliens showing up out of nowhere. The universe is set up in a way that forces everyone to leave everyone else alone and that's a feature and not a bug. 

Parasitic storytelling

 

Hierarchical Review Democracy

I want to describe another iteration of the concept. 

To recap: in a Review Democracy the public reviews the votes of politicians, collectively approving or disapproving of the way they voted on proposed legislation. This creates a scoring system with the highest ranking politicians at the top of the leaderboard and the lowest ranking at the bottom. This leaderboard then determines who advances to higher office, in essence it functions like a primary election and is used in place of primary elections. The highest ranking politicians at the local level become eligible to run for office at the state level, and the highest ranking politicians at the state level become eligible to run for office at the federal level. There are  of course still elections as normal. The lowest ranking politicians at each level are banned from seeking election or re-election at any level and so the system acts like a kind of natural selection that continuously filters out politicians whose actions are hated. This forces the public to pay attention to what politicians do and not just what they say and creates constant pressure for politicians to conform their behavior to the will of the public.

In a regular review democracy the public reviews politicians at every level: Municipal, County, State, and Federal. But in a Hierarchical Review Democracy the public reviews only their leaders at the municipal and county level, while the politicians at those levels review politicians at the state level, and the politicians at the state level review politicians at the federal level. This is similar to the Chinese system the presently exists where the Village People's Congress votes for Provincial People's Congress which votes for National People's Congress. The Chinese have hierarchical elections but in a Hierarchical Review Democracy the public still vote for for all levels and it is only the primary process that becomes hierarchical.

Each level of government reviews the way politicians voted at the next higher level, determining who is allowed to run for office. The public still votes for all levels of government as usual. 

Perhaps this will mollify critics who are worried about such a government being too populist in nature. I am not sure hierarchical review is a good idea since it fundamentally alters the nature of the system from one where the people are forced to be aware of everything their government does to one where insiders are reviewing insiders. Granted, a system of insiders potentially insulates itself from outside financial influence much better, and would not be populist at all, but I am reminded of the Catholic Church where the Pope appoints bishops and the bishops elected the Pope. It's a completely circular system of power totally immune to outside reform efforts. One immediately notices the effects of that lack of accountability on it's abuse metrics. Overall I have more faith in the people than most—or perhaps less desire to have my preferred oligarchy dominate since all oligarchies betray.

Imperialism by gaslighting tolerance

Every in-group only exists because it has an out-group. For a thing to exist it must not be other things, it must not be identical. For there to be "us" there must also be a "them." 

But one special in-group wants to abolish all out groups by making them in-group. This predictably leads to no one having an in-group; total social atomization through altruism. 

Since no one can police the borders of their own group without being intolerant only the homogenizing swarm can have an in-group, and it does have an in-group within the in-group, a kind of in-group made of super-tolerance.

Congratulations, you have reinvented imperialism through hyper tolerance. No one is allowed to have an in-group but you. You are the perfection of tolerance, therefore everyone must be tolerant like you, therefore everyone must be part of your group, except when you exclude them by being even more ultra-tolerant. Thus no one can have an in-group but you, for you are the Holy Super High Goddess of Super-tolerance and all others must come to know the benevolence of your tolerance through the understanding of YOU.

Ultra tolerance is a form of hostility and it's remarkable that anyone falls for it. Ultra tolerance is accomplished through gaslighting both the target and the one targeting. You must first gaslight yourself into believing in your own supreme tolerance before you can gaslight others into believing you are tolerant. Once you are super tolerant enough you have earned the privilege of being intolerant of anyone who is also not super tolerant. You can now have an in-group, and your cowardly ass can live secure in the knowledge that no other in-groups are coming to get you, because your super-tolerance has defeated them. They are all part of the homogenizing swarm now, and you control the swarm by gaslighting everyone—including yourself—into believing that you have the right to define the definition of tolerance, and through this definition all else must accept YOU, but you do not have to accept all THEM, for they are insufficiently holy and super-tolerant. You now have a license to both be intolerant and have an in-group while no one else has a license to do either.

All worship the Supreme Goddess of High and Mighty Super Tolerance! Behold the majesty of the Tolerant One, without from which we would be lost and degraded in our shameful bigotry. Oh hi and mighty Super Tolerant Goddess, please tolerate us so that we may tolerate others.

"Our Super Duper Tolerant Goddess, whom tolerates our intolerance, hallowed be Thy super tolerance; Thy un-problematic world come, Thy therapy be done, on earth as it is in Thy un-problematic world."

"Give us this day our daily guilt; and gnash your teeth and bear our microaggressions as we gnash our teeth a bear other like us; and lead us not into wrongthink, but deliver us from racism, for We are the unproblematic world, and the lust for power, and delicious glory of wielding it, forever and ever, Amen to Us"

Tolerance says: " we are more tolerant than you because we don't believe in the in-group, therefore we are the only ones who are allowed to have an in-group, and if too many people join our in-group we will make the things you have to tolerate even more unbearable to ensure you reject it and stay the out-group. We practice exclusion through making ourselves insufferable and forcing you to tolerate it. This we call radical inclusiveness."