The Anti Puritan
Friday, December 12, 2025
Call them cowards; the accusation that stings as much as "racist!"
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
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.
Monday, December 8, 2025
We are lucky that most Sci-Fi technologies are nonsense
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 destructiveUsefulness: 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 workUsefulness: 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% probabilityCultural impact: utterly destructiveUsefulness: 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/shieldsCultural impact: politically and militarily negativeUsefulness: 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 positiveUsefulness: 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: devastatingUsefulness: dubious
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Saturday, December 6, 2025
Hierarchical Review Democracy
Friday, December 5, 2025
Der Führer in English
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Imperialism by gaslighting tolerance
Friday, November 28, 2025
Ideology and the ugly Asian bitch
Thursday, November 27, 2025
The Cathedral vs ZOG
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Congress is a marketplace for the purchasing of laws
It is a far less efficient version of a trading floor with a lot more stress. Even threats of prosecution come into play.
Monday, November 24, 2025
How can we convert left wing women?
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
The Left and Right Gatekeep Each Other to Keep the Pedoelite In Power. Also Some Design Thinking to Possibly Defeat it
2. Theoretical Problems
2.1 Reviewing actions is not equivalent to reviewing governance quality
Most politician decisions are:
- highly technical,filled with tradeoffs,short-term unpopular but long-term beneficial,or long-term harmful but superficially appealing.
A review system risks:
- incentivizing symbolic gestures over structural reforms, punishing necessary but unpopular decisions, rewarding performative behavior, messaging bills, and optics.
This is Goodhart’s Law: once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
2.2 Voters are not ideal reviewers
Most voters cannot track:
- thousands of bill amendments, committee actions, procedural votes, ambiguous or strategic “no” votes.
Yeah but there very existence of such a market creates disincentive for procedural votes.
Your staff can help, but this creates a new bottleneck and potential bias injection point.
3. Incentive/Mechanism Design Issues
3.1 Sybil attacks & brigading
Unless each member is verified and contributions are identity-linked, you get:
- bot armies, partisan brigading, or billionaire-funded mass accounts.
Easy enough to prevent.
If verification is enforced, then:
- cost of membership becomes a barrier, inequalities re-emerge through “whale users”.
3.2 Transparency paradox
If all payments are public:
- politicians will optimize for visible, rewardable actions, but real governance often happens in dark, procedural corners.
Which the system will bring to light.
If payments are less transparent:
- the system becomes vulnerable to manipulation, you risk reintroducing the trustee problem.
3.3 Incentive to sensationalize
Any approval/disapproval system tends toward:
- outrage-driven feedback, shallow metrics, popularity-contest dynamics.
Feature not a bug.
You'll create a “TikTok politics” ecosystem where attention equals money.
4. Legal/Regulatory Issues (U.S.-specific)
4.1 This almost certainly counts as a coordinated expenditure
The FEC is extremely likely to treat this as:
a PAC,
- making contributions to candidates, coordinated based on explicit political actions.
Could definitely be a problem.
This could violate:
- coordination rules, contribution limits (per donor per candidate), independent expenditure restrictions, anti-bribery statutes if intent can be inferred.
The argument “it’s not bribery because it’s after the action” rarely holds legally. Quid pro quo can be inferred from patterns.
4.2 The system risks enabling legalized bribery at scale
Even if technically legal, it resembles:
- mass micro-bribery, tied to specific votes, algorithmically enforced.
So what.
Courts might strike it down or impose severe restrictions.
6.1 Tip actions indirectly via issue-area outcomes
Instead of rewarding votes:
- reward performance metrics (e.g., constituents’ economic well-being), reward bipartisan or evidence-based behaviors, reward procedural transparency.
No we are not doing Futarchy.
6.2 Use random citizen assemblies to curate review categories
Avoid direct mob dynamics by embedding deliberative mini-publics.
Nope, that gives SJWs a way in.
6.3 Introduce anti-Goodhart safeguards
For example:
- no financial rewards tied to single votes, reward accuracy in predicting bill impacts over time,
This is just a prediction market by other means.
- delay payouts until after multi-year evaluation.
This might be a good idea since it prevents Goodhart's Law but it could also water down the effect of rewards if virtue signaling gets into the mix. Perhaps speeches should only be punished and not rewarded.
6.4 Make the platform an opinion-aggregator, not a payment system
You could separate:
- user sentiment tracking, donation routing, politician engagement.
This would be more legally feasible.
Weakens the effect though.
7. Summary
Strengths
- Creative attempt to democratize political influence.
- Correct diagnosis of principal-agent and donor-class problems.
- Clever mechanism in decentralizing “trustee” authority.
- Draws on familiar user-interface paradigms.
Weaknesses
- Risks turning governance into a popularity contest.
- Highly vulnerable to manipulation and polarization.
- Legally likely to be considered coordinated bribery.
- Goodhart’s Law: incentivizes performative rather than substantive governance.
- Overestimates voter ability to review complex actions.
- Creates new bottlenecks despite attempts to remove them.
"Legally likely to be considered coordinated bribery" is a killer here.
Overall:
The idea is bold and intellectually stimulating, but in its current form it would likely produce pathological incentives, legal conflicts, and severe vulnerability to manipulation. Some elements (community-based review, decentralized tracking of politician behavior, aggregated micro-donations) are promising if restructured to avoid direct pay-for-vote dynamics.
The discussion continues here if you want to see some raw output.
What if we have three levels? If money has the most optionality, vouchers less, and votes the least, what if society is organized into levels where more power means less optionality?
In this monetary architecture, society is organized into three layers of capability objects: money, vouchers, and votes. Money is held by the poor and middle class and operates as true, unconstrained currency. It retains full optionality, meaning it can be used to buy anything, pay anyone, donate freely, invest, save, loan, with no restrictions or programming imposed by any authority. Ordinary people may hold and use money because their accumulation of it does not pose a systemic threat; their financial movements cannot distort politics or governance at scale. For them, money functions as the queen on the chessboard, the most flexible and powerful instrument in daily life.
The wealthy, by contrast, do not hold money at all once their assets exceed a certain threshold. Everything above that line is automatically converted into vouchers. These vouchers look like wealth, but they have reduced optionality and are limited by design. They can be used only inside approved domains such as capital markets, philanthropic channels, investment networks, and political review systems. They cannot buy direct political power, cannot serve as bribes, cannot be converted back into money, and cannot purchase coercive capacity. Their effectiveness is governed by a mechanism called Review Democracy, in which ordinary citizens rate wealthy actors according to transparency, fairness, trustworthiness, and behavior. The rating directly affects the strength of the vouchers: good behavior amplifies their influence, while bad behavior weakens or nullifies them. This transforms large-scale wealth into a conditional privilege rather than a blunt instrument of domination.
Politicians, in the third layer, do not use either money or vouchers. They hold votes, which are the weakest and most narrowly defined capability object. Votes can be used only within the governance system to elect internal leaders, pass internal rules, allocate budgets, and maintain the institutional charter.
To limit the corruption of politicans they get their own kind of voucher as payment for services and this voucher is not directly convertable to cash.
Together, the three layers interact through a strict one-way flow. Money may convert upward into vouchers when someone becomes wealthy, but vouchers never convert back into money. Vouchers may influence political oversight systems through review democracy, but cannot compel or corrupt politicians, whose votes remain sealed off from economic exchange. Votes (in theory) cannot convert into anything else. This sealing of each layer prevents cross-contamination and ensures that no single class of capability object can capture the entire system. The result is a private-sector order where ordinary people retain genuine monetary freedom, the rich are constrained to a supervised form of influence, politicians remain unbribable, and the overall structure prevents hierarchy from becoming abusive or self-reinforcing.
Friday, November 14, 2025
Progressive values are capitalist values (and that's a bad thing)
"A revolution does not march a straight line. It wanders where it can, retreats before superior forces, advances wherever it has room, attacks whenever the enemy retreats or bluffs, and above all, is possessed of enormous patience."
— Mao Zedong