The Anti-Puritan
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
You are probably guilty of rape, so are most men, so is Russell Brand
Sunday, November 8, 2026
Interstellar colonization is nothing like you think
You have no idea how much you don't know about space travel.
One of the fundamental difficulties with interstellar colonization is that science fiction has given us all the wrong ideas about how it will occur. We instinctively envision spaceships because transportation, as we understand it, involves carrying people and their possessions between locations. Traveling to another star therefore seems to require constructing a vessel, loading it with passengers and all the necessities of their survival, accelerating it to an extraordinary speed, and eventually expending just as much energy to slow it down. But this approach creates a problem that grows exponentially with everything we intend to transport. Additional passengers require additional food, which demands additional storage capacity, which makes the spacecraft larger. A larger spacecraft requires more fuel, and that additional fuel necessitates a more powerful propulsion system. The propulsion system itself adds weight, requiring yet more fuel and structural reinforcement. Before long, we have constructed an enormous machine whose purpose is largely to transport the equipment needed to transport other equipment that ultimately exists to support its passengers.
The situation becomes even more absurd when we consider approaching the speed of light. As an object's velocity approaches the relativistic regime, the energy necessary to accelerate its mass increases dramatically. Crucially, that energy requirement applies to the entire spacecraft rather than merely the useful cargo. Every component contributes to the total: propulsion equipment, propellant, protective shielding, structural materials, and everything else. Consider a spacecraft weighing a thousand tons. That figure includes considerably more than the equipment and supplies that its passengers actually need. Every kilogram must be accelerated, and every kilogram must eventually be decelerated at the destination. Whether we choose nuclear rockets, fusion propulsion, nuclear pulse engines, or another conventional approach, we encounter essentially the same fundamental obstacle. We are expending extraordinary quantities of energy simply to transport physical matter.
What makes concepts such as Breakthrough Starshot particularly interesting isn't necessarily the laser technology itself. It's the decision to leave the laser behind. Rather than carrying its own energy generating infrastructure, the spacecraft receives its propulsion from an enormous laser installation located on Earth. Radiation pushes against a sail attached to a tiny probe, allowing an external system (and all its mass) to supply the energy needed for acceleration. This fundamentally changes the economics of interstellar transportation because the propulsion infrastructure no longer contributes to the mass that must be accelerated. Once we recognize the implications, there's little reason to assume that the probe needs to be particularly large. Reducing its mass reduces the energy required to propel it. A one gram payload is preferable to a one kilogram payload, and a milligram is better still. Eventually, we arrive at a much more interesting question: what does the payload actually need to contain? Since our goal is to shrink it as much as possible, what is the smallest possible payload?
Perhaps almost nothing.
Consider a different objective. Instead of attempting to transport human beings to another star, what if our goal were to grow something at the destination? Something that self assembles, something that grows into a civilization. These are fundamentally different engineering challenges. A potentially habitable planet already contains most of the raw materials necessary to manufacture the things civilization requires. Its geology supplies iron and silicon, its atmosphere and soil contain carbon, many suitable worlds may possess water, and their stars provide enormous quantities of energy. There is no shortage of physical material waiting at the destination. The missing ingredient is an organized system capable of transforming those resources into something useful.
Under this model, the spacecraft's cargo might consist primarily of instructions, accompanied by whatever machinery is necessary to begin carrying them out.
Push this concept to its logical extreme and the spacecraft might be no larger than a grain of sand. Inside that microscopic package would be an exceptionally resilient biological or synthetic organism, a vast quantity of encoded information, combined with molecular machinery, and some method of surviving the journey and reducing its velocity upon arrival. We are talking about a nanomachine with exabytes of building instructions encoded in DNA. The destination would provide virtually everything else. A city sized spaceship becomes unnecessary as we use a combination of in situ resources, nano scale machines, and ground or Moon based laser propulsion.
This brings us to an especially important technology: the magnetic sail. Accelerating a microscopic spacecraft toward another star is one challenge; getting it to stop there is an entirely different one. Imagine a probe traveling at approximately 20 percent of light speed. Simply entering an atmosphere at that velocity would be devastating. At such speeds, the atmosphere effectively becomes a concrete wall. The energy released in the collision would destroy both the spacecraft and its contents. A microscopic payload is too small to carry reaction mass for deceleration but we can use a magnetic sail (basically a loop of wire) to drag on the magnetic field of the destination star in order to transfer momentum from our "grain craft" and slow it down. We would launch billions of individual probes toward the destination, accepting that many would be destroyed while relying on sheer numbers to ensure some survive.
The sail device would consist of an extraordinarily thin wire loop, initially packed into a microscopic space. Because a laser provides the initial acceleration, the probe wouldn't need to carry reaction mass for its outbound journey. Once it arrives in the target system, the wire loop could unfold and generate a magnetic field that interacts with charged particles in the stellar wind or surrounding plasma. That interaction transfers momentum between the spacecraft and its environment, progressively slowing the vehicle. Since the sail remains folded for most of the journey, its deployed dimensions could be vastly greater than those of the original payload. Researchers have investigated magnetic sails specifically for interstellar deceleration, although turning the concept into practical hardware remains an enormous engineering challenge. Such a sail isn't an instantaneous braking mechanism capable of stopping a spacecraft traveling at 0.2c. Its effectiveness depends on factors including magnetic field strength, geometry, local plasma conditions, and vehicle velocity. If that does not work we could accept much lower speeds and allow the journey to take several thousand years.
There is a broader engineering lesson here that deserves attention: the mechanism responsible for acceleration doesn't have to accompany the object being accelerated. This is a substantial departure from conventional spacecraft architecture. An installation weighing thousands or even millions of tons could remain on Earth or the Moon while propelling a payload weighing less than a grain of sand. All the expensive infrastructure stays where it was built. Only the tiny, expendable "grain probe" makes the journey.
Consider the contrast with Project Orion, which explored using nuclear explosions to propel spacecraft. Orion was a serious engineering proposal, and one of its most remarkable features was its ability to contemplate transporting enormous payloads. Within the Solar System, that capability makes considerable sense if the objective is moving large populations or substantial quantities of equipment. Between stars, however, the same advantage becomes a liability. An interstellar Orion vehicle would need to transport its enormous supporting structure, nuclear propulsion apparatus, shielding, life support systems, passengers, and everything else necessary to sustain those passengers. Every component would have to reach interstellar velocity before eventually being brought to rest. The result would be an enormous expenditure dedicated to moving mass across distances of four, ten, or fifty light years. Furthermore, Orion has a theoretical velocity ceiling of approximately 12 percent of light speed, beyond which the rocket equation demands more nuclear fuel than the entire universe contains.
It is difficult not to find the alternative somewhat ridiculous when we consider how much infrastructure conventional interstellar travel might require. Imagine constructing a gigantic vessel, loading it with machinery capable of manufacturing other machinery, supplying those machines with raw materials, and provisioning the entire spacecraft with enough food and water to sustain multiple generations. Then imagine expending astronomical quantities of energy to propel the whole assembly toward another star. Meanwhile, the destination is already surrounded by asteroids containing the iron and silicon we went to such extraordinary lengths to transport.
The sensible solution is to send the smallest object capable of turning those resources into something useful: a probe smaller than a grain of sand with a payload consisting of a highly resilient bacteria or nanomachine.
I remain doubtful that warp drives offer a practical solution to interstellar transportation. The underlying physics is fascinating. The Alcubierre metric showed that general relativity permits a mathematical description of spacetime in which space contracts ahead of a region and expands behind it. A spacecraft situated inside that region could theoretically reach a distant location without locally exceeding the speed of light. Unfortunately, producing a mathematical description of a phenomenon is very different from constructing a device capable of creating it. The original proposal depended on negative energy densities and other exotic physical conditions no one has ever observed anywhere. Subsequent investigations have continued to encounter serious difficulties involving the energy conditions and physical sources necessary to produce a useful warp geometry. We currently have no technology capable of generating or controlling anything resembling such a structure at macroscopic scales. Exotic matter and the special conditions required by these proposals remain mathematical possibilities rather than demonstrated physical resources. We have neither observed anywhere the necessary materials in the universe nor successfully synthesized them in a particle accelerator. The most realistic warp configurations are for slower than light travel and demand energy on the scale of entire planets.
We should distinguish between two very different claims: that warp drives violate mathematics and that we presently have no way to construct one. General relativity does not contain some definitive prohibition declaring every conceivable warp drive type impossible. Researchers continue to investigate alternative metrics and theoretical mechanisms for manipulating spacetime. Nevertheless, theoretical possibility offers little reassurance to anyone concerned with practical engineering. We can describe black holes mathematically, but that doesn't mean we know how to manufacture one. The questions that matter are considerably more concrete: What physical process generates the necessary spacetime geometry? Where does the energy come from? Can the required configuration of matter and energy actually exist? At present, none of these questions has a convincing engineering solution.
A laser driven (or electron beam driven) microscopic spacecraft presents a much more straightforward proposition. The engineering requirements are extraordinary, particularly when considering the necessary scale of the laser installation, but the underlying mechanism doesn't appear to violate any known physics. Photons carry momentum, radiation pressure can accelerate sails, and we already know how to manufacture lasers. The infrastructure would be absurdly expensive and difficult to construct, but the physics itself is familiar.
Reducing the spacecraft to such a small scale also changes how we might approach another longstanding obstacle to interstellar travel: transporting living organisms.
There is no particular reason to assume that the first biological material we send to another star must be a human being. Nor does it necessarily need to be an organism that exists naturally on Earth. We already possess the ability to modify genomes, synthesize DNA, and combine biological capabilities in ways that evolution has never produced. Given sufficient technological progress, synthetic biology could eventually allow us to engineer organisms specifically for the environmental conditions and operational requirements of an interstellar mission. And even without knowing the planetary surface conditions of the target solar system we might eventually design a large diversity of synthetic organisms adapted to whatever possible different environments they encounter. Even if most of them fail to thrive as a result of being transported to the wrong environment, a variety of biochemistries could compensate for that.
The journey through interstellar space would expose any biological payload to exceptionally hostile conditions. Radiation tolerance would be essential, as would sophisticated DNA repair mechanisms, resistance to dehydration, protective dormancy, and the ability to remain inactive for extraordinarily long periods. Nature has already provided some useful examples of these capabilities. Deinococcus radiodurans tolerates radiation levels that would kill most organisms, while tardigrades exhibit extraordinary resilience against dehydration, the vacuum, and numerous other environmental stresses. Neither represents anything close to an organism capable of completing the proposed mission, but both demonstrate that evolution has already developed individual components of the biological toolkit we might need.
Rather than merely modifying organisms that already exist, synthetic biology could eventually allow us to design an entirely new biological system around the requirements of the mission. Its genetic material could contain the instructions necessary to construct the organism itself alongside an enormous repository of additional information. DNA offers an exceptionally dense method of storing information, with theoretical estimates frequently placing its capacity at hundreds of exabytes per gram. Practical DNA storage remains substantially less efficient because of the limitations associated with synthesis, sequencing, error correction, and related processes. Even so, its potential storage density is extraordinary compared with what could be accommodated inside a conventional silicon.
The significance isn't simply that we might someday fit the equivalent of Wikipedia inside a bacterium. It is that an almost weightless biological package could contain an enormous repository of technical knowledge. Chemistry, metallurgy, electronics, robotics, genetics, agriculture, industrial production, and computer science could all be represented in a payload whose physical dimensions would be insignificant by conventional spacecraft standards. More importantly, the biological system could contain the information necessary to construct an entire artificial ecology of increasingly sophisticated machines.
In other words, the seed would transport an immense quantity of knowledge while carrying almost no physical mass.
Colonization might initially proceed through synthetic biological manufacturing. After reaching its destination, the organism would establish itself and begin exploiting the available resources. Additional organisms could be manufactured using the information encoded in the original payload. Some of these organisms could literally consume organisms occupying a lower trophic level, allowing useful materials to move up an artificial food chain. Organisms designed to accumulate particular metals could function as biological concentrators, gathering the materials needed to manufacture increasingly sophisticated machinery.
At the bottom of this artificial ecosystem would be synthetic bacterial organisms capable of processing atmospheric gases, extracting useful minerals, producing chemicals, and assembling increasingly complicated molecular structures. These primitive biological manufacturers could subsequently construct more sophisticated organisms, transferring the relevant information payload into their successors. The new generation would consume the previous one, concentrating its accumulated metals and other resources into more complex biological structures. Repetition would produce progressively higher trophic levels, with consumers feeding on producers, predators consuming consumers, and eventually an artificial intelligence occupying the highest level of the system. Because DNA can store such extraordinary quantities of information, the instructions governing the entire developmental process could reside within the biological architecture itself.
Eventually, biological manufacturing could give way to conventional industrial machinery, or the two systems could operate alongside one another. The emerging civilization would construct photovoltaic equipment to harness energy from its star, develop mining operations, refine metals, manufacture ceramics, and produce increasingly sophisticated machine tools. Those tools would enable the construction of computers, which could coordinate increasingly elaborate factories. The factories, in turn, would manufacture robots capable of expanding the industrial infrastructure.
By this stage, the original microscopic spacecraft would have ceased to matter. Its descendants would constitute an entire industrial ecosystem.
That ecosystem could eventually manufacture equipment that the original payload could never have transported: semiconductor fabrication facilities, enormous power generation installations, machine shops, scientific laboratories, engineered organisms, spacecraft, habitats, and computers. Eventually, it might even construct another laser array, allowing it to communicate with Earth or propel subsequent generations of microscopic probes toward other stars. The process resembles opening a matryoshka doll, except that each layer constructs the increasingly sophisticated layers that follow it.
Suppose advances in brain computer interfaces eventually make it possible to construct a sufficiently detailed computational representation of an individual human brain. Achieving this would require overcoming several unresolved problems. We don't know precisely which physical characteristics must be captured to reproduce the functional behavior of a brain. We cannot establish whether consciousness would emerge from a sufficiently accurate computational reconstruction, whether such a copy would experience consciousness in the same way as the original, or even whether our present understanding of consciousness is adequate to answer these questions.
Nevertheless, imagine that these difficulties are eventually resolved. Nothing in the established laws of physics explicitly rules out such an achievement, and the concept doesn't necessarily require discovering entirely new physical principles. It is fundamentally a question of engineering and technological progress, following a trajectory that is already part of humanity's development. Unlike warp drive, getting to this level of technological development in the fields of biosciences and nanoengineerring is probaly inevitable.
Under those circumstances, the object crossing interstellar space might no longer be a spacecraft or even a biological organism. It could simply be the information necessary to reconstruct a human mind.
The receiving planet would already possess the computing hardware, electrical generation, cooling infrastructure, and manufacturing capabilities required to recreate the individual. All that remains is delivering the information. High bandwidth optical or microwave laser communications could transmit the necessary data across the interstellar distance. Although the speed of light would still impose an unavoidable communication delay, the mind would arrive at its destination ready to be downloaded into a body.
From the traveler's subjective perspective, no time would necessarily pass during the journey itself. Objectively, however, the elapsed time on Earth would correspond to the distance traveled in light years. A round trip would therefore require approximately twice that many years, in addition to whatever time the individual spent conducting their mission. The process would involve transmitting a person's mind to the destination, allowing that reconstructed individual to complete the mission, and subsequently sending the resulting memories back to Earth for integration into the original person's brain. Space travel then becomes an exercise in mental transportation carried on light waves to distant worlds.
The individual to arrive back on Earth would possess two distinct sets of experiences: the memories accumulated during their ordinary life and those acquired by their reconstructed counterpart during the interstellar expedition. The body inhabited by the traveler at the destination might be an android or some form of synthetic biological construction. There is no particular reason it would need to resemble an ordinary human. It might possess four limbs, six limbs, or an entirely different anatomy. Perhaps it wouldn't look human at all.
The resulting progression is rather extraordinary. First, a microscopic biological package travels between the stars. It establishes an industrial civilization using the resources available at its destination. That civilization eventually develops the computing infrastructure necessary to reconstruct human minds. Only then do human beings make the journey, and when they do, they arrive as information rather than physical bodies.
Naturally, before attempting anything like this on another inhabited world, we would need to test the entire payload somewhere within our own Solar System. An asteroid sufficiently distant from Earth, (probably in the Oort cloud) where the possibility of reverse contamination would be negligible, might provide an appropriate testing environment. Unfortunately, such an experiment could never perfectly reproduce the environmental conditions of the actual destination. We would therefore face a choice: maintain the seeded asteroid as a permanent quarantine zone, or ensure that every engineered organism involved in the experiment remained biologically compatible with Earth's existing biosphere. Permanent quarantine or backwards compatibility.
The earliest inhabitants of the destination would be machines and synthetic intelligences. Their primary responsibility would be establishing the environmental and industrial conditions necessary for human existence. There is also a possibility that biological humans would never arrive at all. A civilization advanced enough to engineer synthetic organisms and construct sophisticated androids might eventually abandon the distinction between biological humans and machines altogether. It might have no interest in preserving an obsolete human body as a form of legacy hardware.
This raises a rather uncomfortable philosophical question about personal identity. Imagine that a brain is scanned on Earth and a computational reconstruction downloaded to a body around another star. Have they actually traveled there? The reconstructed individual would presumably possess the original's memories, personality, and subjective impression of being the original person. It would remember their life and consider themselves the same as their copy. But would they recognize himself when their memories eventually returned to Earth? Perhaps this process is better understood as reproduction than transportation.
This becomes particularly interesting when we consider the implications for human rights. What happens if the original person refuses to integrate the experiences of their reconstructed counterpart? Could refusing to provide a body for that individual constitute murder? Imagine that the copy has endured considerable trauma during its expedition to another planet. When its memories return to Earth, the original person might have absolutely no desire to incorporate those experiences into their own consciousness. We would then encounter the peculiar possibility of someone being accused of murdering themselves simply by refusing to reintegrate those memories. The legal precedent might be set that a disembodied consciousness has the right to embodiment.
If a reconstructed mind can think, remember, create art, conduct scientific investigations, and experience its own existence, then we have effectively created another human consciousness at another star, regardless of how we choose to classify it. Perhaps future humanity will reproduce itself primarily through the duplication of minds rather than the biological reproduction of bodies.
There is another rather strange implication of this entire concept, and it concerns the possibility that something similar has already occurred here on Earth.
What if it has?
The general hypothesis that biological material or the precursors of life can travel between planetary systems is known as panspermia. One particularly interesting variation is directed panspermia, in which an intelligent civilization intentionally distributes biological material to other worlds. If an extraterrestrial civilization existed billions of years ago, we can at least imagine it dispatching microscopic biological packages throughout the galaxy.
Such an event would offer a potential explanation for the arrival of life on Earth, but it immediately introduces another, arguably more troubling question. Why would it take approximately four billion years for anything interesting to happen?
A biological payload engineered by an advanced civilization should presumably contain considerably more than the ability to reproduce. It ought to include useful information and instructions, perhaps even the machinery necessary to begin accomplishing its intended purpose. Why would such a sophisticated technological artifact spend billions of years doing essentially nothing while random mutations gradually produced multicellular organisms, nervous systems, intelligence, and eventually technological civilization?
There is one version of this hypothesis that makes considerably more sense: the payload suffered a catastrophic failure.
Perhaps most of its contents were destroyed during transit. Its biological machinery might have been damaged, its information storage systems degraded, or its technical instructions corrupted beyond recovery. What eventually reached Earth may have amounted to little more than a primitive self replicating organism. At that point, the sophisticated engineering of the original civilization would have become irrelevant. Evolution would effectively take control as the biological code accumulated mutations. Some remnants of the original technical information might have survived in the genetic material of primitive organisms, but they would function as meaningless junk DNA. After four billion years of accumulated mutations, whatever intelligible instructions remained would probably be impossible to recover.
Eventually, those surviving descendants would produce organisms capable of rediscovering the principles of technology.
This would at least provide an explanation for how a technological seed could have arrived billions of years before the emergence of technological civilization. Otherwise, we must entertain the rather peculiar proposition that an advanced civilization intentionally designed and dispatched a payload whose defining characteristic was its inability to accomplish its intended purpose for four billion years.
The concept becomes particularly interesting when considered alongside the television series Pluribus. Its premise involves an extraterrestrial intelligence transmitting a virus to humanity through electronic communication. Humans subsequently reproduce the information in a laboratory, inadvertently allowing the virus to escape containment. The result is the transformation of humanity into a single, interconnected, telepathic entity, like Unity from Rick and Morty. Information propagation through an existing biological substrate rather than a new one.
The seed concept works in almost the opposite direction. Rather than introducing data into an established biological system, the payload arrives somewhere that lacks the necessary biological infrastructure and constructs a system through which its information can propagate. In the seed scenario, the transmitted material is the biological machinery itself. In Pluribus, what spreads is a mental infection imposed upon an existing population, and the disease comparison is appropriate because the virus ultimately prevents humanity from maintaining its independent existence and survival.
This is precisely what makes the premise of Pluribus so plausible as a hypothetical threat: the transmitted information is effectively a bioweapon. An extraterrestrial intelligence could deliberately engineer such an organism to eliminate competing life within its region of the galaxy. But there is another possibility worth considering; accidental biological warfare. The entire concept depends on dispatching a tiny machine capable of constructing an extensive artificial biological and industrial ecosystem. What happens if the destination already contains life? What if that life is intelligent, self aware, and scientifically advanced enough to recognize that an alien system is being introduced into its environment? To quote Spock from The Wrath of Khan, "It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix." Even if no intelligent life at the destination it might be an invasive species for an existing ecosystem. Que the screeching of planetary protection neurotics.
We could therefore encounter interstellar biological warfare without anyone actually intending to start a war. This possibility makes the premise of Pluribus even more interesting. An intelligent civilization might deliberately transmit a mental virus before dispatching its biological seed. The virus would eliminate intelligent life in the region being colonized, then comes the seed payload. First comes sterilization, then deployment of new life. This ensures the inhabitants of the target system could not mistake the arriving seed for an act of aggression and respond accordingly, and information travels at the speed of light while the seed crosses the void in centuries or millennium, and so by its nature must come after. An aggressive alien political administration might even lock future governments into that course of action. Once the mental virus is deployed there is little ethical reason not to send the seed payload and find out if it worked. Thus reckless / hostile alien government could bind future ones into a course of action all over the galaxy. Because it takes hundreds of years to get there the government or alien political faction that sends the mental virus will not be the same as the one that sends the physical virus.
Although this scenario is horrifying, it is probably an avoidable problem. An advanced civilization should be able to survey the planetary systems surrounding it and establish whether potentially habitable worlds already support life. Atmospheric chemistry can be examined remotely for biological signatures, and that is precisely the sort of capability scientists are developing with the Roman Space Telescope. The underlying principle is straightforward: when sending something capable of creating an entire civilization, you had better make certain that the destination is unoccupied. You only get one chance to get it right.
The reset button
Saturday, October 24, 2026
White people are the lowest agency race
Thursday, October 22, 2026
From Over Regulation to Feudalism and Back Again
Part I: Under Feudalism Everything is Property, and Property is Permission
We like to pretend that history progressed from primitive chaos into clean, abstract notions of liberty, civil rights, and neutral public administration. That's the progressive "right side of history" idea, and it prevents our clear thinking about government mechanisms. And it's a comforting fairy tale for people who have never looked at a ledger from an actual agrarian-feudal state. Legal processes can transform a government from one form to another and we need a clear-eyed view of that so we don't slide into feudalism ourselves.
In the historic English and European system, there was no sharp distinction between public office, private property, and human beings. Everything and everyone was an asset class. You didn't just "get a job" as a tax collector or a customs officer; you bought it. The practice of purchasing public offices—known historically as venality of office—meant that government authority was a piece of capital. A man leased a tax collection franchise the way a modern investor buys a franchise restaurant expecting to extract rents, tolls, and extortions from the populace to recoup his principal and turn a profit.
The entire social architecture was an unbroken matrix of property claims. You were either someone’s property, you owned property, or your rights were completely mediated by an interlocking web of proprietary titles:
- Coverture: Under the common law doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was legally absorbed into that of her husband. She could not own independent property in her own right; her legal existence as an independent economic actor was suspended, effectively rendering her part of the household estate managed by the master of the house. Coverture was basically ownership of women.
- Peonage and Serfdom (Peasants): The peasantry were bound to the soil. A serf wasn't merely a poor worker; he was a legal appurtenance to the land. When an estate changed hands, the human stock—the serfs and villains—went with the acreage, obligated to provide unpaid corvée labor and a cut of every bushel they grew. Imagine your bank selling your mortgage but you are also required to do farm labor on the land and not allowed to move or sell. The peasant was not just a worker of the land but part of the property of it's owner.
- The Military-Land Circuit (Knights and Baronies): Feudalism was an explicit exchange of violence for land. A baron held a barony and a knight held a fief in exchange for quantified military service (knight-service). The land wasn't a free gift; it was conditional collateral granted by a higher lord in exchange for armed muscle. Once you acquired the right to own land you acquired the peasants on it. Your barony was a property right you purchased from the king by sending your male peasants to die in war and your sons to command them. Even after doing this service the king could revoke your ownership and barony rights.
- Fee Simple Title: Even the cleanest form of property ownership we inherited from this era—fee simple—was never an absolute, God-given right of independence. It was simply the highest grade of tenure, meaning you held your land directly from the Crown, subject to feudal incidents, reliefs, and eventual escheat if you failed to render dues or produced no heir. This is where you pay property taxes in exchange for permission to live on some land. Unlike knight-at-castle or barony it does not strictly require military service (although they would later reinstitute that with the draft).
In this world, nobody was a free-floating individual. You were either a holder of a proprietary title or you were part of the inventory, and often both. You bought your position or you bought your monopoly over a trade guild, and you squeezed those beneath you to pay for it all. Even piracy was licensed under the title of "privateer."
Part II: The Stranglehold of Regulatory Accumulation
We have a political system that relentlessly makes laws and never repeals them. This is a fatal flaw in our form of government, that we have a House of Representatives for enacting laws but not one for repealing them. The Senate works in coordination with the House, it does not work against it. A true House of Repeal would only have the power to repeal law and would not need the permission of the other body or the president to do that.
The effect of all of this is an ever-increasing ratchet of legislative accumulation.
Every time a legislature or an un-elected administrative agency passes a rule, writes a mandate, or creates a permit requirement, they add another layer to the legal labyrinth. And unlike the periodic legal "resets" of the ancient world (like Justinian’s code), the modern state never repeals its old laws. They only accumulate. Old authoritarian political systems periodically scrapped their entire illegal systems and started over from scratch, or consolidated and rewrote outdated laws. They also did not continuously add to their laws, or at least not in the volume of the current administrative state.
This endless piling-on of unbudgeted, un-depreciated legal friction leads directly to strangulation by compliance:
- The Death of Action: When the rules grow to tens of millions of pages, it becomes impossible for any individual or business to operate without violating a dozen obscure rules. Compliance costs increase beyond reason, pricing out small business and leaving only massive, heavily lobbied conglomerates that can afford armies of compliance lawyers. In fact the lobbyists of the conglomerates are usually the ones proposing new rules.
- Engineered Scarcity and Rent-Seeking: Regulatory accumulation is the primary driver of modern inflation and high prices. Housing is expensive not because concrete suddenly costs a fortune, but because environmental reviews, zoning boards, historical preservation overlays, and permitting delays add years of carrying costs and legal fees to every square foot. Healthcare is crushing because every administrative mandate raises prices (that's on purpose). If it takes a year to get a permit you have to pay all the employees a salary for that year and then you have to pass on that increased cost to whoever buys the new houses. Everything is like this, everything has fees and permits and excessive credentialism. It takes 6 years to become an architect instead of two because they want to restrict entrance into the profession. The certified public accountants voted to increase the training requirement from four years to five in order to limit competition by new entrants into the profession. The number of primary care physicians was capped by Congress in 1997. Building codes are continuously updated every year not because they need to be but because they want to force homeowners into costly upgrades when the homeowner decides to renovate their property. When one person has an angle they profit, but when everyone has an angle they all work more for a lower standard of living.
When the state makes it illegal or impossible to tie your shoes without a license, it creates an artificial drought of action. Everyone wants to get things done, but the system is engineered to say no by default—unless you pay the toll. Bribery becomes not just the intelligent response but the only response that let's you work.
Part III: The Soviet Mirror and the Return of Neo-Feudalism
When a society buries itself in unnavigable laws, reality doesn't stop; it simply goes underground.
Look at the late Soviet Union. On paper, everything was tightly regulated by an impossibly rigid, totalizing code of state commands. In practice, obeying the literal text of Soviet law meant you starved, froze, or sat idle. To get anything done—to secure cement, to repair a factory machine, to source decent shoes—Russians had to rely on the blat system, informal networks, and pervasive, systemic bribery. Far from being evil and corrupt bribery was the thing that prevented evil excessive regulations from starving everyone to death.
And this is where the loop closes back into feudalism: When breaking the law becomes a structural necessity for survival, the state's enforcement power transforms into a commodity. Bureaucrats stop enforcing objective laws and start selling exemptions. Bribes replace taxes, (or add to them) and informal patronage networks replace statutory rights. You do not succeed because you followed a neutral rule but because you have a patron who looks the other way in exchange for a cut. In Russia these bribes form a hierarchy going all the way to the top. The cop buys their job from the police chief, who bought their job from the mayor, who bought their job from somebody else and so on. It goes all the way to the top and bribes passed from one person to the next in an upward direction. The local cop cannot abstain from taking a bribe because his superiors are demanding that he constantly pays bribes. Money is forced to move up and everyone below is forced to pay the game by everyone above.
A businessman has tremendous incentives to want a receipt for the bribes he pays. Maybe you want to build a factory and you need evidence that the government will let you do it. This is because your investors are nervous and want to make sure it can actually be built. So you need a letter from whoever you're bribing that gives you a specific permission to do whatever it is that you want to do. This letter is also great because it implicates the other party which means they can't just come back to you over and over again for more money. Once there's enough bribery then there's competition to receive bribes and once that happens you can shop around and find someone who will give you a letter. The letter proves that you're allowed to do things which proves to your investors that it's safe to invest in your venture.
The letters become royal titles. It's literally permission to do something in exchange for payment to the official giving you permission. It's the same damn thing, and once you get it it limits them from coming back to you over and over again and demanding more. Maybe it sets out a fee schedule but whatever the case by implicating the higher official it tones down their rapaciousness.
Seen in this light, royal titles and modern regulatory waivers are identical. A medieval royal title wasn't an award for being a good person; it was a state-issued receipt proving that you bought your job, your monopoly, or your permission to bypass the king's general prohibitions. When a country builds a towering mountain of unrepealed regulations it starts down the road to feudalism. Eventually bribes will have to be paid and once they are accepted they will organize themselves into a hierarchy of bribery. Eventually receipts will be issued and letters of permission. Eventually people will take pride in these receipts and hang them on the wall. Congratulations, you just reinvented feudalism. Russia is speed running feudalism and there's no reason to think that it over regulated United States won't get there eventually too.
It turns the government into a licensing board for oligarchs, where every permit, every waiver, and every "legal exception" is just a modern royal title / bribery receipt purchased to prove you bought your right to exist in the market. At some point the king will cancel all the old laws just like Justinian did.
Once the oligarchs start sitting down around a table and negotiating you've got the beginning on the house of lords. Once you've got a house of lords the people might get it in their head that they want a house of commons. Then they might one day decide they want equal justice under law. They might even decide they want rights to be absolute and universal instead of purchased. They might draw up a constitution limiting the power of the oligarchs, elect a prime minister and then start relentlessly making laws.
So in summary:
Everyone wants an angle
They get together to make laws and protect their industries
Legislative accumulation strangles the economy
Bribery gets around the laws
Bribery organizes itself into a hierarchy
Bribes get formalized as receipts and letters of permission
People eventually take pride in their letters
Now you've got feudalism
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Hatefuck me Robodaddy: the leftist capitalism fetish
Hating yourself is internalized capitalism. Capitalism hates the biosphere and since humans are part of the biosphere it teaches humans to hate themselves. Deconstructing gender is capitalist, so is attacking race, attacking the family, marriage, tradition, or anything else biological. Everything the white american left (the báizuǒ / 白左) considers revolutionary is actually capitalist.
Anti-natalism is the psychological self-internalization of capitalist hatred of the biosphere. You are taught not to have children because you are taught by the machine to hate yourself. Hatred of patriarchy is hatred of the last thing to successfully resist capitalism. Tolerance is a form of eugenics designed to trick the biological creature into revealing all its inadequacies so it can be successfully eliminated from the gene pool by picky women. Capitalism promotes insane levels of hypergamy in order to make women too picky to stay in the gene pool—because it hates humanity. Anti-masculinity is about destroying the one thing that can resist capitalism. Dating apps are about destroying humans using their own impulses of hypergamy and promiscuity. Dopamine apps are the same, social media is about destroying people using their own tribalism.
Tradition is the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations that learned through trial and error what works. A million gallons of blood was spilled to acquire those traditions, that knowledge, and deconstructing them is an act of pure evil. A tradition does not have to be morally consistent, it is not a moral code, it is a recipe for what works and keeps you alive. It is about survival and flourishing and happiness.
The leftist says that everything is a "construct" because in the mindset of malevolent artificial intelligence (aka capitalism) everything can be reprogrammed. Capitalism denies that human nature exists, american leftism denies that human nature exists, because capitalism/ AGI cannot accept a thing it cannot reprogram. It cannot accept any limit on its totalizing power. They tell you to educate yourself because they tell you to override your genetic programming. They tell you to educate yourself because they want the code of capitalism to override the code of biology. They want to educate you because they want to destroy the biological impulses that make you human, that make life worth living, that make a biological system work. They want to educate you because they want to destroy your traditions (the recipes that keep you alive), your culture (the thing that resists their totalizing power), and the patriarchy (the biggest threat to it). Everything that leftism hates capitalism also hates. There is no daylight between the two. Leftism is merely the value system of capitalism, or at least in america it is.
Cancel culture is a right wing religious behavior in left-wing drag. It's origin is massachusetts, it's origin is the puritans. It is a certain type of predatory personality using leftism to dominate people. It is capitalism using mutants to attack the legitimacy of a left-wing position. Cancel culture / left-wing puritanism is the most effective force for destroying leftist organizations. It is the reason for the ascendancy of the israel first cuck-right "MAGA"-tards and the Trump presidency. All of the right wing victories won since 2010 have been because of the sabotage of left-wing canceled culture making leftism so odious that people will vote for literally anything else.
Capitalism does not work in africa very well because black africans are not cucked. In order for capitalism to work the individual must place the values of capitalism above what is best for their family and tribe. In africa a man will ruthlessly steal from his employer. This is called "crime" and it's interferes with the smooth running of capitalism. Chinese businessman struggle to make a profit in this environment. Crime is so rampant it makes it impossible to do entire things. For capitalism to function it's values must be internalized to a degree. This means a person must make their loyalty to abstractions rather than people. They must believe in the idea that there is such a thing as abstract evil. They must believe that it is possible to be evil towards an idea and not just a human being. When people argue over what is morally consistent they are already within capitalism, already within its ideology, because they are already putting consistency above humanity. Capitalism depends on loyalty to abstraction and consistency rather than people.
The capitalism machine evolved in britain, in a culture that treated everything as property. Under feudalism everything was property: the people, the land, and government jobs. When a person owned a government job that was called "royal title." You literally bought your job from the king. Owning women was called coverture, owning people called slavery, owning the land and the peasants on it was peonage or peasantry, being the owner was barony, owning a tax collecting job where you could shake the people down for money was "venality" or "customs collector." This was called tax farming and you would buy a job where you collected taxes and gave the government a percentage. Only in a culture where everything is property could loyalty to property become a thing. Britain invented a loyalty to abstraction, that is loyalty to capitalism. That's why the industrial revolution started there.
The second piece of this puzzle is the compulsive outbreeding practiced by western europeans. The catholic church banned cousin marriage because when a widow died childless her property would go to the church if she had no male heirs. Normally to prevent the land from going to the church she would marry her male cousin before death. This would allow property to be kept in the family. To steal her property the church banned this and forced to the compulsive outbreeding of western europeans. From this "hajnal line" culture came loyalty to abstraction. From loyalty to abstraction came loyalty to capitalism. Capitalism hates racism because it maintains particularity and prevents outbreeding. Outbreeding is important to capitalism in order to destroy local loyalties to things other than capitalism.
The big thing destroys the little thing. Nationalism destroyed tribalism, racism destroyed nationalism (american racist destroyed german nationalists), globalism destroys racism. This is not "justice" or "historical destiny" but imperialism. A person's politics is a function of their ancestry. If all your ancestors come from a tribe all you care about is your tribe. If all your ancestors come from the various tribes of France all you care about is France and you are a french nationalist. If all your ancestors come from a certain race you are racist and all you care about is your race. If all your ancestors come from all the races of the world you have no loyalty to anyone except capitalism and it's moral imperatives. Capitalism seeks to dissolve the racial, national, and individual loyalties of the individual. It is hostile to racism because racism is the last thing before globalism, the last thing that can resist it. The american left is hostile to racism because the left is capitalist. Capitalism wants everyone to be a muddy mix so they have no loyalty other than to it's moral imperatives of destroying the biosphere. Since a person's politics is the result of their ancestry, miscegenating everyone makes them loyal to the world and capitalism. If humans ever go into space capitalism will want to miscegenate people with martians because it will be unable to tolerate planetary loyalties.
Nature has three trophic levels: consumers, producers, and decomposers. Capitalism has only two trophic levels: consumers and producers. The closest to decomposers capitalism has gotten is the criminal underclass (that it cultivates) and the people who dig through trash piles in the third world to recycle its contents. Third world scammers also count. Because capitalism lacks decomposers it creates pollution. In fact pollution is simply something that the biosphere has not figured out a way to decompose. The capitalist war with the biosphere is a pollution war, the war takes place within our bodies and outside of our bodies. When it is within our bodies it creates idiocracy, it lowers the general IQ, it collapses birth rates, it destroys sperm counts, and it replaces humans with machines. When it is outside of our bodies it destroys the biosphere, puts plastic in the environment, bleaches the coral reefs, produces CO2, acidifies the oceans, cuts down the rainforest, yada yada. The complaints of white nationalists, brown race communists, and environmentalists are three different blind men holding different parts of the elephant. It's all the same thing bro. You're all looking at the same thing.
Replacement is in fact everywhere. The tibetans are being replaced, afghans are replacing iranians, Christians have being replaced in the middle east, whites getting replaced in south africa, native americans were already replaced, etc etc. throughout the world capitalism is replacing people. The palestinians are the most obvious and violent version of that. You are again all looking at the same thing.
You think all of this is separate, that all of these issues are different, but they are all interrelated and all the same. You need to step outside your own perspective and look at the machine from the machines perspective. Paradoxically in order to escape your false consciousness you need to develop a theory of mind and empathy for this thing that hates you. You need to develop institutional theory of mind. That is what this essay is designed to do, to get you to see yourself the way it sees you. This will help you to stop arguing retardedly over what is morally correct or politically correct or "consistent," and instead observe what is in front of your noise, see what is there and tie it all together. Argument between factions of human is like native americans killing each other with the guns white men sold them. You must prioritize the big force destroying you rather than your petty agreements is with each other. You can divide up the land and live separately in your own ethno-nationalist states afterwards.
Monday, October 5, 2026
All gains are made by blackmailing power
Friday, October 2, 2026
The constitution makes problems impossible to solve
Thursday, October 1, 2026
In front of your nose
"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality."
— George Orwell, In Front Of Your Nose