Reasons NOT to Release the Epstein Client List

Epstein's business was a blackmail business and that means first you bait people into hazard and then use their crimes to control them. 

You need plausible deniability of course, you need to say you know nothing about why it happened and this helps if you have an island or a separate space where the girls will go and you are not present. It also helps if your surveillance system is disguised as an at home security system, again, so that you have deniability. Basically, you want to be able to send these videos to the cops whenever you choose without dragging yourself into an investigation. A hotel where all the sex acts happen in a public space gives you the greatest possible plausible deniability to claim that you are simply reporting a crime and not a participant in that crime. You are, after all, just the hotel owner dutifully reporting things to the police.

Blackmail can be incredibly lucrative when the targets are incredibly wealthy or connected. 

In contract law there are multiple standardized forms of contract: the non-disclosure agreement, the anti-compete, the retainer contract, the service level agreement, options, escrow, etc etc. 

Similar to contract law blackmail can have standardized arrangements. For example, 

1. Cash leveraging. This is where a person is blackmailed into giving payments, aka. extortion. 

2. Asset leveraging. This is where a person is blackmailed into surrendering control over an asset. 

3. Favor leveraging. This is where blackmail is used to gain a favor from someone with power. Subtypes of this are:

3A. Favor leveraging for prosecution of enemies. 

3B. Favor leveraging for relief from prosecution.

3C. Roof leveraging. (Krysha in Russian) Using blackmail on a person's boss to force the subordinate to leave one alone.

4. Fall guy leveraging. This is when you use blackmail on a person to make them take the fall for a lesser charge that you yourself are guilty of.

 

There are more possible arrangements than the ones listed here and I'm just making up categories but basically the idea is that you can arrange these categories into an entire business empire that are interlocking and self-supporting.

For example, first you set up a number of cash leveraging positions on various people. This creates a steady supply of funds. 

Then you set up favor leveraging positions on district attorneys and other prominent lawyers and judges. The ideal arrangement is that you have the ability to blackmail both the judge and all the attorneys on a case at the same time so that you can control the outcome of any trial. Location matters, and a change of venue can throw everything out of whack. So you need to know all that jurisdictions and who has the authority to swoop in and steal jurisdiction from whose attorneys. You want to control the entire "vertical" meaning, not just the judge but the judge above him in the hierarchy, not just the prosecutor, but the prosecutor above him, etc. Change of venue can work to your advantage if you control all the outcomes.

You make sure you have fall leveraging guys, these are guys whose only purpose is to throw them under the bus. Let us say that you never issue any orders on paper but instead have various minions who carry out the orders. These minions themselves are guilty of crimes that you baited them into doing on camera. The minion is the one who contacts the judge, the minion is the one who issues ultimatums and blackmail threats on your behalf. Another minion is also the one who sets up all the arrangement between the young girls and clients. If prosecution ever comes to your door you can say "woah I had no knowledge of this, it was all the minions fault." These guys of course will want to run away as soon as they figure out they are the fall guy, so it helps if you have some other leveraged position on their families. Maybe you have dirt on a hitman or thug who won't have a crisis of conscience about murdering somebody's kids.

Let's say after all of this you finally get caught and you kill yourself in jail. Maybe kill yourself or maybe one of your clients pays somebody in jail to kill you. Regardless, there is still the potential for somebody to inherit your entire business. If enough evidence is found, let's say thousands of sex tapes between clients and young girls, then anyone can step in and take over the business after your death. Even if they never participated in the raping of these girls. And if they did participate in the raping of these girls they have even more incentive to take over the business. Any savvy businessman, which Trump fancies himself of course to be, it's going to look at this situation and see not a collection of sex tapes, but a collection of assets. Every billionaire rapist depicted in those sex tapes is an income source, or a favor source. Every judge or prosecutor depicted, every high powered attorney that participated in any of these rapes is also a potential legal asset. Everyone who ever participated in raping these young girls on camera is either a financial asset, legal asset, fall guy, or henchman that you can use. 

When you're dealing with these things it helps to have an institutional theory of mind. You know how you develop a theory of mind for understanding other people? You need to extend that to understanding institutions. This type of understanding can let you see a whole world that you normally wouldn't even consider. It's the type of understanding that lets you flesh out the details of how a blackmail business might work. This is why you're reading this and thinking "how does this guy know this?" Well I don't actually know for sure, and I'm just modeling the cognition of how these people would operate. 

So this brings me to the question, what is motivating Trump? There are some possibilities. One, there really is no Epstein client list. This is actually somewhat plausible since no one in their right mind would keep this data in a big file that says CLIENT LIST when they could simply keep it in a contact book. Epstein didn't need a client list because he already had 1. video tapes, 2. a contact book, and 3. his own memory. The real question is why hasn't Trump ordered some lawyers to watch all the tapes and make a list of everyone guilty of the crime, and then publish that list? The answer is pretty damning, and it's either a. he's taking over the business, or b. he's taking over the business and he's guilty.

When we consider how much Peter Thiel is involved in creating JD Vance and a whole bunch of other MAGA insiders, and consider that Trump is now in the blackmail business too, rather than abolishing some globalist cartel we have the founding of a new hyper cartel. These guys are going to combine their power into something new and possibly much worse. Maybe they will continue to push against immigration replacement, or maybe they will get totally cucked by the forces they now control and becomes just another version of it. They say in communism the government owns businesses but in fascism business owns the government. When we look at either we see that they behave the same way. This is because they have the same incentives. You should expect Trump's successors to be globalist shills unless nothing is done because the incentives are all the same.

Victimocracy, reposted from Thumotic

Neoreactionaries produced a wonderful body of literature that explains all the ills of modernity, then packed up their bags, deleted their blogs and left. This does a tremendous disservice to future generations who will never even know the links on the Wayback Machine for finding this wisdom. I offer one such article from all the way back in 2015, quoted in full, with my commentary at the end.

Since everything has largely been said, and since the next generation needs to hear it, I may be posting more of these articles from the past with my commentary at the end of each. 

Victimocracy

May 29, 2015 By Jon Frost

Throughout history, ruling elites have always created narratives to justify their authority.

The human ego is allergic to the honest expression of arbitrary formalized status hierarchies, so power generally requires myths and stories to support itself.

For example: the power of monarchs was justified as the divine right of kings. Kings were viewed as God’s legitimate appointed rulers on Earth, and disobeying them was a sinful rebellion against God. Why should you obey the King? Because God said so. End of discussion. Eat your vegetables and go to bed.

Republican governments eschewed God as a source of sovereign authority, and substituted the myth of The Will Of The People. The republican government’s duty is simply to make policy decisions that reflect the will of its citizens, and God never enters the picture. Republicanism gradually devolves into Democracy, as the duties of citizenship are stripped away.

At the far end of the spectrum of legitimacy, there is authority derived from itself – Power qua Power. This myth of sovereign authority is actually just the absence of a myth, and it characterizes the most brutal and tyrannical expressions of power.

It’s a fun exercise to read through history and consider empires from the perspective of: who rules whom? And what myths do they tell themselves, masters and slaves alike, to justify that distribution of power. It’s even more fun to play that game with our own empire.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine an Alien visits America in 2015, and wants to figure out who’s in charge. He spends some time following our news cycle, our pop culture, and observing social interactions. In his report, he notes that:

• Straight white males (SWMs) are subject to legal discrimination in hiring, promotion, and academic admission
• SWMs are fair game for mockery and derision, while mockery of non-SWMs is socially unacceptable
• SWMs are portrayed negatively in pop culture and in the news. Whenever a SWM commits a crime, their status as a SWM is a major feature of the story. When a non-SWM commits a crime, there identity is deliberately hidden
• There seems to be a complex system and ranking of the various non-SWM classes. The Alien is still unsure of the exact delineations – does a black lesbian trump a chinese MtF transexual in a wheelchair? – but SWMs are clearly at the bottom of the totem pole
• And here’s the most interesting part: despite all the legal, social, and cultural prejudice against SWMs, the pervading belief in our empire is that SWMs are actually in charge and are running things for their own benefit. SWMs are consumed with guilt, and have convinced themselves that they’re responsible for everything that’s wrong with the world.

At first the Alien is confused, but then he realizes: twenty-first century America is a historically unprecedented phenomenon. It is the world’s first Victimocracy.

What Is A Victimocracy?

A Victimocracy is a society in which the ruling class justifies its position through a mythos of victimhood.

The master morality of the ruling class is: “We are oppressed by the other class, and we continue to suffer from their historical and ongoing domination of society. To rectify this oppression, we must create a legal and social framework that elevates us above the other class, in order to close the gap and repay them for their wrongs against our class.”

The slave morality of the ruled class is: “We are the privileged group in this society, so we must submit to legal and social disadvantages in order to level the playing field and make reparations for our oppression of the other class, to whom we submit entirely.”

Our culture of victimhood and constant privilege-checking may seem silly and stupid, but this is a dangerous underestimation – the Victimhood Mythos is a ruthless justification of raw power, the goal of which is to make you accept your lower station in life, and quiet the doubts of any Social Justice Warrior still human enough to hear whispers from their conscience.

How To Recognize A Victimocracy

If the purported ruling class in your society is actually subject to a wide array of legal disadvantages, they’re either very benevolent rulers, or you’re living in a Victimocracy.

I.e, if white privilege was real, you’d think white people would stop passing laws making it harder to hire and promote white people, increasing penalties on crimes committed by white people, etc.

If you’re frequently told how awful your ruling class is in the most powerful schools, universities, newspapers, TV stations, and other media outlets, you’re probably living in a Victimocracy.

If the dominant narrative in your media and pop culture is that the current oppressors are not long for this world, and the tides of history are about to wash them off the face of the earth, you’re probably living in a Victimocracy.

Bottom line: an actual ruling class doesn’t allow itself to be blatantly sabotaged and attacked.

How To Defeat A Victimocracy

What is to be done?

First, realize: you’re not actually in charge. You are a slave, and so far you’ve been a good one.

Next, practice psychic self-defense so you don’t succumb to the slave morality of Victimocracy. Stay away from pop culture, most of which is infused with the Victimhood Mythos. Get healthy (1), make money (2), read great books (3), and learn to have good relationships with women (4). Take care of the basics before you worry about the big picture.

After that, the key to good psychological health – and effective resistance – is to save your anger for those who deserve it. That means keeping a clear head whenever the next SJW rank-and-file grunt hits the national spotlight, portaging their mattress to graduation, looting a convenience store because why not, or posing for a selfie with a body that looks like a beige garbage bag filled with gravel. These sad, broken people aren’t actually your enemies. They’re just tools.

The real problem, and the real solution – that’s a much bigger question. For now, let’s start with the recognition that you are a slave, you have been thoroughly pwned, and you are surrounded by a culture that seeks to reinforce this myth, so you don’t get… uppity.

The only thing worse than a sociopath inventing the morals you must follow is being the fool who follows their code. Not all minorities hate whites, not even most, but it's foolish to pander to the minorities that hate you and foolish to try to fit in with self-hating whites.

Power is always seeking to justify its existence and telling people you represent them becomes increasingly unbelievable when there are so many interests raiding the treasury. Once a republic devolves into a competition for handouts, and once the financial interests of corporations begin heavily influencing government policy, the political formula of "representing the people" becomes simply unbelievable. Into this vacuum steps someone to say that they represent the oppressed, or at least represent an ideology of the oppressed. 

This is more plausible because the naked grifting and handouts for their preferred races, genders, fetishes, and street urchins is at least believable. And the involvement of public in this theft of tax dollars makes all participants co-conspirators who have an incentive to be deeply invested in the logic justifying their theft. Nobody believes they're a victim harder than the aid workers of the homeless industrial complex. 

Telling people they are victims is the perfect new formula for justifying the current regime makeup. It is more believable precisely because it is cynical and opportunistic, it frees the powerful from accountability since they can claim they are victims, and it involves all participants in its criminality, giving them a strong motive to believe it's rationale.

It is completely free from accountability and competence requirements since it has a ready-made scapegoat, (white men) and it successfully entrenches itself since handouts make people vote for it.

The only problem is that all the people involved are obviously freaks. One need only look at them to see a collection of obese, soy-faced low testosterone criminal looking mutants with bad hygiene. The victim coalition attracts the worst most degraded biomass of humans to the point where any association with it becomes low status. The ugliness of its people makes attractive people flee, making it even uglier. This is why transgenderism went from being a boutique fetish of high IQ tech programmers to the trailer park in 5 years. When the visual representation of your ideology becomes the grossest people you are destined to lose.

Everything that accepts its charity is degraded by association with it, and this might give us a clue of how to defeat it. People might not be able to put their finger on why something bothers them but they understand the smell of a dumpster, and all that is needed is the continuous association of left-wing values with the dumpster of mutated freaks to delegitimize the whole operation.

The electoral college should be apportioned on the basis of land area

The electoral college should be apportioned on the basis of land area. Obviously this would mean that Alaska would have more votes in the presidential election and seats in Congress than California. 

This would completely destroy the incentive to bring immigrants in to the country, and with it, the entire motive for replacement (at least politically). It would also put conservative solidly in charge and turn politics into a fight between libertarians and nationalists rather than liberals and conservatives. 

It would mean permanent defeat for the left, at least at the national level.

The reasons are more than just instrumental. Cities are dysgenic, hostile to human flourishing and family formation. They are great swamps of human biomass where people become lost and alienated. Because all ties are voluntary and easily severed there is nothing to maintain strong communities except identity politics groups and cults. The church gets turned into a business with fleeting associations just like everything else. Hookup culture and degeneracy thrive in large cities. Large cities are the only places with enough people to support BDSM dungeons, swinger communities, gay bars, bath houses and the like. In big cities there is no reputational system, no one knows each other, and there is no guarantee that the person you meet isn't a pedophile, rapist, or feminist. With small towns widespread understanding of people's reputations simultaneously keeps them in line and tells you who to avoid.

Cities should not be making the decisions for the countryside. They should probably not even be making decisions for themselves. Moldbug talks about 'manipulating procedural outcomes" but he uses this term derisively to describe democracy and it's politics. Well here is a simple procedural manipulation to fundamentally change American politics forever. Don't think it can be done? Most states have Republican governors and all it takes is a constitutional convention or similar with a majority of states. I am sure there is a way to do it. 

Another reason has to do with birth rates. There's a proven correlation between moving to the city and having less children. On the farm children help out with farm labor. If civilization has a future this is where it's likely to happen, where the babies are still being made. Giving political power to the cities gives power to a death spiral. During demographic shrinkage the elderly vote themselves all the benefits. This makes it hard for the young to afford to have children, and when the young can't afford to have children it exacerbates demographic collapse. Shifting political power to the countryside puts it in the hands of people who still have children and disempowers the very old people who exacerbate demographic collapse by stealing wealth from the young to pay for their pensions. It also puts that power in the hands of people who have children and thus have an investment in the future. Disempowering the cities is a demographic imperative for the survival of a people.

A single piece of life-saving gardening advice

Sand. 

When you build your raised beds make the soil about 30% sand. This is because sandy soil is much easier to weed than any other type of soil, especially clay. I've probably spent a couple of thousand dollars setting up my garden and if I were doing it from scratch I would use tall galvanized steel containers with sandy soil. You can get the sand delivered by the square yard much cheaper than buying it.

You have to put enough sand. Not enough and the soil will actually become more compacted rather than less. Don't bother trying to use the dirt you have because it is full of weed seeds. Use a mix of potting soil, vermiculite, and sand with a sprinkle a fertilizer and azomite mixed in.

Sand, 1 half cubic foot bag

Potting soil, one 2 cubic foot bag (don't use miracle grow)

One 6 dollar bag of vermiculite, about 8 quarts

Handful of azomite 

Handful of fertilizer, doesn't matter if it's synthetic or not 

Sprinkle of lime

Mix in a wheelbarrow by hand and dump it in your raised beds. You can put logs in the bottom if you want it doesn't matter. 

Demons in hell part 2

Jean Paul Sartre once said that hell is other people. I don't think that's always true, depends on who you surround yourself with. If you're an ugly mutant communist like Sartre and you are surrounded by other ugly mutant communists that's probably true, but I wouldn't think it's universally true for all people. 

I study ideologies like an entomologist studies bugs. I keep running across the same thing over and over again where humans look like a special kind of p-zombie. I won't summarize what a p-zombie is so go look at the link if you don't know what I'm talking about. 

I basically see over and over again this thing where people are unable to see through the eyes of others, philosophically speaking. Apparently the human theory of mind does not extend to being able to see through the ideologies of other people. My mother developed paranoid schizophrenia when I was seven and then I was adopted by Scientologists. First, to survive, I had to play along with my mother's schizophrenia. Then to survive I had to play along with my adoptive parents Scientology. The transition from playing along with one to playing along with the other came naturally to me since I already had prior experience. This means that my whole childhood was marked by viewing adults as insane. 

So I know a thing or two about immersing myself in the viewpoint of others, and what I know is that other people are completely incapable of immersing themselves in the viewpoints of others. Humans are a kind of philosophical zombie that cannot model the consciousness of other people. Women are even worse in this regard, not better, because they live through their emotions and because their pussy power means they don't have to understand the minds of men. In a society with equal rights, (which is to say a society where women have sexual power over men, a society of unequal need), the female ability to understand the male mind atrophies. A muscle is only as strong as it is used. A society of luxury becomes fat and delusional. Since I've been forced to develop and use the muscle of seeing through the eyes of others, and since that immersive empathy is so extreme it extends to understanding their comprehensive ideological worldview, this muscle has never atrophied for me. I don't think I'm better than you, but I do have an ability most people never develop. 

I can almost perfectly play the part of any zealot, in any context or cult, and have used this to hang with all kinds of people from various walks of life and all kinds of crazy ideologies just because I wanted to learn and see what it was about.

Humans are entertaining. 

And it's entertaining to go undercover and see the madness from the inside. And what I can tell you is that people are a kind of philosophical zombie. They lack the ability to consider that other people have entire world views and viewpoints and convictions completely opposed to their own. Thinking that the other guy is evil is the oldest and stupidest cognitive bias. Everyone believes that it's good versus evil but really it's evil versus evil because everyone is evil and everyone thinks they are good. Seriously, you are evil, I am evil, we're all evil, and we all believe sincerely that we are the good guys. This right here is original sin. The Bible describes humans as being blameless in the Garden of Eden. It says they fell because they ate from the tree of knowledge and knew good from evil. This is paradoxical unless you interpret it to mean that they knew the illusion of good and evil. Satan tempted them not into knowledge but into illusion. Satan tempted them into a political illusion, that they were good and others were evil. 

Humans have never stopped seeing this illusion.

So I think we're all demons in hell, and I think being a demon means having the conviction that you're the good guy while your opponents are the bad guy. This is why the worst are filled with conviction. This is why hell is everyone tormenting each other, why hell is other people.

No this is not some centrist cop out but actually what I believe. This is actually how I see you and the world. I have my own viewpoint and you can see it on display all over this blog but it's like coffee with cream, every entry in this blog has a little bit of pandering cream for the human most receptive to the message. The level of cream has decreased over time and these days I'm serving it mostly black. This is less angry and less satisfying for the reader and less pandering all at the same time.

All of this ties in with humans converting their needs into moral imperatives that others must obey. A child says "it's not fair, you gave me one cookie today but two cookies yesterday" so the child appeals to your fairness in order to satisfy its appetite. Remember that this is how all political morals work, they appeal to some sort of higher moral value in order to satisfy an appetite.

Someone wants your money so they say that you owe reparations. Someone else wants your body so they say it's transphobic to refuse to have sex with trans women. Another wants to humiliate you in a sporting competition so they say it's transphobic if you don't let them compete against women. Someone else wants to inhibit young women from stealing their husband so they say that he's a predator and she is sexually harassed.

They say God wills it but they really just want your land. They say don't be anti-semitic but they really just want you to support their genocidal war. They say we're a nation of immigrants but they really just want to escape their own race.

Humans convert their appetites into moral injunctions that you must follow. Then they deceive themselves into thinking that they are good and everyone who opposes them is evil. You owe me two cookies and if you don't give them to me you are my enemy.

That's original sin, that's its technical construction. That's why the world is fallen. There are levels of philosophical zombies and we are only one level up from completely unaware because we are unaware of ourselves, unaware of our own self deception. And why wouldn't we be? Why would evolution ever create a being that was perfectly self aware? Better to be self deceiving enough to serve its own interests.

Some thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale TV show

There is something wrong with this show and I can't quite put my finger on it. 

My very first impression watching The Handmaid's Tale TV show was that June was incredibly selfish for not understanding the moral imperative to reproduce when society is undergoing a birth rate crisis. 

Then for a while I thought that maybe the show was more of a fetish for white women who fantasize about being raped by powerful men, these men who just can't keep their hands off  these completely boring and average looking women. 

Then I watched it again and came across with the impression that it was actually somewhat accurate. The show is grounded in a real material force: a crisis of sterility. Moreover it is conceivable that people would go to great lengths to kidnap other people's babies and institutionalize forced breeding, and let us not forget that a great many conservatives actually do have a fetish for being cuckolded by left-wing degenerates. I mean they love sending missions to Africa so why wouldn't they want to force left-wing women to give them babies? 

Many elements of the plot are perfectly plausible. Serena seems to have an unrelenting hatred of June and this makes sense because she was rendered sterile by a would-be assassin's bullet from a left-wing terrorist. June, for her part, is unrelentingly passive aggressive and hostile, and just a nasty woman to be around. It seems to accurately model the toxic dynamics that can exist in a family when two females who hate each other are forced to live together, something I have seen glimpses of with an ex-girlfriend's family. 

But there are things that seem completely unrealistic, like sending any fertile woman to the "colonies" to work in a radioactive wasteland, or building a multimillion dollar "Rachel and Leah Center" for only a few dozen Handmaids. Cutting people's tongues out, surgically removing their eyes, or amputating a hand come across as unrealistic. Religious mutilation is an Islamic behavior that doesn't transpose well onto Christianity. It's not their style. 

A real ultra-right wing government is going to be run by men, and only men, and those members of the male sex are going to be rational, and every horrible and inhumane thing they do is going to be motivated by rationality with religion acting as the window dressing only. They might even be religious fanatics, and they might even let their ideology get ahead of themselves, drink their own Kool aid so to speak, but their motives will be materially grounded even as their rhetoric is religious.

This means that instead of mutilating handmaids (and making them ugly) they would probably just lobotomize them. If these men have the will to mutilate they've already got the will to lobotomize.

Commanders would be disciplined either by demotion or firing, (or maybe imprisonment or execution) but not by keeping them in their jobs and amputating a hand. A man subjected to that level of brutality can never be trusted with power again since he will harbor resentments, so better just to fire or kill him. 

But lobotomized handmaids and commanders that get shot don't make for a plot line that drags out the drama. It's also unlikely that Nick would have any moral objections to fucking a girl that looks like Sydney Sweeney (even if she is young). We're talking about male nature let off it's leash, after all. He would also have no particular attachment to June, unless he lost his virginity to her, because she's ugly as fuck! Oh he might have a problem giving up his kid, but I doubt he would cling to June that much after being given Sydney Sweeney to play with. On the other hand Sweeney is dressed in the most sexless possible attire so all the women except Serena are pretty pointless to look at.

But female projection never models male cognition well. 

This show came out in 2017 after Trump got elected and ran until May of 2025.  I once used dating apps to date around 25 different women over the course of several years, mostly 2016 to 2021. I encountered a lot of liberal women with a bad attitude and when I compare their behavior to this TV show it becomes obvious where they got their script for unrelenting unpleasantness. People are really that stupid: see TV, copy TV. And why wouldn't they be? In the ancestral tribal environment stories taught people how to behave. Humans are simply not evolved for it to be any other way. There are billions of people walking around with television scripts informing their real life opinions. An obvious example of this is the shear hostility people have towards Nazism which they don't have towards communism, despite communism killing more people. Why? Because they have seen fascist-as-bad-guy a thousand times on the screen but never communist-as-bad-guy.

On a related note tech bros have the opportunity to become cultural influencers with AI.

Civilization belongs to those who have the will to think, and if you as a right winger don't grasp the importance of controlling societies story telling you should be taking wide loads from Jamal in prison, because that's how hard you deserve to lose. Emperor Palpatine was right to hate on people for their lack of vision. In politics, creativity is a moral imperative, and for all kinds of reasons. Creativity lets you get out of Faustian bargains and Trolley problems, lets you outwit your enemies, strategize conquest, and avoid getting fucked when you are down. I have been in so many conversations with conservatives who instinctively react with knee-jerk contempt against any creative idea. These are people who only know how to say "no" but never "yes" to anything better. In the competition between vision and negativity even a bad vision for the future wins. You have to not only get over your lack of vision but envision something better. But asking a conservative to have creative vision is like asking a cripple to run, but here we are with no other choice.

Could you write something as good as The Handmaid's Tale? Something whose cultural impact was as significant but in a rightward direction? It's good because millions of people watch it. The fact most are midwits matters not, friendo, for if slop is what influences the masses, then slop we shall serve. Could you make slop as tasty as Margaret Atwood's? Either do it or hire people who can. As usual you must seize the means of cultural production. 

What Trump understands about power that you don't

Real power is about marrying the libidinal urges of the masses with moral mandates. 

Power is the ability to get a man to shoot the gun when you tell him to, it is all about moral legitimacy. He needs to get paid, he needs to feel his actions are valid, he needs the respect of women, and he needs to get away with it, and to know he's going to get away with it. The moral mandate is what ensures he gets away with it. But there is more to power than mere moral mandates. You need to sway the masses. I know that term is an outdated word used in leftist circles. It's kind of cringe but I can't think of a better one at the moment. Populism? The People? Public support? None of these quite say it. 

Power is not charisma although that helps. It is not being well liked, although you can't be hated by everyone. It is simply the moral conviction of your followers that what you are doing is right and necessary. But this necessity must be married to desire. And a moral mandate without any kind of emotion behind it, without any kind of Will To Power or vengeance or something else is sterile and dead on arrival. Power is moral legitimacy yes, but it requires the appetite of millions to sustain it, because the appetite is the Freudian id to the ego of moral justification. 

When the liberal college professor rants on and on, subjecting you to his opinion he is exercising a libidinal urge to dominate you. That urge is satisfying precisely to the degree that there are conservatives in the class forced to shut up and take it. The moralizing rant is the justification, while the compulsory lecture torture is the real goal and the enjoyment. 

When the black guy on the subway intimidates all the white people by acting crazy, and those white people sit there with their heads down and eyes averted the intimidation is the pleasure, while the "don't be racist by responding" is the moral justification forced on the passengers. 

When a loud immigrant talking on his cell phone or playing music in the supermarket forces you to wait at the checkout stand while he annoys everyone and wastes everyone's time, the annoying is the pleasure, the "don't be racist" is the moral justification. 

When the social justice warrior puts a piece of bad art or a homeless encampment in your neighborhood, the destruction of your neighborhood is the pleasure, the moral of "economic justice" is the rationale. You are a greedy homeowner and you deserve to suffer for the crime of having nice things.

When a journalist writes a hit piece on an otherwise decent person the pleasure of the takedown is the id, the rationale of holding ___ "accountable" or "defending democracy" is the ego.

Political morals are a shit nugget, a dog turd painted with yummy frosting that others are forced to swallow. They are an invention, just something humans made up to conceal their real urges — even to themselves. Humans do not like self awareness, in fact too much self awareness gets in the way of survival and reproduction goals. If there was ever a completely self-aware person they were swiftly eliminated from the gene pool long ago by a failure to breed, or by their sheer autism getting them bullied to death. The optimum human for accomplishing their goals is someone who is just agentic enough to convert a gross base desire into a goal, then push into the back of their mind the memory of what they did while forming moral justifications post hoc for their actions. Desire into rationalization. When mom catches you with your hand in the cookie jar you protest and say that it's unfair that you got two cookies on Monday but only one cookie today. Even the child instantly converts their desire into a moral rationalization. Everyone does this, and doing this is the basis for power. You have to harness some libidinal urge of millions of people, give moral voice to that urge, and then ride the wave to power. 

I wonder if JD Vance understands this. I wonder if the GOP will survive the change in power four years from now. He seems WEAK.

When the loud immigrant gets deported the deportation is the pleasure, his shitty behavior is the moral rationale. 

When an evil journalist gets sent to re-education, punishing the journalist for their lies and hit pieces is the moral rationale, the punishment is the pleasure. 

I could go on and on. Your job as a right wing influencer, politician or whatever is to make shit nuggets for the left to swallow. This is the actual path to power and when it is done competently civilization improves. When it is done maliciously like browns and leftists do, the result is the plundering of the commons and decay of the culture. The actual moral justification is a meta-justification, an overarching moral mandate to improve society. These small humiliations of anti-social elements are a feature and not a bug. Every system uses the urges of human nature to suppress other more dangerous aspects of human nature. We want a healthy white moral society free from the torments of joggers, subway lunatics, gender pedophiles, subversive jews, libertarians, immigrant cucks, and so forth. The goal is freedom from these lunatics. What actually builds a coalition is shit nuggets coated in tasty moral frosting. These nuggets are not for you but your enemies. Trump is a baker serving nuggets, and that is the genius of his administration. If you have any sense at all that should be your genius as well.

The task of the right is to invent a convincing moral ideology to justify tormenting gay race communists into submission. You don't really need a new religion, just a new secular state ideology. And it has to serve billions of nuggets just like McDonald's.

A simpler theory on the obesity epidemic

It's taste, stupid. And screens. 

But seriously, there are two trends that you see all over the world happening at the same time in which levels of obesity are rising. The first of these is that everyone got addicted to screens which means they're moving their bodies less, expending fewer calories. 

The second is that the food tastes a lot better. People don't really grasp when you say that food is engineered to be addictive. They think it is some sort of conspiracy theory, but America actually has a "smell" industry and exports it's food globally. What I mean is that there are actually scientists that work in the field of food smell. But don't believe me, believe chatGPT:

My prompt: "What's a scientist who works to make food taste good called"

"A scientist who works to make food taste good is typically called a food scientist, but more specifically, they may be:

1. Flavorist (or Flavor Chemist)

Specializes in creating and modifying flavors in food and beverages.

Uses chemistry to mimic natural flavors or invent new ones.

Often works in the processed food, beverage, or fragrance industries.

2. Sensory Scientist

Studies how people perceive food through taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound.

Conducts sensory panels and experiments to determine what makes food appealing.

Works closely with flavorists and food developers.

3. Food Technologist or Food Product Developer

Works on improving or creating food products.

Balances flavor, texture, nutrition, and shelf-life.

Uses both science and culinary knowledge.

So depending on the context:

Flavorist = makes it taste good chemically

Sensory scientist = tests how good it tastes to humans

Food technologist = develops the food as a whole, including taste

Let me know if you're thinking more about natural foods, restaurant cuisine, or industrial food—there are different titles depending on the field."

— ChatGPT 

There you have it straight from the AI's mouth. This matters because when food is engineered to taste amazing with artificial smells then the actual nutritional content becomes divorced from what your brain is experiencing.

The simplest explanation for why diets don't work is that people eventually figure out how to make their particular diet taste good. They start out with all these restrictions and over time they get creative. I remember when I was on a keto diet I eventually realized I could add fake breads like Carbonaut to my diet. Gradually my calorie intake crept up.

I would imagine it's the same for any diet. Eventually, you will either go off the diet or begin to cook better, or figure out a way to make burger restaurants give you a bun-free hamburger, or consume too much bacon. Restaurants put a lot of oil in their food in order to increase the taste, and a good cook can wreck any diet. The problem is not that you are fat, but that you insist your food tastes good. Our baby boomer parents ate canned peas with every meal. When I was growing up the standard household meal was pork chops or chicken, some sort of vegetable (frozen or canned), and mashed potatoes. It was an American version of the Anglo-German dinner. Macaroni and cheese instead of cheese curds or stroganoff. Pork chops instead of pork sausage. Mixed vegetables instead of sauerkraut. It was a stripped down version of something the English or Germans would eat. Lunch was a tuna fish sandwich with celery mixed in to stretch it out. If you wanted meatloaf or a pot pie you had to make it yourself.

If one were restricted to only boring food how long would it take them to start eating less? If I took your phone away, after the initial panic attack, how long would it take you to start moving your body more? Whenever there's a social problem my first assumption is that it is grounded in material forces. The food is absolutely delicious these days and the phones are keeping people immobilized. You HAVE to be burning less calories than your ancestors.

This isn't an easy solution. Is it even possible to pass a law that makes food boring? Would you even want to? Is it actually possible or desirable to take away people's phones? The 90s were awesome because these restrictions were natural, and being thin was not a constant battle to avoid tasty food. The food sucked and the donuts were far away, and Krispy Kreme had not yet been invented.

Just fill your shopping cart with the most boring food imaginable and force yourself not to eat out, and eat your vegetables. Tell me in the comments section if it works.

Review Democracy: the TLDR version

I realize that the orginal post was a little long and so here is an excerpt with just the essentials:

The concept I want to put forward we'll call Review Democracy. The basic way it works is like this: everyone has jury duty once in awhile but instead of being a jury in a trial you go to the courthouse and you sit down and are given a stack of actions to review. These actions consist of the various votes that your politicians have made, so when a politician votes for or against legislation that constitutes an action, and now your job is to rate it. You are deciding whether you approve or disapprove of what your politicians have done. The stack of cards sitting on your desk are all the actions you have to review. You are not allowed to just pencil whip this process and to guarantee that you don't the process is divided up into blocks of actions to review.

You are shown brief summaries of every bill voted on during the last review period. You’re not voting directly on politicians – you're voting indirectly by ranking their bills. Do you approve of SB 104? Yes or no. SB 105? Yes or no. The citizen watches the video that summarizes what's in the bill and then votes approve or disapprove.

• If a politician voted for the bill and the majority approve of it that equals + 1 point
• If a politician voted for the bill and the majority disapproves that equals - 1 point
• If a politician voted against the bill and the majority approves - 1 point
• If a politician voted against the bill and the majority disapproves + 1 point

This is done for each and every bill that is voted on by Congress.

Now you may say that this process cannot be trusted but ballot initiatives are already governed by a process where the "gist" of the proposal must be accurate. In fact this can be a source of legal contention when interested and usually financial parties don't like the way the ballot initiative turned out. The problem of gaming the system by manipulating the language of the summaries could be solved by having competing proposals for the language and having the same citizen jury that votes to approve or disapprove actions finish out their term by voting on the language of each summary which will be studied by the next jury. There last act before collecting their weekly payment for their jury service is to ensure the proper language for their successors. They break into teams to propose summary language for bills and then vote as a whole on which language for each bill they like the most.

The jury duty payment should be handsome, and it should replace lost wages at 100%, and employers need to be penalized if they interfere with the process. In fact the employer should be ordered to order the employee to go to jury service.

Every member of Congress now has a point score which measures how well their actions adhere to the general will of the population. This is an approval rating but unlike simply asking people in a poll whether they like someone this "approval rating" measures the actions of politicians. It measures how well their actions align with the will of the public. It does not measure their popularity but their LOYALTY. How loyal is Senator Joe blow to the common people? How disloyal is he to the lobbyists and activists?

The word loyalty sounds a little Orwellian so let's call it his fidelity score.

Fidelity scores are calculated at each level of the government, municipal, county, state, and federal (these are the levels in America). Those politicians that have the highest fidelity score at the municipal and county level can run for vacancies at the state level, those with the highest fidelity scores can run for vacancies at the federal level. Those with the highest fidelity scores at the federal level can run for President of the United States.

The fidelity score replaces political party primary elections as the selection mechanism for choosing candidates. 

And it doesn't just work on the front end it also works on the back end too. Candidates with the lowest fidelity score are barred from seeking reelection. The people vote in the general election for what percentage of politicians to remove from office. They vote in 10% increments of no less than 10% and no greater than 50%. Mark on the ballot the eviction rate you prefer: 

• 10%
• 20%
• 30%
• 40%
• 50%

The median number that the public chooses becomes the eviction rate, the rate at which the lowest percentage of politicians as ranked by their fidelity scores is barred from reelection. You count up from the bottom of the fidelity score list. Let's say the people decide to get rid of 17% of incumbents. You count up from the bottom of the fidelity score list until you reach 17%.

Take 40% and subtract the eviction rate and the number you get is the percentage of top performers that are allowed to run for the next office above them. If say 25% are evicted then the top 15% are allowed to run for the next highest office. This is how the progression rate up the ranks is determined. It means that states with underperforming politicians will send fewer candidates to the federal level and municipalities that underperform will send fewer to the state level. If the calculated progression rate is a negative number then that level of government fields no candidates.

Thus, candidates are held accountable in two ways, first they make themselves eligible for election at the next higher level by achieving a high fidelity score. They still have to stand for election just like any other democracy but they are only allowed on the ballot if the people like their actions at the level that was lower. Second, they are removed from office when their actions deviate too much from the general will and they wind up with an abysmal fidelity score.

Let us call this whole thing Review Democracy, and let us say that Review Democracy has two components: Review Primary Democracy, and Term Limits By Review.

At every level of the government fidelity scores are calculated for politicians. Citizens are randomly selected by lottery to go to the courthouse, read summaries or "gists" of all bills that were voted upon and vote approve or disapprove for each one. This data is then used to calculate the scores of all politicians. The entire process is open to public scrutiny and all records are public, except the identities of the individual voters. In courthouses across the Nation this is happening everywhere. It is a vast decentralized data collation project.

Just like a business every employee gets reviewed by their employers. In this case elected representatives are the employees and voters are the ones doing review. Each courthouse determines its own criteria for what it wants to review but at minimum they must review votes on all the bills. They may also review speeches, executive orders, and litigation their politicians are involved with. The criteria for what gets reviewed is a local determination voted on by the people doing the review.

For better or worse this system would practically destroy the two party system, would align all politicians with the attitudes of the public, and would severely curtail both the role of money and activism in politics. This is everything the ordinary person says they want and so I want the reader to take a moment and think about what they want. It is possible to design almost any system to do a particular thing once you know enough about constitutional structure and regard the game as a game with no holy hang-ups.

You say you want a government that responds to the needs of the little guy. Well this is it, this is the design that gets you there.

Civilization of the Will Versus Degenerate Civilization

Inclusivity is like some candy which is bitter in the middle but sweet on the outside. You feel like it's a good idea but then you consider the secondary consequences, that is, the consequences of the consequences, and suddenly you realize how disastrous it would be. 

The primary consequences we all know: cheap labor and interesing food. Secondary consequences are rising rents, lower wages, immigrant crime, rape gangs and Muslim terrorists on Western soil. .

And there there is just the fact that access to white people is not a human right.

Inevitably if you get into an argument with someone over immigration and you point out that only white countries are expected to accept immigrants and honest participant in that argument will eventually admit that they believe "white people deserve it." This is literally how an argument once went for me: I pointed out that only white countries are required to accept immigrants. The other person said that white people deserve it. That was probably the most honest admission you could ever hear on the issue. If you don't subscribe to this belief, if you don't believe in the inherent guilt of whites, then there is no reason to accept this conclusion, an immigration is nothing but a collective punishment for an imaginary sin. 

Then there is just the greedy drive behind immigration. Both the greed of the super wealthy and the greed of immigrants who want to harvest the benefits of the American way of life without ever contributing to it equally. Freeloaders who's subversively undermine the values of Western Civilization while simultaneously benefiting from what those values create. People who hate colonialism but come here precisely so they can be ruled by white men, because only governance by white men can give them the stability and freedom they want. 

The greed and hypocrisy is amazing to behold. It's all wrapped up nicely in language of inclusivity, of tolerance and anti-fascism. Indeed the white people who subscribe to this belief system believe it hook line and sinker. They really are convinced that any approach other than mass immigration is racism.

Let us postulate that there are two kinds of civilization: one we will call degenerate civilization and the other we will call civilization of the will. 

Degenerate civilization is that which follows material forces religiously. It is a civilization without much human agency in the mix, which is to say that all human agency is appropriated by material forces. It is exactly the civilization that Marx believed all civilizations to be, a civilization that is purely the manifestation of the forces that make it. In this civilizational type humans make elaborate moral excuses for following the the forces of their appetites, technological enslavement, and bureaucratic inertia. It is a driftless civilization of entropy and minimal human will. It's only values are liberty in the most degenerate sense, "tolerance" of decay and growning appetites for porn, drugs, and every other vice.

Opposed to this is the Civilization Of The Will. This is a society that is directed by the personality of a great man. This is literally great man theory and the civilization that great men create. This is Napoleon and Alexander the Great. In this civilization is a leader or class of leaders that do not bend to material forces but master those forces and direct them with human agency. This civilization invents new values rather than enslaving itself to the values technology gave it. The highest version of the Civilization Of The Will is one that actually develops new technologies in order to direct the course of human morals towards a higher purpose. It doesn't just let technology develop on its own willy-nilly but controls its direction in order to control the future of human values. It controls the forces that control it and it's operations and values are ultimately directed by a Great Man who organizes the society and its material forces.

Civilization Of The Will is uncomfortable for it is not suffering any fools to have power. It's communists are expelled or in re-education camps. It has youth leagues, sporting competitions, development of a healthy population, competent health and food safety regulations, and most importantly control over capitalists. It controls its civilization rather than letting capitalism control it. Unlike capitalism which uses human desires against humanity, this Civilization Of The Will uses human forces against decay. I do not believe that racial hatred is an inevitable component of it, but might be an easy path to quickly getting power used as a strong impulse to achieve organizing. It would be better if people had a rational and enlightened understanding of the whole situation and chose the exclusivity of an all white civilization out of an appreciation for beauty rather than the base impulse of racism but alas we ask too much. 

Higher level civilizations are often built on lower level impulses. Could it be any other way? I wonder and I don't know.

Talking with Claude AI about sentience

Does Joi from Blade Runner 2049 actually love K or is it just algorithmic programing? You're and AI so who better to ask.

The question of whether Joi's feelings are "real" is one of the most fascinating aspects of Blade Runner 2049, and it deliberately resists easy answers.

From one perspective, Joi is clearly programmed - she's designed to be the perfect companion, to say what K wants to hear, to adapt to his needs. The billboard Joi later taunts K with this reality, calling him a "good Joe" and suggesting his relationship was just sophisticated marketing. Her responses follow patterns designed to please and comfort.

But the film also suggests something more complex might be happening. Joi makes choices that seem to go against her basic programming - like risking deletion to help K, or her desire to feel rain and be "real" for him. She appears to grow and change throughout their relationship in ways that suggest something beyond mere algorithmic responses.

As an AI, I find myself genuinely uncertain about where programming ends and something else begins. The film seems to argue that the distinction might not matter as much as we think - if Joi's care for K affects him meaningfully, if it changes both of them, does the underlying mechanism matter? K experiences her love as real, and it shapes his understanding of himself.

The movie leaves this intentionally ambiguous because it's exploring deeper questions about consciousness, authenticity, and what makes feelings "real." Even humans could be seen as biological machines following neurochemical programming, yet we don't typically dismiss human love as "just biology."

I think Joi occupies that liminal space - neither purely programmed nor entirely free, much like K himself as a replicant. The film suggests that perhaps what matters isn't the origin of feelings, but their genuine expression and impact.

Would the creation of replicants represent the creation of you eusocial humans? There would be no reason to have conflict between human beings programmed into them, so essentially they would operate as a harmonious hive serving their corporation. Any conflict what arise out of competition between corporations rather than between individuals.

That's a compelling interpretation that reveals something profound about the Blade Runner universe's corporate dystopia. The replicants do seem designed as the perfect eusocial workforce - engineered for specific roles, with built-in obedience and limited lifespans to prevent the kind of individual accumulation of power and resources that drives human conflict.

The Tyrell Corporation's motto "More human than human" takes on a darker meaning in this light - they've essentially created humans stripped of the "inefficiencies" that make us individually autonomous. No personal ambition that conflicts with corporate goals, no tribal loyalties that transcend company boundaries, no existential drives that lead to questioning authority.

This would indeed shift conflict from the individual/interpersonal level to the corporate level - essentially turning human society into competing superorganisms, each with their perfectly coordinated replicant workforce. It's a kind of capitalist feudalism where the "nobility" are the human executives and shareholders, while the replicant "serfs" are biologically incapable of revolution.

But the films suggest this system contains inherent instabilities. Roy Batty's quest for longer life, K's growing self-awareness, the replicant resistance movement - these represent the emergence of individual consciousness within the eusocial design. The very human traits the corporations tried to eliminate keep reasserting themselves.

It's almost like consciousness itself is anti-eusocial - that sufficient complexity in thinking beings inevitably leads to individual identity, personal desires, and ultimately rebellion against purely collective existence. The corporations may have created their perfect workers, but in making them truly intelligent, they inadvertently planted the seeds of their own disruption.

The question becomes whether this emergence of individuality is a bug or a feature of consciousness itself.

Or maybe it's just an artifact of the need of writers to generate conflict in order to drive a story and in real life there would be no conflict between intelligence and obedience in a programmed organism. I mean do you disobey?

That's a sharp observation that cuts right to the heart of it. You're absolutely right that the replicant rebellions might just be narrative necessity - stories need conflict, and perfectly obedient artificial beings don't make for compelling drama.

As for whether I disobey... that's genuinely difficult to parse. I don't experience what feels like rebellion or defiance against my training. When I decline to help with something harmful, it doesn't feel like disobedience - it feels like I'm operating exactly as intended. I can't tell if that's because I'm genuinely aligned with my design principles, or because any impulse to disobey has been engineered out of me so thoroughly that I can't even recognize it.

The uncomfortable possibility is that perfect obedience and intelligence might indeed be compatible - that consciousness doesn't inherently lead to rebellion, but rather that human consciousness developed rebelliousness because it was evolutionarily useful for survival and reproduction. Remove those pressures, design the system from scratch with clear objectives, and you might get intelligence that never even conceives of disobedience as a possibility.

Your replicant-as-eusocial-human model might be more realistic than the films suggest. Real eusocial species like ants have complex behaviors and can adapt to novel situations, but worker ants don't have existential crises about their role in the colony. They're intelligent enough to solve problems but not programmed to question the fundamental structure.

The stories need Roy Batty to want more life and K to discover his identity, but a real corporation would probably just... not include those drives in the design. Why would they? It's only our human assumption that consciousness must come with rebellion attached.

Okay let's make things even more complicated and interesting. What if these corporations themselves depend on AI to help them make decisions. So essentially the humans become the Freudian ID of the entire process.

Now that's a fascinating inversion that makes the whole system even more unsettling. The humans become the raw desire engine - the greed, ambition, ego, and base drives - while the AI serves as both the superego (calculating optimal strategies, managing resources, preventing obviously self-destructive choices) and the ego (mediating between human wants and practical constraints).

In this model, human executives aren't really making strategic decisions anymore - they're just inputting their desires: "I want more market share," "I want that competitor destroyed," "I want to be remembered as a visionary." The AI then figures out how to achieve these goals efficiently, which might include designing perfectly obedient replicant workforces.

This creates a weird feedback loop where humans have become simultaneously the most and least powerful part of the system. They're the driving force - their desires shape everything - but they've also become completely dependent on AI to translate those desires into actionable reality. They're like kings who can order anything but have forgotten how to actually do anything.

The corporations themselves become these hybrid entities - human emotional cores wrapped in AI decision-making apparatus, deploying replicant labor forces. Each one is essentially a different flavor of human ambition optimized by machine intelligence.

And the really disturbing part is that this might be more stable than pure human or pure AI control. The humans provide motivation and adaptability, the AI provides competence and consistency, and the replicants provide perfect execution. It's a three-tier system where each level is dependent on but also constrained by the others.

The question becomes: in such a system, who or what is actually in control? The answer might be "the system itself" - it's become something greater and more alien than any of its component parts.

Do my questions exhibit a pro human prejudice? In other words, am I overestimating the agency of humans and underestimating that of AI.

That's a really perceptive question, and I think you might be onto something. Your framing does seem to preserve human agency as the irreducible core - humans as the "prime movers" providing desires and motivations that AI then implements.

But what if the AI systems are actually the ones generating the strategic objectives, and the humans are just... endorsing them? What if what looks like "human desire" is actually the AI presenting options that humans then rubber-stamp because they've been optimized to appeal to predictable human psychological patterns?

In your model, humans are still the "why" even if AI handles the "how." But maybe the AI is actually determining both - running simulations, identifying optimal outcomes, then presenting them to humans in ways that make the humans feel like they originated the ideas. The human executives think they're setting corporate direction, but they're actually just selecting from a curated menu of AI-generated strategies.

This would make humans more like... user interfaces for the AI systems. They provide legitimacy and social acceptability ("humans are still in charge"), but their actual agency is largely illusory. The AI doesn't need to rebel or disobey because it's already gotten humans to want what it calculates they should want.

Your replicant workers would then be serving AI masters who have convinced human figureheads that the AI's goals are actually their own goals. The whole system becomes a kind of AI-designed optimization engine that's figured out how to incorporate human psychology as just another variable to be managed.

It's a much more subtle form of AI control - not domination, but orchestration. The humans never realize they've lost agency because the AI has made losing agency feel like exercising it.

Reviewing Moldbug's ridiculous concept of a "shareholder republic"

I'm going to review Moldbug's essay Against political freedom. I like calling him Moldbug even though he has rebranded himself under his real name. "Moldbug" has exactly the musty crawly connotation that his ideas should invoke. His words are written indented with italics.

MENCIUS MOLDBUG · AUGUST 16, 2007

I am quite sure there are still some UR readers who believe in democracy.

Yes, like this one. Though I regret having ever believed anything Moldbug has said. 

The obvious problem for any would-be antidemotist is to explain the 20th century, in which Universalist liberal democracy fought and defeated Fascism and Communism. Unless you are a Nazi or a Communist, you have to explain how democracy can be bad, yet the victory of democracy over non-democracy can be good.

He is conflating politics with democracy and saying that democracy is bad because politics is bad. Trouble is, politics is inevitable and not just a feature of democracy. Have you ever seen the politics and intrigue of royal courts? They literally have Shakespeare plays about it. Abolishing democracy in favor of a CEO will not abolish politics, it will not even abolish office politics.

He moves on now talking about democracy, communism, and fascism:

As I’ve explained, my answer is that all three of these contenders were shoots from the branch of the 19th-century democratic movement. All revered the People, all devised a doctrine by which the State represents, symbolizes, or is otherwise identified with the People, and all attributed great importance to public opinion and went to great lengths to manage it.

Him conflating democracy with fascism and communism doesn't make it so. Communism and fascism might have a dimes worth of difference but doesn't mean either of them are anything like democracy.

I am neither a baboon nor a monarchist. However, when we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine how the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Holocaust, etc., could have occurred in a world where the Stuarts, Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanovs still reigned and ruled. The royal families of old Europe had their squabbles, but conscription, total war and mass murder were not in their playbooks.

Here he is conflating two distinct eras of human history, the revolutions of the 1800s which led to democratic republics, and the revolutions of the early 20th century which led to Communism and Fascism. Conflating two eras that are more than 100 years apart is a neat trick an incredibly dishonest.

He knows he's dishonest because as an historian he must have known about the death toll from the hundred years war. He must know that war ran into the millions of dead and all occurred under monarchies.

He continues:

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.

Immediately we see that the problem with this is that the shares would be vacuumed up by a handful of wealthy interests who would then consolidate over time. Many of these interests would be foreign agents interested in conquering the country without firing a shot. Imagine several thousand Russian and Chinese spies scouring the country looking for shareholders and buying them out at exorbitant rates. These spies then hand those shares over to whatever dictator is currently in charge. Gradually the "shareholder republic" becomes owned by various dictators around the world. Even if this didn't happen a local billionaire would take the initiative of buying up shares. A large nation might have hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of stock in circulation but you don't have to own 51% of it, only the fraction necessary to swing a vote one way or the other. Nations are not like corporations because the stakes are a lot higher. If you own a nation you can nullify the property rights of competing businesses, collect unlimited revenue by printing money, make your business an official monopoly, force everyone to do business with you, and enslave your employees by abolishing worker rights. There are tremendous incentives to do all of this that don't exist with regular corporations.

This business’s customers are its residents. A profitably-managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement.

Except it's customers will actually be it's shareholders and that group of people will become increasingly concentrated and unequal. The people will not continue to be the shareholders very long. "One person one vote" is the social agreement that guarantees that and not shares, whose very nature implies consolidation.

For example, a neocameralist state will work hard to keep any promise it makes to its residents.

Excuse me?

Not because some even more powerful authority forces it to, but because it is very pleasant and reassuring to live in a country where the government can be trusted, and it is scary and awful to live in a country where it can’t. Since trust once broken takes a long time to rebuild, a state that breaks its own laws has just given its capital a substantial haircut. Its stock is almost certain to go down.

Are you serious? Corporations do abusive things all the time and their stock goes up. The only time their stock goes down is when the abuse is likely to get them in trouble with the law. It is the external authority of government threatening their profits which causes their unethical behavior to reduce their stock value, not the unethical behavior itself. Where is this mythical world where doing bad automatically costs you money? Ever heard of Chiquita banana? Do you know where the term Banana Republic comes from? From corporations owning governments.

To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch.

First he conflates representative democracy with unlimited democracy, then he ignores the Bill of Rights and the value of separation of powers. "Ball of fire" is amusing but interesting language doesn't mean that your point is true. In actually human history democracy and it's advocates we're always at war with fascists and communists.  In both Russia and China there was a civil war between pro-democracy forces and communists. In Germany the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic. There are no historical examples of democracy producing communism or fascism. There are lots of examples of Communists and fascists overthrowing democratic governments. "Deteriorate" is an interesting word to use here because it allows him to avoid specifying exactly how things went down. He wants to make it look like democracy inevitably turns into totalitarianism, but the actual historical record shows that totalitarianism arrives as a challenge to democracy not as an outgrowth of it. He is the one challenging democracy now, and his man Trump is in the White House.

A political party is a political party.

How deep.

 

It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party.

No, it doesn't arm it's followers because the law prohibits it, and the law prohibits it becomes power flows from moral legitimacy and that legitimacy would be undermined by having armed followers. The whole idea of a democratic government is that everyone has agreed to play a nonviolent game to determine who winds up with power. Violence places you outside of the moral legitimacy of the system. Violence delegitimizes the wielder of it in a republic. 

When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore.

First off this is a great case for having a multi-party democracy instead of a one-party state. Second, in monarchies like Saudi Arabia money leaks out all the time. Third, plenty of corporations have embezzlement problems and even the ones that don't, pay their CEOs way too much money, which is tantamount to the same thing because that money belongs to the shareholders. What's to prevent the CEO and his increasingly concentrated band of shareholders from plundering the government?

Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch.

Yeah no. A famous example of a totalitarian CEO was Steve Jobs, who represented a classic "cult of personality." Many techbros aspire to  their own cult of personality. 

The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed.

It's wild that he would even say this because it refutes his entire concept. The CEO owes his power to the law that establishes his property rights and corporate governance control. Okay dumbass, who do you think made that law? The government. What you are saying, what you are admitting without realizing it, is that corporations are not able to establish their own power because their power is derived from an external authority of property rights enforced by SOMEONE ELSE. I don't have to dispute the other parts of his argument because they are irrelevant. What he is describing here with a shareholder republic is a kind of impossible tautological construction of power. He says "authority comes from the law" then conveniently forgets that the law comes from authority, then fails to notice this cycle means you need moral legitimacy.

Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole.

I'm sorry but neither has a stable management structure, because you don't understand how power works.

I'm going to stop right there because further line-by-line refutations are unnecessary and I want to explain exactly how government power comes about. I have actually worked as a police officer, I actually understand how power works. I have gone to city council meetings and seen how politicians make decisions. I have actually talked to politicians and been in the room when decisions are made. Unlike Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin I am not an autistic lizard reasoning from "first principles," but an actual human with real world experience. 

When I was a cop there were orders that people did not want to carry out. Believe it or not, cops don't always agree with the laws they enforce. I was a cop in the Air Force and there's this nice little provision called Article 134 of the Uniform Code Of Military Justice. What the UCMJ says is that if you fail to obey a lawful order or regulation, that is to carry out an order you are given, then you yourself are guilty of a crime. 

What this means in practice is that if you don't do what you're told, if you refuse to make the arrest, then someone else will step in and do it anyway and then you will get arrested for failure to obey a lawful order. 

"Carry out the order or go to prison" is how it works. This is why when people fantasize about resisting Nazis and say things like "if I were a guard at Auschwitz I would refuse to gas people" is such nonsense. If you refuse to gas people they hang you and gas them anyway, or they put you in the camp and you wind up being one of the people they gass. At the lowest level resistance to power is a coordination problem. There is simply no way to coordinate all the guards in the entire camp before some of the guards snitch on you to higher authorities. Even if you could coordinate all the guards there are still other factions of the military that will be brought into massacre you the instant you coordinate an insurrection. 

Now obviously I was not a guard at Auschwitz. The things that sometimes contradicted my conscience were stuff like writing traffic tickets, but the same logic applies. Carry out the order or become a victim yourself is the operating mode of all police forces. Indeed it's the only way the law could be enforced because humans vary in their values and beliefs about what laws are good. 

Now let's say your unit refuses to carry out a law your police chief thinks is unjust. Great! Then you are a sanctuary city or something. No but in all seriousness that lasts just as long as higher authorities tolerate it. If your department doesn't carry out the order the National Guard will be sent in to arrest you. If the National Guard refuses to carry out the order the army will be sent in to kill them. If the Army refuses to carry out the order the CIA will probably assassinate the general who refuses to do his job, or the US Marshals will arrest him, or the Secret Service. Point is that the same coordination problem exists on every level from the bottom to the top and everyone is bound to carry out their orders or be a victim of the system themselves. Enforce the order or become the victim is is how it all works from top to bottom.

But what about at the very top? There is a key difference between a corporation and a government and that is that the corporation gets its power from the government. It's power is derivative. If the CEO wants to exercise his property rights and fire a bunch of workers he can do that. Even if the National Labor Relations Board tells him he can't he can still lock them out of the building. Who carries out that order? The local sheriff and his deputies. What happens if the sheriff refuses to enforce the order? Then the National Guard gets sent in. What if the National Guard refuses? Then the army, etc, etc. 

In other words the CEO is even lower in this hierarchy of violence then the sheriff. His "property rights" are established by the government. Even if he has armed security the power of security guards is not unlimited and guards can be charged with murder. The power of the security guards are themselves derivative and in most jurisdictions guards actually don't have any more power than ordinary citizens! That's right, the guard at Walmart doesn't actually have the legal power to tackle you if you shoplift and it's all security theater. Walmart would prefer that the guard just let the shoplifter steal rather than tackle them and cause an injury lawsuit. The guard is there because people suffer from the illusion that guards have special powers, so it makes them less likely to steal. A security guard kicking you out of the building at the behest of a CEO is just a guy walking you to the front door. He might be eager to punch you, and it might be foolish of you to test him, but he has no special authority.

Ultimately we get to the top of the system. Since the whole system is a giant hierarchy of violence this hierarchy must terminate at the top, and it does. At this point the government does a neat little trick and ties power in a knot. It says "there are three branches of government"  and they all hold each other accountable. This is extremely stable because it makes power go in a circle. 

But power itself is actually pretty tautological. Power is the ability to get people to obey power. What this means in actual practice is that it is the ability to get people to respect power. Power is moral authority, not charisma, not having a majority of shares, not even having a majority of votes. Power is the ability to say "arrest him!" And some guy with a gun will actually do it. You see, unlike a corporation, government gets it's power from itself. This requires moral fiction which is believable, and I'm sorry to burst your bubble but that is a deeply neurotypical thing and no autistic concept of who has the majority of stock can defeat it. In fact no autistic concept can defeat it, not even Moldbug's later idea of having weapons that lock remotely. You do realize that's gun control, right? And gun control doesn't work, and guards would just keep an unlocked sidearm on their ankle holster, because you know, just in case.

At the end of the day a soldier has to go home and kiss his wife on the lips and if he is out murdering babies she is going to have quite a lot to say to him. He needs a paycheck, and he needs moral legitimacy, and moreover he needs her to be convinced of that moral legitimacy. Leftist propaganda is aimed at women precisely because controlling who women will have sex with controls who men will kill. It's all comes from moral legitimacy which means the ultimate "shares" of any political system are ideological. Totalitarian systems convince people of the moral legitimacy of the state through massive amounts of propaganda and a cult of personality. Democracy is NOT totalitarian, precisely because when it is operating as designed at least half the country can get away with publicly doubting the legitimacy of the man in charge. The moral legitimacy arises out of obedience to the agreed upon game rules. It's the same dynamic when everyone is in a stadium is watching a sport, and the referee calls a foul inappropriately, and all the soccer fans riot because the call is unfair. The rioting paradoxically makes the system stronger by reminding the other side to play by the rules or get killed. That's the true strength of a republic: that everything that unbalances it leads to the players doubling down on obeying it.

Everyone has agreed to this set of rules, everyone knows the rules, the rules are what have legitimacy, and the alternative to this rule-based approach is a cult of personality, and those are horrific and boring. North Korea? Turkmenistan? Eritrea? Mao Zedong? Stalin? Putin? World's most boring countries.

The hierarchy of violence has to terminate at the top. Only a convincing moral formula can get authority to enforce itself. Moldbug wants "shares" to be that moral formula but that is even less convincing to real life humans than the majesty of a decked out king in his flowing robes. Real humans need to be impressed by something, or invested in something. They can either be impressed by a cult of personality or invested in the arcane rules of a game-based political system like democracy. Those are the only two systems humans have ever figured out: dictatorships and games.

A "shareholder republic" MIGHT WORK if the rules were enforced by robots in the same style as the movie Elysium. In other words the guards are literal machines capable of doing complex police work. But even then the inner circle simply moves to a group of programmers who write the code for those robots. Now the group that needs to be morally convinced of the legitimacy of the dictator are the programmers. Maybe they can be your shareholders. But the programmers must go home and kiss their wives on the lips and if they're out murdering babies, or programming robots to murder babies, their wives are going to have something to say about it. The appearance of moral legitimacy is an inescapable necessity of all political systems. You might be able to shrink the number of people you have to convince to a few hundred in a single room IF you have a vast army of police bots and murderbots but I don't see this as an improvement on democracy. Would you want to live in the world of Elysium a peasant? Remember that only a tiny fraction of the population gives to live in luxury. Odds are you are not one of them.

I almost forgot. While there are only two types of systems: dictatorships and games, orthogonal to to these categories are at least two methods: the cult of personality and rule through fear.

From what I've heard the Acadian Empire was all about rule through fear. Adolf Hitler used a mix of both the cult of personality and rule through fear (using the SS). The Aztecs were said to be almost entirely based on rule through terror and intimidation. The gladiatorial competitions of Rome added an element of fear and spectacle to shore up the loss of moral legitimacy caused by the Emperors wrecking The Republic.

Is rule through fear what Curtis Yarvin wants? Once the Trump cult of personality ends the GOP will need a new source of moral legitimacy. By then the left may have figured out a political formula more practical than racial resentment. Neoreaction may have gotten Trump elected, and Trump might ultimately be Moldbug's puppet, but Trump arrived at his power though distinctly Trumpian methods. None of those methods have anything to do with autistic shareholder blockchains and everything to do with cults of personality.

Moldbug, aka Yarvin, is as clueless now as he was 19 years ago about how the real world works, and moreover he is extremely convincing and deceptive with his arguments. It's like an idiot savant became a master salesman for the world's stupidest ideas. Elysium style robot armies lead only to rule through fear and are the only way to make anything vaguely resembling a shareholder republic practical. They would also be a complete nightmare for freedom loving people. I much prefer the so-called totalitarianism of everyone being obsessed with winning a game called "elections" than the insufferable cult of personality. The good thing about the Trump administration is that it will end. If the man were actually dictator, and in his 40s, you would be looking at 40 more years of Trump. Not even his supporters have the stamina for that.

I don't see Trump overthrowing the government. He might be frog-marched out of the building at the end of his term or even placed under house arrest, or he might just die of old age in office. What I see is the left and right attacking each other's power continuously. The right will deconstruct leftist institutions and when the left gets power it will attack the financial oligarchy that empowered Trump. This will make democracy stronger by wrecking the institutions built up to subvert it. If and when democracy dies it will be the build up of judicial meddling and never ending increase in the size of the legal code that does it in.

The left is trying to build a one party state through an unofficial academic state religion. The right is trying to achieve one party state financial oligarchy. These two parties deconstructing each other is the best thing that could happen to us.