Review Democracy: a second political iteration

Everyone is fat. The food is unhealthy and designed to be addictive. Healthcare is too expensive. All the cars are designed to break and cost too much. The cities are not designed for pedestrians. There are dangerous lunatics and mentally ill homeless on public transportation. Opioid addiction is everywhere. Dating is a fun house of nightmares and the women are all educated by feminists to be unpleasant. The budget is spiraling out of control, and the official policy is to marginalize the native population with mass immigration.

The one good thing about this whole set of problems is that they can be grouped into three causes, and each of these three causes manifest over and over again in various different domains. The first is the increasingly meddlesome nature of the court system, the second is cancerous cycles of money and power, and the third is an ideological disease. It is not actually that hard to solve these problems once you look at the incentives that create them. It just requires a lot of creativity, and probably some money too.

First we should talk about the court system. Our judges interpret the law with the same reverence that a class of priests treats scripture. The problem with this is that they give no thought to the practical business of running an economy. They are a class of people who scrutinize a text according to whether it adheres to the proper application of law written in another text, and every single aspect of the entire economy depends on their judgment. All contract law has its foundation in the court system. Unlike a class of priests, judges plug into the economy, and that means when they become divorced from practical necessity, when they treat law and legal precedent as holy writ, and when they meddle in everything it affects everything. They are only concerned with setting precedents that will make them famous to other judges. The judicial system is the lynch pen of the economy and it is treating the economy with the kind of indifference to practical matters that comes from a priest interpreting scripture.

These judges take pride in creating new legal tests and doctrines and they have expanded their role to weigh in on every single government decision. This is why it now takes 40 years to build a high-speed rail. This and its interaction with innumerable regulations designed to enrich cronies. And politicians are only interested in increasing the number of judges in order to change the overall political bias of the system.

Judges, and their need to weigh in for every decision, are the glue that prevents all reform and makes everything a sticky process. They may limit decay to a certain extent, but they do so at the cost of abolishing any capacity for reform and improvement. They are the tar pit where change goes to die and fossilize.

By inserting themselves into each and every decision that the government makes, and preventing the clean exercise of executive authority, they push the system towards dictatorship as a reaction to their overreach.

Someone needs to audit the legal system and find out each and every point of pain where judges have the ability to interfere in the executive branch and then craft legislation that strips them of that power. The idea that a law making body would be unable to make a law because of a previous law, or because of an invented interpretation to constitutional law, has to end. SCOTUS cannot be allowed to continue to expand its power, and interpretations that expand that power such as Fletcher v. Peck needs to be explicitly curtailed in written law. The entire history of judicial overreach needs to be studied by a team of legal experts and every single point that ties the executive in knots be explicitly refuted in statute. In the courts of most European countries there is far less judicial independence. The last impeachment of a federal judge was in 2010 and of a Supreme Court Justice in 1804. The process of removing them needs to be far easier and structured more like a performance review and less like a criminal trial. Interference with the effective functioning of the economy or the executive branch should be enough to trigger review by a panel whose job it is to keep everything running smoothly. A test for what constitutes needless or tedious interference should be designed by legal experts.

The second cause of decline is cycles of money and power. This is stuff like: the Auto industry lobbies for the Cash for Clunkers Program. This program takes thousands of used cars off the market raising the cost of automobiles. In exchange the Auto industry gives money to politicians. The cycle works as follows: an industry gives money to politicians and politicians give some sort of favor to that industry. This is called rent seeking and it is so common it is probably more common at the federal level than regular law making. This type of money for power and power for money arrangement constitutes the majority of actual law making activity now. It is why bills run into the thousands of pages stuffed with earmarks, and even when an industry is not being paid directly through earmarks it is being paid indirectly by certain firms getting a competitive advantage over the others, for consumers getting the shaft with higher prices, or limitations on the number of professionals in a field, etc, etc. These exchanges of money for power siphon off economic productivity and destroy society over time.

This is a thorny problem because the body that is corrupted, the Congress, is the very body whose consent is necessary for reform.

The first way is to simply pay more. Members of Congress should be paid at least $10 million per year each. Let's say $30 million for a Senator and 20 for a Representative. If you give them "fuck you money" it changes the economics of the situation. But this is not enough, you also need to create some sort of social currency to change the economics of how they are bribed. Basically every American is given social currency to spend and they are allowed to reward their politicians by "tipping" them on some vote. Say Senator Joe Blow votes for a bill. Great, now you are allowed to give him a tip for that vote using your social currency account. Tips must be paid for a specific action and not just to the senator in general. This is because you want to connect the payment to something the senator did in order to incentivize more of that behavior. It is intentionally structured like a bribe that rewards actions the public approve of. The combination of a high salary and tens of millions in tips gives every politician absolutely astronomical levels of fuck you money, and once  that happens that you can begin to change the law. 

It's wild that anyone tries to make a law without first changing the financial structure that makes laws. It's a fools errand, like paddling against the current in a canoe 19 mph up a 20 mph river. Or like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose. You might save your little cabin but the rest of the forest will burn.

So now comes to the second reform: you have to audit the entire legal code and remove each and every action from the legal code that is raising the cost of living. You're going to have to put together a team of a few hundred lawyers to read tens of thousands of pages and take a red pen to most of it. But this will be possible if you get the incentives right.

Solutions are actually possible and you actually can brainstorm solutions that work. Things work when they are grounded in reality and incentives. People obey incentives and they become more predictably obedient in groups, and more predictable the larger the group and lower the majority required for decision making. The trick is getting Congress to pay itself well. This is harder than you would think because the actors who bribe Congress will also bribe Congress to resist losing their influence. The simplest solution is to round up every lobbyist and throw them in internment camps. Is it radical? Yes. But you have to reform the "Shadow Congress"  before you can reform the actual Congress. Whenever you negotiate first grab you enemy by the balls and make sure you have a vice grip on them, once they are in screeching pain you "compromise" and give them a reasonable deal. This creates the appearance that you are both reasonable and effective. It's important to look reasonable so that you do not provoke unified resistance. Putting lobbyists in internment camps will be wildly popular, even while it makes you look like a dictator, demanding Congress pay itself well, and the doctor social currency to take bribes from the common people, also makes you look smart.

Is that unhinged? Yes, of course it is. But I want you to consider the incentives involved in reforming the government. Imagine two options, first you have wealth and success. In this option you sell out to the donor class, you receive speaking engagement fees to stand in front of thousands and be admired, you get to charge $1,000 a plate or more for dinners / fundraisers where you do an hour or two of work. You have friends and lots of people admire you. If you sell out there as wealth, success and admiration. Your children get into prestigious universities and enjoy relative safety.

On the other hand you can try to reform the system. You will be targeted by every wealthy person in the country, you may die impoverished, or even assassinated. Your family will definitely be targeted in nonviolent ways and possibly violent ways. You'll receive far more death threats than usual and more of them will try to act on it. You will be hated in the press, slandered far more than usual by the very media owned by the rich billionaires that you are up against. It will basically be a death struggle between you and the ultra wealthy and you are likely to lose. They will try to impeach you more than usual. They will charge you with real or imagined crimes that they get away with every day. You will never have a moment's peace until you die.

Considering all of this only a madman would attempt to reform the system. We are rapidly approaching the point where only the insane will govern altruistically. The sane thing to do is to sell out and take the money. The problem with this is that the government needs sane people running it to function properly, and so when every sane person is corrupt, and only a madman would govern for the benefit of the general wellbeing of society you are putting your whole nation into a corner which has no positive outcome.

Once things become corrupt enough you get into a situation where every leader has two mandates. 

• Challenge the oligarchy corrupting the system and you will be violently removed
• Don't challenge the system and popular discontent may cause violent revolution 

What kind of personality would want to operate under this situation? Why only an unhinged madman or a playboy who only cares about the next orgy. When tomorrow you may die you either lash out or crash out. This is the dynamic that gives you bad Roman emperors. What I am saying is that before things get that bad you have the opportunity to use unhinged energy to repair the system, and you do that by (at minimum) putting lobbyists in internment camps, and probably the activists too. Everyone creating friction against reform has to be sidelined. What I am saying is that a little unhinged energy can prevent a lot of unhinged suffering later.

I also want the reader to keep the following disclaimer in mind: that when I talk about violence in any approving way I am talking about State violence. There is no situation where I condone terrorism. What is the difference between terrorism and war? Well, it is war when the government does it and terrorism when you do it. I want to make clear that I only condone the government doing things, and that the only appropriate means of change is to get elected to high office. War is that species of terrorism the government does, and I never condone anyone else doing it.

And I want you to keep in mind that you probably have an implicit bias without realizing it against the lives of ordinary people. If one said it was necessary to kill a million people to establish democracy in Iraq that idea seems reasonable too many people. They might not put it that way, they might not mention the million dead from The invasion and subsequent occupation but the idea that you could wage a war to establish democracy is perfectly normal to people even if it kills hundreds of thousands of millions. If you say that we should kill a thousand billionaires to establish Democracy in America now you sound truly unhinged. I want you to take a moment to look at that, to criticize that thought process. Why do you think the lives of billionaires have a thousand times more value than your own? Since it isn't terrorism when the government does it, it isn't terrorism when the President of the United States orders it, unless you subscribe to the idea that some lives have vastly more value than others. "Unhinged" is not a value-neutral term and contains within it certain social assumptions, certain implicit ideas about the relative value of human life. Why is the life of an Iraqi peasant a thousand times less valuable than the life of some billionaire? Why do governments choose to take the most expensive path, in terms of money and human life, to create democracy? Obviously when there is a problem the man who creates the problem is the cause, and the cheapest and most efficient solution is to solve that man.

I believe that if you want the powerful to value your life as much as they value their own you have to first value their lives as little as they value yours. Imagine if war was conducted thusly: the leaders of two countries try to hammer out a deal. If they reach an impasse each nation surrenders their leader to the other like a prisoner exchange. They then perform human sacrifice on the captured leader. The next in line for the job is promoted within each country and those two come to the negotiating table and try to hammer out a deal. If they fail to reach a deal the process is repeated again and again until compromise is reached. This would obviously be the most efficient way to wage a war since it would spare the most possible lives from being killed. If all lives have equal worth why would you ever prefer conventional warfare over mutual human sacrifice? Conventional war is when two leaders order terrorist attacks against each other's countries with the goal of demoralizing the other leader into submission. It is far more efficient and respectful of the value of human life to offer those leaders up as a sacrifice instead, and it would definitely motivate peace. The fact that governments do not choose the cheap and efficient solution tells you volumes about the class solidarity of the ultra wealthy. Your life is a thousand times less valuable than theirs and it is actually considered unhinged in polite society for you to think otherwise. This is one of those things that nobody knows that they know, that everyone believes without realizing it. 

Of course I am not actually advocating mutual human sacrifice. This is more of a tongue in cheek rhetorical example to get you to think things through and shake you out of the complacency of thinking about your own rights through the eyes of those who rule you. The purpose of this hyperbole is to make you a little less knee-jerk, to make you more able to see the world of possibilities.

As I already said governments are dominated by two groups: lobbyists and activists. To alter the game you need to bring in a third group: the customers of government.

If you have ever attended any kind of city council meeting you have seen in person how the only two groups of people who show up are the activists and the lobbyists. This is because one group gets off on power, and the other group gets money. Because of the rise of the homelessness industrial complex the activists are also now getting rich from enabling degeneracy.

Monarchist neoreactionaries don't actually have much experience with government. It's all well and good to have theories but you need to actually show up and watch how the sausage is made. You need to get so thoroughly involved with your state and local government that you know what personalities are involved, what motivates them, and who's paying their bills. You need to be reading Open Secrets about who is giving them financial contributions. You can't really theorize about the process until you peel back the curtain and look at it, and the monarchists don't attend city council or state legislature meetings and certainly don't have access to the inner circles of actual monarchies.

Right now, because government is dominated by lobbyists and activists there is a high-low coalition which operates against the middle class. That is to say, that the wealthy in alliance with the poor and degenerate conspire against the middle class. The goal is to replace this high-low against the middle with a populist-middle coalition. 

To facilitate this the silent majority is going to have to become an integral part of the process. The very nature of their personalities prevents them from actually caring too much about politics. They are the customers of the system, and their motivations are the same as those of customers, and these passive motivations do not lend themselves very well to an argumentative and high blood pressure inducing activity like a city council meeting. They just want to chill, grill, and have effective government that leaves them alone. This demographic and the blase politics they represent is constantly maligned as fascist. Even the term making the trains run on time is presented as a fascist idea, as if competent government itself was inherently fascist.

The concept of "tipping" in order to create a counterbalance to the deluge of bribes that politicians receive as well as increasing their pay is a start in the right direction, but we want something solid, we want something that grabs them by the balls and squeezes  tight enough to produce an audible yelp. We want to replace the vice grip lobbyists have on politicians with our own. Always negotiate from a position of strength.

Humans have really only figured out how to do two kinds of political systems: dictatorships and "games," for lack of a better term. The American system contains all the elements of a game: it has two teams (Democrats and Republicans), a referee (The Supreme Court), a set of rules called The Constitution, and a goal (to win and control offices). It is not just a game but a sport, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. The only thing it is missing is a ball.

This is a really important insight because it means it is possible to design other game mechanics for determining who wins elections in the legislative branch. In my earlier post on go-ocracy I outlined a political system on the East Asian game of Go, and I showed that our current setup was an artifact of historical process.

It is an important insight because it means that a variety of systems, as long as they meet certain standards, are also capable of being free. It means that one can drop a new configuration of game into the legislative branch, keeping the basic process of law making the same while changing the game process for getting elected. This matters because different games produce radically different styles of government and different manifestations of side effects. It matters in ways that are not readily apparent but should become apparent as new iterations of the game are explored. It is NOT about the ability to design 31 flavors of how to get elected but about how each of those flavors could constitute a system with a unique flavor of politics, benefits, and challenges. This matters because the structural approach is the key to solving all the other systemic societal problems that people moan about.

The standards for developing a new kind of democracy without losing rights are that (a) it must have a regular turnover of elites, (b) it must maintain a separation of powers, (c) it must have some sort of referee, and (d) it cannot produce any permanent winner in the executive branch (this last one is somewhat redundant with (a)). Basically, it must maintain all the components of a sport without producing any permanent winners, and if you want it to reliably maintain a set of rights then it needs a separate judiciary. This last sentence is thorny because as we have already discussed how a separate judiciary tends to expand its scope without bound, and I have proposed curtailing its independence. 

Now I have had conversations in person with reactionaries who groaned about their hatred of political systems and said they wanted monarchy because they think monarchy "isn't a system," but this is not really true because monarchy very much is a system, and in fact monarchy is even a game of sorts where you can kill your boss to become king. It's just a very horrible and perverse kind of game that nobody except a psychopath wants to play. It's a game without formalized rules or a referee or human rights. It operates on a sort of law of the jungle, the same dynamic you see when two sea lions compete over a female and the biggest one wins. It may be natural but it doesn't mean you really want to be ruled by it.

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.

So far we have brainstormed a few ideas and one system for how government might operate, how things might be reformed. We need a plan for getting ourselves from here to there, and it has to be realistic. After we've done all that we have to critique everything that we just designed and be brutally honest about it. The process of iterative design, which I use and which is used in architecture, is a process of design followed by critique followed by more design followed by more critique. It can get extremely tedious but it is necessary to do it this way. We are going to take a page from Emperor Palpatine's playbook and brainstorm up a process of subversive gradualism.

We might take the approach of electing a POTUS who first demands that Congress pay itself well and adopt a social currency for tipping. This is the approach of gradualism. Our goal is to change the incentives gradually so that review democracy becomes possible. If you can first wrestle away control of Congress from the lobbyists by changing how Congress is paid it opens up the possibility for greater reform later. But even so I don't see any world where members of Congress voluntarily agree to be "evicted" for non-performance. Getting them to even agree to a financial change is a Herculean task and would require a few billionaires to support the cause. The reason why they might support it is the same as why the American Revolution occurred. In that revolution a landed group of near-aristocrats enlisted the support of poor and middle class people against the king. It was a middle-low alliance against the high, and so we know that these types of alliances are possible.

First a group of billionaires gets a POTUS elected. Then POTUS introduces pay reforms to Congress. Then that same POTUS has the legal code audited to remove cycles of money and power and consolidates the judiciary under executive control. The problem with this approach is that it would never play out this way. Billionaires simply don't have the incentive to care about freedom of the common man. And destroying judicial independence is very dangerous, even if it is becoming insufferable and meddling. Auditing the legal code and precedents to look for points enabling overreach would be a much better approach. One might also establish that legal doctrines cannot be invented from the bench and must be approved by the Congress first.

Another approach is grassroots activism to institute review democracy at the state level for each state in the Union. This is far more practical and likely to pay off. If enough people are educated on the idea of Review Democracy, then a ballot initiative process might institute the system for an entire state. If this was done with even just one state it would shame the others and serve as a constant reminder of what could be. Even if the state with Review Democracy did not outperform the others economically it's policies would still be wildly popular because it's very nature is to favor popular policies. Its mere existence would be a threat to the powers that be.

I hate to say this but you would need to build a massive grassroots movement and start at the state and local level. The problem with this approach is that it gives one's enemies lots of time to prepare their defenses. It turns the whole process into a protracted battle and the system is designed so that the easiest and most frictionless way to get things done is from the top down rather than the bottom up. Coordinating tens of thousands of activists to try to institute Review Democracy on a state-by-state basis, or even starting at the local level and then working your way up to the states runs into the same problem where activists tend to corrupt the process. We are trying to bring the ordinary people who don't normally show up into the government and the activists are not necessarily going to be very friendly to that prospect. I have talked to activists about my ideas and have mostly received a lukewarm response. Activist groups may view bringing more people into the circle as weakening their power. People are always hesitant to give up their power and that does not stop being true just because they have, or think they have, altruistic motives. 

A better approach would probably be to educate the entire population on the concept of Review Democracy by spreading the idea around using YouTube videos and social media. Once the idea is widely understood in the public imagination you engage in a "sneak attack," by which I mean you sneak in a presidential candidate who by all appearances looks just as corrupt as any other, who has a history of selling out, but is secretly sympathetic. This person then wages an economic war on the American oligarchy, freezing their assets, nationalizing their companies, and generally raising hell. He deliberately crashes the economy and refuses to bail it out. He forgives all credit card debt, all mortgage debt, and all student loans. He does this not just because it would be popular but because it destroys the banks that oppose his power. He uses tariffs to threaten any production company that opposes his power. Basically he comes in and hits the oligarchy so hard it is forced into a position of compromise. I do not think Trump is the man who will do this, in fact I think he is probably the opposite: a defender of the oligarchy he promised to challenge.

Fin.

If you have any ideas drop them in the comments. I'm always interested to hear what my readers have to say and I read each and every comment on this blog even when I don't respond. 

Are we all just demons in hell?

So I have this theory that we are all just demons in hell. Literally, this is hell and humans are the demons, and demons don't know they're demons. In fact the task of a demon is to develop self knowledge of his or her own evil in order to escape hell. Christ forgives your sins because it is a foregone conclusion that you did something in a past life to deserve to be here. Not knowing what you did, and thinking you don't deserve it is part of the punishment.

The universe has multiple layers of heaven and hell. This is the true multiverse. It isn't really about living a good life in this life or performing good works or having faith in Christ. Faith is important but the true goal is to develop self knowledge of your own evil, and to learn to transcend it.

In this universe it isn't good versus evil, it's evil versus evil. Every demon thinks they are good and their ideological enemies evil. To overcome this you have to truly understand the viewpoint of your enemy, you have to see through their eyes, and this is a crucial task of getting out of hell. The task of everyone is to see through the enemies eyes, and to see that one is wrong, but not just that oneself is wrong but that everyone is wrong. Since we are all demons in hell none of us can be right. We are sinners who need forgiveness because it is our nature to lack self-knowledge. The cultivation of self-knowledge is the cultivation of salvation. Jesus is not here to weaken you, or to weaken Western Civilization but to strengthen you through the cultivation of a better self. 

This is more than saying "everyone is wrong." You have to actually understand why. You have to immerse yourself in the viewpoint of others and really understand how they think. You have to understand how you think and how you're lying to yourself. This means that therapy and spirituality are virtually identical practices when done correctly. It's not about blame and if you're immersing yourself in blame or self hate you're doing it wrong. It's not about hating others, because it's not about hate at all, and it's not about love either. This isn't an emotional exercise. The emotion comes later after the understanding. The emotion is the outcome of the work and not the work itself. Know thyself, and through the knowing thou art saved.

The worst demon is the one who thinks they're a victim of everything and that everyone else is to blame. The nicest demon thinks they are to blame and everyone else is innocent. The correct demon  transcends blame and understands their own error, and endeavors to see through everyone else's eyes, but also understands that others are not perfect. What is really happening is that everyone lies to themselves, everyone believes their own lies, everyone thinks they have good intentions but they simultaneously do bad things. The normal state of human affairs is self-deception. This is why demons don't know their demons. It's not good versus evil but one dumbass versus another. Hell is literally stupidity. 

What you CAN'T grow in Oklahoma

I have made Oklahoma my home and become a full-time gardener. Growing anything here is a Herculean task because everything you grow has to be able to survive four horrible seasons: 

1. Torrential rain in spring
2. Blistering hot summer 
3. Gale force winds (spring and fall)
4. 10° f winter

Torrential rain will flood your backyard. This causes potatoes to rot, along with brassicas (cabbage, kale, cauliflower, brussel sprouts) spinach and carrots. Even some of your onions will die. 

Gale force winds will break asparagus spears, snap fruit trees, and knock over everything tall and spindly. 

Blistering hot summer kills some species of onions, and some flowers.

10° f winter kills all citrus, avocados, olive trees, date palms, all herbicious plants except onions and garlic, and most herbs.

So what can you grow? Well most of these things.

You can grow brassicas, potatoes and root crops on hills to protect them from flooding. You use insect netting to protect them from being devoured alive by bugs.

You can trellis your asparagus and fruit trees. These should also be on hills. Your fruit trees will literally spend their entire lives strapped to a pole.

You can buy dwarf citrus, avocado, and olive trees and bring them indoors during the winter. Or you can build a greenhouse. If you build a greenhouse it better be strong so it can withstand the wind.

When in doubt trellis it, grow it on a hill, spray with copper fungicide, and cover with insect netting. Mix perlite, spagnum peat moss, and slow release fertilizer into the soil. Water only at the base of the plant. Cover unprotected soil with wood chips. Make hills or raised beds for everything.

Without this all you can grow are onions and garlic. There might be some political lesson here but I can't think of it.

Principles don't care about your facts

I have no love of Ben Shapiro nor of Ayn Rand. The first is a Zionist shill for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the second founded a literal Gospel of Greed. But each of them articulated a different version of the same idea. Shapiro likes to say "facts don't care about your feelings" while Rand once said "nature to be commanded must be obeyed." 

Both phrases are overplayed, both use facts to conceal the principles of their advocates (barbaric principles), and both also articulate a truth. 

Buy something terrible has happened in western civilization: ought became is. Let me explain. 

First there was tradition, it said "things are certain way therefore they ought to be that way." Usually the phrasing for this logic went something like "but that's the way it has always been!" 

Then both Hume's guillotine and the Industrial Revolution came along and said "just because things are a certain way does not mean they ought to be that way." 

For those who don't know the Scottish philosopher David Hume came up with a principal known as Hume's guillotine, a principle which says that the fact that things are a certain way does not establish that they ought to be that way. Hence the break with tradition. It is called a guillotine because it slices a traditional premise in half. Tradition says is therefore ought, Hume's principle separates the is from the ought. 

If you ask any liberal educated in philosophy they will tell you that they believe in Hume's principle, but they do not, and they don't know it. Because what they actually believe in is ought therefore is. For example; 

• It ought to be possible to create a democracy in Afghanistan, therefore it is 
• Trans women ought to be women, therefore they are
• Biological women should have the same capabilities as men, therefore they do
• Biological women should be able to keep up with trans women in sports, therefore they can
• Any society ought to be able to win a mathematics Fields medal, therefore they can 
• Putting black kids in white schools should raise their achievement, therefore it will 
• Homeless people ought to have high levels of agency just like us, therefore we should be able to make them functional addicts by giving them needles
• NASA should not need white male engineers, therefore it doesn't 
• Chinese should not be better at capitalism, therefore we can compete with them in manufacturing 
• Because global warming is a problem you should be able to live with less energy 
• Degrowth ought to be a successful electoral platform, therefore it is 
• We ought to be able to when elections while hating men, therefore we can

The basic leftist principle could be principles don't care about your facts.

Somehow Western Civilization went from tradition to Hume's guillotine to delusion. Why?

Because people got so used to technology overthrowing society's values they just adopted revolution in values as a value itself. Now they think they can just make the revolution happen without a corresponding previous revolution in technology. And because the human mind is bad at understanding the fundamental principles behind what is going on this takes the most crass form of ideological rationalization. In essence, the demand for change gets well ahead of the technological facilitation of that change. This is a sort of wishing makes it so way of thinking. These people write vast ideological tracts to cast a spell and turn a wish into a reality. Progressive spell casting is basically most PhD thesis in non-STEM subjects. Change became the tradition, so change must occur regardless of whether it is possible or founded on a material basis. 

People don't believe me when I say that science has mostly exhausted itself. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, meaning that if there is technology to develop it is typically already been developed. It is far easier to build an engine in your garage than a self-driving car. Technologies progress thru a simple to synthetic process.

First simple technologies are developed. Then those technologies are synthesized (combined) into more complex technologies. The computer for example is a synthesis of integrated circuits, LED lights, battery technology, plastic technology, and many others I'm not thinking of. 

The automobile is a synthetic technology composed of machined parts, rubber tires, alloy wheels, windshield glass technology, motors that raise and lower the windows, battery technology, computer technology.

First all the simple technologies get developed, then they get combined into more and more complex configurations. 

Physics has mostly stalled and this is because technological and scientific revolution is a curve and as you go up that curve for the cost of discovery becomes more and more expensive. Or to put in another way, the cost of cracking particles requires a bigger and bigger accelerator. Without increase in fundamental scientific knowledge there is no corresponding increase in technology. A lot of racism is directed towards minorities for "compromising"  the sciences but science hit the beginning of the hockey stick curve before minorities were welcomed into the universities. Basically, they ran out of new science so they hired and recruited brown people to keep the institutions growing.

To circle back to the previous discussion on how ought becomes is, liberalism is destined to die because the very nature of science and the increase in cost of new science means technological revolutions will occur farther and farther apart. It will take more time in between revolutions, and that means it will take more time for new values to be realized and become permanent. In the meantime the left will get way ahead of the process, it's revolutions will fail, and it will be continuously discredited by jumping the gun. It will also attack the very science necessary for its own values revolution, and attack the white males who have been the most valuable players in that revolution. 

It's going to slow down if not stop entirely, it's going to alienate the core group necessary for technological revolution. It's going to slow or stall new values revolution, and it's old values revolutions are going to continue to fail since they were never substantiated by technological change. They never actually made everyone the same. The technology allowed some surface level changes but vast differences still remained. The gulf between this anticipation and reality is the failure of the left.

What I am for

On a hierarchy of priorities basis race doesn't even register as the most important thing for me. We non liberals can get so wrapped up in refuting liberal and left-wing talking points that what we stand for gets drowned out by the never ending task of refuting the torrential rain of liberal bullshit. 

Non leftists / non liberals are handicapped by being stuck in refutation land, unable to articulate a positive vision. Learn how to say no to madness but never to say yes, they learn what they are against but never what they are for. Liberalism keeps them from realizing what they are for by keeping them preoccupied by a torrent of bullshit.

Race matters, and I am firmly against anyone who hates the white race but this is about what really interests me, what I really stand for, what I really want, and how I want the world to move beyond it's existing neurotic paradigm, so let me talk about that 

I want a multiplicity of games. Capitalism is a game, democracy is a game.  I don't believe in stretching the definition to include dictatorship as a form of game even though there are game elements to it.  I don't care at all about equality and I don't believe it's possible anyway. Equality as "virtue" represents a never-ending war on human nature and tendencies. Besides, people got equality in the Soviet Union and they still voted for blue jeans. Nobody actually likes equality when they permit themselves to think. Real equality means you have to run a race only to have your legs kicked out from under you before reaching the finish line. Only a sadist would think that was the basis for a good society.

A multiplicity of games accomplishes a lot more for furthering human happiness than equality ever would. A person can be bad at one game but will rarely be bad at all of them. Having only two games: capitalism and democracy boxes people in to either succeeding at one or the other. A multiplicity of political and economic systems operating in parallel with each other encourages human flourishing by giving every person the opportunity to (possibly) succeed at at least one. 

And unlike the pursuit of equality, which destroys any incentive for mastery and success, a multiplicity of games fosters a high level of human agency and "empowerment" for lack of a better term. It also encourages the species to speciate, separate, to occupy all possible niches of mastery and competence. It encourages evolution of both the cultural and genetic nature. It creates an evolutionary arms race that improves the flourishing of sentient life.

Everything else tends to fall in line as a sub principal of the overarching principle of increasing the variety of games. This is the essence of Republican reactionary thought: that it is not really reactionary and not strictly committed to republics as a political form. The goal is something so weird, and so different from what everyone else is trying to do that it looks like so many other things that it isn't. It looks like Nazism but it isn't, it looks like hyper-progressiveism but it isn't, it looks like reactionary thought or neoreaction but it isn't. It looks like conservatism but it definitely isn't. Republican reaction is actually constitutional game design in the disguise of everything else.

And I really do mean game design. It is my intention to eventually develop board games that simulate different political systems, to test political systems with an extremely analog method using real human beings. None of this nonsense academic theorizing or Marxist critique that knows nothing because it never experiments to verify its theories. Game design must naturally involve real players playing the game, and this is especially true when you're designing political systems. Is a crime to subject everyone to an experiment when you haven't even worked out the details of gameplay. 

Other than that I stand for certain things and against others but these are just personal preferences. I like the Chinese Communist Party  because they have unified political and economic power at the top instead of letting economic power dominate the political. Their politicians are not required to sell out as soon as they get elected, and China actually has a demonstrated capability for subjugating globalists interest. As far as I know the Chinese are not importing millions of foreigners in order to enrich the business community, nor tolerating deranged academics and gender theorists. There's definitely something to be said for making your whole society one big hierarchy, and I especially admire the CCP for using communism to suppress communism.

But I find that this approach would probably be brittle and definitely inappropriate for the American / European soul. Americans are not cut out for the kind of oppressive conformity required of such a system. Academia should probably have some sort of Pope appointed by the President or maybe a conservative foundation. The universities should be stripped of their power to appoint their own professors or determine who gets in. We need to recognize that the mentally ill are attracted to higher education the same way bullies are attracted to the police and take steps to exclude the insane from academia. Leftism should definitely be classified as a religion and barred from all participation in government. Millions of lefty lunatics need to go to internment camps for compulsory reeducation. America needs its burning of the books and burying of the scholars moment. A heavy hand is required to unfuck this whole situation but going forward the proper format for flourishing Western Civilization is a multiplicity of games. Humans are a Paleolithic species operating with medieval institutions and 21st century technology. A multiplicity of games / political / economic systems creates a test bench for finally upgrading those medieval institutions without succumbing to communism, and the heavy hand necessary to suppress leftism runs the risk of creating a brain drain in the West. Without societal experiments that brain drain might become irreversible.

Nick Land is schizophrenic and not to be trusted

The man thinks he wants autonomous capital. He also acts like a conservative, criticizing everything from a conservative point of view, but also loves the Chinese Communist party. 

Autonomous capital is basically what liberalism is all about, or to put it another way, the left has made a whole business out of slavishly converting every technological development into a values system. Birth control comes along and the left becomes feminist. Transgendered surgical techniques arrive and the left tries to transition everyone's children.

Remember that in the past the Founding Fathers were also liberals and they converted the material force of guns, a relatively new force at the time, into the ideology of a republic. Leftists have depended pornography as free speech. The exception to this technology ---> liberal ideology pipeline is guns, which have been co-opted and reinterpreted as conservative technology, and since conservatives love it liberals now hate it. 

Unstructured slavery to technological forces is what liberalism is all about, it is what defines their mythic "right side of history" narrative. Anyone who believes that humans should be in charge is basically a communist, anyone who believes that humans should resist technological cultural change is a conservative, and anyone who thinks humans should control the direction of cultural change by controlling the technology is a Silicon Valley fascist.

Liberalism's defining feature is demand for unstructured "progress", for belief in destiny, like history will just magically unfold in a progressive direction. It's incoherent because they can't even say the direction they are going, they can just feel it, they just know it, somehow they can tell. It's a vibe thing, but guess what it's capitalism that controls that vibe. 

Because behind most of these liberal revolutions in values is a technological change, though challenging racism stands out as a possible exception since no technology has actually made anyone equal. I suppose the end of racism as a culturally valid phenomenon is also traceable to birth control, and perhaps also the atomic bomb, since the result is that societies no longer have to compete in a death struggle over resources. Birth control removes the constant pressure for growth while the bomb makes direct violence with other superpowers politically untenable. Once you have these technologies you no longer have the material force that sustains hatred of differences, and society seeks its lowest energy state, which means racism becomes stigmatized, because white only drinking fountains are a higher energy state to maintain than everyone being terrorized by black crime.

Humans are lazy and they seek the less effortful path.

My thesis here is that technology drives our values and when technology changes our values change. Humans are tool using apes with religion, and we make religion out of our tools. The whole process exists in a kind of recursive feedback loop where we interpret the cultural effects of our tools as a material force we must obey. As an example the Aztecs always had a problem with surplus population, and they solved this problem with massive quantities of human sacrifice. This is a very obvious example of the material force ---> values system pipeline. Technology plugs into this psychological process and creates a technological force ---> values systems pipeline. This pipeline IS THE LEFT, and you can predict wherever the left will go by looking at the direction the technology is taking, and anticipating how that technology will change people's values.

I don't want to get off track from the main point but I feel another example is an order, because we have talked about the past but we should also talk about the future to make this process as salient as possible in the reader's mind, so let's make a slight detour. 

Elon musk is developing neuralink. He believes that creating a hive mind for humanity will counterbalance against the rise of AI. More than likely AI will simply wind up running the hive mind, but whatever. Useful idiots abound in the human species. 

Let us imagine that it becomes possible to upload memories to social media and to then share them with others. Everyone begins uploading and downloading memories and people even begin editing them to create a more "polished" look. There are even sexual memories being uploaded and downloaded on PornHub. Fake glamorous memories dominate Instagram, hateful memories on X (of course), a mixture of Boomer slop and disturbing stuff on Facebook (as usual), and sexual memories on porn sites. It's the sex memories that really drive the adoption of neuralink. Most men would be hesitant to get their heads drilled for a brain computer interface, but dangle an endless supply of sex memories with smoking hot women in front of them and they change their mind. Of course some of these memories might not be completely consensual, and some might be of the revenge porn variety.

Imagine that your ex-boyfriend uploads a memory to a porn site in revenge for you cheating on him, or leaving him, or whatever. It is seen by tens of millions of men and every time you walk down the street anonymous men you have never met look at you like they have had sex with you, BECAUSE THEY HAVE. There's not much difference between reality and memory is there?  Viewing something on a two-dimensional screen at least gives you some separation between you and the event in question, but memory is far more personal and you become the things you remember. If 10 million men remember having sex with a woman without her consent then effectively she has been raped by 10 million men. 

So in the beginning of neural interfaces the laws are very strict, we hope, to protect the privacy of others. But people begin to put more and more of their memories online, so much so that it begins to reshape the values of society. In the beginning privacy is considered  extremely important but at the end of the process privacy is an outdated concept for old fuddy-duddies. What, you want privacy? You don't want to be included in other people's memories? You don't want your intimate partner to put her memories online? So that her female friends can judge and criticize? That's a red flag! The pipeline of material force ---> new values works fast and in a single generation the right to privacy becomes a concept only conservatives believe in. In fact, this is how conservatism happens, it happens when people simply refuse to update their values. All those conservatives you disdain? Maybe you should have some sympathy for them, since they are simply people who refuse to update their values for a previous change in material forces. This process has been going on a lot longer than you have been alive, you are just here for the latest iteration, and the system will pass you by and if you don't change your values you will become conservative too.

Live long enough and you will become a conservative. 

So this then circles back to my point about Nick Land and autonomous capital. The man thinks he wants autonomous capital but that's like saying you want the victory of liberalism. He says that liberalism is the only thing that has any future, but then he also wines endlessly about white replacement. Does the man think capitalism considers whites special? The fascist paradox is to believe wholeheartedly in capitalism while capitalism destroys all your values. Zizek is not an idiot all the time, and he mentions this.

The most prescient comment on this issue came from none other than Grimes who said,

"What they don't tell you is that capitalism itself is the most obvious vehicle for intelligence and evolution, That the only thing saving you from governance by "autonomous capital" is the selfishness and laziness of women, who are refusing en masse to feed the machine.

The real danger is the eternal sentient economy. 

Once the market can think for itself, it will eradicate women and create factories to grow babies in order to obtain infinite consumers. 

Not to terrorize everyone with another conspiracy theory"

 

Because of the religious nature of the human brain the psychological process of material force ---> cultural values becomes a technological force ---> cultural values pipeline and the humans become the tools of their own technology.

And to piggyback on what Grimes said this process will be horribly misogynistic, because it is a continuation of a technological process of manufacturing substitutes for the female body. This process of substitutes began with things like pornography and transgenderism, and we have already seen the cultural rationalizations of men in women's sports, rationalizations which are misogynistic in nature. The rationalizations have to be misogynistic because they flow from the technology of transgendered hormones and surgeries, a technological process whose purpose is to make the female body more consumable. Consumption of women is the very essence of misogyny and technologies that further it will lead to the reinforcement of misogynistic values. 

But this isn't about misogyny. This isn't really even about Nick Land. This is about the need for communism, or to put it another way, the need for alignment of AI with human values. Or to put it yet another way, the need for real conservatism. Because if you want real conservatism you want to enslave capital. The Amish are the only real conservatives and they're also the only people who pick and choose which material forces they obey, by picking and choosing which technologies to embrace. For a society to overcome slavery to technological material forces it's going to require a pretty heavy government hand. This idea that everything can be fixed the lack of regulation is a fool's errand and gets you only the relentless destruction of all your precious values at the hands of autonomous capital. If you as a conservative value your race, (regardless of what your race is), value your community, value family, value nation, you ultimately need to oppress capitalism. There is no gentler way of putting it: capitalism, and the technological forces it unleashes must be controlled and since you are dealing with an awesome force of atomic proportions only the heaviest hand will work. OPPRESS is the correct term. 

The reason the West is the source of the industrial revolution and also the radical upheavals in social values is because of an analytical process getting ahead of the human Id. Normally the mind does what the heart wants, or to put it another way, the ego obeys the Id. In the "rational"  Western tradition this process gets reversed and the Id is enslaved to the ego. Slavery to the ego, slavery to technology, liberalism, the right side of history, and autonomous capital are all just different ways of saying the same thing: eventual AI supremacy.

And people are beginning to realize that pure unstructured liberalism does not lead to freedom but to the triumph of the machine over the biological. Nick Land is schizophrenic because he thirsts for annihilation, he even says this. Why does anyone listen to him?