Squares do Morals. A Porno.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an intellectually bankrupt, morally objectionable, ethically untenable, financially unstable attempt to implement socialismⁱ in the world, which is to say that most vile, offensive notion of the sovereignty of the group over the individual. It survived sui generis for about 70 years starting earlyⁱⁱ XXth century.

The Welfare State was an intellectually bankrupt, morally objectionable, ethically untenable, financially unstable attempt to implement socialism in the world (which is to say that most vile, offensive notion of the sovereignty of the group over the individual). It survived sui generis for about 70 years starting midⁱⁱⁱ XXth century.

We say "intellectually bankrupt" in recognition of the factual inability of this type of evil to live to the very high standards of its pretense through its actual intellectual accomplishments. There's no Soviet Dostoyevsky, nor indeed could ever be or has there been such a thing, and the same is true of all fields except perhaps ballet. Dancing, and especially dancing around is certainly the one field where socialism far surpasses sanity. One would be however hard pressed to successfully argue delirium into the congress of intellectual life, and indeed for the same reasons one'd be hard pressed to persuade anyone that "dancing with the issues" constitutes statesmanship. There is no American Picasso, nor indeed could ever be or has there been such a thing, and again the same is true in all fields. Always and everywhere human thought worth the mention ceases the day Idiocy receives the keys to the city.

We say morally objectionable for reasons we will delve upon in the body of this article (which by the way isn't even halfway done yet). We say ethically untenable to underscore the difference between morals and ethics, scarcely understood under socialism^iv, and to recognise the unsolvable theoretical problem of moral hazard^v implicit in any attempt at implementing resource distribution, and finally to recall the factual point that on the strength of the historical record any actual attempt to implement socialism is unable to pass even cursory tests of ethics.^vi

Indeed what these failed attempts at enthroning idiocy have in common constitutes vast lists of shocking similarities, far in excess of the sparse and mostly cosmetic differences. Consider a moreover anecdotic point : since the Soviet Union held itself to in fact be implementing in practice the best possible world, it then followed deductively that people unimpressed with this pretense and willing to try and dethrone idiocy by ending socialism had trouble relating to reality. Generally people who have trouble with reality are to be helped by doctors, and consequently a diagnostic of "sluggish schizophrenia" was introduced. Unsurprisingly, the prognosis was "poor", as you can't very well treat sanity.^vii

Correspondingly, since the Welfare State held itself to in fact be implementing in practice the best possible world, it then followed deductively that people unimpressed with the goals, means and results of this effort had trouble relating to reality. Generally people who have trouble with reality are to be helped by doctors, and consequently a diagnostic of "antisocial personality disorder"^viii was introduced. Unsurprisingly, the prognosis was also "poor", for the exact same reasons.

And now, to the topic of morals. The science of morals is an exact science, exactly in the manner the science of numbers^ix is an exact science. Mathematics concerns itself strictly, exclusively and solely with the work of specifying the conditions of validity for any arbitrary given statement. That's what math does : you make a statement and it tells you when it's true. For instance :

• a = b if two sets A and B exist so that a is the cardinal of A, b is the cardinal of B and a bijective function between A and B exists.^x.
• c * 2 > c for every c > 0.
• d ^ 2 = d for d in {0, 1}.

This is what math does : you put some arbitrary statement in, such as "a number equal its square" and it comes out to the conditions where your statement holds, such as for instance "when that number is 0 or 1". If you don't know how to make these statements you will most likely get a long list of "never", which makes you a poor mathematics student, or in other words mathematically iliterate. If you don't know how to find the validity domains you're more than welcome to the human race in general, we're very very bad at that shit, which is why we enjoy trying so much.

Morals are exactly the same thing :

• Killing is bad if you don't find it acceptable to be killed.^xi
• Women are equal to men for any applications where the differences are immaterial.^xii

Now that we understand what morals are, consider what squares make of them :

• Drugs are bad mkay^xiii.
• Killing is bad mkay.
• Women and men are equal mkay.
• Capitalism is immoral, socialism is the only way mkay.
• You should have not cut in front of me in line because I had my blinker on and I only move impredictably around like a beached whale on PCP because I am very fat which is slightly mentally confusing as all the blood that should occasionally reach my brain gets lost in my gullet for hours at a time but nevertheless I can't lose weight because that's racist mkay.

Quite the shocking contrast, wouldn't you say ? Intellectually bankrupt ? Mkay. Morally objectionable ? Quite. Ethically untenable ? Certainly. Financially unstable ? Absolutely. Ecce mobile^xiv vulgus.

PS. In case you're wondering, this article is subtitled "A Porno" because it deals with obscene subject matter, in the form of an unadorned depiction of what the unthinking "think" reality looks like. Scarcely something more objectionable could constitute the topic of letters.

1. The intellectual, moral, ethical and economic statal "system" favoured by Imbecilitatians, such as it is. [↩]
2. A series of armed insurections in 1917. [↩]
3. The fallout of Roosevelt's so called "New Deal" package of evils. Perhaps a more appropriate name under which history will remember this particular collection of unmitigatedly terrible afflictions will be Pandora's Box 2.0, in recognition of the fact that much like in the case of the original, no good came of it, perhaps with the arguable exception of feverish if wholly unsupported hope. It is unheard of for a person to contract poliomyelitis by contact from another, but it is apparently possible for State to contact it from born again lame statesmen. [↩]
4. And intentionally so. As a shorthand for those who were born and lived in the dumbing goop of socialism who otherwise do not know : ethics stand with morals in the relation engineering stands with theoretical physics, or business with economics. One is the thing in itself, the other is the implementation of the first. [↩]
5. I said earlier "intentionally so", and here we come upon the reason. Once a con man knows his proposed "business" could not pass the test of economy he may understandably attempt to divorce business from economy. This will be presented as "freeing" one from the other for the obvious reason, and makes about as much sense as his brother the thief's attempt to represent theft as "liberating victims from their purse". Just so the socialist needs to separate ethics and morals in order to render both impotent, as otherwise their potency would unavoidably direct itself against him and his inhuman goals. That they may not survive this separation as living things able to stand on their own is no drawback in his estimation, but quite the contrary.

   Moral hazard is the situation where the chain of natural causality is broken by an agent. Consider the case of an ordinary maternity ward : women come, labour, deliver and leave with their own children. Why has any woman come hither ? For she was pregnant. Why has she left with a particular child in her arms ? For it was hers. Could she have left with a different child ? No, she could not have. Now consider the opposite case of an exceptional maternity ward where a socialist nurse redistributes children. She has created a list of scoring criteria for mothers, and a list of scoring criteria for newborns, both wholly arbitrary and to an outside eye quite patently insane. She proceeds to optimise each night's batch so as each individual pair of mother score and son score add closest to the average. Why has any woman come hither ? For she was naive : indeed had she known of the practices of this ward she'd have gone to another. Why has she left with a particular child in her arms ? For it so happened. Could she have left with a different child ? Certainly.

   That, my dear reader, is moral hazard, and it rears its ugly head every time some sort of agent takes from one to give to another. Irrespective of the "reasons" as presented by the agent (which obviously have to be flawed, by definition, as no agent's reasoning could possibly be universal), irrespective of the victims' innocence in the matter, and irrespective of any other consideration, the natural chain of causality has been broken and this breach can not be in any way afterward cured. [↩]

6. Which makes it particularly amusing to note that every earnest attempt to implement socialism to date has hee-hawed a great deal over an imaginary inability to satisfy ethics projected upon the "competition" such as it were, ie sane rather than imbecilitarian statal systems. The case for socialism being a mental disease would be indeed exceedingly easy to build in pseudoscientific terms of the socialist style. [↩]
7. The reason the insane can't treat the sane is that sanity is one whereas insanity is numerous and varied. Should the sane try to treat the insane, they are all proceeding towards the same goal. Should the insane try to treat the same they are all proceeding towards different goals, and necessarily their efforts will come to naught. Very intensively drilled in ideology may to some degree manage to align otherwise disparate insanity to the degree of actually causing trouble by systematic induction of errors, but this is also a self limiting condition. The problem is just a particular case of the more general problem of ideal social systems, as described in the linked 2009 article. [↩]
8. This wholly imaginary disease was created through a slightly different process than its Soviet counterpart. The soviets tried to leech some respectability off a well documented and well established disease by means of a meaningless qualifier (much in the manner Obamacare attempted to link Obama's name to the generally positive notion of "care"). This process universally ends up creating a wholly despised new thing, its meaning in no way related to the original, a sort of Folger's Coffee : it's anything but coffee!

   The welfarists opted instead to repurpose an older and rather dubious concept, introduced by the equally dubious psychoanalysis school. While it's true that the glib, seductive, shallow, poorly controlled type earlier proponents of the "psychopath" describe can be found in clinical practice and even walking down the street, it's entirely unclear how much scientific merit this observation carries, while it's quite clear what political interest it serves - that age old desire of all common men to be able to authoritatively say that anyone who successfully resists their own desires is, in fact, Satan. [↩]

9. The Jews have proven the following theorem : In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. [↩]
10. Consider for flavour this May 5th exchange on the ever grandiose #bitcoin-assets :
    

    cads Hehe, lovely girl, and a smart mathematician, the best tits I've ever... kakobrekla yes. But she's getting married now, sadly :D
    kakobrekla Not so smart mathematitican then.

    cads Haha, if you were a mathematician you'd know just how stupid we are. I once spent 5 hours arguing with her that transfinite ordinals are not obviously inconsistent, against her objections. And then we went to bed, and the next morning she was up proving the basic properties of transfinite ordinals. And had made me pankakes and written "you were right" in whipped cream. The _only_ argument I ever 'won', that girl was stubborn.
    kakobrekla hehe
    mircea_popescu Titican lol. Anyway, so did she ever find the aleph-one ?

    cads Mircea_Popescu: yeah, his name is Shawn, and they're pretty perfect for each other - each as stubborn as the day is long.
    mircea_popescu Nono. I mean, the intermediate cardinal. Between naturals and reals.

    cads Haha, we never did talk about the continuum hypothesis.
    mircea_popescu But that'd have been the end of your debate. Here, there's an extra infinite.

    cads We got to isomorphism classes between ordered set, and I tried at long length to motivate that the real numbers were not countable, and she kept coming up with silly schemes to try to count them, because to her, at the time, it was absolutely absurd for there two be two infinite sets with qualitatively different amounts of infiniteness.
    mircea_popescu Um. That's easily provable tho neh ? Cantor's countability trick. Sort out all the numbers then show you can make one which is distinct from each on a different digit. (By "easily provable" i mean easily showable to the intuitive approach).

    cads Yep, suppose that C_k : N -> R is a counting of the real numbers, then there exists a number x_k such that x_k is not in the image of C_k. x_k is easy to construct for any possible C_k
    mircea_popescu Ya but it helps if you actually list them out. But anyway. Alternatively of course, she could have proven the continuum, thus proving Frankel set theory incorrect, which is also good enough. Either way, either by producing a counter example or by actually showing the hyptothesis to be correct. And by incorrect I mean inconsistent.

    cads It was strange, like a cognitive blindspot - I tried what you suggest, and a few other approaches that I invented just during that conversation (which have been useful in similar situations). I lost a lot of faith in her as a mathematician, but regained it in the morning - she was chattering like a bluejay about how she now sees why she was wrong in her reasoning and why I was right: her intuition was that you can't just infinitely extend C_k to C_k', and for some reason just wasn't getting that _forall_ C_k there is an x_k, and that even any C_k' that she could concoct would also have its own fatal x_k'.
    mircea_popescu lol.

    cads Mircea_Popescu: now wouldn't that have been a sight? Two stoned college math students, disproving ZFC.
    mircea_popescu Freud would have been happy. "See ? Woman brain!" Schopenhauer even happier, in his gloomy way.

    cads To her credit, her area was in the statistics of neuronal bursting in biological neural networks, and for some god awful reason, basic logic courses at our university do _not_ adequately introduce foundational issues such as ordinals or even set theory as an axiomatic topic. It's like, naive set theory without talking about the axiom of choice, or the axiom of infinity, or the implications.. part of the reason I recently dropped out - if this is what the undergraduate math degree means here, I'm not interested in it

    mircea_popescu Anyway, it is my considered opinion (along with, I wager, most everyone else's) that positively the ONLY way that's getting show to be inconsistent is by some intoxicated kids during having sex or somesuch. Everything else was tried to death.

    cads Mircea_Popescu: Haha, you may be on to something. Maybe she was on to the truth and I squelched her breakthrough!
    mircea_popescu feelbad.gif

    [↩]

11. That's right, what this says is exactly that killing is perfectly fine as far as moral goes for all those who do not object to being killed themselves, such as for instance soldiers in war, such as for instance druglords in any inner city, such as for instance terrorists/freedom fighters. This theoretical advance is due to Kant's work. [↩]
12. Which does reduce such equality quite strictly to the realm of legal persons as represented for instance in commerce : a Bitcoin paid by or to a woman is exactly the same as a Bitcoin paid by or to a man, and consequently the two are equal. The two are quite unequal in any fields which in any way touch to their physical person, such as social dominance (as applied for instance in politics or management), artistic expression, sexual congress and whatall have you. [↩]
13. This theoretical advance is due to Mr. Mackey. [↩]
14. Because they have Ipads, see ? [↩]