Orlov is wrong, and other stories.
My friends read Orlov, and so I write about Orlov. That's how I ended up stuck writing about that Curtis Yarvin character, too, and various Romanian nuts before that. That's how I generally end up writing about all sorts of dubious, bizarre and outright wrong stuff.i
Not that I'm complaining, seeing how that's how I ended up writing about Bitcoin, but merely to point out to the various would-be important people who carefully avoid writing about the guys their readers read that they're doing it wrong. 'Course they think they know better than me, but hey - the duty of the father is to tell the father of tomorrow what is and what isn't, not to persuade him of it.
Anyway, his most recent piece - Shock over Ukraine suffers not only from that disease of the Internet-famousii, but also from a more subtler defect.
Consider the "problems" listed :
Question is, Will there still be a country for her to (pretend to) run? Financial reserves are down to a few days, federal structures are being dismantled throughout the country, regional governors are fleeing, and a default on some €60 of Ukrainian bonds, many held by Russian banks, seems likely.
Honey, finance couldn't be less important in this discussion. In particular Romania was in the same exact situation cca 1989.iii I have clear memories of the various importers stuck without the possibility of paying for critical inbound merchandise in Constanta (fuels, etc) begging the National Bank to bail them out over the phone. The impact of these considerations on the larger question of whether there was a country to run ? Zero.
And it goes on : what the guy considers are "the EU bureaucrats", the "US Dept flunkies", the various would-be local leaders. As if any of these mattered in the slightest. That'd be his error : they do not.
Whatever the EU does or doesn't do, whatever the US does or doesn't do, whatever the local whoever individual people "in charge" in their own mind do or don't do has negligible impact in such times. Sure, people love finding patterns, and especially in retrospect a pattern can be fitted to any sort of dataset. Sure, people love a good conspiracy theory, and what'd a conspiracy theory be once you understand that the relative control financial and political elites actually exert over the course of events is minimal at best. What'd that do for the desire of everyone, Orlov included, of feeling secure ?
Consider however : Amazon has immense warehouses, which are theirs and which they control to a much larger degree than even the most Korean regime controls its own country. Suppose I visit and forget my hat in there somewhere. Can they find it ? Suppose they have a slight problem. Can they decide in which order the boxes are retrieved ? Pretty much every supermarket in existence has a rodent, bird and cockroach infestation problem. These are "kept under control", but not erradicated. Why not ? Why can't the owner of a warehouse control such things ?
For that matter, you own a computer. Do you even know how many viruses you're running currently ? Can you tell me what's at offset 845976 ? If your os dumps core right now, can you debug the error ?
Orlov is wrong, it makes jack shit of a difference what X Y or Z nominally identified do or say, these days. All that matters is how many Russian speakers are fucking Ukrainian speakers tonight, and how lovingly.iv The problem of the Ukrainian revolution is now purely sexual, and will be resolved on purely sexual lines.v
I know, after a certain age you can't get it up anymorevi, and so your chief business of the day becomes a twin headed beast : a) to convince everyone, and in so doing maybe convince yourself, that you still matter, and so finance and politics and conspiracy theories and bla bla ; b) to deny that well... nobody cares what you think on the topic, because you can't get it up anymore.
Tough.
———- Specifically my reservations re Orlov come from an event earlier this month when I debunked some incidental bunk contained in some article of his. It's generally very risky to present lengthy lists of confirmations to some broad sweeping generalisation you make, especially if you're not well familiar with the respective examples : someone who is actually familiar may pick one, beat you into a pulp over it and invalidate your whole broad argument, not to mention your whole career, on that basis. Actual scientists are reserved for a reason.
The reaction, rather than the correction & apology you'd expect in the case of the intellectually honest, came in the form of variously misguided appeals to authority and assorted nonsense you'd expect in the case of climate change proponents, Internet pundits and assorted intellectual malfeasants. I regard this sort of thing about as dimly as I regard scamming in Bitcoin. [↩]
- Something like
Ow gawdy, something happened and we've not written about it ? But we must write about it! What difference does it make whether we have or have not anything of value to say ? We're great Internet famous people, we can always find something to say!
Obviously one with practice in any creative field can fake creative writing. An actor dumped on a stage can improvise and likely deliver a better performance than most amateurs who had actually read the script. A reporter who missed the event because he was busy that night may still manage to send something over to the network that may well be unremarkable, but will definitely be passing grade.
Nevertheless, that mortar is intended to fill the holes between stones, not to stand as the actual wall. The actor dumped on the scene is unlikely to be worth much five hours later, the reporter on a bender lasting since September is unlikely to maintain his job all through February. As the Internet famousness (self perceived and self reported) grows, the frequency of stones in the wall drops, and soon enough the thing starts cracking and crumbling everywhere.
That, my friends, is no way to live. Leaving aside the strategic consideration that such stress exposes both the writer's mental capacity and internal art to outside scrutiny (much like an encryption mechanism working without a RNG source can be analysed at will), it simply is no way to live. Write about shit that interests you, not about shit you're expected to write about. By anyone, including "yourself". Fuck yourself, when did yourself become the boss of you ?
Do yourself a favour, post the occasional picture of tits, write a bawdy poem, let the "audience" get over itself, and more importantly let you get over your own delusions of yourself. Who asked them anything anyway ? [↩]
- This is not the only similarity between the Soros plan for Europe in the 80s and the recent re-runs. Leaving aside the almost exact coincidence of days - Romanian revolution started 16th/17th, Ceausescu runs off on the 22nd... I guess we'll see if Mr. Y makes it past the 25th or not - even the "golden toilet" bullshit was prominent at the time, review the newspapers. [↩]
I quote,jurov Seeing all this I wonder why the Czechoslovakia divorce went so smoothly.
mircea_popescu Everything goes smoothly there. It's because the womenz are so well lubricated. Didn't they have the velvet revolution too ?
jurov Cuz Czech women? Oh gives sense :DDD
wao-ender :D[↩]
- Speaking of which,
Feb 23 01:32:13 mircea_popescu http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/23/world/23ukraine7_part/23ukraine7_part-articleLarge.jpg < check out the hottie in red.
Feb 23 01:42:50 mircea_popescu So our birdies tell us the hottie is Kaletnyk Oksana Mykolaivna. Vinnytsya. communist. deputy chairman of budget comittee.Or if commies aren't your style, maybe give Donets Tetyana Anatoliyivna an eye. She's from the Batkivshchyna, so the swastika people, but "chairperson of the subcommittee on legislative support to combating HIV-infection/AIDS and other socially dangerous diseases and on control over drugs and medical products that are purchased on state funds of the Committee on Public Health". This is your chance to date a Ukrainian-liberal, to vary your diet of Ann Arbor bred libertards. Go for it, and in the process help the US State Department! [↩]
- Either your own as a guy or some guy's as a gal. [↩]
