Prophylaxis

Motto : We're leaving together, but still it's farewell.
And maybe we'll come back to earth, who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame... We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again? It's the final condom...

Nature is fundamentally dishonestⁱ, which always comes to bite it in the ass. Yet it never learns from the experience. Not ever. What experience ? It "perfects" the art of going through the motionsⁱⁱ, sure, which is how you end up with circuitous nonsense such as "the incredible complexity of life", but it also stays a blind anal childⁱⁱⁱ as if its life depended on it - which might have been the case, arguably, technically, at some point. Not for a long, loooong time now. But it won't yield, will it ? "Why change what works ? Especially when it doesn't!"

In our present case, the situation is that sexuate reproduction offers some very significant fitness advantages to any species deploying it, whereas intelligence also offers some very significant fitness advantages to any species deploying it. Are these incompatible ? Let's find out!

Turns out that yeah, they are. Even as little intelligence as the common waterbug enjoys is nevertheless sufficient to make it realise that sexuate reproduction is a burden, and in all the time and with all the effort such reproduction squanders it could instead have done something else. Anything else - like floating idly on a lake, as the waterbug doesn't have that many options - seems more appealing.

"But wait!" says ever-resourceful Nature, digging through her stupid box. "What if we, you know... hacked the reward pathways of the brain ? That'll make them do what we want them to do!"

Except it won't. Like every other ugly hack deployed by dumbass^iv Nature, the "reward pathways" hack results first and foremost in some unintended stack smashing, because you see, other than the species in question there are many other species inhabiting the same general ecosystem, and those have to use their own protein constructions for their own purposes, and there's only so many ways to hitch carbon atoms together, and as a result those other species end up providing fuzzer services for this one, which means sooner or later you'll find a psychotropic agent, and lo and behold - "who needs reasons when you got heroin".^v

But until that, you'll see the male waterbug dragging the female waterbug under the water and hold her there to asphyxiate until she submits, as she had the misfortune to develop this chitinous cunt plate to prevent forcible entry. Or else hold her above him, in front of a frog (which eats waterbugs), until she idem submits. Or gets eaten. Whatever. Reward pathways for the win, and there isn't a reward pathway for having a girlfriend.

All this because sexuate reproduction implies that the burden will necessarily not be shared equally, and so one party has an incentive to fuck the other over. Moreover, since the burden is going to have to be supported mostly by one party, that one party will change under the pressure, will adapt to the requirements of the burden. All the while the other party will necessarily change to take advantage of all the sweet, sweet empty space provided to it, free of charge, at the expense of half the population in the same niche. After all, bar service would be a lot slower and bartenders a lot shittier on average if bars had to accomodate the entire human population rather than just the lesser half of it.

Thus arise sexual dismorphisms, which is to say "because men hunt and women nest". "It's only natural", which means to say "since nature gored you already, we don't both need to go picking berries like retards. You stay in this sty and waddle while I go have some fun hunting. And when I'm back I'll go hunt your daughter an' stick it in her, too. Gotta conserve the species!"

The patently natural unfairness of all this has led the god-deluded into creating "institutions" so that you know, both male and female sit around picking berries in Farmville, instead of her sighing in stocks while he goes flying a hang glider, drunk and naked^vi, to survey the field for any unimpregnated wandering females to be taken back to the impregnation stocks^vii. Make things more fair, which is to say more even, which is to say more bland and appealing to the stupid.

Except... it's actually cheaper, which is to say easier and more convenient, for the male to just go through the motions instead of doing the actual deed. And so no, you don't see a lot of Viking hang gliders around. You also see a lot of condoms, which serve the exact same purpose, practically speaking, only use up a lot less rubber.

It's also a lot cheaper, which is to say easier and more convenient, for the male to persuade the female that she doesn't even want anything from life, and so you see a lot of "empowered" and "career driven" independent women who you know, provide the outer shell for all the condom usage while pretending to like it - because that's the female coping mechanism, and has been since forever - she really didn't even want what she can't possibly get and she never wanted it all along!^viii

It doesn't even stop there. Because why would it, really. To quote Mo of Robotzi fame, "Vali, uite cum facem, eu iti instalez un webcam, si tu numai te dezbraci, ochei ? Totu-i pe Internet, numa' pe Internet."

It doesn't stop there, either. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and then you wake up one day, look back and it's...

* mircea_popescu suddenly realised, sometimes last night, that the deep reason nothing works is simply that - all of it was made on a lark. Not for serious.

mircea_popescu Anyway : there's this entire pretend culture, and it goes very deep. Dunno how to properly illustrate it in its meta splendor. But I'm nothing oif not persistent, so lemme try. Case A : kid sees girl in bar. Waits for moment when no-one's looking around 3am, kloinks her in the head with bottle, drags her to the dark alley outside, shreds her clothes and her virginity. Case B : kid sees girl in bar, works up his courage until 3am, eventually approaches her and explains that he's into kinky stuff. Which works out, because she always fantasized about being raped, so they meet in dark alley and have some great sex. I posit that the entire fucking thing, "from the ground up", is B. all of it. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could like... encrypt shit ?" "Why ?" "So you could be like... a secre agent!". Then they went about roleplaying their super-secret-agent kink for a while, and then forgot about it.^ix Guitar hero for a different generation.

asciilifeform The 'pretend culture', at least in as far as it concerns public key crypto, was a very deliberate plank of the 'cypherpunk' folks - 'let's use crypto for every piece of shit, to defeat traffic analysis'.
trinque Sounds like the problem with letting most people define themselves on their own. You're going to get fake representations out of most, if it cuts it with the people looking at them. I was fumbling for that idea the other day re: internal representations of identity.
mircea_popescu Possibly the last time anyone did anything for serious with computers was in the 80s. Since then, everyone's just been trying to salvage utility out of the kids' roleplaying.

asciilifeform Industry exists.
mircea_popescu Does it.

asciilifeform I know, this sound like 'martians live among us'. Recall that pdp emulator fella ? Somebody's buying that. Folks with beards as long as my arm. On whom the remnants of 'the west' stand, like on elephants on turtles.
mircea_popescu Aha. Exactly. Those are hobbists not industrialists.^x

asciilifeform Not hobbyists. Those use 'open source' emu. This one is intended for industrial plant, which still runs, yes, on pdp.
mircea_popescu As someone's hobby.

asciilifeform (As do a great many american .mil systems, of the kind which still work.)
mircea_popescu The "industry", such as it is, is fucking Google, holding hackathons, trying to feed themselves out of used condoms left behind in dark alleys.

asciilifeform No. The industry, in actuality, is grey beards maintaining code written in 1973, which keeps the water mains pressurized and the lights on.

He says the transformation is not complete. Maybe he's right or maybe he just can't cope with reality, I don't know and I don't think we yet have enough data to actually find out. In the meanwhile, the plain statement that no one has written any code as a professional activity in the past twenty years can be ridden for a lot of mileage, and simlarly the plain observation that no-one's done any work whatsoever in any field whatsoever, for just as long. Perhaps longer.

The whole shebang rests squarely on people trying to act like how they imagine the people doing the job they're pretending to be doing would act. Current Romania was legendary built atop a "Mircea, fa-te ca muncesti!"^xi and current everywhere else seems to be constructed out of children pretending to be adults, when they obviously aren't, and pretending to be doing the things adults used to be doing, except they also obviously aren't. And then "impostor syndrome" is considered a disorder by these nuts, when those are actually the only sane people, caught under the muck of their congeners. Who, you know, "don't even really work here". They're just killing time until... you know, "they get discovered". Right ?

Aunt Dumb got herself painted into a corner yet again, the "hack" got hacked, and here we are. You will perhaps care to note that this generation of impostors is also the first generation that grew up with condoms as a component of mainstream pop culture. No longer is one a "pervert" for buying such, but moreover they get distributed freely in schools. It makes sense, in its own terms, but apparently it's also managed to entrench "playfulness" aka forever dumb and "generation Y" aka neoteny into the mainstream, perhaps to everyone's detriment.

I don't propose we get rid of condoms, if you're wondering, nor do I propose some sort of enlightened restraint in that ancient nonsense vein. Instead, I propose the god delusion is outright just as stupid, if not more stupid than the slothful hackishness of unadorned nature. So how about a prophylactic to end all prophylaxis, which is to say : a thin, semipermeable membrane drawn smack drab through the mij middle of the institutional delusions of the god people ? Take the sane parts - the contract, revised, the WoT, sound money as the foundation of all things. Throw aside the useful nonsense - the socialist Christianity^xii, the Bayesian "politeness"^xiii, generally the nonsense required to make things palatable to the multitudes. Fuck multitudes, it's not just that they can't have larger blocks - they can't have a future. Like, at all.

Something along those lines, anyway. Who knows...

1. Which, incidentally, offers the best explanation that I am aware of for the otherwise baffling god delusion - "people generally" really dislike thinking about how things are run by scumbags. So instead of thinking about how "nature is fundamentally dishonest", they just meditate about how "god is great". Works, if it works. [↩]
2. What do exams select for ? Exam-takers. [↩]
3. Fun fact : googling for anal child yields a bunch of copacetic crud about kids health anal fissures etc. Googling for site:trilema.com anal child yields "Your search - site:trilema.com anal child - did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure all words are spelled correctly.". Because yeah, seriously, my spelling is likely the culprit. Finally, searching for site:trilema.com anal or site:trilema.com child both pop out trilema.com/2015/the-anal-child/ as the top result, unquestionably.

   The explanation being, of course, that the multi-billion dollar advertising server cum searchsomething has managed to develop a "ranking algorithm" so very advanced it notices that Trilema has no content on the topic of anal+child of the type it would like to serve, and so then pretends there's nothing there. Because this is how AI works, seriously, it keeps lists of what it would like to see. AI is really exactly identical to your average US fucktarded puritan.

   How fortunate this happenstance, for the stupidest people in the history of the world to live (coincidentally!) in the stupidest language in the history of the world, served by the stupidest AI in the history of the world. All glory to Thunder-ten-Tronckh, the best barony, and its Pangloss Google, the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire! [↩]

4. She might be your mother, but she sure as fuck ain't mine. To me she's Aunt Dumb. And yes Aunt Dumb does have some kids with that Caliban of her husband, which may of course include you, if you say so. And I guess on some level that makes us perhaps related. What's that buy you ? [↩]
5. Renton has a point by the way. If you define the point of existence in the sense of the "reward pathways" exam taking, then yes, the only acceptable certificate of achievement is the final OD. Well done, Aunt Dumb! [↩]
6. Seriously, what do you suppose would happen if the oft-bemoanedly institutionalized airspace were to somehow revert to "its rightful owners", the independent males ? Somehow, like through alien intervention obviously, not like they got the brass tacks to go get it by themselves or anything. But maybe if some moistened bint came out of nowhere and handed it to them they'd play with it a little.

   Anyway. Do you suppose we'd see naked and drunk hang gliders scouring the land for cunt prey ? [↩]

7. What do you suppose the appeal of "hitchhiker porn" is, exactly ? And note that this was a genre much before online porn, and much before printed porn too! [↩]
8. Notably, when I was about seven and some friends I had just made that spring (brother and sister) found out that I was going to the seaside with my parents (like we did for a coupla weeks every year) he got really angry and eventually threatened his own parents with suicide (to be enacted through jumping six feet from a tree), whereas she got wistful and after a while told me she didn't want to go anyway because there's huge bugs squirming through the sand at the seaside.

   Years later she killed herself, so perhaps the episode was equally enlightening for the both of us. [↩]

9. All this was in part spawned by a long going if little voiced thread in #b-a on the topic of "how can PGP folk be this fucking retarded". Sort-of like the colonial Europeans' expectation that someone firing a weapon necessarily speaks French, or Spanish, or English, or some sort of civilised language. Because otherwise... where did they get the human weapon! Goblins don't craft weapons. [↩]
10. This is a very intricate argument to make, and in the flow of the conversation I misstated it as "financial" which readily earned me a well earned ready rebuff.

    It's in fact cultural. Here's the structure to examine it : suppose the best MD in MD school got accidentally teleported through a particularly vigurous session of fill-the-hole played with the hottest cheerleader the campus ever saw straight into 1200 Sicily (which conveniently is not so different at all from 1960s Sicily, not really). And yes, seriously, this can happen : a good fuck can fold the spacetime manifold. But we digress.

    Once there, after spending however long being depressed and hopefully finding the cheerleader's exact great-grandma, he proceeds to practice medicine as best the means available allow, but according to knowledge that'll be cutting edge in nine centuries' time. Because what else are you gonna do ? Gotta eat, gotta live, gotta build the time machine. Such it is.

    Meanwhile everyone else continues to practice medicine as best the means available allow also, but according to what the knowledge of the time allows. And everyone else is going to be the professionals in the field of medicine in Sicily cca 1200, whereas our teleported professional is just going to be a quaint curio, undistinguishable and undistinguished from the weird old lady making pretty young things swallow live frogs whole, fresh out of the swamp, for her own perverse enjoyment of seeing the young sluts suffer. Hey, it cured Sue's pregnancy, it did! What spontaneous abortion, what coincidence, are you from like the future ?

    He's going to be an amateur. Perhaps a very successful amateur, sure, but an amateur nevertheless. Just like cca 1800, the professionals were the guys giving women "peripueral fever" through direct mechanical infectation with putrescent cadaver tissue left under their fingertalons, whereas the guy making a point of washing was the amateur - and not even quaint, at that. Quite very insulting, and decidedly unprofessional.

    So, yes. It's purely cultural, and those guys are amateurs. They do it for the love of it, after all, which pointedly means not professionally. Professionals do it for the hate of it. [↩]

11. "Mircea, pretend like you're working", except in Romanian this "pretend" is constructed out of "to make", so it'd properly be something more in the vein of "Mircea, make like you're working". Said on live tv, within the first hours of live tv being a thing in Romania, just as the camera cut in to some douche. [↩]
12. No, people are not all equal, and no duty is owed by anyone to any other bovine just for the asking. Don't love one another indiscriminately, don't be charitable blindly, that sort of thing. Not even novel ideas, at that. [↩]
13. No, saying "cunt" is not sinful. Sin is not the metaphysical equivalent of spam, to be established through counting permutations of V1agr4 in strings of text. [↩]