Modernism ; and traditionalism

mircea_popescu phf asciilifeform as per your understanding of folk logic, could Кощей have kept the needle anywhere ?ⁱ
phf Probably not, requires a descent/ascent into the cave for the development of hero's journey. So couldn't keep it in his private study or kept some complicated opsec routine with fake needles and multiple storages and rotations, because that would take it out of realm of mythical.

mircea_popescu My idea is that it being an ontology (as distinct from and very much opposed to a technology) such is entirely out of the question.
phf I'm not sure I get it. Perhaps the idea is that the plot is constructed from conclusions backwards, rather than as a chain of causes and effects resulting in an outcome, then conclusionⁱⁱ. So the setup is restricted by what actions hero must perform or what other kind of allegory

mircea_popescu No. You can't fly by your breaches, can you ? Nor can you "make yourself" a boyar. Nor can Koschei DO things. In the world in which he lives, you are things ; you don't DO things. Which is why eg. the notion of "consent" is entirely baffling. What do you mean, Ivan should ask Natasha. Ask her what the fuck ?!?! Whether she is a woman ? He can damn well see that ? the whole story is decided at the onset - are you Hero Mc Heroson ? Yes ? Then you go kill Koschei. No ? then you don't. What do you mean "do what he did" ffs.ⁱⁱⁱ
phf Aah.

mircea_popescu Kinda what "traditional society" actually means, if the term is used properly. And why derpage eg in the US re "traditional marriage" is so hysterical. Really, TRADITIONAL ? Mmmkay. Just because it's your daddy's modern dun make it traditional.
phf "This is how things are around here parts", except nobody ever said that except in movies or when things no longer are.^iv

mircea_popescu Aha. It's ever only used as a cheap mocking post, see. Gotta frame the modern story in some sort of context, but it's never more than context ; not in modern stories at any rate. Still, noticing this distinction is hermeneutics 101, the pons asinorum of the scholarly^v disciplines.
phf Huh, it's unknowable, so either presented as a joke, or as complete hostile aliennes. Sort of Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of stuff. Russian equivalent would be narratives about "деревня"^vi. Forest^vii used to be where the ancestors came from and that where demons and ghouls are. Now ancestors come from tradition and that's where wilderness is.

mircea_popescu Aha. It's also the deep reason why reversion to feudalism / end of modernism is entirely unavoidable^viii. The deep reason "Dark Ages" guys did what they did isn't them being "stupid"^ix, it's the absence of the modernist interface. When the world of possibilities is endless and the only possible trail is offered by strong identity, be it of the chivalric^x or V/WoT type, society works a certain way. In order for the modernist delusion^xi to work, some equivalence clases are prerequsite, which is why all modern states are socialisms^xii. If differences matter, "modern democracy" is impossible. This is also why traditionalist societies' guilty pleasure is genealogy, as in heraldics or vtronics ; whereas modernist societies' guilty pleasure is "self improvement" as in miracle diets and college degrees. (No, the two aren't different, the notion that you will BECOME at the college is entirely like the notion that you'll go to heaven through not cursing.^xiii)
phf Hmm. Not sure how reversion follows though. It's easy to run away into the forest, because it's completely meaningless.^xiv But running away into tradition is equivalent to death (per older thread). "Destruction of known universe". Oh unless you mean it in a sense that it's inevitable with you or without you.

mircea_popescu There's a who and a what. Traditional societies put the what in an equivalency ring and discern the who ; modernist societies put the who in an equivalency ring and discern the what. Let's look at it through the example of the married woman. Married woman in Belgium, a modernist society, expects to fuck her husband, or another man (ie, the who is indifferent) PROVIDED they woo her properly. The what is discerning, and "I fucked him because he bought me roses just like you did 20 years ago you pig" is perfectly "rational". Married woman in Brunei, a traditionalist society, expects to be fucked, in the way fucking goes (ie, indifferent), by her husband but not by another man. And if her husband fucks with a stick, or with electrified vaginal pears, it's none of her business. Much like the belgian woman might fuck another woman, or a cat or a bit of plastic, just as long as it DOES the right thing - the Brunei woman will fuck in whichever manner as long as it is the right fucker. Excess is actually societally repressed, for instance the husband that fails to what correctly in Belgium goes to jail ; much like the lover that fails to who correctly in Brunei. in Belgium "but I am her husband" is no defense, but on the contrary, scandalous^xv ; and in Brunei "but I fucked her right" is no defense, but on the contrary, scandalous^xvi. The major problem of contemporaneous, post-modern, post-structuralist whatever world is that the practical equivalency class is the what, not the who. Such as for instance : as long as the product is a web app, you know what shit it will be and all you care about is WHO does it, which is why we have the entire who-driven structure of code inheritance (much to the chagrin of the "oh noes, wasn't invented here syndrome" belated modernists^xvii). anyone can make "a prediction" (what=equivalent) but it really matters WHO makes it, as per the pro idiotas article. And so on. So it's not a matter of reversal. It's a matter that the practical structures of reality favour a certain equivalency class over the other and so in short I don't even mean that it's inevitable with you or without you. It's inevitable with or without your mental constructs, the body will follow^xviii. What, you think people fought in the US civil war without their scruples ? The body went ; the scruples - nobody asked those anything. ~Everyone involved in WW2 thought WW2 is a stupid idea, for that matter. All the better for them!

asciilifeform Re the foregoing and the part where the Asian folk donated jewelry to motherland's central bank , quite reminiscent of the 'old woman who bought T-34 tank and named it after Stalin and her five dead sons' recurring item in WW2. I have nfi how many parts fact to how many parts propagandistic swill.
mircea_popescu It seems credible to me qualitatively ; quantitatively I have nfi.

asciilifeform I can actually see the tank; but, why the fuck would anyone donate family gold to prop up emperor's golden toilet?
mircea_popescu Because the emperor is ; in traditionalist societies existence is predicated on existence. Why the fuck would cunt lubricate to ease penile intromission ?^xix

asciilifeform In traditional society we also have 'emperor is far away, what care I'.^xx Afaik standard feudal org chart works in steps (d00d answers to ~immediate~ commanding officer)^xxi. Good part of 'царь-батюшка' is that he never asks you directly to do anything. can always blame immediate superior for your famine, fleas, conscription.
mircea_popescu Not really. Ru peasant aslo thought emperor is good ; and right here. This "what care I" is very much a proposal to modulate behaviour ; whereas this active diatesis is not there contemplated. "The emperor is ; this gold is ; they go together."

asciilifeform Well yes, you blame the d00d who actually worked you to the bone.^xxii
mircea_popescu This is not at all the case. the boyar was blamed in 1700 for the exact reason the Jew was blamed in 1900 : the perception of "optionality" in the sense of the dead jew and the raped girl ; strictly drawn along the lines of "the emperor is ; the gold is ; the grain is and the famine is ; disease and war and grass and cunt and penis all are - but the $enemy DOES!". This inadherence to modernism is why Russia was modernised via socialism/soviets, not via capitalism/industrialism^xxiii. So no, the peasant didn't blame the boyar because the boyar did something. The peasant doesn't care about that (nor was the doing actually verifiable as such, nor did it likely happen rather than the opposite). The peasant blame the boyar because the boyar was the wrong thing, a do-er rather than an is-er. This is why the "golden toilet"^xxiv device is so important in trying to sell modernism to traditionalist societies - the point is to show optionality in the desired public enemy. It directly mirrors the biblical understanding (God was ; and Lucifer did) and very much explains why "patriotic war" and "peace keeping" and "defending" and etcetera. The narrative always is "we - were ; enemy - did ; we - shall be again"^xxv. This very much because contrary to pretense commonly shared and widely held, modernism was never more than a superficial paint coat over things. There's no practical way in which anything can reduce to "doing". Even in software. (Also why^xxvi so many of the moribund modernist world take refuge in "coding" as they understand it rather than much more obviously productive, satisfiying and accessible venues.)

phf Not quite true, you had лжецаревич^xxvii uprisings. Also kind of tru re famine, but typically boyars were blamed rather then tzar or barin, since both were beyond reprise.
mircea_popescu You did ; nevertheless - in the case of those runaways^xxviii who were discovered in the 60s after however many centuries of absence, what figured greatly was that a) the tsar is good and b) that woe on random anon merchant for refusing to donate a quarter ton of potatoes to the cause.

phf No, no, I'm saying the opposite. ~Barin~ in this case is the dude who worked you to the bone.
asciilifeform Goodcop/badcop symbiosis, emperor/landlord.

mircea_popescu And the fake Ivans etc are not exactly attacks on the tsardom ; they're just a discussion of identity, not actually a modernisation proposal. Similar to the whole "mandate of heaven" Chinese thing - is he or isn't he the "one true emperor" ; whether his being anything in particular matters with regards to "his job" ie, what he has to do is not discussed. Even the notion that emperorhood is a job is nonsensical in context. (for distinction between emperorhood and emperorship see Oamenii superficiali si bestia.)

phf I think I'm being misunderstood. I'm saying that fake-tzars were cases of "emperor asking of you", because both tzar and barin (i.e. immediate supervisor) were seen as fundamental good. Peasants consistently and historically allocated blame on various random hangerons. Boyars, traders, foreigners, etc. In fact in fake-tzar cases the narrative was consistent "evil boyars have deposed our tzar-father and we won't stand for it".
mircea_popescu This is very true yes.

asciilifeform Eh, semantic games. Rebel armies surround capital? Ooops, must mean he lost mandate of heaven! 'Mandate of heaven' is about as logically consistent as the proverbial witch-drowning tester.^xxix
mircea_popescu They're only semantic games to you ; for they to be games they need the optionality. Hence the "useful evil minister" strategy deployed in England and France as well as everywhere else - get the guy to do things then behead him.^xxx

asciilifeform When my time machine malfunctions and Aztec priest eats my heart so that Quetzalcoatl will shit the Sun back out, it will still be semantic game.
mircea_popescu So if I give you a lined mat and a pile of all-black tiles you thereby "still have a game of Go" ?

asciilifeform Not as such. Though mircea_popescu's Asian rituals and 'no optionality' thread reminds me of the infamous 'castle tournaments' in jp, where go players would rehearse same game dozens of times in advance. ( Royal folk dun like to wait for moves ! )

mircea_popescu Getting back to the modern/traditional thing : there's a very visible and practically relevant distinction in trade. When I hire a modernist, I hire him to do a job, and I expect him to do a job. But when I hire a traditionalist, I am essentially assigning office. And as it is LOGICAL in that context, he may agree to any "job" specification ie burdens on the title before he gets it, while all he is is humble applicant ; but once he gets it, once he is the job title, then of course he finds himself in a more elevated position, which should mean by his logic that he gets to renegotiate and eliminate some of the burdens.^xxxi which is exactly why simple minded folks in third countries such as Argentina etc display the strange behaviour where they don't wish to actually work, earlier discussed in that article about whores.
asciilifeform Eh it's an orc thing, 'работа стоит -- а срок идет!' (tm) (r) ('work stands still, but the [prison] sentence still moving!'). Modify, perhaps, for modern world, 'work stands still, but the paycheque still approaches'.

mircea_popescu Aha. However - which is why I bring all this up - the reversal is fucking evident here too. See, when I hire diana_coman to do dev work for Eulora, of fucking course she gets to redefine the job on the basis of the title^xxxii). For instance because before she got it she hadn't seen the code, and after - she had. In short, in the entirety of the observable universe, we are reverting to traditionalist systems, approaches and altogether a^xxxiii reality. Most computing jobs are unspecifiable in the terms most industrial jobs of the brief modernist interlude were specifiable^xxxiv ; whereas most computing jobs require identity in terms entirely impossible in the brief modernist interlude. What cares the cotton ginny whether you are white or black skinned ? And this is what all the Unicode wastage is : they, the lost souls of a dead world, are trying to make computers more like cotton ginnies. More inclusive, more capable to work with a modernist perspective, where who dun matter and what is the considered variable.
asciilifeform Did the sword 'care' whether knight came from 10 or 40 generations of pure-blooded norman ? Or did the horse ?

mircea_popescu Yes. both. Fundamental myth of English feudalism is a sword that cared. Fundamental myth of English modernism is "blind love", which, if you'll notice, is at the time of its introduction a very cheap trick very much in the manner of protestantism ; and also a mythical beast : the belgian woman from before. "Blind" as in, no who - just what. A modernist unicorn.
asciilifeform And fundamental myth of pygmistan is that magical horn (today replaced with drainpipe, they forgot how to carve wood) that talks to the dead.

mircea_popescu Pygmystan is not actually a culture ; stone age tribes don't get names. It's just "the stone age". (the discussion of all this, for the curious, is probably best started with the trilema on the mind's compartments.)
asciilifeform Eh the Bantu -- who enslaved them -- iirc had iron. So just as iron-age as ol' rotten England. Just stuck there. Iron, turns out, is not such a handy 'iq test'^xxxv, plenty of folx passed the iron exam and failed everything else. But re 'cheap protestant tricks', and also in re 'Argentinians who sit in chair and won't work', a good chunk of the weirdo mass-programming the protestants have been doing for 200+ yrs is precisely to 'make'em work'. There are not so many ways to make folks work. You can prevent 'работа стоит -- а срок идет!' by imposing 'no work - no food' quotas, and this was often tried in gulag, but led to unexpected problems (in 100 zeks, you get a few well-fed блатные and a bunch of dystrophic worker bees^xxxvi).

mircea_popescu Except there is no "work" in the abstract, as a byproduct of anti-idlehandsaredevilswork. Not anymore. Back in 1616 there was a "do something - anything". Today that results in github. And not just in github, it results in 5bn for BART's 16 track miles and in 12mn/year for 1bn database for microsoft. In short - it dun work, in any practical way.
asciilifeform And in Egypt it resulted in pyramids. Shithub is a religious ritual.

mircea_popescu The Floating Littoral Embarassment^xxxvii is very much the symbolic product of "technology by modernist means in postmodernist times".
asciilifeform Also pyramid. If you have a massive project that nobody computes ROI on, and folks throw rotten eggs at anyone who suggests doing so --- pyramid. (In all fairness, moon probe, arpanet, etc -- also pyramid.)^xxxviii

mircea_popescu Modernity hadn't quite ended yet.
asciilifeform Often I get distinct impression that mircea_popescu is posting from a parallel future on mars : where, e.g., robots are not three orders of magnitude more expensive than well-brainwashed 'work ethic' folx working with bare hands.

mircea_popescu They aren't. there are a number of reasons for this. 1. robots eat electricity ; humans eat a sort of oil derivate ; see engine discussion ; 2. robots are an industrial product, this costs ~nothing while "well brainwashed humans" are the equivalent of a "well behaved wife". Tell you what, here's a half billion girlies in your "civilised world", you have a week to find a wife^xxxix. Let me know what you spent.
asciilifeform You gotta take the ~hardest~-to-roboticize industrial processes as the basis for comparison, not the ~easiest~; otherwise we 'had cheap robots' in 1850, cotton mill. Talk to folx who worked with industrial robots, dun take asciilifeform's word for it: robotization of a process is not 'magical free work while you supply mains current', but replaces 100 fungible gurlz with 1-3 'assembly line phd', which is not always a +ev trade. Nor is yield necessarily higher, because Software Sucks.

mircea_popescu I suspect I might've talked to more industrial robots folks than you have over our respective careers, but be that as it may, the trend is towards not away job destruction.
asciilifeform This is on account of easily-roboticized 'low hanging fruit' (e.g., pcb component placement) and also shortages of human hands created by welfarization.

mircea_popescu The welfarization creates nothing. It is the maggot on the corpse of postmodern industry. Those people would have been idle anyway.^xl (Kinda yet another angle of why the great again is so lulzy - what, economic trends will reverse by election ?)
asciilifeform Take mircea_popescu's proverbial 'twerk chick'. Her grandmother - was idle ?

mircea_popescu No ; because modernism hadn't ended yet. But the chick herself - if she weren't twerking she'd be on reddit. There is literally NOTHING for her to do. With the exception of tmsr, there is NO PLACE in this world which sticks to the modern tradition of, "random bozo walks in, is given a job". This is how eg, construction yards used to work, for milennia. Not anymore, for decades now.^xli
asciilifeform From whence then comes this 'nothing to do' ??

mircea_popescu From "robotization" in the general sense of the term.
asciilifeform This 'total robotization' thing, I can see it as a logical conclusion, but it isn't here yet. e.g., how many robots has mircea_popescu , to date, fucked ?

mircea_popescu Fucking me is not a job. it is an honor^xlii. I've not decorated any robots either.
asciilifeform Aite. When mircea_popescu called plumber, did robot show up ?

mircea_popescu Amusingly - I used to call plumbers in places where plumbing had been laid by hand. But in places where plumbing laid by robot - no need so far. Dat old "ecosystem drives itself by supporting its niches and denying competing niches" thing.
asciilifeform Elaborate re 'plumbing laid by robot'. Are you referring here to digging machine ? (a bit of stretch to call 1890s item 'robot').

mircea_popescu You are aware "car fixing" ie, "that is my idea of heaven - a bucket o' grease and a cracked cylinder" now consists of sticking probes in dataports ?
asciilifeform Well yes, it consists of 'read error code and throw part # into order form and replace assembly'.

mircea_popescu So no, plumbing mostly comes as part of the prefab components of construction nowadays. It is not a separate thing. "Robots" does not strictly mean r2d2. Entirely automated process chain is also a robot in this sense, even if perhaps a meta-robot for they preoccupied with the physicality of things. Which is to say that the visually driven notion of "robot" as "anthropomorphised tuna can" is not particularly useful in a discussion of economics and robots.
asciilifeform Prefab plumbing makes me think of that air/sewage switch in Brasil^xliii.

mircea_popescu Heh. Laugh all you want, and take refuge in 1970s artworks if you will - but the fact remains that if you buy planks you buy planks^xliv but if you buy ikea you buy robotized planks^xlv. It's what it is, out of the final table in the latter case about 2/3 is robot work. Yes, there isn't a beep-boop thing going around your livingroom. But it might as well be - the warehouse is entirely robotized ; the production line mostly ; etcetera. Even driving is going away^xlvi. Do you know how many longshoremen work for Amazon ? O wait ... the name is entirely antiquated.
asciilifeform Actually there ~is~ , lol, I'm a robotization aficionado, I have programmable vacuum, etc.

mircea_popescu Aha.
asciilifeform At no point in my head for this thread was 'tuna can', but the headaches of fairly standard industrial robot process over which I presided some years ago.

mircea_popescu Sure, but tell you what : the headaches of managing herd would be a lot closer in your mind had you I dunno, been a McDonalds manager in your late teens.^xlvii
asciilifeform Quite possibly.

mircea_popescu There's no economic future for the average human, quite literally. For as long as we still feel like entertaining ourselves by providing them with food and board, the derpage will last. And they'll "put women back into history" at the call of bbc wikipedia. Once that becomes old, they'll become dead, in a very starved and cold sense of the term.
asciilifeform 'Robocalypse' is a when, not if, yes, but there are certain obstacles (mainly reducing to 'software sucks', and even 'we don't quite have computer yet')

mircea_popescuYes, well, that when is cca 1999. Anyway - the original point was how the environment changed, and modernism is strictly no longer possible because exogenous reasons, not opened to consensusing, electoralizing etc. The who is the major consideration today ; the what is relatively equivalent. Which reduces to and is in fact equivalent with the "no economic future for average human" above, and with the "there's nothing one can do on the simple basis of being one" even further above.^xlviii
asciilifeform Afaik we still dun have a tech for producing ubermenschen other than by keeping massive herd of 'average human' around somewhere,

mircea_popescu That somewhere is important.
asciilifeform ^ Sorta how golden age su worked, roughly.^xlix

mircea_popescu O look! The separation of the fat from the water in the sense of leaving the who-equivalent modernists behind in the gutter is actually quite the viscerally ferocious thing! Nobody is going to forbid modernism. They who wish to feel equal will have a place where this is how things work. (Arguably this is also in the past - not like I'm actually forbidding redditards to reddit, even as I am squeezing the cream from the thing).
asciilifeform In mircea_popescu's sketch, by what process does 'who' come to exist ?

mircea_popescu http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-08#1579718
a111 Logged on 2016-12-08 14:44 mircea_popescu has the pleasure to introduce EDLionX , who's chinese, lives in brunei and looks altogether like a great kid (though he isn't a kid!)

mircea_popescu How else ? Exactly how it historically worked.
asciilifeform Well yes, but how didja dig him out of the ground

mircea_popescu Chance encounter.
asciilifeform Asciilifeform, for instance, (for those who were not tuned in), was excavated from www by hanbot.

mircea_popescu Rather similar actually! Eulora, with its steep learning curve and well engineered intake manifolds is actually a muchly improved bitcoin from THIS^l perspective, the perspective of "how to fish whos".
asciilifeform This may be, but I could not tell that this is so by the backflow from #e into #t

mircea_popescu Hey. Everything around you is new. Still, the question was "how who" not "how non-who". That your milk contains fat and water is not a valid objection to "how do you get fat from the cow ?" "You milk it".
asciilifeform isn't playing Eulora and cannot say, but so far looks to me as if it mostly attracts folk who are good at playing eulora, rather than generalists spilling over into the kinds of projects in motion here. (exiles from other muds..?)

mircea_popescu I am entirely unconvinced by this "good at x" bs. Nobody's "good at x". The "good at x" is nonsense of the ilk and period of "blind love", to try and help the wedge of who-equivalency into the trunk of reality. Either your brain works or doesn't. If it does, you can use it for all brain things, much like either your cunt works or doesn't, and if it does it does for all dicks. There's no "good at math" anymore than there is "white dicks cunt"^li

1. This got started by an observation of Diana's. [↩]
2. He's evidently done his log reading. [↩]
3. There's a fundamental assumption here, namely that "what" he did would work for you as it worked for him. It may not be for you what it was for him, but that "doesn't matter" as a convention. [↩]
4. He's right, it is stock in trade strawman of libertard propaganda. [↩]
5. As opposed to technical.

   The distinction is surprisingly simple : if the subject of your study does something, you're aiming to become an engineer ; but if the subject of your study is something, you're aiming to become a scholar. [↩]

6. The "little hamlet lost in the taiga" sorta thing. (The taiga is the biome of conifers with some larch and a lot of snow). [↩]
7. Note that the English term does not denote "a place with trees", but "a place set aside". It comes from the latin foris and it denotes that place of the realm where the king has not permitted access to the plebs (who thereby are forbidden from going there). Breaching this interdict was a hangable offense throughout the bulk of the history of the term's usage. [↩]
8. This was previously if vaguely discussed as part of an analysis of the modernist's fear of idealism. Check it out, Framedragger's quotation model has its most definite uses! [↩]
9. There's a lot of libel circulating about people of old among the populists of today (no, Trump isn't one ; the idiocy machine that spit out Clinton and then convinced itself the shrew had a shot, that's what populism is). Contrary to what you may like to believe, you aren't either smarter or more powerful than similarly anonymous, anodyne peon packing the ancestral mud in 900s Europe. If my time machine switched your place and his, he'd be a reasonable you and you'd be a reasonable him in short order.

   Yes, I know it's "a hard pill to swallow". The only reason is that you're insane and are hallucinating pills and swallowings. [↩]

10. "All men'd be cowards if they durst", yes ? [↩]
11. Modernism is always illusionary in nature ; if the whys and wherefores aren't self-obvious, feel free to place your inquiry in the comment section. [↩]
12. Ie, aim to resolve the problems of individuals as groups. The deep reason isn't some sort of problem-solving approach, but simply the need of modernism, that all men be equal and interchangeable, so then there be no possibility of ideal, and consequently the rest of the nonsense can be introduced. Which resolves in simple terms the equation of the modern state : it will a) promise to b) resolve problems through c) the group except d) the only problem it aims to resolve is e) that for as long as people are people, modernism ie anti-idealism can not exist. So yes, as the more advanced voices of the libertard press point out, "of course people will be dissatisfied with the state". Of course of course. Nevertheless, pretending people are "a group" in order to escape the fact that people are different is untenable theoretically, and strictly depends in all practical implementations on the ready provision of a steady string of distractions. As the mind grows weary of shiny plastic, the ability of the socialist state to continue diminishes. [↩]
13. A favourite Protestant "growth hack". [↩]
14. This is, of course, mere pleading to ignorance. The forest is not meaningless, for instance : do you know what the first widely deployed iron tool was ?

    No, it wasn't the plow. Guess again if you will.

    No, it wasn't "the sword" or "axe" or "some kind of weapon", because no, contrary to what the liars that told you the Ancients believed the Earth to be flat told you, people don't actually prefer to murder each other pointlessly. Yes they tend to murder each other when overpopulated, but so do farmed chickens (look it up) - and nobody regards gallus as gallo lupus est. Which by the way is your hint.

    Did the hint work ? It didn't, did it. What's a Wolfsangel ?

    Yes, you see, before manpower (really, wifepower, soon to be supplanted by ox power) was sufficient for plowing to be significant, and before densities were sufficient for insanity to become a sort of disease, men still competed with other predators for territory. The clearing of wolves from the Germanic forests through the application of early iron to the problem is what allowed the tribes to swell to the point Caesar and Greek fire had to become involved in population control.

    The technological approach didn't work, by the way. Even though the Littoral Combat Ships and F-35s of the time were actually delivered and actually used on the front, the empire still fell to the horde.

    Back to the topic - the forest is quite meaningful to me ; and whether it is or isn't to you interests perhaps the wolves. [↩]

15. Marital rape!!1 [↩]
16. This apparently needs no explanation. [↩]
17. They occasionally show up in the forum, fail to produce meaningful text and leave in frustration. In fairness - the bar to understanding why they fail is perhaps a little high. [↩]
18. Very much like, "it doesn't matter what you tell yourself about the whys and the wherefores - the cock's getting sucked one way or the other". [↩]
19. No, think about it. The cunt does that. Whether you want it to or not, it doesn't ask ; and especially because you "don't want to" as in eg, "you're scared". Why does it do it ? [↩]
20. This is actually early burgeois sentiment, about as abjurant as it can get and certainly untraditional. [↩]
21. This, for the record, is wrong. The "org chart" in question is very complex, with the same person a vassal to multiple overlords such as in the notable case of generations of English kings who nevertheless paid homage to the French crown for their feudal tenures on the continent scl. Plenty of times the vassal would be more powerful than the liege, such as in the celebrated case of Warwick the kingmaker etc scl. Feudalism is very much a saturated graph, and wouldn't at all look like a corporate org chart. [↩]
22. If this were the case people wouldn't loot their own neighbourhood when "rioting" would they now. [↩]
23. The proposition that there's some sort of difference between Stalin-socialism and Roosevelt-socialism is ridiculous on the face, [↩]
24. When the Romanian Communist dictator fell, a major point was the "gold plated bathroom implements" in the guy's palace. It stayed with me, because it seemed so weird. Then when the US engineered "color revolutions" copycats failed to replicate their model, talk of the same sort of thing surfaced. It is by now evident that it's simply a propaganda device, but its exact nature is instructive. [↩]
25. That you rather than the judge or assorted courtiers will come with a cracked skull out of the court is rather predictible on the basis of the shared pretense that "the law" is and you "did". Why isn't it that you are and the law does ? Oh, it is, except in a different sort of environment, right ? That's how the narrative flows among the criminals, isn't it. A well.

    There's a reason the fundamental dispute of all politics reduces to "I was" and "they did". [↩]

26. Software appears on the face to have a better shot at it than anything else. This appearance is however altogether dubious. [↩]
27. False tsars, ie the Time of Troubles. [↩]
28. In 1978 Soviet geologists in Abakan ran into a family that had been in the woods for decades. [↩]
29. It's altogether unclear that thing wasn't consistent, depending what is meant by consistency and logic. [↩]
30. It's the fundamental scapegoat, whether you call it Cromwell or Fouquet or Noi-capul-lui-Motoc-vrem. [↩]
31. This is the deep reason you end up with worthless employees who wish to negotiate away their actual tasks while keeping the sinecure intact.

    And before you nod and walk off : the first example of that is your wife. The second is - your children. The fact that you're not holding any of these to their account is why and wherefore your society dissolves into goop, ready and willing to be pounded in the ass by better men.

    The historical expression is "woman, mind your house", if you're curious. [↩]

32. Imagine for a moment, if you will, hiring a senior engineering on the premise and the methodology used to hire the common peon. In this absurd world where the senior engineer is just a larger intern with more hands and more fingers per hand (much like Orc Captains are just bigger Orcs in MMORPGS) she'd be doing what, write more LoC, right ?

    That's how the logic of "who-equivalent" modernism works, woman pulls 10 on dynamometer, man 18 and ox 44. So then logically intern types Lo"C" with two fingers off one hand and senior engineer with three hands and twenty-six fingers and if division head also uses her feet.

    I don't dispute that there are modernist companies which work exactly like this. As per say Caragiale they always existed, since at least the 1800s. But I do say that this is rank nonsense, and nothing that works works like this. Over at reality ranch the principal job of the senior engineer is to define what the fuck she'll even be working on. Not as a solipsistic act, of course, within constraints specified by management, of course ; yet nevertheless you don't actually expect someone running a company to micromanage the momentary life of all those involved, do you! (And if you don't, why the fuck do you expect them to "show up" for work ? You do, you do, you just learned how to lie convincingly about it, you modernist shithead you. [↩]

33. It's "a" reality not "the" reality in the exact sense physics - the natural science - is a paradigm not the physics. [↩]
34. Review eg. Charlie Chaplin for documentary work on this point. [↩]
35. Speaking of which. [↩]
36. Because if I can work, I will not work for you - I will work for myself, such as by beating up the other idiots who can barely work and take their food. In this scheme - you work for me ; and by "in this scheme" I mean absolutely all the time and everywhere without exception possible and irrespective what you may wish to think. [↩]
37. Hey, did you hear it broke down in the Panama ?

    I'm not sure you understand what this means, so let's explain.

    Have you ever driven a beat up old car, that tended to stop working at the most inconvenient of times ? Were those times being stopped at a light for instance, and unable to start again to the angry despair of all the other motorists ? Were any of those times when you were trying to go up or down the ramp, perhaps with a semi or two behind you ?

    Now imagine there exists a place where ALL the US traffic goes through the same tunnel. THAT is where your rust bucket broke down ; and the semis behind you weren't carrying 20 tons of canned tuna, they were carrying 20mn tons of refrigerated pork bellies. Just like yours.

    What the breakage in the Panama canal means is that the on-board engineers can't, no matter what they do, physically can not ensure the basic functioning of that damned thing for one straight half hour of their choosing. Forget "battle readiness", or anything like that. [↩]

38. He's myopically focusing on details. "If there's white on skin - fungus. In fairness, sunscreen lotion - also fungus." [↩]
39. The wife is the definitive, and the ultimate, meat robot. Which is why indsutrialization is a problem for marriage : the two compete for the same scarce resource. [↩]
40. Consider the "this dude is so fucking dumb it'd be worth my time to pay him to stay out of my way" ancient piece. [↩]
41. In Ballas' terms,
    

    I love how people assume economics doesn't apply to construction. The demand for those jobs is very high AND hipsters suck at them. At any wage, Gerry the hipster will always be outworked by Vinnie the son of a longshoreman, who will always be outworked by a Mexican illegal, i.e. the system will always be able to find someone who can do the job better AND with lower labor costs.

    The substitution train continues past the biological into the robotic ; and from there it still continues but no longer interests us in this discussion. [↩]

42. I mean that quite literally. No college exists that produces degrees that are worth as much. [↩]
43. No, this isn't exactly what he said, but I'm translating. [↩]
44. Ie materials made by people with tools. [↩]
45. Ie made by robots with tools. Perhaps supervised by people, but this is not germane to the issue. [↩]
46. I didn't mention playing Go because I was in a nice mood. [↩]
47. If you missed out on that, you can always catch up with, say, Compliance, the story of a twerk girl who... twerked. [↩]
48. In the sense of three whole years' worth of above. [↩]
49. Apparently Japan still does ; the Muslim world certainly still does. It wouldn't be the first time the Arabs waited out the Christian nonsense and came back in style. [↩]
50. The "kids have a problem" perspective, so to speak. [↩]
51. Amusingly, the SAME people desperately pushing the modernist nonsense, which is to say who-irrelevant white males of no practical value of import ALSO push the dick-specific cunt fiction. Like so :

    

    

    See, the idea is that if they make it "black dicks only", then we won't know what's going on, much like kid A who writes "Kid B did this" on the wall. After all who could possibly figure out that the driver for the pretense is a white kid desperate to prop up modernism lest he ends up in the soup, and that his concern is for cunt to be cock-specific because then mind can be job-specific and then he can continue to pretend he's "good at X" and therefore "too big to fail" can continue to exist and so his wallmart credit card will keep working ?!?! Nobody ever!!!

    Given all that, giving away the cunt is a relatively small sacrifice, especially as long as what's given away is an image. [↩]