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"First, the engineers need to dig a giant pit 300 meters deep in the city center —" Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and stop you right there.

Ahf mgull wuff, whummh gruh mahmf. Whiffl mifh, bunguh wah snuggah. Blor mnah mrah muffah? Mmhrm, mmhrmm. "Uhff gugnah bluh muh," wugged Blorg, hufflm agh smugg. "Whaff knoff uh pluh muhmf?" Mruff wuggr, miff puffguh smahff. Whimm skruff! "Ahgh knuff?" hghelfl Phlorm, muhf whun glugguh whiffluh. Blorg shugged. "Uhff ghimmah munnugh!" heh flubbah. Mrunh miffl uhff muggaguh mahff. Glorf snubbah whug gruh mpahff. "Uhff guhr," Blorg slorphed. "Ahgliff mmuh gruff." "Bffmuff uh groo? Snugguh wug wuhff!" Phlorm waffed. Mugh. Ughff, sniff snah glummuh mpahh! Whump grugg plahff. Fliffmah snurph glumpah, mnorr muggff. Smahff muggah sniggff. “Gluff muhg, wrrmp!” mghsh Flerb. "Gnahff snugguh wuffl!" Ahff pffm! Whummf plagg snurr. Blor mahf! "Gwah snuh grumm!" flupped Blorg, grug sniff whugga. Mphfff... Flumm grug snuh whar? Grubb phiffluh snugh. “Snuh? Fluff whaffniff!” mfflla glu Phlorm. Ah, piff. Whug mahff. Smorgh gluggah, nugguh waffluh phug.

Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me right now? Is this fucking joke? Fukushima? Really? I mean, Japan did some pretty awful stuff in WW2, but... Fukushima? Of all the ridiculous things to feel guilty over... Fukushima was hit by multiple 50 foot tidal waves from a 9.1 earthquake at sea. That's not a fucking nuclear accident. That's your nuclear plant being hit by the hammer of god. And after that, you contained it. You took the hand fate dealt you and you played it with everything you had. You had workers volunteering to be heroes, to stay and fight to shut that thing down. And you saved... everyone. Not a single clearly connected death. In the middle of a natural disaster that cost you fifteen thousand souls, your people fought this thing and won. Chernobyl is something for Russians to be ashamed of, because that was their own screwup, and stupid communists can't do anything right. Fukushima wasn't your screwup. Fukushima happened to you. And your men stopped it. Fukushima is not your national shame. It is one of your finest hours.

The Japanese love to pretend that they were just sitting around on the beach braiding flowers into each other's hair when the evil round-eyed devils suddenly targeted them for a weapons test. Let's see what the Japanese did: 1. Literally allied themselves with the literal

Dear Japanese people: Do not believe this false propaganda. Breakfast handgun should be laid on its LEFT side, pointing outward, so you can quickly grasp it with your right hand, in case of communists.

The large explosion that immediately follows it.

There's a broadly applicable lesson here, but most Americans aren't ready for that conversation.

This is what will matter 1000 years from now. Not your politics. Not your stupid tantrums about who platformed who on some website. Not your incomprehensible desire to send NASA's entire budget to the third world. This guy reignited the Space Age. He spent his own money, hired a bunch of dudes, and reignited the Space Age. And together, they underbid and outdid NASA and its pet dinosaur corporations on every conceivable level. This is history happening before you. If you are a puddlefish, if you think this is a wasteful showpiece or science project, then you don't understand physics, economics, astronomy, or in fact the basic layout of the universe you live in. We live in a tiny puddle at the bottom of a well. Out there is an entire universe, full not only of stuff to explore, but full of stuff to build things out of. Big things. Wonderful things. Things that are going to make all of the cool stuff you have today, all of human civilization to date look like early Assyrians writing stuff down on wet clay with a reed. Infinite resources. Infinite energy. Infinite space. Instead of fighting over little patches of land, we will have an infinite 3d volume. Enclose it in steel, pump it full of air, spin it, and it's a habitat. Instead of scratching tiny scraps of metal out of the crust of one planet, we will break down entire asteroids and smelt them. Instead of drilling for hydrocarbons and turning water wheels, we will harness entire suns, split the atom, and eventually draw our fuel from the substance that makes up 99% of the entire universe. None of your local, temporal Earth politics matter compared to this. This is more important than pride parades and abortions, more important than tribal conflicts in eastern Europe and southwest Asia, more important than tensions with Russia and China. More important, in the long run, than the United States of America. America's most important function, its one most vital purpose, is to serve as an incubator for this. Because this changes everything. All of our arguments about conditions on this planet become obsolete, because the whole planet becomes just one suburban neighborhood. All of our wars over resources and territory become obsolete, because no one has time to brawl when we're all sitting on top of a dragon horde with sacks and shovels. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when Kennedy died in Dallas. When the towers fell. When the Eagle landed. When the Wall came down. But this... this is the real moment, one of the first of many. They are what every child will know about a thousand years from now, even if they have four arms and are genetically engineered for zero-g, or are sentient blocks of code running on a sphere of computronium enclosing an entire star. You may not live to see that, depending on what we do or don't invent, and when. But it will happen, and you will live to see wonderful things. If the puddlefish don't get in the way. Don't be a puddlefish.

I didn't go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult. One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers". This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something. Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. These women didn't want to be wives. They wanted to be pets. What's a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves. You get a cat because you want to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he's smart, he'll adapt you somewhat, but he doesn't have responsibilities other than "be a cat". If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don't have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on. These girls didn't want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but some of the time. When they felt like it. The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job. These young millenial women didn't realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that's what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to. Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted. And as I've said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child. The reason that a significant portion of men want to invent sentient feminine robots so that they can marry them is because they want wives, and they have given up on the possibility of young women re-embracing the concept of sex roles and actually having to do something for someone else. Women didn't spontaneously became more selfish than previous generations, of course. They were the targets of a concerted psyop whose purpose was to convince them that female responsibilities were demeaning. It was tailored to their unique psychological vulnerabilities, and they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Who mounted that psyop, and why, is a conversation most of us aren't ready for yet. But our point for today is don't worry, young ladies. The robots aren't being brought in to replace you. Just to do the jobs you won't do.

I don't understand. We made a show where they're the bad guys. Why aren't they giving up?

When Hernán Cortés laid siege to Tenochtitlan, he had 1,300 Spanish soldiers, and over 100,000 native allies. So, yes, it was Indigenous Peoples' Resistance Day. Just not in the way you thought.

One thing I did not expect to learn from Japanese twitter was that you can tell a cat is Japanese just by looking at him.

What you are seeing here is female intrasexual competition in its most raw and naked form. "Do not mate with a pretty American country girl who can help you build a home to live in... she is unfeminine." "Instead, mate with a pretty Lebanese woman who is more interested in receiving expensive gifts and posing for photographs, because this is more feminine." The target audience, of course, is men. But the message is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how male sexual/romantic attraction works. She is talking to men, and trying to influence who they are attracted to, as if they were women. Because male attractiveness is performance-based, you can use persuasion and social proof to convince a woman that a man is attractive. But it doesn't work that way in reverse. Female attractiveness is not performance-based. Instead, it is based upon directly observable appearance and personality traits. Men don't need to rely on social proof or other third-party opinions to decide if a woman is attractive. They can just look at and talk to her. So men will form their opinion about whether this girl is attractive based on the video, not the comment above it. Not only will the comment not impact their opinion of the woman in the video, it WILL impact, by a great deal, their opinion of the attractiveness of the woman writing the comment. Because it is directly observable information about HER personality. And comments like this one are not a flattering look, because men are not attracted to female intrasexual competition. They find it disagreeable, negative, hostile, and cold. In other words, there is nothing feminine about this kind of cattiness towards other women.

Yes. I am not old enough to have lived in this world, but I am old enough to have seen it. Here's how it worked. Everyone, man and woman alike, walked around with the baseline idea in their heads that, when they came of age, they were going to get married. So pretty much everyone, from the age of 14 on up, was passively on the lookout for potential partners, until you settled on one you liked. "Dating" wasn't a perennial state, or an activity for its own sake, it was a purposeful vetting process, and it lasted only until you were satisfied you had a good choice. And it wasn't a hard choice to make. Because you couldn't throw a rock without hitting two suitable candidates. Almost no one was obese, because food was made of food and not industrial chemicals. Almost no one was covered in unsightly tattoos or pink hair dye, either. Almost everyone had compatible goals, because they were almost always the same... happy home, modest prosperity, reasonable amount of kids. Almost everyone had compatible values, because culture hadn't been demolished. Almost everyone was a good choice, because sex roles hadn't been demolished. "Husband" and "wife" were jobs with clearly defined responsibilities. Everyone knew the specific tasks, 1-2-3, to be a good one. And those responsibilities were carefully designed, over many generations of trial and error, to be what made your partner actually like you. Not a coincidence. So choosing a wife or husband wasn't like sifting through sewage trying to find discarded coins. It was like choosing from a restaurant menu designed by a competent chef, and pretty much anything you order is going to be satisfying, so long as you avoid one or two options you don't personally like. Life wasn't easy. The past had other problems, like polio and communists. But there was a plan. And if you followed it, with a little luck, you'd be okay. What happened? Boomers and their crusade to tear down the entire past, resent to year zero, and reinvent culture. That's what happened. Now we are all fat, sick, and ugly, humans aren't breeding, and we're constantly bickering over nuclear-grade political distrust, so it's safe to say the boomers dropped the ball on that one. Why they thought this was a good idea is a topic for another day.

Actually, you can just kill violent psycho murderers. There's no downside. Things just immediately get better for everyone except the violent psycho murderers. The left refuses to discuss this because they love violent psycho murderers more than normal people.

In America, this is called "cat loaf".

The Japanese love to pretend that they were just sitting around on the beach braiding flowers into each other's hair when the evil round-eyed devils suddenly targeted them for a weapons test. Let's see what the Japanese did: 1. Literally allied themselves with the literal

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren't people. They are large language models. I'm not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, "they are stupid". No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body. First, you have to understand what a large language model is. It's a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt. That's all there is in there. This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly. It's not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of "truth" at all. For something to be a "lie", or an "inaccuracy", there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality. And there's the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality. Not just one model, of language. This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality. So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is "stupid". He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on. What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent. Which brings us to this woman. Most conservatives understand her behavior in terms of concepts like "suicidal empathy", or "brainwashing", or an "information bubble", interpreted as reasons why she is delusional, but the truth is far worse than that. To delusional is to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong. But to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong... you have to have one in the first place. To sapient humans, words are symbols, grounded in object model of reality, that we use to communicate ideas about that reality. We need those words because we don't come equipped with a hologram projector, or telepathic powers. But for another type of human, that object model isn't very large or robust at all. It consists only of a grass hut or two with a few sticks of furniture, and it can never be matched up with the palaces in the air which she weaves out of words. And so, to her, there is no reality. Or at least very little. Reality consists only of her and her immediate surroundings in time and space, and words referring to anything bigger or more complicated are not descriptions of reality... they are magic spells which will make other humans drop loot or give her social approval. You cannot correct her worldview with contradictory evidence, because there is no worldview to correct. You cannot confront her with the logical inconsistencies in her worldview, because her object model doesn't actually have any, it's not complex enough for that. The relevant parts of her world-object model can be summed up as follows: "If I say Goodthing, I get headpats and cookies from all the people like me." That model is simply not big or complicated enough to contain notions like self-defense or vehicular assault. She has no theory of mind for a man whose job includes violence. She cannot explain or predict his behavior. It is too far away from her daily experience to fit into her reality at all. And if she can't imagine things like these, how can she possibly imagine concrete meanings for vast and complex ideas like demographic replacement, culture shift, and western civilization? This is not about intelligence or lack of it. This is about what her brain is trained to do. Her upbringing, education, and life did not force, or even encourage, her to develop a robust world-object model. It wasn't necessary for her to get safety, approval, or cookies. She just had to be glib. So it really didn't matter if she had an IQ of 125, or whatever, because if she did, then she was just an IQ-125-large-language-model, and only used that brain capacity for writing clever poetry, and saying things that aligned her to her local social matrix. She couldn't actually understand the world no matter how smart she was, because her brain was trained up wrong. I don't know if this is correctable, or if there was some critical developmental phase that was missed, but it doesn't matter, because once the LLM-humans are adults, they won't sit still for corrective therapy, percussive or not. What's important is that they can't be taught things. They can be programmed to repeat stuff, and if you win a culture war, you can even program them to say the sensible stuff. But even then, they will just be saying it for headpats and cookies. They will never truly understand the sense of what they are repeating, because they don't understand things. They are just Large Language Models. And we have to figure out some way to take the vote away from them.

"First, the engineers need to dig a giant pit 300 meters deep in the city center —" Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and stop you right there.

This is what will matter 1000 years from now. Not your politics. Not your stupid tantrums about who platformed who on some website. Not your incomprehensible desire to send NASA's entire budget to the third world. This guy reignited the Space Age. He spent his own money, hired a bunch of dudes, and reignited the Space Age. And together, they underbid and outdid NASA and its pet dinosaur corporations on every conceivable level. This is history happening before you. If you are a puddlefish, if you think this is a wasteful showpiece or science project, then you don't understand physics, economics, astronomy, or in fact the basic layout of the universe you live in. We live in a tiny puddle at the bottom of a well. Out there is an entire universe, full not only of stuff to explore, but full of stuff to build things out of. Big things. Wonderful things. Things that are going to make all of the cool stuff you have today, all of human civilization to date look like early Assyrians writing stuff down on wet clay with a reed. Infinite resources. Infinite energy. Infinite space. Instead of fighting over little patches of land, we will have an infinite 3d volume. Enclose it in steel, pump it full of air, spin it, and it's a habitat. Instead of scratching tiny scraps of metal out of the crust of one planet, we will break down entire asteroids and smelt them. Instead of drilling for hydrocarbons and turning water wheels, we will harness entire suns, split the atom, and eventually draw our fuel from the substance that makes up 99% of the entire universe. None of your local, temporal Earth politics matter compared to this. This is more important than pride parades and abortions, more important than tribal conflicts in eastern Europe and southwest Asia, more important than tensions with Russia and China. More important, in the long run, than the United States of America. America's most important function, its one most vital purpose, is to serve as an incubator for this. Because this changes everything. All of our arguments about conditions on this planet become obsolete, because the whole planet becomes just one suburban neighborhood. All of our wars over resources and territory become obsolete, because no one has time to brawl when we're all sitting on top of a dragon horde with sacks and shovels. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when Kennedy died in Dallas. When the towers fell. When the Eagle landed. When the Wall came down. But this... this is the real moment, one of the first of many. They are what every child will know about a thousand years from now, even if they have four arms and are genetically engineered for zero-g, or are sentient blocks of code running on a sphere of computronium enclosing an entire star. You may not live to see that, depending on what we do or don't invent, and when. But it will happen, and you will live to see wonderful things. If the puddlefish don't get in the way. Don't be a puddlefish.

What you are seeing here is female intrasexual competition in its most raw and naked form. "Do not mate with a pretty American country girl who can help you build a home to live in... she is unfeminine." "Instead, mate with a pretty Lebanese woman who is more interested in receiving expensive gifts and posing for photographs, because this is more feminine." The target audience, of course, is men. But the message is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how male sexual/romantic attraction works. She is talking to men, and trying to influence who they are attracted to, as if they were women. Because male attractiveness is performance-based, you can use persuasion and social proof to convince a woman that a man is attractive. But it doesn't work that way in reverse. Female attractiveness is not performance-based. Instead, it is based upon directly observable appearance and personality traits. Men don't need to rely on social proof or other third-party opinions to decide if a woman is attractive. They can just look at and talk to her. So men will form their opinion about whether this girl is attractive based on the video, not the comment above it. Not only will the comment not impact their opinion of the woman in the video, it WILL impact, by a great deal, their opinion of the attractiveness of the woman writing the comment. Because it is directly observable information about HER personality. And comments like this one are not a flattering look, because men are not attracted to female intrasexual competition. They find it disagreeable, negative, hostile, and cold. In other words, there is nothing feminine about this kind of cattiness towards other women.

Yes. I am not old enough to have lived in this world, but I am old enough to have seen it. Here's how it worked. Everyone, man and woman alike, walked around with the baseline idea in their heads that, when they came of age, they were going to get married. So pretty much everyone, from the age of 14 on up, was passively on the lookout for potential partners, until you settled on one you liked. "Dating" wasn't a perennial state, or an activity for its own sake, it was a purposeful vetting process, and it lasted only until you were satisfied you had a good choice. And it wasn't a hard choice to make. Because you couldn't throw a rock without hitting two suitable candidates. Almost no one was obese, because food was made of food and not industrial chemicals. Almost no one was covered in unsightly tattoos or pink hair dye, either. Almost everyone had compatible goals, because they were almost always the same... happy home, modest prosperity, reasonable amount of kids. Almost everyone had compatible values, because culture hadn't been demolished. Almost everyone was a good choice, because sex roles hadn't been demolished. "Husband" and "wife" were jobs with clearly defined responsibilities. Everyone knew the specific tasks, 1-2-3, to be a good one. And those responsibilities were carefully designed, over many generations of trial and error, to be what made your partner actually like you. Not a coincidence. So choosing a wife or husband wasn't like sifting through sewage trying to find discarded coins. It was like choosing from a restaurant menu designed by a competent chef, and pretty much anything you order is going to be satisfying, so long as you avoid one or two options you don't personally like. Life wasn't easy. The past had other problems, like polio and communists. But there was a plan. And if you followed it, with a little luck, you'd be okay. What happened? Boomers and their crusade to tear down the entire past, resent to year zero, and reinvent culture. That's what happened. Now we are all fat, sick, and ugly, humans aren't breeding, and we're constantly bickering over nuclear-grade political distrust, so it's safe to say the boomers dropped the ball on that one. Why they thought this was a good idea is a topic for another day.

Dear Brits: Do you understand what the Second Amendment to our Constitution is for, now? Do you understand why we added it? Because we were smarter and wiser than you along. You made jokes about "school shootings", and considered yourself more civilized, but we knew that history isn't something that happens in the past and on the other side of the world. History happens everywhere, all the time. And now invaders are raping your children. And the "civilized", polite, genteel society you were so proud of isn't defending you. It's defending the rapists. From you. You thought we were a buncha of dumb, ignorant, toothless rednecks who just like going boom. Well, I sure as hell am a redneck, but I have all my teeth, they are straighter and whiter than yours, and my way of life is based on a whole coherent philosophy that you never bothered to understand or even become aware of. I have enough rifles and ammunition stocked in my house to arm all my neighbors, and take on pretty much any number of third world barbarians. I can reach out and touch someone from fifteen hundred meters away. Five years ago, ten, you would have winced to hear me say that. You would have wondered if you were dealing with a psychopath. You would have asked me why I think I need all that. Answer is... I don't. You need all that. You need it, because you don't have it. I don't need it, because I have it. And because all my neighbors have it, too. Si vis pacem, para bellum. I'm not coming across the pond to save you. I want to see you saved, but you have to do it yourselves. Why? Because the problem you have isn't third world barbarians upon your shores. Your problem is how they got there in the first place. Your problem is that you lack a spirit you haven't had since the microsecond you abandoned your allies at Dunkirk. Your problem is that you forgot what it means to be British, Scottish, Irish. You gave up your guns without a fight. Will you give up your daughters?

Most people think of philosophy as an abstraction that doesn't touch the real world, but they're wrong. Most real world problems are philosophy problems, and most philosophy problems are "giving things the wrong names". For example, if you call feral drug addicts "homeless people", then you can't solve the problem. You can only buy more houses for feral drug addicts to destroy. In this case, we called the police and courts the "justice system". But they're not. They can't be the justice system. The function of a justice system would be to give everyone what they deserve. Now, I deserve a hundred million dollars, a private Caribbean island, and a foot massage from Lauren Bacall in her prime, but I don't see the "justice" system lifting a finger to correct any of this, do you? No, what we are supposed to have is a public safety system. The function of a public safety system is to keep the public and their property safe. If we understood that, we wouldn't care about what criminals deserve. We would care how likely they are to do it again. Or something worse. In a public safety system, retardation and mental illness are not migrating factors. They are the opposite. Because they mean that the criminal is more likely to pose a future threat. We all understand this. We all understand that the feral retard who stabs strangers on the train for being White and beautiful is a worse person than the man who murders his wife and her lover when he catches them in the act. Not because of some abstract calculus of moral agency, of who is disadvantaged and who isn't, but because one is certainly going to murder more people if he can, while the other is a lot less likely to. We've known for centuries, if not millennia, that it's the same small percentage of people doing all the robbing, raping, and murdering, over and over and over again. And we've known for centuries that if you physically remove them from society, that's 100% effective in stopping them from doing it again. The only hurdle is philosophical. Call it a "justice" system, and you have to argue endlessly about morality and redemption, and then some leftie thug-hugger weaponizes your own Christianity against you. Call it public safety, and you confine the argument to likelihood of reoffense. Then you are in the realm of statistics. Which you can compute. It all starts with naming things correctly, according to their actual nature.

Is it time to liberate Germany again?

This, and Disney Star Wars, and all of modern Hollywood, and all of Manhattan tradpub, can be explained with one simple idea. And no, it isn't "Satan". No religious suppositions are required. What's going on here is venial, and even more depraved. Narcissism. You see, there are two kinds of artistic creativity. Both are based on egotism, but one is healthy, and the other is destructive. The first says "Art is about beauty and truth. I will create that which is beautiful and true, that which uplifts those who look upon it. And my ego will be satisfied when my work is acknowledged as good, both by myself and others." This is based on a healthy version of egotism... pride. Pride is self-respect, a sense of one's own proper dignity or value, as earned through merit, virtue, and accomplishment. The second says "Art is about self-expression. I will create art based on whatever is in myself, no matter how ugly, deceptive, and low. I will make myself visible in every aspect of my art, and my ego will satisfied, because I will be the center of attention, with everyone looking at me." This is based on the sick version of egotism... narcissism. It is the ego that demands to be the center of attention, regardless of what others actually wish to see or would like to pay attention to. It is the revenge of the neglected child, not on the mother who ignored him, but on the entire universe. Great art is not about self-expression. It comes from the self, it is shaped by the self, but it the truth it expresses is shared and universal. This is why it speaks to others, not just the artist. When we look upon a fine sculpture, we see only David, not Michelangelo. When we read a great story, we do not see Tolkien, and we forget, for a moment, that Frodo and Sam aren't real. We can say Van Gogh painted one white iris because he was lonely, isolated within a crowd, but if we do say that, we care because we have been lonely, too. Great art makes the artist invisible. He waits backstage until the art is done, and it is time for him to step out and take a bow, receive his applause and be satisfied in a work well done. He does not stand between the audience and their enjoyment of the work. But, for this precise reason, great art cannot emerge from narcissism. The narcissist cannot bear to upstaged by anything, even the work of his own hands, the child of his own brain. The narcissistic artist creates art not to please others, but to force others to look at him. He must stamp his personality on every corner of the work, make it his and his alone, and remind the audience, in every moment, in every place they direct their gaze, that this work is his, and that he is what truly matters, here. This art, shown here, is not ugly by accident. It is ugly because the artists wish you to look upon their ugliness, both outer and inner. It is ugly because its message is not "look at this" but "look at me". This is why the left is obsessed with "representation" in art. This is why they cover themselves in ugly, mismatched tattoos, and dye their hair pink, purple, and blue. This is why they write self-indulgent stories about "identity" and "finding your squad". They are screaming their identity at the void, never realizing that it's not only possible, but easy, to be unique without being interesting or useful. Those who fancy themselves to be beautiful unique snowflakes would do well to remember that the slightest touch of heat will turn them into homogeneous, ubiquitous, undifferentiated water. They can work for Disney all they want, making black lesbian Jedi so that "the character can look just like me", but the character will be boring because they are boring. In other words, what we are seeing here is not a rebellion against god (if you are religious) or civilization and merit (if you aren't), it's something far worse. It's the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention. I blame their mothers.

I didn't go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult. One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers". This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something. Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. These women didn't want to be wives. They wanted to be pets. What's a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves. You get a cat because you want to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he's smart, he'll adapt you somewhat, but he doesn't have responsibilities other than "be a cat". If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don't have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on. These girls didn't want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but some of the time. When they felt like it. The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job. These young millenial women didn't realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that's what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to. Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted. And as I've said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child. The reason that a significant portion of men want to invent sentient feminine robots so that they can marry them is because they want wives, and they have given up on the possibility of young women re-embracing the concept of sex roles and actually having to do something for someone else. Women didn't spontaneously became more selfish than previous generations, of course. They were the targets of a concerted psyop whose purpose was to convince them that female responsibilities were demeaning. It was tailored to their unique psychological vulnerabilities, and they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Who mounted that psyop, and why, is a conversation most of us aren't ready for yet. But our point for today is don't worry, young ladies. The robots aren't being brought in to replace you. Just to do the jobs you won't do.

There's a broadly applicable lesson here, but most Americans aren't ready for that conversation.

Here's what Song of Ice and Fire actually wants to be, and why George can't finish it. The Song of Ice and Fire isn't actually supposed to be dark, Machiavellian, hopeless, or a subversion of Tolkien at all. It's just supposed to start that way. The details may be complex, but the formula is simple. Low-fantasy version of the British Isles, torn apart by multi-sided Machiavellian power struggle, loosely based on the War of the Roses. Things are bad because of Machiavellian power struggle. In the background, subtle hints of external, magical, otherworldly threat. Warring factions scoff and ignore it as first. Enter the high-fantasy tropes; prophesied hero emerges to unite the morally-grey factions into an unambiguously-good pro-civilization force to confront and defeat the unambiguously-evil threat to all life. Full transition, in the end, to epic Tolkienesque high fantasy, played straight rather than subverted. Heroism triumphant, humanity triumphant, realm unified in peace and prosperity. Roll credits. Were the story to be completed thus, completed as it wants to be completed, as it yearns to be completed, every dark, gritty, Machiavellian moment would be fully justified. Every chapter and scene filled with thugs and villains and no heroes at all would be fully justified. Because they would merely serve to emphasize the rarity of heroes, and the need for them. Because they would make the arrival of a true hero that much more satisfying when, late but not too late, he arrived. ASOIAF doesn't really want to be a subversion of Tolkien at all. It wants to be a path out of darkness and into light. It wants to be a study in how Tolkien is deeply relevant, even to a gritty, morally grey world. This is what George knows it needs to be. But George cannot write it. Why? Because he's a socialist. And a boomer. Socialism's motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is "thou shalt not be better than me". The boomer's single guiding principle is "whatever makes me feel pleasure right now is good, and whatever makes me feel bad right now is evil". Take these together, and you get someone who has a real problem with heroes. Heroes are, by definition, the best of us, at least on some dimension, and if your underlying motivation is envy, standing next to one is gonna make you feel bad. This means that socialists, boomers, and socialist boomers tend not to want to believe in heroes and heroism. They want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil because reasons. So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist. (Of course, when they see a fascist, they also call him a fascist, but that's just coincidence, because they'll call anything fascist... random passers-by, buildings, rocks, trees, squirrels, anything.) Because they want to feel morally superior to him. The only way they can admit that someone has a moral compass at all is if they can feel superior to him in some other way, usually by portraying them as naive, and hence doomed to failure because he is not empowered by cynicism and selfishness, to pursue the most efficient path to... whatever. So if ol'George thinks that everyone who appears good is either secretly evil, or openly stupid, then writing a character with heroic impulses is gonna be tough, and writing about how they succeed... impossible. This is why George can write characters with noble motives (Jon Snow, Eddard Stark, etc), but he keeps making them fail. You see, in George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just lack of moral virtue. If heroes are all frauds or suckers, then George is being smart, because he has seen through the whole heroism thing. If heroes are real, and they do sometimes succeed, and they do make the world better for everyone, then George is just a fat, lazy, cynical old man who doesn't wanna finish his art for the sake of art or integrity, because he only ever wanted money, and now he has more than he knows what to do with. In order to finish the story, George would need to have an awakening of virtue. He would first have to develop a sense of integrity — a desire to fulfill his promises, even when no one can or will punish him for not doing so. He would then have to develop a sense of humility — because to write a better person than he is, he would have to admit to himself that there is such a thing, that people can be better, and that trying to be better is an actual worthy goal, not just the act of falling for a con game run to control you. The longer someone goes without admitting to their faults, the harder those faults are to admit to, because they have been more deeply invested in. And this means he would also have to develop the courage to admit to himself that he is, in fact, a fat lazy cynical old coward, and that Tolkien, whom he envies and despises, was the far better man all along.

Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me right now? Is this fucking joke? Fukushima? Really? I mean, Japan did some pretty awful stuff in WW2, but... Fukushima? Of all the ridiculous things to feel guilty over... Fukushima was hit by multiple 50 foot tidal waves from a 9.1 earthquake at sea. That's not a fucking nuclear accident. That's your nuclear plant being hit by the hammer of god. And after that, you contained it. You took the hand fate dealt you and you played it with everything you had. You had workers volunteering to be heroes, to stay and fight to shut that thing down. And you saved... everyone. Not a single clearly connected death. In the middle of a natural disaster that cost you fifteen thousand souls, your people fought this thing and won. Chernobyl is something for Russians to be ashamed of, because that was their own screwup, and stupid communists can't do anything right. Fukushima wasn't your screwup. Fukushima happened to you. And your men stopped it. Fukushima is not your national shame. It is one of your finest hours.