Bloody Shovel 3

Well well, tomorrow is the big day.

All big elections are interesting but the 2020 US presidential election is the most bizarre I can remember. People worthy of respect can be seen holding the whole range of opinions: Trump will get a landslide, Biden will get a landslide, it will be very close, etc.

So which is it? Who the hell knows. I sure don't. You, however, might have some idea. If you do, please head to https://spandrell.com/uselection2020 where I published a nice interactive survey.

Best of luck tomorrow.

Lee Tenghui is dead. 97 years old. I won't wish he rest in peace, as his life was dedicated to making peace harder on earth. He was the man who single handedly prevented Taiwan from reuniting with China, thus prolonging the life of the American Empire in Asia for a good 3 decades. Of course I exaggerate, but only a little. The man really was a force of nature. Readers of historiography might now that there's a factional battle among historians, between the proponents of the "Great Man theory" which says historical change is driven by extraordinary men and their raw energy and ambition; and it's opposite, what you could call the "naturalist theory", that history is driven by larger forces such as modes of production or religion or whatnot, and individuals don't really matter that much.

Large ideological battles are of course always bullshit; they are driven by factionalism, status infighting inside the guild in order to capture monopoly rents and vanquish your factional enemies. I'm not an academic historian, hence not a member of the guild, so I won't give fuel to any faux dichotomy. Obviously history is both influenced by overarching forces and the actions of extraordinary man. The same way wars are generally determined by fundamental factors such as production and manpower, yet some decisive battles are very close and pretty much decided by random chance.

Well Lee Tenghui was a most extraordinary man, a man who for decades did what very few human...

Hi everyone, welcome to Bloody Shovel 3. It's only been one year since Bloody Shovel 2, but at lot has been going on and I decided to move the blog away into what I believe will be a more secure setting. Probably permanent.

Not that Bloody Shovel 2 was canceled; it was not. I'm not that famous, yet. Bloody Shovel 1 wasn't canceled either, I myself decided to move out of wordpress.com after they canceled Heartiste. I'd rather be proactive with these things and not be stabbed in the back unawares.

The blog may look very similar on the surface but the inside has changed a lot. This is a custom build now so in theory I could make a lot of fun stuff going on. A forum, AMAs, maps, the sky is the limit. Any requests are welcome. I'd like to use this to thank my techy friends for all their help in pulling this off. Feels good man.

You might have noticed there's three icons on the navbar now. One is a link to my Twitter account (while it lives), the mid one is a link to my Urbit group chat. You can't link to a Urbit page, by its very nature, so the way this works is you click on the icon and it'll copy the address of my group chat to your clipboard. This only works if you're browsing this page on HTTPS, so if it's not just change that on the browser url bar.

The third link does the same for my Bitcoin address. Donations are much appreciated.

Again the blog's code is a b...

So it seems that hostility to China is now official American policy. Redgov, i.e. the Military Industrial Complex has been pushing it for quite a while, and for good reason: they want war, or at least a plausible threat of war so they can get bigger budgets and waste more money so they can embezzle their cut and invest it in things like Theranos. That's their job. And it happens that the narrow pecuniary interests of the Military Industrial Complex now fit very well with the electoral interests of the Republican Party. Trump wanted to run on the economy and the stock market, but Corona-chan has completely wrecked it. The strategy now is "It's all China's fault, let's make them pay". Again, lame, but understandable.

All in all it's been a while since these two sides of Redgov, the Military and the Republican party have interests so tightly aligned. As a result we've been having a massive onslaught of Pentagon-led propaganda this last year, and man, is it lame and stupid. The left really is better at this stuff. The left is not only smarter (on average, it attracts social strivers and smart people want status), it's also more motivated, and the internal competition is way higher. I've blogged before about how retarded Chinese propaganda tends to be due to a lack of market incentives: you could say the same about official right wing propaganda in the West. It's all for the boys, to fill up the resume. Not that promotion depends on anything bu...

People have been asking for a blog post on the coronavirus crisis, and I've demurred. Mostly because I have little facts to add. I'm no virologist, no epidemiologist, I basically know nothing useful about the virus, and I'm not in the business of making up shit or speculating for clicks. I try to offer insight in this blog and I really have no insight about viruses.

Is the virus man-made? I don't know. Is it just the flu? I don't know. Did China release it on purpose? I don't know. Was it made by Americans to fuck with China? I don't know. Is bat soup that good? I don't know! I'd say I'm sorry that I'll never get to try it at this point but nah, I've had the chance but never tried it. I'm high-openness but not that high. I've never even tried cat meat. Or bugs. Or pangolin! Oh pangolin. That I wouldn't have minded trying. Friend tells me it's pretty good.

What I can write about is the all sorts of realizations I've had over this already 3 months of global crisis. And I'd say by far the most salient thing that's struck me is the sheer amount of bullshit going around. People literally making up shit all the time and peddling on Twitter, on Reddit, on WhatsApp, everywhere there's an audience.

And sure, some of that is Hasbar...

Hi everyone, sorry for neglecting the blog. I blame glycine: I'm the descendant of a long line of night-owls, but I'm able to sleep early now for the first time ever. Alas I've always been a late-night writer, and my healthy lifestyle was getting in the way of my blogging. Trade-offs. I should think of something.

Also apologies to my commenters: the comment notification system was broken so I had a backlog of unapproved comments: they're all online now.

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Years ago, back in the times before Bioleninism and all that, I made a name for myself in the intellectual parts of the right-wing blogosphere (≈neoreaction) in a large part because I was the best at categorizing the different strands of dissident thought. Back then I said there was by and large three different factions, the religious, the nationalist and the technological, what then Nick Land rebranded as the trichotomy of theonomist, ethno-nationalist and techno-commercialist.

That was 2013 though, and a lot has happened since. Most of it bad. Some good things too: Russia grew a spine, annexed Crimea and kicked USG out of Syria. China grew two spines, destroyed their liberal fifth-column, is forcibly assimilating their native muslims and is fast approaching military parity with USG.

And yes, Trump happened. That was fu...

There's an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don't actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environment, fitting skyscrapers into the mountain bedrock and open-air escalators to reach them with ease.

Hong Kong also produced Hong Kong cinema, one

of the few non Anglo film industries with a distinctive style and which aims to

entertain and not preach to the viewers. There's also Hong Kong music, which...

well, no, that's pretty bad. On the other hand Hong Kong has, in my view, one

the best food industries in the world, or at least had until 5 years ago when

mainland China started to up its game. All in all, Hong Kong is a great place.

I used to go often and enjoy every visit

But that doesn't mean it has a great people. Oh no. Hong Kong is indeed a cool city...

A while ago I wrote a post on tax law, proposing some ideas that I thought could plausibly make for a better existence if implemented by a sane government.

Reactions to that were mixed. It was, admittedly, an uncharacteristic post. I am not a "policy wonk", I'm usually more interested in deeper questions of history and human psychology as it applies to our political environment. As such, some people said that that sort of piece, proposing some tweaks to tax policy or this or that law is not just beside the point, it's actively harmful. The problems of modern society are, they would have it, not something that can be fixed through the legal political process. And talking as if the state could just tweak this or that law to make our existence better is to be guilty of cuckservatism, if not something worse.

On the same topic, Chris Nahr posted a translation of an article by some right-wing Austrian writing about this problem. "Full Speed into the Void", it's titled. Reminds one of the "Flight 93 election" essay in 2016. Austria has, by modern White standards, a fairly large and successful far right political party, who has managed to get into the government now and then. That article says that vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Po...

It's been 30 years this week since the famous riots in Beijing. I refuse to give any attention to an incident which was of little consequence, which nobody in China knows about, and to the extent they know about it nobody but a small number of dieharders (i.e. the people rioting back then and their families) gives a shit about.

If the Western press won't shut up about something, odds are is all a pig pile of fake news, of official propaganda which has been concocted up at some upper level and been issued hierarchically to the Cathedral press so everybody toes the official message. That applies to things like #Metoo, to the idea of "Russian interference" in the 2016 American election, the goddamn Rohingya, and yes, the stories of the "Tiananmen massacre".

So I won't add my blog to that message volume. Which is what they want, of course. Attention. To occupy mental space and crowd out other ideas, so the fake news gets around. Don't give it to them.

That said, some people do ask me what Tiananmen was about. Short answer: nobody knows, they won't tell, everybody is lying. Long answer: probably an internal coup attempt by a pro-Western faction of the CPC (led by premier Zhao Ziyang) with some Western intelligence support; a coup attempt which perhaps was aided by other factions inside China which disliked Deng Xiaoping and just wanted to take advantage of the disorder to drag him down.

<...

So our good Russian friend Anatoly Karlin had this take on his blog

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/climate-bioleninism/

I paste the complete link because the URL is quite ominous, "climate bioleninism". Imagine that. Karlin there makes a point that ideas that flatter the upper-class, like global warming, become entrenched, while ideas that they find inconvenient, like the genetic load of IQ or HBD more generally get killed or ostracized, no matter how solid the science behind them.

Seems Karlin thought I wouldn't like talk of Class Struggle, but he's wrong. I'm a great fan of the idea. The perhaps most basic part of my thinking is that whatever exists, exists for a reason. It follows that whatever is popular must have something going on for it. I'm certainly no Marxist, but there is much wisdom in Marxist theory, and I personally think that Class Struggle was a conceptual bomb which was so good and so powerful at the time that it basically destroyed and replaced Christianity all by itself. Well, I exaggerate, but not by much.

Incidentally, and I only learned of this recently, apparently in China, the idea ...