Garden of the Internet back up
Fixed, with SSL active and even a new post! Thanks to hackerman Jim.
Against copyright
Recently, in the gym, I heard a song by Enrique Iglesias. An old classic, I don’t know the name, but the chorus goes ‘you can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape my love.’ This made me think: how funny would it be to make a video parody where a beta sings those lyrics, totally creeping out the woman he sings it to, probably stalks her or something. You know, exact same lyrics that turn women on when sung by high status man, but when a sung by a low status man, suddenly horrible. Good stuff.
Then I thought to myself: not a chance it’s gonna happen. Apparently, the copyright police has become so tyrannical, that by this point you cannot even hum a song in a youtube video without risking it being copyrighted. Talk about stupid greed.
Now people will say: ‘yes perhaps that is stupid, but there should be some kind of law to protect artists from other people using their content without permission.’ I disagree: there should be no such law. Let people re-use other people’s content without permission. Hell, copy-pasta my stuff all you want, if you really want to you can even pass it off as your own and turn a buck on my blood sweat and words. I don’t care.
The thing is, and this becomes really obvious on the internet, that artists gain traction because people spread around their content. Will I be sued for using an image of Pepe? No I won’t, so I can safely spread images of Pepe. Whereas I cannot even hum a song of Enrique Iglesias, so I will not be spreading songs of Enrique Iglesias. To expect otherwise, i.e. that people will continue spreading your stuff when you actively undermine them in doing so, it is just plain self-defeating greed.
I guess Metallica were among the first of major artists publicly consumed by greed when they sued Napster. The truth of course, is that Metallica should’ve sent a personal thank-you note to Napster for spreading their music. The only reason I even know a decent amount of Metallica songs is because I can listen to them for free. Metallica, you’re good, but you’re not that good. No artist is that good. What is going on is a fundamental feeling of insecurity: ‘I am missing out on revenue when people pirate my stuff.’ Nah man, when people are spreading your memes, it is free advertisement. Of all the people showing up at your concert, how many have actually bought your album versus how many have listened to your pirated music? Pretty sure the ratio tilts to the latter.
Now, the greed of individual content creators didn’t need to be a major problem, but unfortunately we live in a decaying prog society, where, if the state can screw us over, it will screw us over. Since there’s censorship to be made in copyright claims, of course the state was going to get involved. Ostensibly under the name of ‘protecting the artists’ but pretty obviously in actuality to extort and to censor. No one asked for the EU to regulate memes. Absolutely no one. But it happened anyway.
Whenever the state sticks its nose in business not absolutely necessary to stick its nose in, things tend to go very badly, because in the absence of being able to do even tiniest amount of good, only bad eggs stick around. Copyright laws are not absolutely necessary, not even necessary, even counterproductive, hence all the state-involved parties are bad eggs
As for content creators: when you excise copyright power on your own memes, you kill them. People are gonna steal and copy your stuff, but this is a compliment, since standard procedure is that people ignore your stuff. The more your stuff is stolen, the more it spreads, and the more it spreads, the more people will be inclined to actually buy your stuff.
Putin, boogeyman
Last year, a prominent Dutch Republican stepped down from his position as minister of foreign affairs, after he claimed that, during a foreign trip, he had overheard Putin say, in a Datsja no less, that Putin was intent on conquering Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan. Now this man, Halbe Zijlstra, had already developed somewhat of a reputation of being a professional liar – he had once claimed to be so close to the Madrid bomb attacks that ‘glass shards flew in his face’. But when it turned out that there was never any meeting in a datsja whatsoever, it became even too much for the Dutch Republicans, and Zijlstra was siphoned away.
Of course, this has not stopped the Dutch Republicans from using Russia as a boogeyman. Zijlstra was merely overenthusiastic, is all! Of course Putin is a threat! A major one, at that!
OK, how strong is this major threat?
Russia’s GNP 2018: 1.7 trillion $.
How does that compare to the countries it is supposedly threatening?
US GNP 2018: 20.4 trillion $
Huh. So the US is twelve times richer than Russia. Surely that makes the US a stronger threat towards Russia than vice versa? How about on the ol’ continent?
EU GNP 2018: 19 trillion $
Huh. It’s almost like the EU is the strong party, Russia the weak. Perhaps its individual countries are weak?
Germany GNP 2018: 4.2 trillion $
France GNP: 3 trillion $
So even the individual states of Europe are two, three times richer than Russia.
If Putin is really such a threat to the West, how come Russia is a glamorized gas station? Combined, the EU and America outproduce Russia by a factor of twenty-four. But supposedly, Putin is on the verge of invading Europe, hacking our internets and installing a sock-puppet government in the US.
Bullshit.
War costs money. Putin does not have money, nowhere near enough money to wage a sustained fifth-generation war effort against an enemy twenty-four times as rich as he is. Simple economics tells us Russia is no where near as threatening as the cuck right tells us, for the strong take what they will, the weak endure what they must. It is the permanent government of the West that is the strong, Russia the weak, which is why the permanent government of the West has conquered the whole of Ukraine, Russia merely the Krim.
This war of Western aggression in Eastern Europe, like all wars, has led to casualties. One of these casualties is the shooting of MH-17, a plane which flew over a war zone in which West-sponsored fighters were battling Russia-sponsored fighters, killing 193 Dutch citizens. In an entirely predictable turn of events, the Dutch cuck right has ceaselessly blamed Russia for these deaths for the past five years, conveniently forgetting its own involvement in supporting the Western aggression that has led to the war in the first place.
If Putin had allowed the Western government to seize the Krim, he would have been pushed out of the Black sea. Putin’s actions are not those of the aggressor, they are of the team on defense. Mind you, Putin looks like he could be a conqueror in another life, but that is simply not the role he is playing as leader of Russia, which fact is confirmed by a simple comparison of economies.
Then, the issue of hacking. Supposedly, everyday, thousands of hack-attacks are executed by the Kremlin. What are they hacking? We don’t know, you don’t know! We never know where hackers come from, they are everywhere and no where at the same time!
Now, I am no hacking expert, but I think most of this meme lends power from the fact that few really know how hacking works.
Hacking as in infiltration, espionage, or even hostile takeover from the outside is difficult. When your enemy control his own software and hardware and secures it, it is mighty difficult to break into. The reason Hillary’s emails were hacked was because she had taken absolutely terrible security measures. Trump, learning from this, insisted on solid security measures, and so hasn’t been hacked.
So, to break into a solid secured system of which you control neither the hardware or the software, you need insiders. That’s what Mueller was looking for, but what he could not find, no matter how hard he tried.
Pretty sure there’s plenty of cold hackers, but they can be repelled just fine. Anecdotally, I recall that the best method of success for hackers is always some form of social engineering: get someone on the inside, some secretary or something, to spill the passwords. To cold hack from a thousand miles away into a system that is well secured; it is just not cost-efficient. Hence, to say that the the Kremlin executes thousands of hack-attacks a day, it is a conspiracy theory.
Now, if you dò have access to software and hardware, well suddenly a lot becomes possible. Which is why Huawei is being kicked off of Google, for if we walk around with Chinese hardware, hell yeah we can be hacked by the Chinese, and naturally the Americans rather have us being hacked only by the Americans.
But no Russian hardware, no Russian software, so no Russian hack attacks. Which is why no one can ever give a concrete example of Russian hacking in the West, except for the very few occasions where Russian spies try to physically break into the hardware, which of course they don’t do because of nefarious collusion schemes, but because of a plain old double-agent assassination investigation. Spooks gonna spook.
Defecting from the right
A problem escaping the matrix is that in your search for fellow escapees, nine times out of ten, you find defect from the left, as in, they defect by being lefter than society, e.g. being holier than everyone else. Defecting from the left is easy, it is even encouraged: ‘oh man, the planet is going to shit man.’ +1 moral point to you. Or: ‘uh its only about the greens man, they dun care bout nothing but the greens.’ +2 for your eternal selflessness! Of course, the problem with defecting from the left is that it is defecting on bullshit by spouting even more bullshit. Consider: both of the above statements are lies. I have steadily observed the weather for the past years, and my observations tell me the weather is doing just fine. Whenever someone gives me photo evidence of the opposite, upon finer inspection the evidence always turns out to be bad or fabricated, such as comparing an image of the arctic in winter with an image of the arctic in summer.
Similarly, my eyes tell me clearly that money is not our elite’s prime concern, for if it was, we’d have occupied Venezuela, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, pumped its oil and mined its gold, instead of meekly occupying Iraq and Afghanistan in order to teach seven year old girls how to put condoms on bananas.
If making money was holy, I would encounter diminished taxing as I move up socioeconomically, while in truth my taxes increase progressively. The peasant with ten cows may sacrifice two cows to his team of lawyers and accountants in order to stay clear for now, but the peasant with two cows is pretty screwed already. It is obvious that our ruling elite’s prime concern is not money, it is humiliating whitey while at the same time failing in trying to stop themselves from humiliating whitey.
So, I defect. Mind you, not as hardcore as some, I have yet to purchase my first fake passport, but in spirit I have checked out.
A remaining debate between reactionaries is how bad things have to go to shit before we can start to fix them. My gut tells me things have to go to shit still pretty badly before we can start to fix them.
If Trump stays president beyond two terms, and Baudet becomes the first Dutch Stadholder since 1795, we can start to fix things. But in the meantime, I defect.
So what is this blog about then? Well, as long as it is not banned like Heartiste (rest in peace), we shall, quite simply, be exploring how to defect from the right.
For instance, take the women issue. What I have long suspected and heard is what I now experience directly: the state hates families. I have been pestered with intrusive government tentacles that want to monitor my baby until adulthood, intrusive healthcare tentacles which demand three vials of blood for every protocol violation my girl makes, and intrusive economic tentacles that demands my girl be a a worker instead of a mother. Dealing with this is not impossible, but it is not easy. You get paranoid. Before nurses helped to take care of the newborn during his first week, as is customary in the Netherlands, my girl read the protocol to me. It said that the baby’s temperature needs to be measured three times a day. Rectally. At this point I interjected angrily: ‘we are NOT sticking objects in our son’s ass. These people are NOT turning my son gay.’
Was I paranoid? I dunno. I did vocalize my objection to the nurses, of course a tad more diplomatic. They were great.
See, the thing is this. Because I am a hundred percent Jimian in my relation, I have established peace in the war of the sexes. But, because I am at peace with my woman, I am at war with the state, because everything I do in order to establish peace with my woman enrages the state. You see the inverse with men who dó follow the state’s prescriptions. A friend of a darkly enlightened friend summarized it as thus: “Everybody I know who has kids is in exactly this situation. No time, energy or mood for sex because if we happen to have a little time to ourselves we will go out for a dinner or a theatre and happy to have survived, tiresome things like sex aren’t even on the horizon. Having kids is very much like war every minute every day.”
I refuse to live like that.
It is often said that to effectively resist power, need a religious community. Look at Islam, they’re doing pretty good! Yes, it’s true. But a successful religion cannot be established pre-story, if that makes sense. You can not say: ‘this is now a religion’, and expect the designation of words to have any sticking power. It is only after the story that people may or may not say: well, that was pretty powerful. As much as Scientology kicked the IRS to the curb, in the end L Ron Hubbard still goes down in history as a talented conman.
So, building a religion is harder than I initially thought. For the most part out of my control. We shall leave the religion building at rest for now.
But, while the state is powerful in its steamroller mode, it seems to be generally quite incompetent. Government tentacles, especially in the Netherlands, are everywhere, but it seems able to repel them. Well, except for taxes. But I pay my taxes, and so far find it doable to prevent myself being raped by other state tentacles. There’s enough breathing space still. So I do not necessarily need a new religion. Let us not let the perfect get in the way of the good.
So, lets embark on this adventure then, and see how we can successfully defect from the right. I think it is mostly an offline adventure, but I will try to keep writing posts at least semi-regularly.
All the World’s a Stage
Sometimes you learn new stuff, which you, some time later, promptly forget. Probably, it wasn’t as useful as you thought it was. Time is an excellent judge that way.
Conversely, when you re-remember something you learned a while ago, it is probably a sign that it is useful. I experienced this with the Dancing Monkey meme.
I noticed that lately I tended to get along better with people in my professional life than in my personal life. This puzzled me. I was still the same person, right? Then I realized: nonsense, I’m exactly not the same person.
In my professional life, my income is related to how well I get along with people. Consequently, I play a role that people like, which role I guess you might call a 17th-century gentleman. People like this role – it is colorful, mysterious and slightly larger than life. Thus, social success.
In my private life, I am less inclined to put energy into my act. I have come to the realization that, privately, I am a bit of an asshole. Well, professionally I am also a little bit of an asshole, but professionally I am a charismatic asshole. Privately I’m just an asshole. I am overly critical, including with friends. I must come around from my initial agreement with Aristotle’s definition of friendship; my new opinion is that Aristotle was a spoiled boomer whose high status ensured that his friends were yes-nodders, tricking Aristotle into thinking his friends accepted him for who he was at heart, and not his monkey dance. Nonsense. Your values never completely align with other people’s values. They might show great overlap, but they never completely align. You and your friends will have differences of opinion. That’s just the way it is.
The dancing monkey meme says we are performers. It is leftist nonsense that people accept you for ‘who you are’. No one accepts you for just who you are, or at least, no one cares for you as you are, not even your momma. It’s like, have the personality of a rock, get treated like a rock.
In my professional life, I have the personality of a minor rock star, so I get treated like a minor rock star. In my private life, I have the personality of a curt asshole, so I get treated like a curt asshole. This realization made a lot of sense to me, with the only thing still puzzling me being the fact that my girl loves me for who I am in my private life, but then I realized that women love curt assholes, so even that made sense.
There is no way around the dancing monkey meme, no way to get away with ‘just being yourself.’ Your dance must add value. If it does not, you can always turn to leftism, but if you turn to the left, be prepared for the left to turn on you.
The world’s a stage. When you interact, you act. You put up a small show. People can pick up on some subtleties, but generally, bigger gestures do better. As you grow older, you become a more pronounced version of yourself, because that makes it easier for everyone to make sense of your dance.
And everyone means everyone, including friends. Good friends are merely men who enjoy acting together, enjoy dancing together, if that metaphor does not sound too gay. Thus, the eternal introvert realization: if I spend my social energy performing professionally, why should I want to exert much more social energy performing privately?
Which leaves the final question: what role am I performing on this blog, for you, my reader dearest of dearest? I guess I’ll leave the answer to you.
Slavoj Zizek, a second time
OK, I lied. Zizek is interesting enough to merit a round two.
What makes Zizek interesting is that, besides the fact that he is easy on the ears, he is a pretty honest commie, insofar an honest commie is of course not an internal contradiction.
The left has a narrative problem. In the twentieth century, all narratives were leftist, as all dominant religions were leftist – progressivism, fascism, communism. In the twenty-first century, it has become obvious that every single one of these religions has spiraled out of control; killing lots of people, bringing chaos to its normie adherents. So, mass faith dwindles. It is in this faith vacuum that we operate: we offer an alternative faith. A pretty good one. Our biggest weapon is that we are cool, which of course is mostly best left unsaid. But of course this is a market with heavy competition, and the left will not move aside without putting up a good fight. Zizek is one of those fighters, he is sort of cool, and he offers a coherent leftist narrative. Let us take a look at three of his videos to see what he has to offer.
I think this gets to the core of Zizek’s ideas. Notice how he is exactly on the same line with Carlylean Restorationist in his anti-capitalism. He talks about ‘early critics of capitalism’ – what is early? Well, ‘a few decades before the French Revolution.’ Zizek thus assumes capitalism is recent, while we are pretty sure capitalism is ancient, demonstrated among many by the capitalist Phoenician ship industry some 3000 years ago.
Nine of out ten times, when a leftist thinker talks about the world, he is really talking about himself, because that is his only point of reference. Observe that when Zizek argues that capitalism is a religion, he is really saying communism is a religion. Zizek argues that capitalists were 18th century priests that took the power, are still in power today. Capitalists were never in power, never took power. Zizek applies his own priest mindset and projects it onto entrepreneurs, willingly blind to the fact that entrepreneurs don’t think like him at all. When Zizek says ‘a capitalist is someone who is willing to stake his life to ensure production grows’, again projects a false script on capitalists. He imagines capitalists act like priests, as he acts like a priest, while in reality capitalists just like to create stuff and earn a buck. While a capitalist might care mighty much about a business he built with his own sweat blood and tears, not a single capitalist will ‘stake his life’ for production growth the way a commie will stake his life for a chance to kill the peasant with two cows. There’s no holy aspect involved in the entrepreneurial life, hence the inability of capitalists to band together into a church, which, if I can readily observe, if Alinsky can readily observe, Zizek can also readily observe, hence Zizek is a liar.
What Zizek is really saying is this: ‘don’t you hate the peasant with two cows? I sure hate the peasant with two cows. We should do something about it. In fact, it is our moral imperative to kill him and take away his cows! But, in the twentieth century we killed too many people, took away too many cows and for some reason people got upset with that. So, let us think harder about how we are going to kill the peasant and take away his cows without too many people getting upset about it.’
Thus, when righties like Zizek for how he mocks other leftists, bear in mind: he might mock them, but whenever their disagreements run too wide, Zizek will always play his Joker card: ‘yes, well, we might disagree on this, but at least we both hate the peasant with two cows’, which is the central reason he is on the payroll of the left.
Video number two: Zizek on women.
Zizek is blue-pilled on women, which is to say, he is the kind of guy who will steal your stuff and murder you -and you can’t help but still sort-of like him while he does it- but he will not rape your wife. On women, he shows weakness – ‘in principle we should support #metoo’ he says, but of course, ‘it is not really about the working class appropriated by the bourgouisie and so on and so on.’ He criticizes Metoo from the left. Makes perfect sense, it’s the easy answer, but: women hate it. Women much prefer the man who calls them out for their bullshit, not the man who encourages them to create even more bullshit. So here he is weak.
Final video: ten Zizek jokes. Some of them are good. I especially like the first one by a young Zizek.
The joke about the dusty balls is a good way to convey his edginess: he knows he is on the payroll of the power left, but he is always looking for opportunities to eat the power left. Such is the relation of the lefter left to the central left.
The joke about Jesus Christ is telling. Perhaps I am looking too much into it, but it is true that Jesus was weak on the women question, and a good case can be made that it was the women question that eventually undid Christianity. So the joke is a useful meme: it is funny, but it also conveys information on the enemy’s weakness.
All in all, while Zizek is a dirty-cool intellectual, he says nothing we have not heard before, nothing we cannot handle. His memes are stale, in that at their core they are boilerplate Marxism, and we are in the last stages of having fully refuted boilerplate Marxism. Put Zizek up against a purple pill man such as Jordan Peterson, and Zizek will take him down, for Zizek is a holier leftist than Peterson, but pit Zizek against one of us and he will lose, for we will call him out for what he is actually doing. This is good news for the Dark Enlightenment.
Slavoj Zizek, first and last time
Occasionally I hear about reportedly rebellious intellectuals with good platforms. Of course, always turns out that the reason these rebellious intellectuals have good platforms is that they are given these good platforms by power, e.g., they are on the left’s payroll. Observe what happened to Milo, who refused to be on the left’s payroll, while Jordan Peterson happily accepted fat cheques signed by the left.
So, all these intellectuals and philosophers are, without exception, cookie-cutter leftists. They all sell the same leftism, merely in slightly different flavors.
I was wondering what flavor Zizek was selling. This video seems pretty representative.
OK, ok. Zizek is a cocaine commie. That was easy.
When Zizek says ‘this is not communist propaganda’ he means: ‘this is communist propaganda’. He is pretty obvious about it. His entire point on communist leaders clapping along with their own ovation is, after all, that fascist leaders are egomaniacs, while communist leaders are part of a greater cause. Ergo, communism is better.
Nonsense. Both fascism and communism are nuts.
What is important during an ovation of any leader is not whether the leader claps along, it is that the leader receives an ovation. That ritual is the showcase of power, and Zizek’s claim that the leader clapping along with his own ovation somehow negates the hierarchy of power is nonsense. In fact, pretty sure that if someone did not clap along during an ovation of Stalin, much more likely to be executed than someone not clapping along during an ovation of Hitler. Zizek is selling us that the murderers in the 10/10 no pressure video are actually genuinely interested in protecting the environment, not at all in murdering people.
He then goes on to defend communism by saying that ‘prisoners in communism are allowed to totally objectively pass judgment on their own betrayal.’ I first thought he was being sarcastic, but he continues: ‘this is a consequence of dialectic enlightenment‘. What? When he calls the system of communism ‘universal reason‘ I am officially out. Slavoj Zizek is a murderous liar.
There is no dialectic enlightenment in Marxism, only insofar the French enlightenment was a total lie, for the so-called revolution of the proletariat and the assumed recent rise of capitalism are lies and nonsense the commie uses to convince the peasant with one cow to murder the peasant with two cows, after which the commie will murder the peasant with one cow. The commie is aware of his lies, as Zizek is aware of his lies, demonstrated in the ease with which he switches from ‘I am not defending communism’ to ‘communism is the language of universal reason’.
Now, you don’t need to be a rightist geek such as myself to figure out that communism is thoroughly evil, but when a slobbering man claims that communism is dialectical enlightenment, you can be pretty sure he is out to murder you. Add to that the fact that he is relatively high on the left’s payroll and you would be correct to conclude that the left is out to murder you.
The Dutch Constitution
I’ve had some discussions with Americans who believe that their constitution, written in 1787 following the successful American rebellion against the British, outlining the rules of a Trias Politicia democracy, will protect them against a coup, whether by Trump or the Democrats. ‘A coup is unconstitutional’ they argue, and since politics is governed by the rule of law, the original law being the constitution, a coup cannot happen.
This seems silly to me. As if a bunch of words on some paper have the magic power to prevent government collapse. Nah, they’re just words on some paper. But let’s take a deeper look at this constitution fandom by comparison with the Dutch constitution, whose history is pretty interesting, at least, insofar I can piece together the story using the Moldbuggian strategy of going straight to the historic source.
The very first Dutch constitution was written in 1798, under French revolutionary occupation. It opens with a proclamation by the French: ‘Dear Batavians, long have you been oppressed by the Spanish, but following your independence in 1588 you have still been oppressed by your own evil aristocrats! This all ends now, with our generous and kindhearted occupation.’
Interestingly, the constitution itself is not democratic. Rather, it affirms the existence of something which ominously translates to an ‘all-controlling supreme creature’, which I interpret to mean a faceless committee of revolutionaries.
The constitution is short. It stresses, among others, equality among the people and in front of the law, respect for private property, the strangely Christian ‘don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t do unto yourself’ and obedience to the all-controlling supreme creature. Compared to any modern political document, it is very readable.
Of course, the French were defeated, because when are they ever not, and the Netherlands regained independence. What do?
Well, Willem VI, descendant of Prince of Orange Willem I, Willem I being the assassinated leader of the independence war against Spain, wanted to be king. He convinced other royal houses to support him, returned to the Netherlands and gave a speech that would be the first proclamation of the Dutch 1814 constitution, in which he basically said: ‘dear countrymen, I have missed you terribly much, and you have missed me terribly much, and now that we have been freed from these terrible foreigners, I shall rule as your king and we shall be stronger than ever!’
Other proclamations in the constitution include the States-General inviting Willem VI to be king, Willem VI accepting the position of king (now as His Royal Highness Willem I), and His Royal Higness Willem I telling the Belgians that he is their king also (that last one would bite him in the ass).
The 1814 constitution itself is, again, refreshingly short, written in a way that even an amateur like myself can understand two hundred years later, very contrary to the ubiquitous byzantium nonsense found in modern legislature. It covers many more points than the French ‘we are boss and that’s all’ constitution, but every point is concise. It is monarchical: Willem I has the power and his descendants will have the power after him. The king may declare war, may declare peace, leads the army. The king rules in cooperation with the fifty-five men of the States-General, who represent the will of the people (take a wild guess how that unfolds…). Interestingly, locally, Willem I introduced democracy: cities would vote on their representatives every year.
The constitution posits four ministries – the ministry of Justice, ministry of Finance, ministry of Defense and ministry of Water (of course only the Dutch would have one of four ministries be a ministry of Water).
The final chapter in the constitution is interestingly titled: ‘on Religion, Public Education and Care of the Poor.’ What did the Dutch constitution say on Religion? Well, surprise surprise, it says that the Netherlands is a Christian country, that public education is meant to promote Christian values, and that other religions are permissible as long as they do not disrupt public peace. L O L.
Let us flash forward: Willem I loses the independence war against Belgium, is angry that being a king isn’t turning out the way he wanted, abdicates throne to his son Willem II. Willem II is a bit of a pussy, observes royal houses falling apart all over Europe, so when pushed, he allows the liberals led by Thorbecke to radically change the constitution in 1848. The Netherlands is now a parliamentary democracy, e.g., its constitution is just like the US constitution. King no longer has the power, parliament (previously the States-General) does. Rule by committee is back.
And from here on we see the predictable ever-leftward movement of Ctulhu. The constitution has since 1848 been changed three more times: near the end of king Willem III’s rule, after world war I, and in the aftermath of the hippie rebellion. Every time, predictable changes: among others, voting rights for women, more democratization, more expansion of education to teach Progressive values, and the addition of wonderful leftist ministries such as the Ministry of Economic and Climate Policy and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. The original constitution is pretty much memory-holed, and if a Dutch normie even knows the contents of the current constitution, he usually knows only its very first rule: everyone is equal, discrimination is forbidden.
So, to make a long story short, my point to my fellow constitution-loving American is the following: while you may believe that the American constitution is better protected against such radical changes, I believe that the Dutch are simply better at formalism. That is, the modern American constitution very much resembles the modern Dutch constitution, but the Dutch are more honest.
Staying lit like Notre Dame
I have ten different posts in mind, not feeling like following through on any of them, so here’s one big stream-of-consciousness post.
I’m a dad now. Little baby boy, came in at 3740 grams. Healthy, so is the mother. We’re doing things as trad as possible (home childbirth, keeping government tentacle agencies at distance, breastfeeding) and so far I’m proud. Generally being a dad is as I expected. Takes up time. Makes me… Well, ‘burgerlijk’, the Dutch would say, which is a euphemism for ‘boring’. I see it happening to myself; as a bachelor, I took all kinds of risk, said all kinds of stupid stuff. Then I entered a relation and I became a bit more reserved, more responsible. And now, I already notice myself consciously avoiding trouble. The only downside of that is that since this blog is pretty much me actively seeking trouble, my urge to write has gone down a bit. I think this is entirely natural. I do believe I have written down the most important stuff. The remainder is housekeeping, kicking the shit.
No worries though, adventurers gonna adventure. My next secret project is already underway. It shall be revealed in due time…
Mai’s baby blues surprised me, which I am told is quite normal for mothers but which we both underestimated. Pretty sure it is evolutionary, that mother right after birth has to decide whether or not to kill the baby, and that baby blues is just a giant shit-test designed to check whether her environment supports her. But I cannot complain. We’re a family now. It’s fun, challenging. The whole situation feels right, even if he’s crying right now and TAKING ME OUT OF MY GODDAMN CONCENTRATION GODDAMNIT BABY.
*Ahem*
So, what about that Notre Dame burning down? Pretty symbolic huh. People say the left can’t meme, and it’s true that stuff from the right is infinitely more fun and creative, but the left Power Memes, which is to say, when the left memes that the Notre Dame fire was caused by restoration work, it is accepted that the Notre Dame fire was caused by restoration work. Personally, while I do not know the exact truth, I do not buy this meme for a second: I have seen the yellow vest riots, the French demographic, the burning cars and shooting police… The Notre Dame was burned down by the left. That’s my meme. Probably not on the power level of ‘restoration accidents happen’, but what can you do.
Moving on.
I have been accused of making ‘Jimianity’ a forced meme. I thought that was funny. Of course it was forced, but that does not make it bad. Could’ve been an amazing meme. I was a bit disappointed to see Jim turn down the position, but this is fine as well. Both situations would’ve worked I think; Jim the prophet would’ve been more polarizing, more long-term less short-term, but Jim the blogger works fine. More practical. In the end it does not change that much, just a matter of frame. Whatever happens will be interesting nonetheless. Jim’s comment section now competes with Scott Alexander in activity, and Scott Alexander is big enough to feature in the New York Times.
DAMN IT BABY STOP CRYING.
…
Ah that’s better. Where were we.
Don’t have much more to say. Some final disjointed thoughts.
The distribution of beta vs alpha males is something I still wonder about. It’s about 90 : 10, in males as well, e.g. a male tends to act beta 90% of the time, alpha 10% of the time. Now, we are all descended from killer apes, and we’ve been through genetic bottlenecks as well, so I’d expect males to be more alpha. But, they’re not. They’re more beta — apparently, to be a follower is the Nash equilibrium. To communicate is more important than to dominate.
It reminds me of this docu on a guy doing a Robinson Crusoe for 300 days. His biggest problem was not the weather, lack of food nor mosquitoes…. It was loneliness. He felt extremely alone, so much that he does not want to repeat the experiment. This makes perfect sense – man is a social animal. The most recent thousands of years of evolution have not served primarily for us to deal with materials, it has served primarily for us to deal with other humans, who form our only competition at the top of the food pyramid. It is ingrained in our nature to communicate and impress others. Take that away and we sense something is wrong. This is something the hermit will always have to deal with.
This news is good for reactionaries looking to make a change — if most men are betas, if alpha males love having betas around… It is win-win, right? Just need to swat away these damn commies…
OK that’s enough for now. I’m off.
AlfaNL 