Monthly Archives: August 2020

Navigating error

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I’ve been thinking about something that crops up every now and then in discussions about religious traditions.

The atheists, arguing that religious traditions are not needed, state that every rational individual can figure ethics and philosophy on their own, without need for belonging to an organized religion.

The members of organized religions state that nobody can expect to attain salvation without accepting revelation from above, by which they invariably mean their respective religious systems and/or organizations.

I am quite annoyed by both statements.

To respond to the atheist argument first, if figuring out correct ethics is so easy and intuitive, how do they explain the vast difference between the customary ethics of the ancient Rome, and Christian ethics? What, there was a lack of rational people in the Roman empire? I assure you, there were lots of people trying to figure things out, and they were quite smart, and nobody managed to come up with Christian ethics. However, today some atheist like Dawkins or Molyneux thinks he can just pull ethics from the hat, because it’s so intuitive? It’s intuitive to them because they’ve been surrounded by Christians from an early age and everything they’ve experienced had the Christian ethical system beneath it. The problem is, they don’t understand the sources of their ethical feelings and thoughts, they think it’s “reasonable”. Reason has nothing to do with it; they are just stating the basic premises of their upbringing. It’s interesting how they don’t find Buddhist premises intuitive and think anyone could follow pure reason and come up with them. Ibn Tufail thought Islam was so intuitive, you could put a child on a desert island and have it brought up by animals, and it would follow pure reason and end up with mystical Islam. It’s also interesting how atheists think that anyone could come up with a their worldview if only they followed reason and evidence, when they themselves can’t do it – they just copy each other’s stupid arguments, including logical errors and illustrative examples. Diversity of thought among atheists is about the same as in any crazy cult, they just parrot their authorities and no significant thinking is either demonstrated or required. It is obvious that original thinkers, who are capable of creating entire philosophies that are actually innovative and revolutionary, are exceedingly rare, to the point where you can only expect to find a handful of them in a millennium. The expectation that one can follow reason and evidence and come up with a valuable and mature philosophy is therefore incredibly naive. Even the great thinkers usually produced derivative work, with few actual innovations. Jesus, for instance, introduced no significant original ideas; his thoughts were recognized as very much like those of the contemporary scholars, only spoken with the authority of direct knowledge and power. Sankaracarya introduced very little in terms of original thought; for the most part, he isolated the core thought from the Upanisads and made it into a succinct and powerful argument. Teachings of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya essentially elaborate on the Puranas, Upanisads and the Bhagavad-gita. Even the Bhagavata-purana is highly derivative, for the most part explaining the teaching of Vedanta through many different stories, repeating the core thought ad nauseam. How is it, then, that everybody keeps stating that their own religious, ethical or philosophical system is intuitive to the point where every rational individual could discover it anew, if only they followed reason and evidence, when it is obvious that religious philosophies exist as separate and distinct islands of thought, where you have highly derivative thinking on each respective island, and huge and insurmountable differences between the islands? If atheism is so intuitive, how come there were no significant thinkers in the history of the world who were atheists, up until very recently, and now all of the sudden it became some sort of a fashionable “meme”? If humanistic ethics are so intuitive, how come owning slaves and working them to death was the ethical norm throughout the world, across all history? Nobody really figured out Christian ethics before Christianity, that’s why it’s one of the few original ideas in history. Believing that anyone could figure it out now without being exposed to an entire civilization that was built upon it, is just arrogant and stupid. Atheists who keep their Christian ethics but state that you don’t need God for that, are but fools. Of course you do, it’s just that they are too stupid and arrogant to understand where they got it all from. It suffices to see how many things the Christians got right, and how few of those belong to the category of trivial intuitive things anyone would get right; whenever Marxists or some other atheist bunch tried something they considered “reasonable”, “modern” or “obvious”, they produced a disaster. Their disdain for the sanctity of human spirit produced the slaughterhouses of modernity. Their “progressive” ideas about sexuality or human equality resulted in the nightmare that is today’s society. Every time they thought they will make “progress” by opposing the traditional Christianity, they produced a hellish dystopia. Apparently, getting ethics right isn’t something a rational intellectual can reliably do, and there’s a significant difference between thinking you can do something, and actually pulling it off.

As for the opposing argument from the religious circles, where they argue that it would be dangerous to think independently because of the vast probability of error, stating that it’s much safer to just espouse their respective traditional worldview, what annoys me is the arrogance of assumption that they have the good stuff. Oh really? You are safe from doctrinal error? You are ethically pure, and only the others are in peril? You have God by the balls, so to speak? You have the truth that was revealed from above, and then kept, refined and explained by the tradition of saints? Why, then, if you have it so good, is the light of your truth so incredibly dim? Why is your “truth” always formulated the same way, in almost the same words, if God is the wellspring of creativity and intelligence? When I see most priests, they look stale and boring, like trained actors who fake “inner peace”, “confidence” and “balance”, they try to speak calmly and softly because they know that will make an impression on the impressionable, but anyone who actually experienced something from the direction of God will immediately understand them as poor imitation of a poorly understood phenomenon. Basically, you can’t even fake it properly, because you don’t have even the indirect knowledge of the phenomenon that would help you fake it. Every religious organization I can think of is oozing scandals of the basest kind – scandals that indicate profound spiritual depravity. Don’t you dare talk about ethical purity or safety from ideological error, you conceited buffoons.

What do I recommend then, since those two obviously fallacious alternatives seem to split the world between them? If I argue against trusting yourself and your intellect, and I also argue against putting trust in religious or philosophical traditions, what else is there?

First of all, you need to stop fearing error, as if it were somehow avoidable and, consequently, those committing it are somehow disreputable. The first thing you need to understand is that error is unavoidable, and the second thing is that error can either be a part of the learning process, or something you get stuck in, something akin to getting caught in orbit of a black hole. Error is something that exists as context of every single thought, word and action, where you are either in error, or you just missed it by a hair and you’re on trajectory to overshoot into error on the other side, because “too much” is as bad as “not enough”. There is error in form of insecurity, and error in form of arrogance, and there is the right path somewhere, in missing both Scilla and Charybdis. God is not something you choose once and you’re safe. God is something that has to be found again, and again, when formulating each thought, when you’re trying to linearize thoughts into words, and navigate proper action. That’s probably why Jesus was speaking of the “living God”, because if you’re not in touch with God as a living force of rightness and fullness, you are in error, by default. There’s never a safe haven of infallibility anywhere, regardless of how holy you are. Even if you are so firmly in God that you appear to be perfect and infallible, it means only that you are correcting every deviation from the proper path so quickly, that they are imperceptible by others. In essence, error is nothing to be feared, because the feeling of error allows you to quickly correct yourself until you are back where your inner spiritual compass points back at God.

The next important thing is to trust holy scriptures, persons and traditions, but only to a point. At some point you will have to deviate from traditions and figures of authority and carve your own path, but that won’t be soon, or all at once. I am a very original thinker, if such a thing exists at all, and I followed the recommendations of saints and holy traditions with diligent obedience, until I reached a point where I had to go my own way, which I never did lightly or without profound consideration. Spiritual traditions usually contain wisdom that is far greater than anything a smart, intelligent and educated individual could figure out on their own; in fact, they usually contain wisdom that is beyond what a great saint could do on his/her own. However, there is excess on both ends: in either arrogant assumption that you can do better, or in fear of carving your own path once your personal revelation had matured to the point where it actually exceeds collective historical revelation of others, and either breaks away from it altogether, or merely adds to it. There is a middle path between sinful arrogance and sinful humility, and finding that path is all but easy. If you think you are walking that path of rightness merely by virtue of belonging to a church, you obviously didn’t think about those things enough. There isn’t a trick that can give you safety from the naked blade of reality on which you have to make a choice. Correctness of choice exists only in the state of spirit where God is not only your singular point of focus, but also the way in which you do things. God needs to be the way, truth and life, and you need to be there, in way, truth and life, walking the sharp blade of rightness that separates two wrongs, fearing no error, because in darshan of God, you are that blade. Failing that, everything is error.

May God save us from atheism and other evils

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The leftists call themselves “woke”. I assume it’s how the American blacks think you say “awakened”, and they are of course wrong because they speak shit English, however the white leftists are so collectively obsessed with self-flagellation over belonging to the race that invented our civilization, which includes being the only race in history that actually abolished slavery, they think they have to culturally appropriate this illiterate bullshit to ritually de-white themselves. But to return to the point, their idea of being awakened means perceiving the world through a neo-Marxist lens of exploitation dichotomies. One sex exploits and subjugates the other, one race exploits and subjugates others, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s stupid, intellectually lazy bullshit that’s taught at American worthless universities. You know how I define lazy ideologies? They give you a very simple pattern that explains everything, so that you don’t have to do complex thinking. This neo-Marxism is surprising in a sense, because it’s really hard for me to grasp how any adult person could find that shit convincing, because, for instance, game theory provides a much better explanation of how humans interact in groups; however, if you apply game theory to large human groups in a free system, what you get is basically cooperative meritocracy, a free market of ideas, goods and services that is self-regulating. Essentially, when you stop fucking with the system, people are motivated by self-interest to create things and provide goods/services that will be of most use to most people, because they trade those things for money which gives them more power. They are also motivated to limit disruptions to the freedom of the system by controlling crime, and so on. Sure, when you look at the system from the outside, the distribution of wealth and power always turn out to be hugely unequal, but that’s apparently normal not only for human groups, but also for physical entities; it’s called Zipf’s law, or Pareto distribution. So, basically, the entire “woke” understanding is just nonsense, it’s intellectual laziness and sheer idiocy. To think that you’re “awakened” because you have a simple pattern for explaining the entire reality and to keep sticking to it regardless of the evidence to the contrary doesn’t make you awakened, it makes you lazy, stupid and arrogant, but first and foremost it shows you’re deeply insecure, because only insecure people, who feel they are worthless, have to resort to such stupid forms of self-deception. I almost forgot, the “woke” are of course atheists, because they understand religion as a system of oppression.

The right-wingers are also “awakened”, only they call it “red-pilled”, in the much overused image from “The Matrix” movie. Basically, take the blue pill, you keep sleeping, take the red pill and you wake up and see the real world, ugly as it might be. This “red pill” thing is applied to almost anything, from wild and completely idiotic conspiracy theories where “they” are doing “thing x” to fuck you over, but you saw through it because “red pill”, all the way to the realization that women apply game theory to mating and sex, basically they will use all the power at their disposal to create what they see as preferable outcomes for themselves and their children. As we would say in Croatia, congratulations on discovering hot water. This “red pill” community is as arrogant and stupid as the “woke” community, and yes, they too are atheists, because they are “red pilled” to understand there’s no God, because science, and shit. They’re not the ordinary “sheeple” who will go to church and believe in God, they are “woke”, oops, sorry, they are “red pilled”. They are so much smarter than everybody else, because they got a rudimentary understanding of the intuitive interpretation of game theory.

As for me, I’m done. Fuck atheists; as far as I’m concerned, they can all shut the fuck up forever, because I’m done listening to their stupid bullshit arguments, the same stupid bullshit arguments I’ve been hearing for the last few decades. They always act as if they are the ones who figured it all out, and everybody else is stupid, but you know what? People have been building civilization, which was always tightly interlaced with their relationship with the transcendental – call it religion if you will – for thousands of years, and atheism has realistically been around only a few centuries, and in those few centuries they managed to wreck everything to the point where you are no longer free to state that humans exist in two sexes, male and female, which are distinct, different and immutable, because you’ll be attacked by rabid herds of fucking idiots who will try to destroy your life in every possible way. For something that purports to be inherently rational, it’s quite interesting how atheism spawns the most ridiculous, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific ideologies at a whim. Also, they like to say that religions are violent, but atheism is literally dripping with the blood of millions, from the French revolution and its guillotine orgies onwards. They come to power using lies and propaganda, and then they start killing everybody who doesn’t agree with them; that’s how their “rationality” works in practice. They argue with you just enough to confuse you and get themselves into positions of power, and then they simply use violence.

They will say the science is on their side. No, it’s not. It was, somewhere between 19th and 20th century, but it advanced to the point where it no longer is. You know why there’s so much talk about crazy shit such as “the multiverse” in today’s “science”? It’s because it was proven that this Universe wouldn’t work if some basic constants varied even the slightest bit, so you get either the option of accepting that it’s created by someone who knew what he’s doing, or that an infinite number of universes was created by accident and one of this infinity just happened to have the right fundamental constants and here we are to observe it. The trick is, by Occam’s razor, the hypothesis with an intelligent creator suddenly became infinitely more probable than the random-creation theory, because you need to introduce one entity in order for the hypothesis to work, not an infinite number of them. However, the “rational” atheists just skip over that inconvenient fact and talk about that multiverse bullshit as if that’s actually proven physics; as a footnote, remember Carl Sagan and his “Universe is all that is, all that was and all that ever will be”? Well, apparently that became inconvenient, so “multiverse” was pulled out of thin air, as a sleight-of-hand to rescue materialism and atheism. The same goes for the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever heard, because it doesn’t even understand that the wave-function collapse really works with how our quantified ignorance (also known as “probability”) transitions into knowledge, and imagines it actually has to do with anything in the actual universe. Today’s science is, for the most part, desperate garbage, the only purpose of which is for someone to get a PhD and grants.

I’m not saying that problems with atheism and materialism mean we should go back to some medieval religion. Those religions got kicked to the curb for a good reason; we can’t base our understanding of the reality on bronze-age scriptures written by sheep herders. However, we also need to accept the fact that those bronze-age sheep herders got more things right about what works in a human society, and what doesn’t. If you want to create a society that actually works, a bronze-age scripture will get more things right than all the “rational” atheist philosophies ever devised. It’s curious how there are people on YouTube who will point out all the ways in which our civilization screwed the pooch, but without pointing out that all the “primitive” and “regressive” things that came before actually got all those things right. I know why: because they would have to admit that the religions, such as the traditional Christianity, obviously possess better answers, far superior to anything devised in the “age of reason” and “humanism”. This would be highly unlikely if they didn’t have a better “source” than human reason. You can be “sceptical” as much as you like, and invent word-trickery and irony about religion, but if something is as stupid as you try to make it, and it gives better results and provides better predictions of social outcomes than anything you came up with, “stupid” or not, it’s better than anything you have, so as far as I’m concerned, you atheists can go collectively fuck yourselves, and I don’t want to hear a single word in defence of your stupid bullshit philosophy.

Now that we come to this, it’s interesting how the Catholic Church here in Croatia, several years ago, gave a perfectly accurate interpretation of the phenomenon of “gay marriage” and other “civil rights and liberties” considering normalization of all kinds of anomalous and aberrant behaviours, and their interpretation sounded too extreme and improbable, and they were for the most part laughed at. Their predictions of the destruction of the entire value-based structure of our civilization, as well as the destruction of the family unit and the traditional concepts of human sexual identity, were exactly right, everything they said was on point. It’s interesting how that works: all the “stupid” and “backward” traditional religions got it right, and all the “progressives” were completely wrong, to the point where you couldn’t be more wrong even if you actively tried. It’s as if those religions actually do know what they are talking about, of course using their own respective imagery when trying to “interface” with the infinity of the Transcendental. As a conclusion, I would concur with the quote from a Catholic priest, who said that atheism is an evil that can be fought only with fasting and prayer. Truly, atheism is an evil worse than murder, because all murders and other evils arise from the lack of awareness of God’s presence, and I would agree that it can be fought only by firmly establishing our consciousness in prayer to God and renunciation of our lower animal nature. Only thus can we be saved from this nightmare created by godless men and their father in spirit, Satan.

Gold and silver spiking

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Gold is at the all-time high in all currencies, including USD. Silver is having the third greatest recorded spike since the 1970s, but as you can see from the graph, its behavior has historically been fundamentally different than that of gold.

What does this tell us?

One thing is certain: both gold and silver had their greatest spikes at the same times, but silver spiked higher, more violently, making it possible for investors to make greater earnings if they were smart, but those spikes turned into suddenly appearing cliffs, the greedy ones fell off of. Basically, everybody who believed silver was going to the Moon got in late, somewhat akin to buying Bitcoin at $18K, they didn’t sell when they should have, and so you still have people who bought silver at $50/oz, and never sold because the loss would have been too painful; BTW, those $50 are not adjusted for inflation, so that would be much more money now. Why am I saying this? Because every time metals do this, and they did something similar in the August last year, some people get hysterical, screaming how silver is going to the Moon, it’s going to be more valuable than gold, everybody should put all their money into silver and never sell it. In September, when silver falls off a cliff, they disappear, and many people who bought into the hype are left feeling deceived. Why am I pouring cold water over hot coals here, despite the fact that I believe that the metals are indeed going to reach fantastic heights? Because, historically, at every single one of those spikes people were hyping the shit out of the situation, saying it’s going to keep rising forever, it’s going to the Moon, up to the very point where everything fell off a cliff. It happens with stock, it happened with Bitcoin, and it happens with metal. Every time there’s a spike, some people make up a rationale about why it’s not a bubble and why it’s not hype. Sure, the spikes happen because something was undervalued, but then hype gets into the picture and the price over-corrects.

One thing, however, is different now, compared to all the other times, and you can clearly see it on the gold price graph. This spike is much higher, and starting from a much taller “hill” than all others that came before it. This means the fiat currency is in deeper problems than ever before, especially since the spike from the 2012 ended when people were lulled into the false belief that the “quantitative easing” was a limited thing. Now it turns out that it isn’t, and some kind of logic says that if a certain trend was stopped by something, now that we see a similar trend, but it’s not possible for the same thing to stop it again, it’s not unreasonable to assume that this time the storm will be much bigger. Big enough, maybe, for the entire currency system to be fundamentally restructured, and at that point I would like to be 100% in precious metals, because although it might be a great way to make money, any money you might make by selling at some high point might become worthless once the currency system is transformed, and holding metal past that point is the only way to safety that I can see.

 

Access to precious metals might be restricted

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I found out today that a major Chinese bank is prohibiting its customers from buying precious metals, citing some bullshit “concerns”. Basically, for the good of their children.

HSBC and JP Morgan are blacklisting Perth mint, citing some bullshit “concerns“. Some children somewhere are suffering and they can’t stand it.

The real reason is that the major banks and the states want all the gold for themselves, at these cheap prices, and if the people are allowed to get into gold too quickly, the prices will rise and the market will dry up. I expect some AML law to be passed restricting or outright outlawing purchases of precious metals by the citizenry, because precious metals are bad things used for money laundering, financing of terrorism, tax evasion and poor children will cry if you buy gold, so only an evil person would have it.

So, basically, buy it while you can, unless you are a complete fool, and if you buy the bullshit the states and banks are telling you, you deserve no better than the fate they have in store for you. If you want to not be a slave, prepare to see yourself as a criminal and a terrorist, because that’s where this is going. You’re either a slave, or a criminal and a terrorist. You’ll be left with no middle ground. Obey their laws and be ruined.

PS.: If you think I’m being paranoid, watch this:

Gold

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It will be no news to anyone following me thus far that gold price recently rose to the all-time high in USD, and had long ago passed the all-time high in EUR. Also, if you followed me long enough, you’ll know that I predicted this much before the current corona-crisis and what not; so, you know those things have nothing to do with it, other than exacerbating the shortages of physical metal on the market, compared to the “paper”.

The expected question would be, is it still a good idea to buy, or should we wait for the current spike to subside? If you take a look at the graph, it’s obvious that the growth isn’t linear, and the price goes back a little after each spike, so the question is valid. However, we don’t live in “business as usual” times. There are presently no shortages of gold on the retail market, and the prices are well above those in the corona-peak, premiums and all. My assessment is that the target price of gold is somewhere in between 15000 USD per troy ounce, and 100000 USD per troy ounce, depending on several factors that are difficult to predict, such as the actual volume of fiat currency that will have to be backed by gold, the number of retirement funds, hedge funds and others who might exchange sovereign bonds for gold, the percentage of citizens with savings who might rush to gold in attempt to save their money from inflation, the percentage of holders of speculative and volatile assets who might want to save whatever they can when their respective markets collapse, etc. It’s difficult to predict, but in any case, the predicted end-game price of gold is at least 7.5x of what it is now. This makes long-term decisions easy. Short term, you tell me; I certainly can’t tell. There’s too much short-term chaos, even without people who don’t know what they are doing, and who seem to have taken to trading on their phones during the quarantine. I sense chaos, panic and anxiety in the air (coming from the deep levels of finance), with only a whiff of greed (and that comes from the hipsters who don’t know what they’re doing). What we want to do is do all the buying before the graph turns from linear to geometric, and at that point you’ll look at the gold price somewhere between the AC unit and the roof, projecting from the current graph on your screen.

What about silver? I don’t know. It might blow up, it might do nothing. I don’t know what it will do, and unlike gold, it didn’t do anything logical so far, so I can’t anticipate its behavior in the future. Sorry. I’ll stick mostly to gold, and hold just enough silver to not regret it if it actually does what some silver bugs are predicting.