Category Archives: society

Political induction

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There’s an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon I noticed in Western politics.

As time goes by, official narratives about things are first accepted unconditionally, and then as things move on, they are discredited and what used to be considered an extreme conspiracy theory turns out to be the truth.

However, nobody in the media or the political circus ever connects the dots, and concludes that if something is true for element x and for element x+1, it will most likely also be true for x+2, x+3 and so on.

No. Instead, every new “thing” is treated as if it exists in a vacuum, and the official narrative is to be unconditionally trusted. Also, reasonable people in the West who know that their media aren’t to be trusted with anything, unconditionally trust the official narrative about China, Russia and so on, and believe that every country the West wants to go to war with is a dictatorship ruled by a corrupt tyrant who oppresses his own people and something needs to be done about it. Also, induction is never applied and each new case is treated as if there were no precedent.

The problem, of course, is the emotional cost of the logically correct conclusion, because one would have to accept the fact that the media are controlled by an invisible ruling oligarchy, that the visible politicians are mere puppets, that we are not free, and there is no obvious way out. Also, the more one is invested in the system through “education” etc., the greater the emotional cost of realising it’s all based on deception and indoctrination and is not qualitatively different from the North Korean regime.

 

Why Apple and not Linux?

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I am aware of all the problems with America weaponizing IT by spying, withholding access to technology to those who defy them, and so on. So, why did I not migrate away from American technology, for instance by migrating everything to Linux?

I considered it, but eventually concluded that it wouldn’t solve anything, and would just make things difficult for me in the time before everything collapses anyway.

Let me show you my line of thinking.

I live in Croatia, which is an American vassal state. The government, police, military, courts and news/media are tightly controlled by America. In a best case scenario, I could have a computer that is not controlled by America, but the computer is the least of my problems if they really want to deal with me, as the example of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan illustrates. They, too, lived in an American vassal state and thought they could be independent, sovereign individuals, and they were proven wrong quite easily. I am perfectly aware that the Americans can at any time pay or pressure any number of local corrupt bastards to plant fake evidence, purchase fake witnesses and lock me up indefinitely on fake charges, if they really found me a threat. They don’t, because I don’t have a significant audience, but they could. Migrating my computers and phone to Linux would not solve any of those issues. If doing it would actually contribute to my safety from any kind of oppression, I would have done it already.

The second argument is that having a technological setup that depends on being able to log in to a cloud service in America might make it all defunct if something happened to either America or the Internet. If that happened, I guess I would have bigger things to deal with than the computer, but I do, in fact, always have alternatives. I have an old laptop with Linux/Windows dual boot, everything on it is up to date, and I can open it at any time, boot into Linux and, in case Microsoft and Apple do some kind of a lock-out, I can still go online and access everything. It’s not like I would have to learn Linux from scratch or anything. I also have a spare Xiaomi smartphone with a spare SIM card, in case my primary phone ceases to function. My main worry in case of a major Apple/Microsoft denial of service is inability to contact people or perform basic tasks, such as the access to Internet banking, mail, ssh, web and so on.

The third argument is that the operating system is actually the least of my concerns, as all hardware seems to be designed with back doors in mind, such as the Intel management engine (ME), which is an ARM core on every modern Intel CPU, that listens to the ethernet port and seems to be designed to wake the computer up on remote command, and perform tasks below anything the user can see or control. Above that is the UEFI/BIOS, which is also proprietary technology that does who knows what, and only then we get to the operating system. The entire palimpsest of technology is so complicated and convoluted that I freely admit inability to secure my computer infrastructure in any meaningful way, because the American back doors are installed in every aspect of the infrastructure. It’s as if the primary purpose of it all was to extend American power and influence, and everything else, such as utility, was a secondary concern, or merely a way to market it. The way they went nuts when Huawei started to out-compete them in selling infrastructure was telling; basically, they couldn’t order the Chinese to install all the back doors and spying tools they install through the American/Western/vassal companies, and every Huawei infrastructural device meant loss of control for America.

So, I could dedicate quite a bit of my personal time and effort to attempts of securing my personal IT sphere, and it would all probably be for naught, so I shrugged and decided not to even try – instead, I decided to secure my money by keeping it almost completely out of the state/bank system, keeping connected just enough to make it easy for me to pay the bills and purchase goods and services in the system before it all fails. You see, there are several levels of true sovereignty. The first is the level of physical power and invulnerability. The second level is money and influence. The third level is all the unimportant stuff people fuss about. I don’t have anything to protect me against the first-level threats. I have enough money on the second level to make me a hard target; close my bank account and I’ll laugh. Try to cancel my credit cards and you’ll find out I don’t have any. Try to make me default on my loans and see I don’t have loans, I do everything cash. I have debit cards because I have to pay for the online stuff, and that would be a problem. I do use communal infrastructure, like water and electricity, and I’m sensitive to interruptions there. I also buy food, so I’m sensitive to interruptions in supply. As you can see, I thought things through and decided that computers are a luxury that works in the present-day environment, which is quite fragile, and it might all blow up at some point, in which case I am prepared to deal with all kinds of contingencies, but migrating to Linux? Yeah, if in some unlikely case in a world without Internet and American services I need computers, I am sure I will be able to patch something together well enough to serve the purpose, but I am more concerned with water, electricity, food, antibiotics and so on. Essentially, it’s a non-issue.

A constructive approach

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There is, of course, a legitimate undertone to all that positivity/negativity talk, and it’s the same thing Jesus mentioned in his “log in eye” parable – basically, stop finding faults with others, because other than signalling your own supposed virtue, it only makes other people feel bad and accomplishes nothing good or useful.

This is a very real issue that needs to be addressed, especially in the age of the Internet and the social media, where everybody tries to make themselves artificially important by making loud and extreme claims that are meant to elevate their voice above the noise floor, and as a result, there’s a lot of hysterical shrieking about every conceivable topic, and any measurable effect of it all is markedly negative. Since it is not a new phenomenon, somebody already noticed it and, basically, stated that one should mind their own abundant flaws before addressing those around him, because, although everybody will always claim that there are more important issues in the world than fixing their own problems, this has always ever been but a way to avoid dealing with one’s own issues. Yeah, there’s plagues and war and climate change and pollution and what not, and there always will be, but how about you learn how to be polite, useful, responsible and honest first, instead of yelling about global warming and accomplishing nothing, eh? The world is perpetually unfixable and, by the way, it’s of no concern to you. Your job is to have a good relationship with God, and then externalize this by being God’s presence in the world, for the benefit of others. Nothing else matters.

Also, in dealings with others, if you have nothing constructive to say or do, it might be best to at least avoid doing harm, and the best way to do that is not to disturb people with critical opinions nobody asked for. Essentially, you need to understand that criticism comes with responsibility, because if you’re observing a problem, criticism must exist in the context of willingness to engage in solving it. If you don’t care enough to engage yourself in solving the problem, it’s obviously something you should not concern yourself with and remaining silent and minding your own business might be the best course for you. For instance, if you observe signs of poverty in your neighbour or a relative, the constructive way to approach it would be to tactfully ask if there’s a problem, and if there’s something you can do to help. Criticising or gossiping is neither constructive nor helpful, and you might instead take a big cup of STFU.

This is what someone probably meant by “staying positive” and “avoiding negativity”; basically, keep your nose out of other people’s business unless you are there to offer help. However, like all things, it was generalised way out of its area of usefulness, and caused a different set of problems.

Positivity

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I was just thinking about all the virtue-signalling and posturing that is currently in vogue, and remembered that I’ve sen something similar before: the “positivity” trend of the 1990s.

Positivity actually has a legitimate purpose in psychology, as I would know, having been proficient in autogenous training, which is a form of self-hypnosis, where positive formulation of suggestions is paramount. By “positive” mean statements such as “my hands are warm” instead of “my hands are not cold”, and so on. It seems that human mind doesn’t really work well with avoiding undesirable outcomes; basically, if you tell it what you don’t want, you’re not really telling it what you do want, which is very much like telling your driver to go “not to London”. That’s hardly a useful instruction, because “not London” is quite a large place.

So, positive suggestions such as “drive me to Bristol” or “get me coffee” work, and negative suggestions such as “drive me away from here” or “get me something other than tea” don’t. However, a whole movement of abject charlatanry developed around those basic truths, and “positivity” and “negativity” became amoral substitute for good and evil, and right and wrong, in a moral framework that tried to avoid such designations at all cost, in order to avoid any notion of religion.

You see, there’s a problem with rejecting negativity in expression. While it is true that you need to positively formulate your ultimate goal in order to be able to get there, it is also true that we often don’t have enough knowledge of the goal at the beginning of the journey. For instance, let’s say that you want to reach God, but what is God, exactly, to someone who is a mere beginner? God is something awesome and magnificent at the very extreme end of a multidimensional coordinate system of values – greatest consciousness, greatest truth, greatest power and so on – but what does that actually mean? Here, negativity plays an important part, because you can see all kinds of evil and depravity and say, “I don’t know what God is, exactly, but let’s assume he’s in the opposite direction from this”, and such a statement will, of course, not lead you to God directly, but if you practice the virtues that are opposite to the wicked depravities that are abundant in the world and easy to perceive, it will certainly help to move you from the starting point, and trying to imagine virtues by rejecting sins will give you some idea of where you want to be, which is of course not perfect, but “not perfect” is much better than “horrible” already, and as long as you understand that this is a transitory position and not a destination, I see nothing wrong with it. Hate and disgust directed at evil things imply some sense of goodness and virtue, and this can later be properly formulated, but as beginnings go, hatred and disgust are effective and dynamic enough to give you some momentum. Certainly, that’s not where you want to be stuck permanently, and you do need to transition your understanding from, for example, “I am revolted by all the perversions in modern society”, to “those things are instinctively revolting because they lie in the direction opposite of God, who is truth, reality and fulfilment”.

My problem with the positivity movement is not as much that it is wrong; it’s an ideological poison, akin to the modern variety known as “tolerance” and “diversity”. Positivity on its own can actually be extremely harmful, if it stops you from recognizing and changing things that are obviously wrong; likewise, tolerance for bad things isn’t a good thing, and diversity on its own doesn’t mean anything good, because is it really preferable to have many different bad things, and not one good thing? If you have many things, is it preferable to see them all as equal, or to choose between them based on some criterion of merit? It all looks like some kindergarten ethical philosophy of “nobody is wrong”; in fact, everybody is wrong, and everybody stands to improve, and stupid flattery is of no use whatsoever.

Without an ethical framework based upon the referential target of the Absolute, all quantitative and qualitative designations are pointless and worthless. What is right and wrong without God as the referential truth? What is good and evil without God as the referential goodness? Of what use is positivity without a referential absolute target? Also, if you understand that a statement “Satan is beautiful” is positive, and a statement “Satan is not beautiful” is negative, it becomes apparent that the entire thing on its own has no moral reference, and is a mere linguistic gimmick. Positivity starts making sense only after you obtain your actual moral reference from a worthwhile theology.

Dangers of AI

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There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about the dangers of AI technology – from human jobs being replaced, to terminator-like robots killing all humans.

My take on this, after having seen some of the AI achievements, is that the name “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer – “artificial stupidity” would be more appropriate. Those things are essentially stupid as fuck, and have some extreme limitations, but they do have the ability to quickly iterate across datasets in order to find a solution, if there is a clear way of punishing failure and rewarding success. That’s basically all they do.

I’ve seen neural networks being trained to win in computer games, and the end-result is amazing and exceeds human ability, simply because it’s a scenario where there are clear win/loss events that enable the neural networks to be trained.

In essence, yes, those things can replace a significant number of human jobs; everything that has to do with data mining, pattern recognition and analysis, trivial but seemingly complex work such as programming that consists of finding and adapting code snippets from the web, or iterative “art” that consists of modifying and combining generic tropes – that’s all going to be done with AI. Engineering work that would require too many calculations for a human, such as fluid mechanics solutions – turbines, rocket engines and so on – are all excellent cases for neural networks.

Unfortunately, military use is among those cases, where it is quite easy to create loitering munitions – basically, drones that hover in the air – that can be sent to scan enemy territory for everything that moves, then recognise targets to identify the priority ones, and crash into them. Ground weapons that recognise human targets and take them down with some kind of a weapon also fit this category, as well as underwater drones that use passive sonar to scan for exactly the kind of ship they want to sink, and then rise from the sea floor and hit it from beneath. This is all trivially easy to do with pattern recognition of the kind that exists today, combined with the kind of hardware that exists today. Imagining killer drones as the humanoid terminators is silly, because such a form would not be efficient. Instead, imagine a quadcopter drone hovering above in scan mode, seeking targets, and then using some kind of a weapon to take them down – a needle with some kind of venom would do. It’s all technically feasible.

The more dangerous thing is a combination of neural networks and totalitarian-minded humans, and by that I mean all kinds of leftists in the West. An AI can data-mine the information sources in order to tag “undesirable” humans, and then this tag would be acted upon by the banks, governments, corporations and so on, basically making it impossible for one to send or receive money if not compliant with the current ideological requirements. This already exists and it’s why we must look for all the things the governments attack as “money laundering friendly” and adopt them as means of doing financial transactions, because if it’s “money laundering friendly”, it means the government can’t completely control it, and if the government can’t control it, it’s the only way for us to survive totalitarian governments aided by neural networks. Have in mind that the governments talk about controlling all kinds of criminals and perverts, but what they really mean is you. Targetting universally hated groups is merely a way to get public approval for totalitarian measures that will then be applied universally. What we will probably all end up doing in order to evade fascist governments is transact in crypto tokens, and settle in gold and silver, in some kind of a distributed, encrypted network that will be incredibly difficult to infiltrate or crack.

Basically, the payment and financial systems have been modified to accommodate totalitarian intent for decades already, to the point where now even the common folk understand that something is not right, but they cannot even imagine the danger. If someone restricts your ability to conduct business and purchase goods and services, and connects that to your political attitudes, you can kiss every idea of freedom and democracy goodbye, and that’s exactly what the American “democratic” overlords have been quietly doing, both at home and in their vassal states. Unfortunately, Russia and China are no better, because government power over the populace is just too tempting for any government bastard to resist.

So, basically, I’m not really afraid of AI. I’m afraid of AI being used by evil humans to create a prison for our bodies and minds, and only God can save us from this hell, which is basically why I think a nuclear war that would decapitate all the governments and destroy the technosphere that gives them infinite power is a lesser evil. The alternative, unfortunately, is much, much worse, because a logical continuation of “business as usual” is being completely controlled by the madmen who will cull the population every now and then to “save the planet” or whatever makes them feel good about themselves, and control us to the point where even saying the word “freedom” would put you on some list you don’t want to be on.