Category Archives: society

Tiers of evil

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I’ve been thinking about various definitions of evil, and since I’ve been playing Witcher 3 a lot, I’ll use that as illustration.

The simplest type of evil is something that is universally harmful. For instance, a plague is universally harmful. It kills everybody equally and doesn’t discriminate between good and evil people. However, since a plague is not a conscious entity, you can’t really see it as evil; it’s merely a force of nature, like floods and avalanches. However, we can use this as a reliable standard – for something to be classified as evil, it needs to behave as a plague or a flood, only there needs to be a consciousness behind it.

Going by that, drowners in a pond are evil: if someone finds himself there, they will kill him. They have as much consciousness as wolves, though, so we can’t really talk about very organized evil. Basically, these are localized predatory beings that are universally harmful. In our world, a pond inhabited by crocodiles or a sea inhabited by sharks qualify as habitats of localized predatory beings that will eat you if you go there. The problem is, it’s easy to prove that crocodiles and sharks are dangerous to humans, but are they in fact evil? Is a hawk evil because it eats rabbits?

There’s a human equivalent of this kind of evil: bandits. Order of the Flaming Rose, for instance, consists of former knights that manufacture drugs, kill people and extort peasants. There are also gangs of deserters, pirates and cannibals that are quite similar to packs of wolves, drowners, necrofages, nekkers or ghouls; basically, they inhabit some place, and if you wade in, they attack you, no different from any other kind of pestilent monsters. Are they evil? They are certainly not good in any way I can think of. They are universally harmful, and they are harmful by choice and strategy, so there’s that. If you wanted a conscious plague, bandits are the closest thing. As you can see, the more conscious will and intelligence there is behind harmful actions, the closest we get to being able to easily define something as evil, so it’s obviously more about a state of consciousness, than actions themselves.

Next incremental step would be some sort of a serial killer, for instance that higher vampire that attacked Priscilla and others in Novigrad. He is a believer of the holy fire cult and targets people who are “sinful” in the eyes of his religion, and is much more conscious and deliberate than a pack of wolves and drowners, and also much more cruel, since he works very hard to inflict as much pain to his victims as possible, before he actually kills them. Geralt calls him a sick fuck, which is not wrong, but here we also have a very good taste of true evil.

Where do we go from a vampire serial killer belonging to a sick murderous cult? How about Caleb Menge, the chief witch hunter of Novigrad, the one hunting, torturing and burning mages, alchemists and non-humans in Novigrad? The main difference between him and the vampire is that the vampire is an amateur, and Menge is a professional, someone who organizes a whole movement of torture and murder in the name of madness. Can we go into the next level of abstraction, and say that the theologians who invented the religion that released and organized such evil in the world are the greater evil? Sure, but now we are venturing into very abstract territory, where we might end up with someone who didn’t actually burn witches at a stake, or torture anyone in his basement, and yet we must conclude that he’s more evil than those who do, because this is the logical conclusion we were heading to when deciding that a conscious murderer is a greater evil than a plague or a flood, because harm alone without consciousness does not constitute evil; consciousness, however, without actual direct harm, might prove to be the endpoint of this adventure of logic.

Let’s go further – the Crones of Crookback Bog. They are very easy to see as evil, because they kill and eat humans, with a particular taste for children, they are physically deformed and disgusting, and they are also mentally and emotionally deformed and vile. However, it might actually be that they are worse than that: in a very far past, they poisoned and perverted the ancient oak of Velen that served as some sort of a nexus of a druid circle, a tree of life if you will, and they are keeping it barely alive and feeding it broth cooked from human flesh every year, which might actually be the real reason why Velen is the worst place in the world, full of misery, dark evils, hunger and death. This is a regional evil, so to speak; it’s localized, but at a far wider locale than drowners in a lake, or a vampire serial killer. It is dark, perverted, disgusting, and profoundly evil in every sense something can be evil, from murder to spiritual darkness, and it envelops an entire region of the world.

The next greater evil on this scale is Radovid, the king of the united North, who actually started the persecution of mages, and who enveloped the entire North in the smoke of pyres, insane religions and slaughter. He is so incredibly evil and insane that I chose to conspire to kill him every single time I played the game. I’m not sure whether he’s worse than the Crones, but he happens to more selectively target good people, and turns the world into a hellish nightmare much more quickly and with less regional constraints.

The worst of all, and that’s already something considering the competition, is Emhyr var Emreis, Emperor of the Nilfgaardian Empire, the person who directly initiated the process that turned the North into a war-ravaged post-apocalyptic nightmare in which all lesser evils flourished. He is a cold, ruthless evil that wishes to grasp and swallow the entire world, to rule over all even if it means dancing on a barren graveyard.

Interesting, eh? In the world filled with monsters, and frequently monsters with super-powers, the two worst monsters I could think of are human.

Land of a Thousand Fables

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In one of the extension packs of the Witcher 3 game, the “Blood and wine”, the authors managed to make an excellent and accurate illustration of an actual “astral” process; they called it the “magical entropy”. Spoilers ahead, because I’ll have to provide a description.

Basically, a court mage created an illusory fairy-tale reality where the two princesses could play with the fairy-tale characters when they were children. However, the girls grew up, everybody forgot about the place for decades but it continued existing, and decomposing, to the point where the characters became crazy, malevolent and dangerous. The three little piggies became the three huge aggressive pigs, the big bad wolf killed the red riding hood and the hunter and threw them into the well, and now drinks with the pirates, the pixies are attacking everyone indiscriminately, the girl with the matches is a drug dealer, the Longlocks hanged herself by her own hair because the Prince Charming never came to her rescue because he broke his neck falling down the broken stairs of her tower, and so on.

This behavior of “magical structures” is in fact real and well known in the literature; Alexandra David-Neel, for instance, described behavioral degradation of a tulpa she created, where it became more and more nasty and malevolent with time. This happens as the energy invested in the entity by its creator is depleted, and it loses ability to access higher spiritual states, because this requires more energy. Basically, it loses the highest things it could originally access first, and then progressively degrades to the point of being able to access only the lowest demonic states, after which it completely loses coherence. You can call it astral entropy, tulpa degradation, or structural decomposition; doesn’t really matter, because none of the terms describe the phenomenon completely, and completely new terminology should be devised. What matters is that astral structures have a very distinct and recognizeable pattern of degradation, and they are by design net energy negative, meaning they would require a constant influx of energy in order to maintain a stable state, and if they are not externally powered, they degrade along the arrow of time. The way you need to design astral structures if you don’t want them to degrade is to provide them with either a power reserve, in form of a spiritual “crystal”, which is basically very condense and coherent form of localized spiritual energy, which then acts as some sort of a “soul” that drives the astral structure you designed, or you need to provide it with a link to God, that will keep it permanently powered, but this won’t work if the structure is in any way incompatible with God’s will and nature, but there are ways around this (for instance, when God delegates a duty to grant or deny access to another spiritual being, and this being makes a mistake due to negligence or outright stupidity). There is a third way, that is the darkest black magic by definition, and it consists of tricking souls into forming some sort of a symbiotic relationship with the entity, where they are tricked into powering it, and deluded into believing that they will somehow benefit from the process.

Why is any of this relevant? Well, it is in fact most relevant, because that’s where we are. This world is the “Land of a Thousand Fables”, and it’s powered in several ways: by our own energy captured through deception, by stolen spiritual crystals, and partially, probably, by the will of God, because Satan obtained permission to run his experiment unopposed, for a time. The reason magical entropy, as described in the game, crossed my mind, is because it is an excellent explanation of the phenomenon we are faced with. The structure we are locked within is going to hell because it lost power, which means it is progressively losing access to higher spiritual states, and acting exactly like you would expect from a tulpa that is depleted of energy.

The very specific aspect of this process, that is taking place as we speak, is America losing its “mystique” and attractiveness, like a wicked witch that magically presented herself as a beautiful and good lady, and the magical makeup is starting to show holes, revealing evil and rot underneath.

Inclusivity

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I watched an ad for the Google Pixel 6 phone yesterday:

I initially wanted to see the specs of the phone, but it turns out the ad was very revealing, in a political sense, the way reading the early writings of Marx is revealing – you just see all the robbery, poverty and starvation in the future. In case of this ad, you see the desired future as written by the present-day America: everybody is shallow, stupid, perverted, lame and obsessed with completely irrelevant garbage, and almost nobody is white. Also, everybody is content and smiling, for some reason.

That’s called “inclusivity”, which is another one of the newspeak misnomers; it actually means removing all the successful people from positions of power and calling it “social justice”; if everybody is black and brown, they say, the world will be a paradise.

No, fuckwits, because there already is a “planet” where everybody is black, it’s called Africa and it’s a shithole. The new America and Europe where everybody is black wouldn’t look like a Google ad, it would look like this:

That’s the “dreamworld” where everybody is black, the only thing that’s out of place are the electricity poles, because you won’t get any of that in a black people’s world. That’s white people stuff. Also, the phones, running water, in-door plumbing, radio, TV, Internet, satellite navigation, and so on. You shit in the bush, wash your arse in a creek, and you get parasites. Also, you drink water from that creek in which everybody washes their arse, and into which the elephants shit. Also, it’s ruled by gangs wielding machetes. AK-47s are all fine but they are made by the white people, too, so no ammo for those in Wakanda.

Besides, since when is “inclusive” a good word? How is it a desirable quality? Would you want a sexual partner that is “inclusive”, in a sense that anyone can fuck them? Would you want to send your kids to a school that is “inclusive”, in a sense that anyone can get in? Do you want a job that is “inclusive”, in a sense that anyone can do it? I didn’t fucking think so. Inclusive isn’t good, unless you’re a retard, a whore and a loser. Exclusive is good. Exclusive is a thing to strive for. You want a job that’s so demanding that only a few can do it, and you want to be one of the few. You want a woman who will have only one man, she wants the best and you want to be that best one. You don’t want a car anyone can have, you want a really good, exclusive one. You want to send your kid to a school that has so stringent criteria that only the best can have a hope of passing the qualifying exams.

Inclusive, that’s where you don’t want to be, if you have any self respect. Aim for the stars, because mountains are not high enough.

The ever tightening grip

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I watched this video last night:

Basically, with Windows 10 it was “recommended” that you turn on the UEFI encryption keys and the “trusted platform” stuff. In Windows 11, it was a precondition for installation. Now they are planning to build something into the CPU itself, so that you can’t run an OS that hasn’t been approved by Microsoft, basically. What the author of the video didn’t say, and what I find glaringly obvious, is that this isn’t about Microsoft, it’s about America. They want to make sure that “their technology” can’t be used by anyone on their sanctioned entity list, because, if you pay attention, you will see that Microsoft, Apple, Google and similar extensions of NSA routinely sanction countries that refuse to bend over to America, by the principle of “if you refuse to be our slaves we’ll take our toys away”. Let’s say that Macs and iPhones outright refuse to work in any truly sovereign country. You take a thumb drive with Linux, install it, set it up and take a slight hit in comfort and productivity because the open source stuff isn’t written by people whose pay check depends on all the details being polished. However, you will still get the job done, and in some aspects the Linux way of doing things is actually better. I was actually quite productive on Linux when I had it on all my personal systems; the only exception is photography, because nothing on Linux is even in the same decade as Lightroom. But would I manage; oh yes. And if Windows/Mac didn’t really exist as an alternative, I would venture a guess that excellent Russian and Chinese commercial software would start appearing for Linux in short order. So, things would not only work, but also improve with time.

However, if the Americans succeed in putting this “trusted platform” shit in the CPU, it means that you won’t be able to run Linux or BSD on any American-designed hardware anywhere in the free world (because that’s what the “sanctioned entities list” really is). It’s not unexpected, and I actually think they are kind of late with this, but if anyone thinks Microsoft could lobby to put this stuff in Intel and AMD CPU designs without not only approval, but direct order from the NSA (and probably other deep-state structures as well), I have real estate on the Moon to sell you.

So, what does this mean in practice? Is it worrisome enough to warrant an immediate transition to non-American-designed computer architecture and non-American OS? Yes, if you’re a sovereign state. For individuals, it’s a more complicated matter. It’s worrisome enough for me to warrant building and maintaining redundant systems I can use in case this becomes a problem.

Smartphone to dumbphone?

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For some reason I got a few videos about switching from smartphone to dumbphone and back in my YouTube stream, so I actually checked them out because the idea seemed bizarre. It turned out that some people are so overwhelmed by a smartphone that they just can’t leave it alone; they constantly find things to do with it, from social media to all the music and stuff you can listen on it, that their entire lives get absorbed in it. The reason why I find it bizarre is that my iPhone sits somewhere on the desk all day and I use it only for internet banking purposes (because Revolut, for instance, doesn’t have a desktop app so I have to use a mobile device) or when someone calls me; basically, when I’m home, I either don’t use it at all, or I use it for very specific things, the way I use a tootbrush or a coffee cup. When I’m going out, I put it in my pocket and basically forget about it, unless I want to check something. I’m probably the least typical smartphone user; I don’t use social media at all, I don’t listen to music or watch videos on my phone, but I do actually need a smartphone, because when I need it, it’s for checking some website or chat or map or things like that; my “screen on” time on the phone is perhaps five minutes a day, if even that. Still, I do kind of understand the problem people are having with them; it’s just that I get stuck on YouTube, watching hours of political, tech or historical videos, and it’s quite easy to lose the whole day like that. Still, I don’t consider it a loss; I want to keep informed in order to understand what’s going on, and analysis of the kind I’m doing requires keeping tabs on multiple data streams, but I occasionally find myself watching something that’s so far off-tangent that I wonder how I got there in the first place.

In any case, I think I’ve been doing it long enough that I can offer advice on how to manage addictive and time-consuming things on the Internet.

First, you need to be focused, as opposed to scatter-brained, and disciplined, in a sense of being in charge and not just clicking on shit that’s in front of you.

Second, you need to take breaks – take a long walk, or exercise, or something else that has nothing to do with either computers or the Internet. It doesn’t count if you use your phone in any way while doing it.

Third, no using the phone in the car. I can’t even tell you how annoying I find the people who drive while doing something on their phones, not to mention that it’s dangerous.

Fourth, when you’re with someone, talk to them. Don’t even touch the phone.

Fifth, do specific things, and when you’re done, let go of the phone, or the computer. Don’t fidget with it because you’ll always find something on it that will preoccupy your attention and waste your time. It’s a tool, not your connection with God.

Sixth, use an ad-blocker and similar tools for de-cluttering your screen. Don’t watch ads, don’t watch useless “entertaining” garbage, avoid live chats in favor of email and forums. Avoid Internet versions of “hanging out” – if you want to hang out, do it with friends in real life. Avoid functionality that keeps you “tethered”, in a sense that anyone can “ping” you at any time. That just keeps you plugged in and stressed. Turn the chat off unless you actually have something of importance to communicate, or if you expect to find something of importance there. In any case it’s best to write an e-mail. Chats are superficial, addictive, waste of time and for the most part they are disrespectful of other people’s limits and time, and if someone wants to keep you tethered it indicates an insecure personality. Avoid. Also, don’t ping others with useless shit – nobody really cares what you ate, or that you had to take a shit. Communicate important ideas, and if you don’t have any, shut up and read some books, and eventually that will change.

That’s basically it. If you’re scatterbrained, shallow and have an addictive personality, technology will certainly give you enough rope to hang yourself, but it isn’t an iPhone problem, it’s a dumbass problem.