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Jan 13 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
My 🧵attempt at summarizing Spandrell's essay on Bioleninism (biological Leninism)
Spandrell starts his essay reviewing the loyalty generating mechanisms of the ruling classes in Europe - in their transformations from feudalism to absolutism onto liberalism
archive.org/details/spandr…
Important note on what's being addressed: this is not about various forms of govt, but factional ruling class loyalty mechanisms
Which inner party faction rules a state / society, how cohesive / loyal / stable is this faction, and which factions tend to outcompete others by generating fiercer loyalty mechanisms? Which group will get to extract rents, and exclude others from doing so?
In the 1960s U.S. this would be white male WASPs (natural/evolved), in Ptolemaic Egypt it was the Greek speaking Ptolemaic dynasty (outside conquerors), in the Soviet Union it was the communist dregs (ethnics, criminals), etc.
Feb 20, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
If you work in data science, machine learning etc pay very close attention. The tools to rule your company, and forever squash any notion of "buy" (vendor) vs "build" have never been more accessible and at your fingertips. This will separate you from your peers going forward:
There's a sense in which what I'm going to say is completely stupid and obvious - "learn to work with these APIs" - but even in one of the largest tech companies I see complacency / separation happening as we speak.
Dec 13, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
One of the ideas that completely fascinates me lately is @CovfefeAnon 's "The Woke are more correct than the mainstream"
"South Africa used to have a Space program"
Liberals: "under the leadership of the ANC..."
Wokes: "yeah b/c apartheid" (b/c you locked up all the black ppl"
"Look at the decline of cities in the U.S."
Liberals: Republicans and their budget cuts refuse to fund schools, public services etc. Plus that's just nostalgia
Wokes: "It was only the good ole days for white people, blacks and gays were marginalized"
Jul 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
@CovfefeAnon For rw people with family or even just married, The opportunity cost of simply engaging in battle in order to just 'not lose' a relatively insignificant institution like the local library is enormous. For the single librarian cat lady - low opp cost for the cause
@CovfefeAnon The librarian *only* serves the cause in whatever way. For a rw'er, fighting costs time w/ kids etc. As Mr. Kaczynski pointed out - the leftist typology has extreme inferiority, intensely identifying w/ weak/defeated ppl and collectivist politics
Mar 19, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Lots of fundamental misunderstanding of the meme
Covid accelerated the trend of people spending increasing amounts of their time not engaging / socializing in palpable, physical reality but in an artificial, simulated hyperreality - a digital world of abstractions and images 🧵
'The current thing' is not about the substantive issue - it's about the process of technological control that provokes unquestioning obligatory social responses - not by a change in people's material reality but by changes to the inputs in their artificial hyperreality
Dec 7, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You have to understand German Unification - suddenly overnight it creates an autocracy of elite Prussian militarism powered by an economy w/ largest population in Europe all during peak industrialization
This Germany in Central Europe is surrounded by enemies on all sides
All under major influence of Britain, who has ruled the world since Waterloo. France and Britain with their combined dominions and colonies own a significant share of the world at this point, Britain is the leader, and German Unification massively upsets this balance of power
Dec 7, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Thomas Carlyle [proto-Joyce / Melville] is your DEFINITIVE #lawoffunny guide for the French Revolution, and more generally the enlightenment (thread)
The Festival of Reason was celebrated on the eve of its worst atrocities - mass drownings at Nantes and shootings in Lyon
Which was all true to the Revolution's Enlightenment form / origins - that it enthroned Reason, but unleashed Furies, worshipped Liberty, yet institutionalized Terror, it proclaimed Brotherhood, but ate its children
The Revolution culminates in a grotesque display of the law
Dec 6, 2020 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
@PereGrimmer Since we're relying on #lawoffunny for its predictive power, have we validated how well the law holds up historically? Maybe I missed a megathread - I couldn't help try to apply it to last election.. just one here
Thread
2015 - Trump kicks off his Presidential campaign with now infamous elevator scene to deliver speech focused on illegal immigration; media interprets as racist / xenophobic, Trump steps right into the exact impolitic media stereotype of Republicans nbcnews.com/news/latino/do…
Dec 1, 2020 • 19 tweets • 7 min read
"It all seems so obvious after you get the joke"
It's becoming too predictable - suspecting 'the science' just means bureaucrats in policy arm of govt agencies, promoted by corporate media lapdogs cheerleading govt authoritarianism, quick lit review
Donald Henderson, arguably most famous Epidemiologist of 20th century for eradicating smallpox - led a major research effort as part of a 2006 bioterrorism review and readiness plan
pre-Barbarossa: losing only 100k soldiers - Hitler achieved in 7 weeks what nobody else in history had done, not Napoleon, not Caesar
He had conquered & combined what is basically the modern day EU, relying on this new economic production
So Hitler's resource calculations relied on estimates of total production the army would depend on based upon each country's pre-war output
But countries did not come close to reaching these levels of production under coercion that they had achieved freely & individually
