On Specialization: Why Academic "Specialists" Are Fuckups.

There's a place for anger and frustration and every other emotion. Well, not stress, not in my life anyways. And there IS a place for fantasy.

The thing is, there is NO space for confusing planning and fantasy. You want to plan? Plan. You want to fantasize? Fantasize. But never do them simultaneously, and never mix them up, and never confuse them.

When you're planning, fantasizing is not allowed. And equally, when you're fantasizing, planning is not allowed! Mixing them up makes for pathetic fantasies and pathetic plans!

Calling on the cattle to rise up and change some law or other ... that makes for pathetic plans AND pathetic fantasies. If you're going to fantasize, start by drawing up a list of the top 10,000 people you would order to have killed. And go on from there. :)

You can't learn about the world without trying to redesign it. (Just like you can't learn to speak properly without hearing yourself). So to learn about the world you need to both plan AND fantasize. But at all times you should be aware and conscious of what you're doing.

Separation of concerns isn't just critical in planning. It's critical in all areas of life. And it's why you need to know at all times whether you're planning or fantasizing, so you can do that thing well!

The same goes for hopping from one issue to the next. You want to fix the world before finishing grieving? Fine. IF AND ONLY IF you know whether you're hopping or dodging. If you're dodging then freaking do THAT well. If you're hopping then do THAT well. And if you're overloaded emotionally or by work... then don't expect to accomplish anything at all except BEING overloaded.

If you want to do a thing, do it well. Make sure you know what you're doing and make sure you meet the preconditions for doing it well. Otherwise you're just deluded and playacting. And if you WANT to playact then sign up for theater school. And if you want to be deluded then don't hang around me because with my core value Truth I will fucking shatter your illusions.

And lastly, the exact same reasoning applies to academic specialists. And is the reason why I despise them. Because they don't specialize around learning or understanding their respective academic field. They specialize around the role of being an academic specialist. Someone who publishes within only their field, is respected by their peers and gets grants.

So they spend their entire lives never knowing what it is they're doing. Because if they did, they would be ashamed of what they do rather than being proud. You don't learn to understand chemistry by specializing on the role of a chemist, it just doesn't work. And you don't learn to make discoveries in the sciences, or inventions, or even discoveries or inventions in chemistry, by specializing on the role of a chemist. That works even less!

Academics are universally fuckups who don't understand specialization. That's why I despise their fake concept of "specialization" and their despicable "specialties" and every last academic and the whole institution of academia itself which was built on an artificial tie-in of teaching and research and sucking up to the government.

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. I am however telling you something you forgot, perhaps because you never learned to appreciate it properly in the first place.

Why Nuclear Bombs Bring Peace To A World Of Slaves

In Social Implications of Technology I talk about how expensive technologies are tools for the rich and cheap technologies are tools for the poor. And as technologies fall in price from infinity to expensive then society regresses, then as they fall further in price to cheap then society progresses. I alluded to killing technologies but I never made a complete analysis of it.

Military technology seems to follow the same rules as all other technology. When it goes from infinite to expensive, it makes conflicts bigger (the tommy gun was two year's wages) and when it goes from expensive to cheap (the nuclear bomb) then war suddenly becomes too scary to engage in. We don't want poor people killing rich people after all, do we? Poor people killing each other only at the direction of rich people, now that's fine.

A nuclear sub with one or two dozen missiles each with a dozen warheads costs about a billion. If we assume it kills 100 million people then that's 10$ per life extinguished. An AK47 at 100-1000$ will kill how many? Hmm. But we don't have to guess. We can simply look up How Much A Nuclear Bomb Costs. So actually, nuclear weapons are pretty damn cost effective. They're cheaper than bullets assuming that you successfully kill one person per bullet!

Scary isn't it? How after you factor out emotion / childrearing mode, and pure raw techno-economics, there's pretty much absolutely nothing to human will. And you know, when you think about it, THIS MAKES SENSE! Because 99% of the human population are slaves, either submissive (90%) or passive (9%). They are such slaves that they seriously consider aggressive people to have high willpower! How fucking revolting and pathetic!

So yeah, in a world completely dominated by slaves, the ONLY thing that matters to human history is raw emotion (which coordinates the masses of slaves in language primitive enough to unite them) and the economics of the technology they have available to them. And that's it.

Don't Force Evil People To Work: Save Jobs For Non-Evil People

Imagine a world where there's 25% unemployment and all of them are Evil because Evil people have been identified and are blacklisted. Can you imagine an "anti-discrimination for Evil people" legislative package? It would be a tough sell! It might put schizophrenics in perspective as potential employees.

More importantly, imagine what this would do to people's perception of having a job. Having a job means you're a non-evil person and it doesn't even matter how much you're paid. Oh you're a janitor? That's nice, at least you're not evil! I believe people would devalue currency and that the job itself would count as a marker of social position, a political marker effectively. Who CARES if people on welfare are paid just as much as you for doing precisely nothing? They don't have a job!

Of course, if jobs become purely voluntary and aren't paid much if anything, then all those shitty coercive things about jobs (competition, payment, dictatorship, guaranteed jobs, working with assholes) will all have to wither and be swept away. Hell, in that situation, it wouldn't even matter if paid employment collapsed and disappeared. People would still have jobs as a social activity, as something to do. They would merely be volunteer-jobs with no Evil people allowed.

Tying jobs to income and to deservingness (merit based solely on past deeds and actions) is the most corrosive and ludicrous thing imaginable. Let Evil people have an income so they're out of the way and don't cause trouble, regardless of whether or not they deserve anything. And keep the jobs for non-evil people!

Trying to force Evil people to be Good caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why should we be trying to force them to work? Or to do anything at all? WE DO NOT NEED EVIL PEOPLE. This isn't the fucking middle ages. All we need is to get them out of the way! Cut them a check and be done with them.
And if that isn't enough then remember that deservingness is an Evil notion propagated by Evil people. Once Evil people are all sidelined away from jobs, nobody who has a job will care whether or not jobless people "deserve" an income.

And while Good people firmly believe all Evil people should die, most of the population isn't Good. If Evil people get to live then they should have an income whether they deserve it or not, just to get them the fuck out of the way. That's what we NEED, to get them the fuck out of the way!

It's not a coincidence that giving homeless people a paid apartment and groceries is the cheapest way to deal with them by far. It's just a manifestation of the fact that Evil people always fuck things over. Toying with Evil is a stupid idea, no matter whether you call it 'fairness' or 'rehabilitation' or 'proper procedure'.

There are many societies on Earth that can't afford to just sideline Evil people. In fact, there are many societies that are so primitive they're actually overrun with Evil people! Africa comes to mind. But even America with a hefty quarter of its population being Evil can afford to sideline Evil people. And it can't afford NOT to. We can all see what a total fucking wreck actually encouraging Evil (narcissism) was for the USA.

Reserving Jobs For Humans? NO!

I can actually respect them for it. They do the stuff I don't want to do and can actually be happy doing it. You just have to get them to help humanity in their own way... Humanity obviously can't have everyone be Researcher or System Designer or few things would get done. I figure if we progress further we'll probably get less drones since people will care more about what happens.

Look, I respect that it was necessary for human beings to do all this shit. But it's not even true that I wouldn't want to do it or that I couldn't be happy doing it. So long as it was constantly varied from one week to the next, I could have been happy at it.

Job Complexes are a concept from Participatory Economics by Michael Black. PARECON should really have been implemented ... oh yeah, it already is implemented in this company called Semco SA in Brazil. And just about nowhere else in the world! Even if temporary and freelance workers sort of quality.

So you see, the workplace of today isn't identical to the hierarchical workplaces of 300 years ago because it HAS to be. Work doesn't HAVE to be mind-numbing and repetitive. The workplace is identical because a lot of the population is Lawful Evil. Because people are Fascistic arseholes.

Hell, they're so Evil they actually believe that competition HELPS over most of the planet. Despite the comprehensive book No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn. I don't recommend it by the way, it won't have anything you don't already know or believe to be true. I do recommend you use it as ammunition against arseholes.

But getting back to my point! The point is that I respect that it WAS necessary. Emphasis on was. It no longer is, therefore I no longer respect them for doing jobs that are unnecessary and subjecting themselves to demeaning, dehumanizing, and hierarchical subjugation to do them.

And you need to think very carefully about this point: robots vs slaves. Because before robots and mass production came along, some people did have hygiene, and large homes, and mass communication, and publishing, and long-range communication, and books, and education and this and that.

You know who they were? The rich! Yes, there were ... you know, just read Social Implications Of Technology.

Prices have come down and things which were infinitely expensive in the past became expensive and now they're getting cheaper. And while it's generally bad for society when they go from infinitely to merely expensive, it's super-good when they go from expensive to cheap. Even killing technologies such as AK47s.

The problem for your position is that using slaves puts a floor on the price of goods. It intrinsically makes them expensive. It intrinsically makes it so that only the rich can afford them. Rich people could always afford artisanal crafts.

But for poor people to afford them required mass production and industrialization. Automation! Mass production is an intrinsically socialist idea just as artisanship and craftsmanship are intrinsically aristocratic. Same with elections being aristocratic.

Nowadays, only rich people can afford custom-designed products. And I long to see the day when AI make it so that everyone gets custom-designed stuff. I already said as much in what space colonization would really look like. Every possible opportunity will be taken, no opportunity will ever be wasted, because personalized design of everything (even your life) will guarantee it.

Hell, I'm a mental systems designer. I help design human minds. I help design human lives. I know what can be done. I know the glories that can be achieved. Read The Crimes of Ms Jean Brady for an idea of what a fairly ordinary person can achieved with a mind capable of systems design behind her.

I fucking want that. I want every person to have that. To be their own agent, to be forceful. I don't want poverty and deprivation. I don't want normal people to be slaves, or serfs, or "artisans" for the super-rich. Like the artisans employed by the Vickys (neo-Victorians) in Diamond Age. An execrable book, I recommend against it.

I want an EXPLOSION of mass-produced stuff. Even design! I want EVERYONE to be able to afford it, not just the fucking super-rich. I want to be out of a job! I want everyone else to be out of a job too! I want a genuine ludic civilization. One not where "people can be happy" but where people ARE happy.

What we have, fucking sucks. And your modest improvements to what we have ... fucking suck. Too little too late. I want infinitely more.

Totalitarian Communism Works Great!

Many people believe the problem with communism or socialism (especially the Soviet kind) is to "motivate people".

Well, not really. The biggest problem was distribution and logistics. Marxist use-value theory made no allowance for the gain in value achieved by transportation and trading. Capitalist theory of course has the exact reverse problem.

You say that collectivization disincentivized people? I retort that can't possibly have been a problem because competition ALSO disincentivizes people.

And furthermore, that Semco SA which is one of the most successful companies in the world, uses a totalitarian communist model. One that's even MORE totalitarian than Marxism. Toyota which is essentially fascist in nature, has many elements of communism too.

The big problem with the Bolshevik's version of communism, and there is no way you can possibly know that, is the coercive nature of it. And that came about not because people were forced to work or any such nonsense but because everyone was included.

You see, the big problem wasn't that everyone was guaranteed food, shelter, clothing, and a smattering of luxury items. The big problem was that everyone was guaranteed a job. Which is something YOU are trying to replicate when you imagine a Utopia.

You see jobs as bad things because the filthy capitalists have dehumanized them and tied them to money. Because they've been made compulsory and externally motivated. You idiot!

Haven't you ever heard the parable of the old man who stopped a gang of kids from hurling insults at him by first rewarding them for insulting him with money, and then reducing the amount of money from one day to the next?

Real motivation can only ever be internal. You tie jobs to money? Then you've automatically demotivated everyone. You guarantee jobs to everyone? Then you've ALSO automatically demotivated everyone!

Meaningful jobs, things to DO, are GOOD things. People fucking CRAVE them. That doesn't mean it's your fucking job to provide them! Let people fucking MAKE their own jobs!

The only thing more retarded than providing jobs to people is to provide them AND ruin them. The capitalists do this because they are fucking EVIL. The communists did this because they were GOOD. They did it out of good intentions and not knowing how human psychology works.

The problem with forced collectivization wasn't collectivization, it was with the 'forced' part of the equation. People do AWESOME work when they collectivize. When they feel part of a team, of something greater. Now you force them to work with people they despise? You just ruined their job!

If you think about it, you'll know it's true because people create coops and unions all the fucking time. But the clearest example was in the middle ages when an English king heard that the yeomanry were collectivized to deal with the law. They organized together in groups to vouch for each other you see.

Well, the king thought that was a fine idea! But what about those people whom nobody would vouch for? Let's force other people to vouch for them! And very rapidly, what had been a totally spontaneous self-organization was utterly destroyed when it turned from voluntary to compulsory.

The Bolsheviks tried to force good intentions on evil people. That's why they failed. Because evil people simply refused to do good or be good, and people came to hate being in their proximity.

You want a communist system that works? You don't have to kill evil people. You don't even have to starve them. You simply have to not cater to them.

Semco SA does that. It's totalitarian, it's communist, it's also purely voluntary. You don't want to work with a particular team? You don't have to. They don't want to work with you? They don't have to either!

The Sexual Attraction Equation

Someone asked on a mailing list I subscribe to whether sexual attraction followed a 2-dimensional model. Ugh, so so wrong! No, that isn't even close to anything real. This is the complete form of the equation for sexual attraction:

Fetishes if any + face (neurological averaging) + abstractions (core values) + body-part attraction (tits, ass, legs, arms, genitals) + overall body proportions + interaction dynamics (dominance, submission, attunement, etc) + assortative mating (non-core values).

And I'm leaving out pheromonal attraction because I don't know anything about it.

Now gender identity by comparison is MUCH simpler! It's just core values + non-core values!

Of course, what people are actually interested in is the dimensional decomposition of the solutions to these equations. Well, I will simple them up for you to understand: that whole male vs female attraction shite is oversimplified crap spoonfed to simple-minded idiots.

See, the way it works is that sexual arousal is semantically content-free. It has no meaning! You're not attracted to ANYTHING, at all. Except maybe "people". Or if you have fetishes then the fetish in question. Otherwise, it's just things that turn you off. Or things you're conceptually attracted to. Oh and beauty but beauty is just neurological averaging and is essentially non-sexual.

And things like core values and non-core values? They are *too complicated for idiots to understand*!

Finally, to answer whether sexual attraction is a choice, when the sexual attraction equation returns negative numbers for the entirety of one gender, then that person is exclusively attracted to the other gender. When it returns negatives for both genders then they're asexual. And when it returns some positives in both? Well in that case, take a good look at the above equation and realize how fucking retarded your question is.

Engineers Boast Of Creating Mind Control Technology

Take a good look at this creepy ass story of imbecilic morons playing Doctor Frankenstein for no reason whatsoever.

Now, before you get on my case, I know full well that the ultimate application of this technology is brain-downloading of human brains. And they're doing it this way in order to verify that their brain interface is correct, reliable and portable. I fucking KNOW this. I am ALL FOR IT.

But that's not what these scum fucking scum fuckers are SAYING, is it?! What they're saying is just utterly fucking REPULSIVE! Organic computers!? WHAT. the. FUCK?!

If you want neuromorphic computers, Hewlett Packard is working on memristors to produce just that. And they will ultimately be FAR cheaper, and FAR more reliable! And far more powerful and far faster!

But no, these scum sucking fuckers are going the BIO route. Why? Bio bio bio bio! Like saying fucking "magic". Magic makes it better! Bio's better! These scum fuckers are trumpeting an INFERIOR and OBSOLETE technology! A REPULSIVE inferior and obsolete technology. A creepy and freakish technology. WHAT. THE. FUCK?!

It almost looks like they're deliberately un-selling their technology. Pitching it in such a way so as to deliberately turn off or repulse their audience and market. Almost! But the TRUTH is these are the same kinds of worthless scum that work on nuclear weapons and LANDMINES. And BIOWEAPONS!

And so here they are trumpeting for all the world: look we've got a better landmine! Look we've got bioweapons! Look we've got MIND CONTROL TECHNOLOGY!

Fucking engineers. That's what this is. Fucking engineers. Engineers incapable of synthesis, thus incapable of JUDGEMENT. Incapable of ethics or morality except as some stupid list of rules saying THOU SHALT and THOU SHALT NOT. And because nobody TOLD them "thou shalt not make mind control technology" they think it's GREAT.

No fucking judgement. Fucking engineers!

Nuclear Power Should Never Be A Popular Issue

You know, I'm not just well-read on nuclear issues, I'm also reasonably well-read on anti-nuclear activists.

So I can tell you that when anti-nuclear activists in Canada categorized the Canadian government's financing the construction of nuclear power plants in China as a multi-billion dollar "subsidy" instead of a LOAN to be paid back with interest ... that was entirely typical of anti-nuclear activists everywhere in the world.

How can that possibly be? Well, it's because the nuclear industry is one of a few major industry (eg, semiconductors), that is a genuinely modern industry. It could not possibly have existed in the past because no part of it is comprehensible to a non-analytic. EVERY part of it is HUGELY complex. Every ASPECT of it is hugely complex. There is nothing about it that is simple.

There is absolutely nothing about the nuclear industry that your typically mentally retarded zealot is even remotely capable of comprehending or understanding. Not one thing. And that is why everything which spews out of anti-nuclear advocates is a lie, a misdirection, or a misrepresentation of some kind. Without exception.

In fact, not even the 'iconic imagery' of nuclear power plants is accurate. Not even something as simple as that. Every journalist who wants to pass off a picture of a nuclear power plant looks for cooling towers. Only, coal plants have cooling towers too. Most power plants do. What identifies nuclear power plants are the containment buildings with their domes.

Non-analytics and non-experts in the field literally couldn't get a single thing right.

Did you know that the steel pipes in a nuclear power plant, the ones that transmit high pressure high temperature steam, aren't even steel? :D They're metal and they're an alloy, but they're not principally made out of iron. They're made out of nickel - hasteloy. Or the cheap ones are just internally lined with hasteloy but you can't exactly dismiss the lining as unimportant because it's what makes the pipes work. Even something that simple. And it's so across the board.

Nuclear power should NEVER be a popular issue because the vast majority of the population is totally incapable of understanding or comprehending any aspect or component of its operation. Nuclear power is one of those wondrous areas where human civilization has completely outstripped its pathetic magical-thinking forebears. It probably won't surprise you to find out that the French nuclear union is explicitly communist.

Come to think of it, that's WHY zealots hate nuclear power so much. Because literally no part of it is comprehensible to them. Because it's a monument to their idiocy.

Nuclear Industry Needs More Accidents To Prosper

Nuclear accidents are a bad thing? A terrifying or worrisome thing?

(scoff) Yeah right. I've got news for you, supertankers cause oil spills, coal plants kill a million people each and every year in Western Europe! Hydroelectric dams break, causing enormous deadly floods. And oil refineries blow up too. And guess what? That's ALSO "simply damage we can't undo yet". But the difference is that nobody expects them to! EVER. But nuclear? It's so fucking clean that you almost realistically expect it to be 100.000% clean. What a fucking joke!

No industrial activity will EVER be totally clean. Absolutely NOTHING in physical reality CAN be. Worse comes to worse, protons decay! Enough eons pass and you've got a small but non-zero chance of a micro-black hole forming by quantum tunneling and destroying something. Everything dies, all things. Everything comes to dust. But nuclear? You seriously expect it to be ETERNAL. Because it's the power of the GODS! Talk about unrealistic expectations.

The truth is this. If a Chernobyl happened each and every year, it wouldn't be a big deal. How many people died from those two incidents? 50-something? It beats the million people who are dying from air pollution in Europe each and every year.

I'm not an apologist for the nuclear industry because I think it's got nothing to apologize for. As far as I'm concerned, we should have MORE nuclear accidents because then people would get fucking used to them! But no, realistically, Fukushima is the last nuclear accident that's gonna happen in the next century. Fucking crap.

The Economic Benefits Of Personal Computers

Some people (engineers and fascists, not that those two terms aren't almost synonymous) have difficulty grasping that modern personal computers have vastly increased productivity of individuals. They say correctly that big mainframes greatly helped the record-keeping of large corporations. And that smaller computers helped the lesser record-keeping of smaller corporations. And that's it, because individuals can't possibly be doing any record-keeping.

These people also get greatly upset over computer games and other modern "distractions" and are dismissive of the fact these things are more enriching and valuable than other equally mindless age-old pastimes of chatting over the water cooler, being brainwashed by the idiot box, square dancing, and bobbing for apples. Never mind those, age-old means traditional and there can't possibly be anything wrong with that! In fact, when people aren't slaving for a corporation they should just go to bed like the good slaves they are.

Never mind the benefits of automation. The order clerks that don't have to be paid for because web sites are processing their orders. The large retail warehouses (not a new phenomenon) where order pickers are aided by autonomous robots. The ATM machines everywhere. The self-checkout machines. Being able to do your banking and taxes online with the aid of software. No, we're not going to go into those. It's not like they greatly benefit individuals and the economy and are aided by small computers.

No, we will here talk about individual record-keeping. Because individuals DO in fact keep records. These are called "notes". And in the bad old days which the engineers are conveniently forgetting, individuals had to keep records ANYWAYS. They were just on this thing called "paper" which had no search functionality, random or fast lookup. In the bad old days, people used these things called "index cards" as meta-records. They were shit! In the bad old days, people did linear searches through all of their records instead of using 'grep' or 'google'.

People DID have records in the bad old days, and they DID engage in record-keeping. But in the bad old days, even though you could write at as much as 1/10th the speed of typing, getting writer's cramp a hundred times faster than RSI (and infinitely faster if you're smart enough to switch to Dvorak keymap and/or get a Kinesis keyboard). Hmm, a 10-fold productivity improvement you say? Nay! Because in the bad old days, retrieval of records was so difficult it was prohibitively expensive. Yea, in the bad old days, in order to be able to maintain any kind of records, you needed very high intelligence to remember where your records were.

And nowadays ... intelligence no longer matters. You want to remember something? Type it up. If you're moderately organized, you'll be able to remember it. So that nowadays, it's possible for someone to function with as low as 2 slots in working memory when people normally have 4, in other words at less than 50% capacity. You know those times when your head is fuzzy and you're braindead? Well, it's actually possible to measure numerically how far your mental capacity has gone down. And it no longer matters. Because you can still do productive work ... with your cybernetic memory.

Thanks to personal computers, everyone now has an IQ of roughly 150. An enormous boost to personal productivity and the economy. Sure, people aren't any more logical than they ever used to be, and they aren't any more creative than they used to be. But in terms of raw intelligence, raw memorization ability, the boost provided by computers is phenomenal!

Of course, none of that matters as individuals cannot possibly matter to slaves or insects. Which is what the typical engineer is.

And to think, this is all without the computer / Internet revolution having happened yet. Because it still hasn't. For all that you morons believe it's taken the world by storm, it is barely inching its way through the world. It still hasn't happened in any meaningful way as cybernetic memory (or dirt cheap social organization provided by the Internet) is nothing compared to what's coming.

Speaking of dirt cheap social organization provided by the Internet. That was pioneered by people illicitly sharing porn and movies. It took over two decades for business finance to move to take advantage of it. So no wonder fascists and engineers, to whom only corporations and governments could possibly matter, would be utterly blind to the phenomenon. After all, it's not like dirt cheap porn brings any value to anyone's life. Certainly not to someone who takes seriously the notion of sexual abstinence for adolescents.

Power-Hunger Is Great

... so long as it's not from Evil people.

Power hunger is directly proportional to dissatisfaction with life. Or something like that. And since I consider this world Hell, I love it when people have their eyes wide open and see the world for the shithole it is. Power-hungry people who want to change this shithole for the better are my kind of people.

There is nothing evil about Power, it's a simple necessity to get nearly anything you want out of life. It's not like fame or freedom, which ARE evil. Fame being intrinsically evil and freedom being sought by apathetic people who are content letting others suffer. And money? Money IS power!

It's too bad that power is mostly sought by Evil assholes who want power for its own sake. Not to DO anything with it but merely to enjoy its possession. That too is evil because it deprives Good people of power. It deprives Good people of the ability to do Good things.

So power is great. The things that ordinary people say are better or less controversial than power? THOSE are the evil things. And like all great things, Evil people want to coopt and steal it.

I suppose it's like Heroism and Courage, which are also bad and evil, and all too frequently coopted by Evil people and Evil societies. So there's a lot of precedent.

Neurodiversity: Why Eco-Zealots Should All Be Killed

Eco-zealots talk a lot about "biodiversity" like it's something wonderful. All those wonderful diseases and parasites that kill human beings, yeah! Well, let's talk about neurodiversity for a moment.

Culture Is More Complex

There are fewer than 100,000 genes in the human genome. There are 800,000 words in the English language. There are a mere 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. There are over 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each with an average of 7000 synapses, for a total of 700 trillion synapses.

(You believed DNA coded for your personality? Well, it's clear from the evidence that isn't the case. For those rare people who have distinctive personalities, the personality came about as the result of random chance. For the vast majority who don't, their personality was injected into their brains by those around them.)

Oh but you're going to say that human genes recombine to form a vastly greater number of proteins? Funny that, but concepts recombine to form ideas and English words combine and recombine into English sentences. The proteins combine into organelles, cells, organs and bodies. The sentences combine into calculations, instructions, artifacts, industrial processes and economies.

(Concepts are not "memes" by the way and ideas aren't digital! So-called "memetics" has nothing intelligent or meaningful to say about ideas, culture or society, that wasn't said better earlier. In fact, the central premise of "memetics", that all ideas have intrinsic value to the brains that hold them, that the brain doesn't treat conceptualization and valuation independently let alone completely separately ... this premise is FALSE and a LIE!)

Culture Is More Rapid

Cultural evolution is vastly more rapid (and powerful!) than mere biological evolution. After all, biological evolution can't give rise to an entirely new species in a single generation. Cultural evolution has given rise to an entirely new society in a single generation! Not just once but repeatedly, over and over and over again.

Think of the de-Nazification of Germany, think of the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, the rise of Marxist Communism, the French Revolution, Quebec's Quiet Revolution. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, the computer revolution, the railroad age, the telecomm age, the information age, the rise of robotics, the rise of genomics!

Culture Is More Powerful

Now let's talk power for a minute. How many bacteria live out in open space? None, zero, zilch, nothing. And yet there is a thriving colony of satellites operating out in space right now. How many life forms tunnel through solid rock? None! And yet Tunnel Boring Machines routinely do, right now. How many life forms span a single kilometer in length? None! Not even Pando comes close! Yet transoceanic fiber optic cables routinely span thousands of kilometers!

How many species divert raging rivers? None! Yet we routinely build hydroelectric dams. How many years did it take all life on Earth to alter the composition of its atmosphere? Two billion. How many years did it take culture to do it? We still have a thousand years to go before the 10,000 mark is reached, and that's from the very genesis of culture, not even the birth of the Industrial Age.

How much mass has the biosphere? 600 billion tonnes of carbon after 3 to 4 billion years. And that is all it will EVER amount to. How much mass has the technosphere? 5 billion tonnes of steel and cement being added to it just last year. And we've barely even started! Culture levels mountains and drains seas, literally. Biology ... just fucking sits there like a cadaver, completely inanimate.

Culture Is Vastly More Valuable

Getting back to the point, it is clear to anyone that is not completely brainless and/or lost in mindless hatred for humanity, that a single human life is more precious than en entire species of cute furry little creatures. One starving street urchin in Rio de Janeiro is worth ... pandas. If it were a choice between that street kid's life and the extinction of a species, any species, I wouldn't hesitate to go for extinction. And I wouldn't stop to poll how other people FEEL, I would just fucking do it.

There are an estimated 9 million species on the Earth. So ALL of the Earth's biodiversity is worth little more than the human population of Papua New Guinea. And I fucking despise those infanticidal cannibalistic savages! Eco-zealots are complaining how humanity is causing mass extinctions? How thousands of species are dying every minute? Well it's a total lie, but even if it were true, I would only have this to say: GOOD!

You say that biodiversity is important to the survival of humanity? That "it's all about habitability"? That "sustainability" (stagnation) is enviable? LIES! Mono-cultured grains, orchards and plantations are fully capable of feeding humanity, which as per the proofs above is ALL that matters. And very soon, thanks to our technological evolution!, we won't even need those as we'll be eating vat meat or synthesized protein. Culture will make it so we won't need nature within a thousand years, whereas if it were left up to nature, we would all be extinct within the next hundred thousand years.

The human population of the Earth is 7 billion. Its worth, neglecting for the moment that some of those humans' lives are worth a billion times others', is completely unchanged by the extinction of homo sapiens as a biological species. If the entire human population suddenly became AIs and homo sapiens became extinct, the value lost by homo sapiens' extinction would be recouped after all of 6 seconds, during which 2 babies would be born and 3 people would die.

Eco-Zealots Are Worth Less Than Nothing

But as I said, not all human lives are equal in value. If eco-zealots believe that their own lives are worth LESS than a biological species' continued existence, I am quite willing to oblige them. In fact, I would go even further and say that they are worthless and all ought to die. After all, since an entire species' genome is numerically worth less than one hundred-thousandth of a single human brain, it follows that an eco-zealot's life (equal to a species' only) is worth only one hundred thousandth of an ordinary human life.

And that's not all! Because THEIR lives are inimical to the continued prosperity of the human species. because THEY want "nature" to thrive at the expense of human lives, it follows then that eco-zealots ought to be treated like any other human virus inimical to human life, and eradicated from the face of the Earth with extreme prejudice. Let me be blunt: every single last eco-zealots ought to be shot in the head and killed. Because the filthy hateful words spewing out of their mouths constitute hate crimes deserving of capital punishment!

So-called "environmentalists" and "climate researchers" are literally as valuable to humanity as HIV and should be treated the same way. With prophylactics and plenty of serious research aimed at creating a vaccine against them. Eradication wouldn't be amiss either.

Japanese Are As Despicable As English

I believed Japanese childrearing was stuck in mode 4 of the deMause childrearing modes, but until just now, I didn't have any evidence to prove it. Well, now I do. It only took reading a few Naruto fanfics too so I'm getting better. Because Naruto harkens back to what we in the civilized world (which excludes the UK, USA and now Japan) would call a bygone age where everyone owes their entire lives to the clan and clans are everything.

Naruto can only be loyal to Konoha because his own family is completely dead, so all of Konoha is his clan. And as it's his clan and he's in mode 4, he must be absolutely loyal to it. He can have no personal ambitions outside of his clan. That's why he wants to be Hokage, because being head of the clan is the ultimate ambition, as nothing exists outside the clan. And that's why the missing-nin are traitors instead of adventurers and freethinkers and individualists.

When you really think about it, it's quite sick. And that's why nobody but Japanese can buy into it. Everyone with a smattering of a brain writes Naruto fanfic in a subtly off-canon way. And those capable of genuinely thinking for themselves often construct a premise that completely derails and blows up the Japanese obsessions with clan and village, that force the protagonists to grow up in a non-Japanese way.

The best part is this. I thought the UK were bad? Oh man, the Japanese are worse! The English are 4+ or mid-4, as they don't generally whip their children into unconsciousness like the Austrians did when Adolf Hitler grew up. But you can tell the Japs are worse despite their children's fiction being roughly the same because the Japanese in real life destroy all remnants of creativity and individuality in their children.

The high tech, more functional and communal nature of Japanese society as opposed to the broken psychopathic nature of the English doesn't make up for their explicitly suppressing individuation in toddlers. Man I hate the Island Apes on both sides of Eurasia. The English are the Whiny Traitors Of Europe. And the stupid fucking Japs are all but begging China or Korea to nuke them.

The Germans moved on from being 4- back when they were Nazis. They leaped straight to 6- and are still taking lessons from the 6+ Scandinavian societies around them. So the Germans might be a tad weaker economically than the Japs, but politically? They are infinitely better. The Germans became best friends with the French, they're not trying to alienate and provoke their nuclear-armed neighbours like the Japs.

Japanese are insane fucks and in their own non-violent incestuous way, they are just as bad as the parents of Germany's Nazi generation.

Character Alignment: US Democrats

I just read an interesting little tidbit that shed some insight on Democrats in this discussion of Right Wing Authoritarians.

What do young people get for joining Democratic political causes? Scrutiny. What do conservative internes get? Adventure and the very real possibility of advancement. Unfortunately, most liberals are not even willing to consider an opinion until the speaker has become famous. Grover Norquist's ideas had much of their power BECAUSE he was unknown, and the clever Republican 'stealth mode' was able to capitalize on them to the fullest - because they were effective ideas, and not because he was important-enough to be worth listening to.

Fundamentally, Democrats seek unity whereas Republicans seek separation and division.

Here this fellow says that Democrats worship hierarchical authority, or at least their Character Alignment is Lawful. And well, Democrats are definitely not Chaotics. They hate political activists and protestors almost as much as the Republicans do.

But Republicans worship hierarchical authority TOO. They're right-wing authoritarians mostly and Lawful Evil primarily. So what does that make Democrats? Well, they're not Good, not even remotely. I'm thinking they might be Lawful Neutral?

And Lawful Neutral looks simultaneously more purely hierarchical and yet ... yes, definitely more Cattle-ish. As the entire * Neutral band of Character Alignment is NPCs, insects and cattle. The Lawful Neutrals are tools and slaves. That's the Democrats pretty much.

The Republicans are of course monsters. Not complete monsters, but monsters.

Applying Logic to Harry Potter

one learns that

• Hermione Granger is autistic - it's why she's incapable of Judgement, like that mind-wiping her parents is EVIL
• HG married Ron (the Peter Pettigrew of the trio) because her love for authority + a Nazi regime that wants to kill her led to crushingly low self-esteem - a desperation move for a girl who thinks she has nothing to look forward to in life
• Lockhart wasn't really a narcissist, he was a psychopath
• Ronald is a narcissist, a Lickspittle and Hedonist to be specific
• Mrs Figg is a turncoat who sold out to the Dursleys for money and/or to backstab Dumbles. The alternatives are that Dumbledore is Evil, or that what the Dursleys did isn't considered abuse in the Whizzy world.
• transfiguration and conjuration are fake - just holograms and forcefields
• and Whizzes are too stupid to understand that! - JKR just wrote random crap and it's totally by accident that it's self-consistent so it's not like she could explain her magic system.
• Hogwarts Houses are cults with charismatic leaders - it's no coincidence that between the two Gryffs on staff, only one is charismatic and the other is his minion - see how far into AU you have to go to make Hogwarts a premiere institution of learning (also portrays a living breathing Wizarding World)
• the Whizzes' intention-based system of magic robs them of the capacity for common sense and logic, reducing them to wishful thinking - save us, save us, someone save us! - magic is BAD!
• the Whizzy world's talking creatures and magical potions (to say nothing of Hags, Werewolves and Vampires) strongly encourages psychopathy - stewing magical creatures "as soon as they reach sexual maturity"? Uhuh.
• the Pissers stay in the Whizzy world either due to copious use of Compulsions or Shared Insanity - their brains can no longer manage the rudimentary logic even the mentally deficient non-magicals can do - what else can explain the lack of illegal smuggling of artifacts for money? Or the pathetic threadbare pastiche of a society and culture that is the Whizzy World? Like anyone liking Quidditch!
• the Wand warped Dumbles' brain making him batshit crazy to the point where he was fostering Dark Lords just so they'd kill him, or he them. HP and the Prophecy were always an obstacle to Dumbles' insane plans for glory.
• Dumbles was probably an artificial narcissist
• Dumbles completely brainwashed HP and may have put his own horcrux into HP to resurrect himself in HP's body - Albus Severus Potter? WTF?
• if not that then HP has fully assimilated the 'child abuse is a good thing!' philosophy of JKR and tortures his first born
• the Stone creates Sirens that lure the Stone's user to his or her death - HP's "parents" were fake
• the Cloak curses its user into insignificance, possibly a desire for insignificance, and apathy towards meeting Death
• the most important character in the series is Death: since He manages to wipe out both HP and Dumble. Yay!

messages that JKR sends

• child abuse is normal - the only okay parents (Hermione's and Draco's) are mythological and/or really Evil
• racism is great! - "muggle" even sounds like "ugly"
• concentration camps and genocide are swell - just good old boys acting out, forgive and forget she says!
• you'll go far on luck and self-sacrifice - in fact, that's the ONLY way to advance.
• anger is the only possible form of emotional depth and as such the only possible proof you aren't a psychopath, everyone who isn't angry is Evil. Only exception: Cedric, whom we don't see much of at all.
• the best government is no government, yay for patriarchal feudalism!
• the Clan Leader (Grandfather Dumbles) is owed Fealty unto death
• it's really okay to abandon your kids (the Potters, Black, Dumbles with Harry, Dumbles with every student, Lupin) - I'm sure JKR wished it every day
• child services are horrors, oops "aurors".
• children should be gone and good riddance - most of the students could have been day students and it would made no difference except to make the lack of extracurriculars more realistic!
• you CAN throw random crap together and write a book ... so long as you don't give a shit what message it sends!

Want to hear of the Nazi lessons in The Never Ending Story? Because that book WAS written by one of the parents-of-Nazis who raised the Nazi generation to be what they are. It makes you wonder, doesn't it? And then you stop wondering and become disgusted when you hear of the rampant child sacrifice and child abuse (imagination is a bad thing! bad!!) in Fantasia.

Credits: Publicola and Diresquirrel on FFN. Mr Ragtop on FFN (the asshole got in a snit and erased his account). Some are mine.

See also Bravery Is Evil, .

Profile of an Autistic

Some autistics can be creative in an abstract way but since abstract creativity is rare in the general population, we aren't going to talk about that here. We're going to talk about an abstractly uncreative autistic, and show what it means for them to be concretely uncreative as well.

I've already explained in this blog how there are four fundamental cognitive traits. Of those, intelligence (memorization) and intellectualism are irrelevant here. Which leaves only analysis (passive logic) and synthesis (unforced creativity), which compose together to form Judgement (meta-level reasoning). Autism is a severe cognitive deficiency of synthesis which cripples Judgement.

Incidentally, I find it utterly laughable how conceited some Asperger sufferers are when they claim that their mental deficiency is an evolutionary advantage of some kind in our modern world. It is not, it's a form of retardation and an evolutionary dead-end.

HERMIONE GRANGER

Now, let's take a look at our autistic, shall we?

HG is logical and intelligent, but she is even more uncreative than the least creative normal person (the definition of autism), she's obsessed with rules and memorization, she's incapable of judgement. Like maybe what the house elves say they want is more important than what she herself thinks they want!!

Hermione has been raised and indoctrinated with a certain code of interactional conduct (which people misleadingly call "morality", the same way they say New York when they mean USA). She is incapable of looking at the raw data of house elves' behaviour, their stated wants, and their proven needs, and deriving from that an entirely NEW code of interactional conduct logically appropriate to house elves.

Hermione imposes her own code of interactional conduct on a completely different and alien species of sophonts (what fools call "sapients" thanks to Star Trek despite the fact domestic cats are sapient) from her own species, not because she projects her own insecurities and neuroses on others, but because she's as creative as a stone!

She is literally incapable of coming up with an alternative idea, let alone a whole entire system of ideas. And being logical she is unwilling to accept that the pissers in the Whizzy world are right because those same pissers say she's a second class citizen and/or ought to die. And how, logically, can it be possible for her to be a second class citizen when she is "the greatest witch in her generation" according to one of the Whizzes?

Hermione is utterly incapable of creating new categories. If she were told to sort the words "train, car, fruit, and cake" she would come up with the categories "method of transportation" and "food" only because those categories ALREADY EXIST in her mind, having been put there by someone else (a textbook's author, a professor, her parents). If she didn't know those categories beforehand, she would be unable to create them.

This is why she is capable of understanding Dark Magic versus Light Magic. Or Charms vs Transfiguration. But she is incapable of creating the category 'Technomany spells' because it doesn't already exist! The same for "blatantly underused spells" or "blatantly underpowered spells" or "spells that really should be legal but are not".

Hermione isn't some creative genius. She never put any food in that bag of hers. And her conception of original is to use a shoulder bag rather than a backpack or a mokeskin pouch or a trunk. What most people would consider a trivial derivation.

HOW AUTISM CRIPPLES HERMIONE'S OWN LIFE

The reason why Hermione marries Ron Weasley of all people ... has to be explained. Especially since it isn't that she's a born victim like HP. Her inability to form judgements from raw data ... does explain it. She's unable to conclude from "lazy, slob, anti-intellectual, angry, jealous, prejudiced, bigoted, violent, hair-trigger temper" that Ron Weasley would make a terrible husband and especially a terrible husband for HER.

Because that's an example of taking raw data and creating a conclusion out of it on the META-level.

Unless you've gone to a spousal abuse worshop where they will carefully spoonfeed the profile of the typical spousal abuser into your brain, you have to actually create the pattern out of the raw data of common stories (gossip) of spousal abuse. This takes Synthesis which Hermione doesn't have. Though IFF she DID know that Ron Weasley were a spousal abuser just like his mother, she would then be able to logic that he makes a bad prospective husband.

Hermione can use logic to come to conclusions on the same level as the data. So conclusions like "Ron Weasley's personality traits are all undesirable" are possible for her. As are things like math. But she can't come to conclusions on the meta-level, the level of abstraction ABOVE that. "Ron Weasley would be a terrible husband" is impossible for her.

She's capable of extrapolating from the present to a specific future. But not from the present to the entire space of possible futures. So she is incapable of testing the boundaries of that space in her mind. She is also incapable of extrapolating from one specific idea to the space of all ideas. Or any of the many, many kinds of meta-level jumps which normal people routinely do and which creative geniuses do as easily as breathing.

INCAPABLE OF GRASPING THE BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS

Other examples of meta-level thinking which HG is incapable of deriving from level thinking are: WANT from IS, and SHOULD from WANT. HG is incapable of figuring out what she wants out of life, for example, beyond what people tell her. She is an important person (because people tell her so), important people go to the Ministry (because people tell her so), therefore, she goes to the Ministry (logic).

Hermione is so mentally crippled that she's even incapable of creating a rule for whom to believe from the contradictory things people tell her. The rule she has adopted (higher authority wins) is simply what everyone has always told her. She didn't create that rule nor even choose to adopt it from a set of alternatives. She's practically incapable of doing what most people consider genuine thinking, relying on rote memorization and regurgitation.

As a worst case, HG will marry RW and never figure out that she's unhappy in that marriage or didn't want it. She HAS a marriage and no basis from which to conclude that she doesn't WANT it (eg, she's always yelled at RW so yelling is normal behaviour hence unremarkable, rather than tiresome or draining). And even if she were capable of figuring that out, it would require yet another impossible leap of cognition for her to conclude she SHOULD NOT have married him at all, rather than that she made an "honest mistake".

Unless of course someone in authority tells her this. And then she'll whine that they didn't tell her earlier! And then that person will look at her puzzled by her obvious mental deficiency when she is so "smart".

In canon, HG is incapable of figuring out that mind-wiping her parents is a bad thing. It isn't a crime after all. It isn't something anyone has explicitly TOLD HER is bad nor can that conclusion be derived using pure logic from other things she knows are crimes. It would require synthesis (the creation of a new concept, a new pattern for pattern-matching purposes) to conclude that mind-wiping is bad.

WHERE AUTISM FITS IN

As a result of her mental deficiency, Hermione Granger's brain is incapable of spontaneously forming core values, and so her mind is unable to ascend cognitive valuation meta-levels.

META-LEVELS OF COGNITIVE VALUATION - psych-emotional maturity

• 0. infant (senses) -- you learn to feel and perceive
• 1. toddler (rules) -- you learn to act
• 2. child (hypotheticals) -- you learn to plan
• 3. juvenile (agents) -- you learn to emote
• 4. adult (cost-benefit) -- you learn to manage your desires
• 5. celestial (core values) -- you organize your mind

Where psychopaths are stuck at #1 and narcissists are stuck at #2, definitively, uncreative autistics are perhaps stuck at level #3. I know for a certainty that autistics can't ascend to level #5 no matter how logical they are, but I also have serious doubts they ever get to #4.

Besides, it makes sense. Theoretically, there HAS to be some form of cognitive deficiency which gets people stuck on #3. #2 as I said is narcissism. #4 ... is normal people. Whom I variously call insects and cattle and NPCs, depending on what personality trait I want to emphasize and how scornful I am of that personality trait. So that leaves only #3.

The only question really is whether creative autistics can climb higher. And answerinng that question is equivalent to defining in exact detail exactly what concrete creativity is. IFF cognitive valuation is concrete then autistics (lacking it) can't climb higher than #3. IFF cognitive valuation is abstract then abstractly creative autistics can climb higher than #3.

Climb, ascend, grow up. Different words for the same thing.

CONCLUSION

Hermione Granger is mentally handicapped. Because autism really is a mental handicap, of the cognitive kind specifically. She is incapable of forming judgements about abstract things (eg, house elf rights), or things she observes in her own life (eg, RW is a terrible prospective husband), or even about her own person (eg, suckups to higher authority are scorned for a reason, she herself is mentally handicapped, she has a horrible marriage, her life sucks and she's miserable).

Oh yeah, only people possessed of Core Values are Good People, because Core Values ARE a person's independent conception of Goodness. Since different people can possess different sets of Core Values it follows that Goodness is Chromatic. It occurs in colours, and never in black and white. The fact that you NPCs all think Good and Evil is Black and White is sufficient proof that you don't understand Good. And solid evidence that you're incapable of ever understanding it.

Hermione Granger, being an uncreative autistic, is incapable of ever being a Good person. Her being selflessly fucked up and mentally retarded doesn't make her Good. It merely makes her Lawful. She is Lawful Neutral.

Gamers Are Lame

I recently discovered that gamers who aren't game designers are exceedingly lame. And I realized that the reason I'm not a gamer is simply because I'm not that lame, and because all the games ever made, all the games anyone could make, will always be lame.

There are damned few games where you get to alter the game world. The only ones I know are Minecraft, Second Life and the old MOOs (I consider Second Life a 3D MOO). And of course, the Reality MMORPG (that one's manual is really inadequate by the way).

In World of Warcraft, you don't get to change the outcome of anything at all. Things move around randomly, events happen, and you don't have any say in them. Only an unreachable deity (the Content Programmer) has any say in it at all.

In Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights and other computer role-playing games, you get a choice of a tiny number (usually 3 or less) "endings" which are barely distinguishable. You win and become evil, you win and become good, you lose and die, so on. There isn't any possible way to get off these plot rails you're stuck on.

And aren't you happy with 3 or 4 destinations? Like I said, I'm not that lame. And although in Minecraft and possibly Dungeon Keeper, you get to craft worlds, you only get to do so on a very superficial level. Like a freaking engineer! I look down on engineers, I don't want to emulate them!

So anyways, how did I learn all this? Well, I read a couple of self-insert fics about computer games. It took me a while to figure out their authors were uncreative hacks who were novelizing the games. Cause yeah, I don't play computer games, I just read about them. And then I started wondering what the fuck was wrong with these people.

And I realized! They're cattle and insects. They don't think of anything beyond their own self-aggrandizement. The "sandbox" in Elder Scrolls where you get to acquire power, prestige (social status), and fortune (wealth) is all they could ever want.

None of them ever want to REMAKE the world, putting down railways and signal towers to keep the Tamriel Empire together. None of them want to build aqueducts, public baths and radically improve coal mining to heat the baths in Athkatla.

I suppose Civilization and Railroad Tycoon let you do that to a small degree. But they were crap, because you got bogged down in repetitive micro-management pretty damned quick. And they were over-simplistic. What you could build was exceedingly limited. The plot rails may have been conceptual but they were still there.

My favourite genre of fiction has always been crossovers with reality. And the first question that always comes to mind is what the trade opportunities would be. I think this rant kinda shows that. Healing potions for steam engines, hmm. Steam engines are nearly always possible so long as something resembling human life lives.

Revealing Language

PROGRESS VS SURVIVAL

Fascists and fascism apologists talk about making sacrifices in order to "secure" survival. Not in order to survive but to "secure" it. What does that mean? Well, it means that they make these sacrifices in order to FEEL SECURE. And what is change and progress and growth if not threats to the feeling of security and stability? In other words, fascism apologists aren't really sacrificing anything. Not for themselves. Rather, they are sacrificing YOUR progress and growth, and YOUR desire for justice ... for the sake of THEIR feelings of security.

Because there is no empirical data whatsoever, and copious counter-examples disproving the notion, that survival and progress are incompatible in any circumstance. There are plenty of revolutions that advanced social progress FIRST in order to ensure survival LATER. China comes to mind. France comes to mind. It is only in the minds of would be Fascists that survival is somehow more important than progress. Because in their minds, progress really doesn't matter in the first place, because progress is NEGATIVE in their minds. When as a matter of empirical fact, progress is NECESSARY for survival.

(Simple example: if we don't progress technologically then in a few million years, an asteroid or super-volcano is going to annihilate the human species. Because Nature is just plain evil like that. Of course, that doesn't stop people from worshiping an evil nature in the least, any more than it stops people from worshiping the evil Jehovah. Or Batman. People seem to just like worshiping Evil.)

The would be fascists will claim that survival while not necessarily more important than progress is nonetheless more urgent. But how can it possibly be more urgent when progress is often a logical prerequisite of survival? Ahh, that's right, for a moment I forgot that most people are incapable of logic. And so by being incapable of logic, their perceptions and their actions are effectively fascistic. Wonderful!

HELPING POVERTY

"Helping" poverty is another good one. These people are doing nothing to END poverty. They rather believe ending poverty is impossible. It's why they rarely say "helping end poverty", although some do. I would go so far to say as they don't even believe they are helping poor people, not really. Else why don't they say "helping people in poverty" or "helping poor people"?

No, what they are doing is perpetuating poverty, helping poverty to exist. By papering over it and making it palatable to others, especially to the middle class and the poor, they try to prevent a revolution or other definitive actions that would actually eradicate poverty. I know that if I had a goal it would be to end poverty or eradicate poverty. It would certainly not be "helping" it. It takes some special kind of fucked up person to want to help poverty. But then, there is no shortage of evil-minded retards among the general population. It seems rather that's the overwhelming majority of them.

And if you believe otherwise then I have but a simple question for you: if people really believed that it were desirable to reduce or end poverty, then why would they make not a single goal towards that end? The fact that people are insects does not explain why their hive-mind hasn't come up with a single idea to reduce or end poverty. The fact the overwhelming majority of insects are cattle following the herd who are ultimately following freethinkers, doesn't explain why the freethinkers didn't lead the cattle towards reducing poverty or perhaps why the cattle didn't glom onto reducing poverty as a goal. The only thing that explains the fact of near-universal apathy towards poverty is this ... people like poverty.

The Value Of Knowledge

I have encountered twice the erroneous belief that knowledge is somehow important, let alone important for psychological growth and self-knowledge. This ridiculous notion must be uprooted as it is ludicrously false. It is a simple matter of economics, but first I will deal with another misconception, omnipresent amongst the idiots studying psychology and AI. That emotions somehow matter and are the root of personality.

EMOTIONS

Emotions are trivial and meaningless. They are instantly changeable using the Emotional Disciplines I have invented. Not like pathetic Buddhist meditation or Kolinahr where some neutral emotion like tranquility or calm is targeted and great efforts are made to achieve it. No, using the Emotional Disciplines it is trivial to cancel any emotion within 6 seconds AND you can also SUMMON any emotion within 6 seconds. It doesn't even take any real practice, all it takes is knowing exactly how to do it.

Now, if emotions are completely unimportant then why would one's reactions to various situations be important? Why would one's memories be important to one's self?

KNOWLEDGE

Getting back on track now, there are 800,000 words in the English language. Say that 10^5 = 100,000 are concepts, and there are (10^10) possible ideas (agglutinations of concepts). You can see the combinatorial explosion starting. Well, among the 100,000 possible concepts, there are maybe 10,000 that can be universalized as core values. So that's 10^4 possible core values, out of which an Angel will typically have *SIX* for their whole entire lives. I myself hold exactly TEN, being a total freak of nature and far more passionate and caring than others.

Those 6-10 core values determine HALF of your personality and 97% or so of its individuality. A SINGLE core value determines MORE THAN 5% of your personality. Think about that. And now compare it to individual bits of knowledge which has a TOTAL weight upwards of 10^10 so that a single idea has a weight only of 10^-10! Upwards of 5% compared to less than one tenth of a billionth. Core values versus knowledge. There is no contest.

Knowledge just doesn't matter.

META-LEVELS

And then of course there is the argument from meta-levels. If you do not know what meta-levels are, you should look it up. Suffice to say that higher is better. That transcendance is meta-meta-leveling. And that the higher you go, the more leverage you can have.

Knowing the value of 3.14159 is less valuable than knowing it's the ratio of a circle to its circumference, which is itself less valuable than knowing that it exists as an important mathematical constant called pi. Knowing how to work the political system is less valuable than knowing how to change the political system is less valuable than knowing how to abolish it in preference for a completely different political system.

Similarly for IS versus OUGHT. There is what is. There is what you want or desire (although those are misnomers for low-level values as 'want' and 'desire' are specific emotions thus insignificant). And then there is what OUGHT to be (high level values - core values).

IN REAL LIFE

The way this manifests in practice is thus, you can divide your life horizontally between intellectual, work and personal. And you can divide it up vertically between lower and higher:

intellectual: knowledge about the world and knowledge ABOUT knowledge (about how to acquire knowledge, about how to determine what knowledge you require, about what knowledge is valuable, about what knowledge you ought to have).

work: doing something to get paid and be financially sound versus doing meaningful work to effect a change in the world.

personal: knowing your desires, thoughts & hobbies versus knowing your Core Values, your mind, & Life Dreams. HAVING Life Dreams. Knowing how to discover and produce them systematically and at will. Being an insect versus being a giant (and knowing not to imitate insects).

interpersonal: having friends versus having the kinds of friends that will make you happy and a better person besides, growing and furthering those relationships, strengthening and broadening those bonds, learning how to do all this, learning how to pick great friends.

Perfect Example Of Solar Zealots' Hype

In Gizmag,

It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F).

Ahh, so THAT's why solar towers aren't built anywhere. Kind of a big disadvantage. And puts the scorcher on those stupid plans to have green greenhouses underneath. For free! Yeah right. Well, I always hated that stupid Desertec crap.

The amazing thing is that this paragraph above is exactly 1 paragraph and 1 photo distant from the following marketroid hype:

Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;

Far from consumers. Since when has this been an advantage?

It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

Yes that's right, they say that 80-90 degrees celsius is "remarkably good for growing vegetation under there". That's the Worshipers of the Sun God Ra for you, incapable of common sense or of comprehending 'logical contradiction'.

Oh that's right, apparently I made a mistake in assuming these would be EARTH vegetables underneath those solar towers. No, all along it was supposed to be Vulcan vegetables. I feel so stupid now.