Regional currencies take a beating.

For all the talk about Syria for the moment, let's zoom onto something local. For those who don't quite follow financial news of this particular region, South-East Asian currencies have taken a beating of late, bringing up shades of the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. Very interesting indeed. Zerohedge has reported that the Thai baht, Indonesian rupiah and Malaysian ringgit have all taken huge losses; I know for a fact that the ringgit - traditionally at about 2 to the Singapore dollar - is now about 2.5 now.

The Singaporean dollar has remained quite stable, even during the 1997 crisis, so it means stuff just got quite a bit cheaper both to the north and south of the country, whether it be across the Causeway or on a ferry ride to Batam. It's certainly interesting, considering how most things I follow seem comfortably away on the other half of the planet...until ripples start trickling down here.

Wonder when the ripples will turn into genuine aftershocks.

Time-preferences and not just civilisation, but virtue as well.

Amos and Gromar have another piece up on this as a preamble to what they're working on. Go over and have a gander, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to read.

Peering out of the box - 28/8/13.

Free Northerner - Marketing Marriage.

McDonald’s doesn’t sell cheeseburgers by having a fat, ugly man eat them in his dingy basement while playing WoW and sobbing to himself. They sell cheeseburgers by showing groups of realistically attractive people having fun together while eating cheeseburgers.

Patriactionary - The reactionary cancer smothering the liberal heart of New York.

 Holy crap! They actually got the liberal city of New York, for a while, to enforce a rule that women had to sit at the back of the bus: segregation. Again, not something you’d see in a restored patriarchal Christian society, but amazing that this happened recently in the capital of liberal America. Why do the ultra-orthodox have such influence?

Jim - Words and meanings.

The word “racism” illustrates this. The ostensive meaning, what it is actually used to mean, is an insult term for white, like “cracker” or “honky”. The nominal ostensive meaning is KKK Hitler slavery. The nominal meaning, what people claim they mean by it, what dictionaries say they mean by it … is incoherent, incomprehensible, and differs from one source to the next, because no one really cares or pays any attention.

The lie implicit in the word “racism” is therefore that all whites are guilty by original sin of KKK Hitler slavery, that blacks suffer because whites exist, that merely by continuing to breath, whites harm blacks. For example, by thinking evil thoughts about blacks, whites cause blacks to underperform, (stereotype threat) and devastate black run cities such as Detroit. The logical implication of the word “racism” is that non whites need to eradicate whites, because evil white magic is causing non whites magical harm.

Anarcho-Papist - Masculine and feminine modes of discourse.

First, I should like to point out that the difference between the modes is not one of absolute superiority. The two modes are better suited to different sorts of tasks. The masculine mode is better suited to abstractive forms of thought, such as logic, philosophy, and science. The feminine mode is better suited to subjective forms of thought, such as emotions and the appearances of personal relationships. I’ll note that the two modes do have important contributions to the other aspects.

[...]

Given the foregoing, I might propose a revision of my post about why women won’t make it in the Manosphere. That revision is not that women may serve a unique place in the Manosphere, but rather that there is room for the development of feminine rhetoric based in red pill knowledge. The interests and modes of discourse of men and women are at a contrast, leading to little opportunity for women to take on the kinds and means of discussions men usually have within the Manosphere; however, there may be a sidelong Womanosphere, which I imagine will more typically jive with that contingent of the Manosphere which not only recognizes the disadvantages feminism imposes on society, but also seeks reasons and means of overcoming feminism.

[...]

As Manosphere writers, women might be typically overrated, but as Womanosphere writers, there is room for a lot of subjective insight.

The Reactivity Place - Christians did not build the Cathedral, but...

It is true that orthodox Christians did not build the Cathedral, but heretical Christians did, and they used Christian bricks.

Christianity is the most adaptively successful memeplex in human history. It has always, and likely for this reason, been a fertile breeding ground for potentially virulent competing near neighbors.

Le Cygne Gris - Full circle on testing.

I do wonder, though, how long it takes some enterprising students to figure out a way to skip college and take the CLA.  Then I wonder how long it will take for everyone to realize that the CLA exam is probably a waste of time, and that good old-fashioned SAT scores work just fine.  Then I wonder how much longer it’s going to take for the education bubble to pop once everyone realizes that college is a clusterfuck, and a poor substitute for IQ scores as a means of demonstrating intelligence.  Honestly, I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Elusive Wapiti - Say no to crack.

While the commander claims he issued this decree partly for health reasons, it is more transparently an attempt to re-establish standards and enforce decorum in the midst of an anything goes libertine popular culture that sees little value in self respect or, failing that, respecting others enough to not wear your pants so low your underpants hang out.

[...]

Yah, the part about "health reasons" strikes me as pretty flimsy.

All this just goes to show the futility of legislating morality...or respect for others. If it's not internalized, good luck enforcing it short of an absolute police state. And who wants to live in one of those?

"Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good." - Confucius

Theden - The regime that offends our sense of basic humanity.

It is nonetheless difficult to come up with a moral doctrine under which the chemical killing of 355 people is unacceptable and the chemical killing of somewhere between ‘fewer than 500′ and 50,000 civilians is perfectly fine—not to mention aiding in the chemical slaughter of many thousands.

Entryism in Video Games.

Roguelikes are a sub-genre of role-playing game that center around randomised environments, often brutal difficulty, and permanent player death. Implementations vary, but the core game mechanics of the subgenre are listed here. One particular aspect I'd like to highlight is listed below:

Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - he's dead for good. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pause from playing. Save Scumming is thus flatly disallowed.

A player on the forums has appeared, claiming to want to "improve" the game in various ways. First off, the removal of anti-save scumming features:

I would like to have the option to quit without updating my save.
That Is to say that the next time I loaded the game I would pick up at the last time I hit "Save and Continue"; rather than picking up at where I quit. I'm sick of having to shut down the game from the task manager. 

[...]

I am of those standards; but we don't all have to be sheep and do what everyone else does. 

[...]

I could ask a similar question of you. Why should the game be needlessly restricted other than rigid adherence to meaningless tradition?

 Removal of core game mechanics:

I would like to have an option in tweakDB to have all corruption effects instead instantly kill the character. Quite frankly it would be more fun to have to reload from my last save than have all my equipment ruined (quite frankly this is what I do half the time anyway, but this suggestion would save me the trouble of having to end the game through the task manager). 

And decreasing the difficulty:

As one progresses through the game the frequency at which one levels up slows to an intolerable crawl. This factor conspires with several others (such as inventory management) to make the game become progressively more dull as one plays through a game.

I understand that this is something that occurs in many RPGs but I see no reason why you should seek to emulate the extremely poor design of other games. Especially since the issue could be corrected, both here and elsewhere, simply by increasing the xp values of higher level monsters.

The thing is, all of these are amongst the reasons why Roguelikes have a very small fan following and are hence often only developed via open source or by indie developers; there simply isn't enough for a fanbase for an AAA game studio to justify making one worth the time and money spent. And that's fine. It's part of the culture.

And there is a culture amongst the roguelike game community. We play these games because they are unfair, because we like randomly generated stuff, because we like having to deal with our mistakes instead of using the save/reload feature to wipe them all out at will. We enjoy the brutal difficulty.

And here comes some guy demanding that stuff be changed. What is this fellow's definition of "meaningless tradition" and "poor design"? Apparently, "anything I don't like."

What makes things worse is that the modding tools provided with the game allow him to do all those and more, with little more than notepad and a quick find and replace/delete, if he so desires. If people want to play a game the way they want to personally, hey, that's fine. If you get enjoyment from turning all the cheat codes and messing around, sure. But that isn't enough for this fellow, he needs everyone to follow his schtick. No matter there's a reason such traditions are around, no matter that his demanded changes would cause the roguelike to cease to be one, which was what we all came and paid for in order to enjoy.

This is what happened to SFWA, only on a smaller scale. An organisation or group gets infiltrated by external agents, it gets improvemented, as Tex Arcane would put it, and if not checked, eventually looks nothing like the original. A standard tool of the left in their long march through the institutions.

Jim calls this phenomenon "entryism", and has listed a number of historical and ongoing examples, as well as counter-measures to it.

Happily, the developers appear to be ignoring this particular loudmouth, so he doesn't seem to be so much of a problem, and there's not as much at stake here. However, when applied to societal institutions...yeah.

Weaselly Mainstream Media is Weaselly.

"Gripping spectacle as 18-year old girl wrestles 3 men at Kampong Ubi CC"

Taking out three heavy men in the wrestling ring is no easy task - especially for a petite 18-year-old girl.

Last night, Republic Polytechnic student Lee Xin Yi was seen attempting to do just that. (Bolded emphasis mine). Spectators cheered as she dodged blows from her much bigger opponents while trading dropkicks, cross-body blocks and headlocks.

The video provided in the article was not of the event itself, but a demonstration headed off by two muscular guys.

Could she be one of those +3SD upper body strength women that Vox talks about? Why, sure. But given all things, I'm betting on a case of Curie-Hultgreen syndrome and the press needed something to create social opinion. Note the implication in the first paragraph, that she actually took out three guys, and then the weaselly bolded quote in the second.

Psht.

Peering out of the Box - 23/8/13.

Vox Popoli - Publishing bias and the new vertical markets

And, in like manner, left-wing writers should learn to accept that right-leaning publishers will not work with them and an increasing number of right-leaning consumers will not read their works. The age of the uniform mass market and its ideological impartiality is over and the age of ideologically-based vertical markets is upon us. The sooner everyone on the right side of the ideological aisle embraces that fact and begins to act accordingly, the sooner we will be able to stop swimming in the moral filth, breathing in the philosophical effluvia, and wandering aimlessly throughout the creative wasteland of the Left.

Larry, I have no doubt, will disagree with my opinion. So will a number of other writers on the Right. And that's fine, as we can disagree about this and debate this without feeling any need to excommunicate each other or rigidly enforce a dogmatic consensus because we are not rabbits of the Left. 

Amos and Gromar - A sense of fatalism: the beauty and violence of systems

It’s good that lower class white interbreed with sub-civilizational races and ethnicities because it expunges that lower bell curve segment of the white population, which can only serve to increase the good attributes of the average on the white curve. Given this fact, I’m not about to cry over the so-called extinction of the white race due to miscegenation.

It’s good that feminists embrace degenerate lifestyles, such as fat-acceptance, for several reasons. First, being grossly overweight and fucking fat signals to the sexual market not to date them. Second, being grossly overweight results in pain, misery, and an early death. If feminists were thin, neat, and well-behaved, it’d decimate the flock instantaneously and overnight–the wolf in sheep’s clothing. But it’s good that they aren’t, because even if they were, that sort of behavior which has within the seeds of destruction would have likely come out at some point (after it’s too late, I might add), so it’s good that they are presented to the sexual market place with visual signifiers of bad behavior, and probably bad genetics, namely a vastly underdeveloped and defective amygdala (R-selected leftists).

Sultan Knish - Looking back on the life of Barack Obama

After the ceremonies, the speakers, the guest musical performers and the services by an Imam, African Liberationist Minister and Reform Rabbi, Obama's funeral plane is expected to fly low over every major American city still standing, inciting riots, mass panic and all the chaos and destruction necessary for a proper sendoff to the man who destroyed America.

Jim - The total absence of a manosphere schism.

Lately a bunch of people have been complaining about a schism in the manosphere. Roosh dissed everyone except pick up artists, which upset lots of people. But Roosh’s complaint was that men without lots of experience with lots of women are poor sources of advice about women, which is trivially true. Dalrock is good as a source of truth about women, but Heartiste is better, even if you approve of Dalrock’s goals, and disapprove of Heartiste, minion of Satan.

If you care about truth, take it like a man. I knew the nature of women when I was teenage, but am a poor source of advice about women since I married very young, and stayed married, which cramped my style a little.

[...]

Oh for the double standard. When the sexual market place functioned, it was not because men were restrained, it was because women were restrained. We had, and have, a double standard for a reason, that reason being that men and women are very different.

[...]

Some non human animals are careful not to damage stuff or hurt people, some humans are not. There is significant overlap. Most non human animals need leashes. Some humans need leashes.

When the Park service was trying to design a garbage container that bears could not open, but tourists could open, they found that there is significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists. The same is true when it comes to civilized behavior.

 I agree: Jim is pretty much the most cynical reactionary around.

Free Northerner - 1-10 scale: an analysis.

Oh, and before I begin, Truthmosis at RotK has a post up on the scale that I came across while writing this. Check it out.

I’d also like to point out that, to some degree, beauty is subjective, so a numerical scale is not the be-all-end-all of female beauty. There are certain objective metrics of beauty: a 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio, symmetry, and other such indicators of fertility and health, that (almost) all men are naturally drawn towards. These can be a basis for an “objective” 1-10 scale.

But outside of that, there are numerous subjective factors on which men disagree. For example, I really like fair-skinned, light-haired, innocent-looking women (ie. cute women) and detest tattoos and piercings. A tongue piercing disgusts me and is an automatic 3-point drop. So, if I were to rate a woman with a tongue piercing a 5, others who don’t find it disgusting, might rate that woman an 8. Another example: I’ve never figured out why the Captain likes Jennifer Aniston or many men like Angelina Jolie; never seen the appeal.

Anyway, with that caveat out of the way, here we go.

Alpha Game - Meta-ruination.

The problem is that we always know what the Strong Female Character will do and say in every situation, because at no point can weakness be shown for fear it will expose the entire fraud.  And characters who lack weakness, who lack doubt, who lack even the basic trappings of genuine humanity, are little more than tedious cardboard.

A little something extra from Spandrell: 30 year-old Singaporean woman claims to be a virgin taken seriously by the press, claims that her mainland Chinese husband is so much greater.

In the Jakarta Post, but cribbed from the local Straits Times. Usual nonsensical self-validation shit, "intelligence is sexy" (nope, not in men or women), "educated women are so much smarter than those stupid breeder cows", "women who fuck around with foreigners are so open-minded and tolerant" and "it's not the local men rejecting us, but us rejecting them, ha ha, man up."

But what is additionally interesting is that the article tries to portray this sort of relationship as not just a) good but b) commonplace in Singapore, whereas the word on the ground amongst what can only be called our local Vaisya class is that mainland Chinese are at best disliked and at worst loathed, if the Feburary and May Day protests were anything to go by. Oddly enough, by and large the local Brahmins seem to be ambivalent on this issue, probably due to Singapore being already established as a bastion of multiculturalism and tolerance according to the national identity, so one can only wonder who's at work...not. Unlike the western model, the press here is quite obviously government-controlled.

Then again, only the deluded still believe the media serve to inform the public of social trends, instead of manufacturing them.

Foreigner comes to Singapore to work, demands locals change culture to suit her.

Somehow, this sounds familiar...

I am from the Phillippines and I first came to Singapore 2 years to work as a bank manager. I would love to know the Singaporean culture better but while people pay respect to the dead during the Hungry Ghost Festival, they should not leave incense papers scattered all over the place

[...]

I hope I do not offend the Chinese or Buddhist community in Singapore but can't they not burn so many incense paper as I am sure many will know this kind of superstition is no longer valid in the current modern world.

I am planning to bring my kids over in the next few years and I hope that they will not have to suffer from any respiratory problem in the "7th Month" every year.

I have already email to the relevant authorities and hopefully the government will listen to my advice and ban burning of papers in the public.

Foreigners coming to a country and demanding legislation be changed to suit their wants and preferences. Now, where have I heard of that before?

Oh, right.

"I love the culture here...but want to ban it anyway." You don't "fundamentally change" something you love.

If you don't want to take it as a religious issue, then it's a damn cultural issue. Really, banning burnt offerings altogether, a custom that's persisted for more than a millennium, because you don't like it.

We are nice people. We use incense bins, or burn the stuff on the grass, and do it away from storm drains, potential fire hazards, and roadsides (or at least, less than before). It used to be that people didn't even bother using cages when burning paper cars and mansions.

People don't clear up the ash piles or hell money because it's supposed to belong to the dead now.

Now, could this be a fabrication? Well, of course it could. But the shitstorm of a response provoked shows that even the local lumpenproletariat are beginning to be more than a little incensed (no pun intended), and the local Brahmin class appears to be either ignorant or dismissive of the concerns raised. Interesting.

But what's going on - it's happening at a smaller scale than in the West, but still happening nevertheless.

Time Preference and Civilisation, Part 2.

Continued from my previous post.

So jungle-dwelling man A has now twenty apples a day, a shelter, and a flute. Man B has his ten apples a day. Along comes Big Chief, who thanks to his possession of a big club, has an effective monopoly on violent coercion, and says to man A, "that's not fair. To be fair, you must give man B five of your apples, let him sleep in your shelter, and play your flute. Who can argue against equality? Oh, by the way, I have a big club."

So man A is forced to share his goods with man B, who has little incentive to build anything of his own now, let alone maintain anything that man A has made. He has little idea of what went into the making of the shelter and flute, and constantly soils both, much to man A's chagrin. Yet man A is kept in line with Big Chief's equally big club.

Given the insanities of Big Chief, it's perfectly rational for jungle-dweller A to shorten his time horizon to nothing at all. Why save apples when Big Chief will take them away? Why build anything when Big Chief will make him "share" it? Big Chief, oddly enough, does not live with man B despite singing man B's praises, living in his own gated community of his chieftain's hut. Man A makes the rational decision and enjoys the decline. He picks no more than ten apples a day, lets the shelter fall into ruin, and the snick and flute are snapped in two.

Why hold out on the promise of twenty apples tomorrow when Big Chief will take them away, as opposed to ten apples now?

And so civilisation crumbles, this being just one spreading crack in the base.

Peering out of the Box - 14/8/13.

His Lordship's Domain - Spot the Unintended Consequences.

That is, the false assumption is that you mortals are quite capable of making wise decisions without having them imposed upon you.

[...]

Where is your "wisdom", that you brought to bear to check your race's disappearance? Where is your restraint? Where is this "common sense" that even you admit is not common? I thought you said it would emerge magically, and the world would spin on unaffected by the choices of a narrow few?

[...]

And then you wonder why I, and now my consort, doubt that your precious society can handle yet another sort of openly accepted depravity. What, indeed, could possibly go wrong?
But by all means, stone yourselves senseless. I understand that it eases the frustrations of plantation life and makes your daily toil for your masters more bearable. Indeed, prepare yourselves for your coming, inevitable fate.

Anarcho-Papist - Wizard Privilege.

The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, the wizards enjoy a massive amount of privilege. But those privileges are also clearly grounded in innate differences. No one would say we want the less capable to rule. Thus, wizards rule, not goblins or centaurs. This ties into the ultimate hierarchy which takes place in wizarding society. It is also obvious that you could not find ways to increase non-wizard representation in traditionally wizard social roles without subsidizing the presence of other races in those roles and de-incentivizing the presence of wizards in those roles.

Sultan Knish - Winning the Peace.

Forget charging up a hill. Armies charge up the slippery slope of the moral high ground and they don't try to capture it from the enemy, because that would be the surest way to lose the moral high ground, instead they claim the moral high ground by refusing to try and capture it, to establish their moral claim to the moral high ground, which they can't have because they refuse to fight for it.

Free Northerner - The Omega's Guide: Martial Arts.

You have now joined Toastmasters and bought How to Win Friends and Influence People. You  have started to practice what you have read in the latter and are on your way to learning basic social interaction skills.

Now it is time to gain confidence. You will gain confidence in your social skills as you practice, but to really gain confidence you have to have something to be confident about. So this week’s task will be to start training in a martial art.

Cappy Cap - A Testament to the Value of American Women

So hear me and hear me well when I say this, and know I say this without bias, vindictiveness, or "desire" for any particular outcome:

The drop in demand for marriage is a DIRECT and OBVIOUS reflection of the declining quality and caliber of Ameirican women.

You may not "like that."

You may find that "insulting."

But I and reality really don't care.

Vox Popoli - End Raciss, Ban Clowns.

Providing every clown in the country with sensitivity training is not going to blind whites, Hispanics, and Asians to the fact that "juveniles and young adults" of some mysterious and unidentifiable race are attacking and killing whites all over the country because they hate them.  Desegregation is a complete and utter failure, and if legal segregation is not permitted, the historical solution of popular violence will be inevitable, with Hispanics leading the way.
I suspect the main reason it hasn't started yet is that the only whites dumb enough to put themselves in a position to be harmed by these feral packs of vibrant juveniles and diverse young adults of the sort pictured above tend to either be homeless or come from liberal families.

When the golden horde drags you screaming from your gated communities, SWPL folks, I hope you're alive to feel every moment as they devour you like the swarm they are. After all, it was you who sought to break the social institutions holding them in check so you could feel holier than everyone else.

Time Preference and Civilisation.

Two men live in a jungle. One has a low time-preference, the other a high time-preference. Both men require ten apples a day in order to survive, which they spend the whole of a day picking.

One day, both men independently come to the conclusion that if they could craft a special stick, that would make apple-picking so much easier, allowing them to pick twenty apples a day. However, the stick will take a whole day to craft, time they need to spend picking apples. Survival on nine apples a day is possible, but not without some discomfiture.

The high time-preferenced man, by definition, elects to avoid hunger and continues as he is. He spends the rest of his life solely engaged with picking and eating apples.

The low time-preferenced man endures a diet of nine apples a day for the next ten days, then spends the gathered ten apples on the day he crafts the stick. He now only needs to pick apples every two days to meet his apple needs. Then he realises he could do better with a shelter to keep the rain off, and spends every other day designing and building a shelter. With the shelter complete, he sleeps more soundly and feels more alert and inspired in the mornings. To express this inspiration, he whittles a flute...

The high time-preferenced man may desire and know how to build a shelter, or he may feel the need to express himself artistically, but regardless of his intelligence or innovation, he will never have the spare time or resources to build anything past his ten apples a day.

How heavy-handed should eugenics be?

There's been a small discussion in the reactosphere lately over eugenics, the whys, hows and wherefores. It appears to have started over twitter, but Nick Steves opens with the first formal piece, followed quickly with a reply by two fellows, Amos and Gromar. Most reactionaries do agree that dysgenic social impulses should be curtailed, i.e., stupid people should be discouraged from breeding. The converse, say, tinkering with the human genome to produce ubersmench, is more of a controversy.

I fully admit I'm a midwit and don't have that much to contribute, but a few thoughts from myself to myself as I watch this discussion unfold:

Well, who are the "stupid" people? What is "stupid"?

The generally-agreed upon definition appears to be the following points which define the underclass:

*High time preferences (or low time horizon. Essentially, spend today, don't save).
*Tendencies towards violence.
*Inability to understand cause and effect, or unwillingness to associate the two.
*Inability to hold to promises, guarantees and contracts.
*Insistence for others to bail them out of negative consequences of mistakes, externalising their negatives.
*Inability to learn from mistakes.

More points may be added depending on who you ask, but these simple few points can quite soundly be blamed for the state the modern-day underclass is in.

When people hear eugenics, the immediate thing that comes to mind are well, Nazis. Evil! Bad! Guilty of wrongthink and inflicting feelbad! The moral opposition to extreme measures such as forced breeding and culling of humans aside, where even James A. Donald, the most cynical and blunt blogger in the reactosphere points out that he prefers moral objections aside, he prefers segregation to culling the underclass because of the few individuals who may indeed possess the wherewithal to drag themselves out of the mire.

Solution A is not the solution, as I've written before.

Nick Steves points out the important, well, point: in a traditionally arranged (and presumably Christian) patriarchal society, the underclass men who would be babydaddies today would simply not get to breed. The women who would be babymommas, while they would still reproduce due to the female sex being the reproductive bottleneck, would still not get to exhibit the worst of their high time-preference tendencies. All this without grim state programs, laws on who can reproduce with whom, and sinister biotech labs people commonly associate with organised eugenics. Hell, one doesn't even need contraception for that idea to work. All that's required is a sense of discomfiture at the bottom, and people will be provoked to rise to the top, if only to avoid said discomfiture.

Soft eugenics are by far the most effective, I believe, if only because they work well with a stable societal structure; they are also the most humane to boot. By the point you have to offer people incentives to be sterilised in exchange for welfare, vouchers or what have you, society has already largely gone to the dogs and can't be saved

Addendum: Graaagh has thrown in his two cents:

What the eugenicists saw was the fact that advanced civilizations coddle weak and degenerate people, people who would have been culled in a primitive society. The answer to this is not to give some committee the task of culling them, to bureaucratize barbarism, but to have a society that gives them a place, or to deport them to a society where they have a place. This means firm institutions and norms, not a false Cathedral or Bazaar. Tradition is our best eugenics policy.

"I-it's not my fault!"

 
Well, the job hunt continues. Went for some more interviews, mailed in my CVs, went for a walk-in interview or two. No dice. Seems like the global joblessness plague is hitting this lovely little island as well.

In any case, this little tidbit caught my eye. Our glorious leader LKY denies that Singapore's low birthrate is his fault in his new memoirs:

In his new book 'One Man's View of the World', Lee Kuan Yew shares that he has given up on solving the problem of low fertility and also emphasised that money won't solve the problem.

He suggested that if he were the prime minister, he would introduce a huge baby bonus which was equal to 2 years of the average Singaporean's salary.

He expected that running such a scheme for 1 year would prove beyond doubt that even super-sized monetary incentives have only a marginal effect on fertility rates.

This would prove that "low birth rates have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents.

Locally, the Stop at Two policy wins the award for the greatest "keblekan pusing" (Malay: about face) that the incumbent government has done. Is he right? Partly, yes - the effects of atomised people, hedonism, political freedom, breakdown of patriarchy and traditional social support networks, etc, etc - these factors are all universal across time and cultures to bring on the downfall and resultant zombie apocalypse of the golden masses in every civilisation in which they manifested themselves. This is, after all, the cycle of history. One can no more expect things to be different today as opposed to the women of Sparta, who refused to partake of the very activity which made them so valuable.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that Lee's government back in the day actively pursued policies that contributed to this situation. Legalising abortion, selling sterilisations and abortions door to door to the point when a single doctor found themselves performing nine sterilisations per day, exponentially increasing fines and hospital fees past the first two children, denial of education to third and fourth children, and that's from the policy alone. Not to mention the targeted (whether intentional or not) breakup of the extended family structure, then once those support ties were severed, refusing government assistance to women with more than two children - a policy which continues to this day with the lower class. (In this last point I can see why dysgenic fertility should be discouraged, but the means should be a 'discomfiture at the bottom rung' that's socially imposed. More on this another time.)

Things would have gone downhill eventually, as Mr. Lee suggests. But people respond to dis/incentives, so that doesn't excuse him from blowing the brakes to hell and claiming "not my fault". Dis/incentives are why some cycles take longer to turn than others - hardship, affluence, decadence, destruction, back to hardship. At this point, the only way to fix this is what history has gone through before - destruction of affluence and artificial governmental constructs leading to the family being net positive to those who don't eat their seed corn, and a return to the patriarchal social structure. It's only a matter of time now.

On a side note, the idea of overpopulation is nothing new - it's been bouncing about since at least the second century AD with Tertullian. Apparently having a track record of being wrong for 1900 years hasn't dampened their enthusiasm any.

What I find curiouser and curiouser is that manosphere ideas are beginning to permeate the local culture as well, although it seems that the authors of these articles haven't quite grasped the full extent of human realities the average game blogger might, let alone a reactionary.

Plugging this guy.

Go check out this anarcho-papist fellow. He's got plenty of interesting things to say.

Good =/= nice.

I have previously written a short piece on my idea of The End.

The End, as I noted, will not be comfortable, let alone nice, and that's a massive understatement. Is it good, though?

Author Tom Kratman had this to say in one of his comments on Vox Day's blog:

Christians and children....My church's thing is running a school in Haiti. Having been adjutant of the battalion responsible for running the interment camps for Haitians (this was well before Death Camp GTMO, of course) at Guantanamo, circa 91 and 92, I am not entirely unfamiliar with Haitians and therefore with Haiti. I and not unsympathetic to Haitians, but I will not give a penny to running a school in Haiti. Why? Because the effect of educating a few hundred Haitians is to allow them to escape the hellhole that is Haiti, thus leaving Haiti the poorer in human capital and helping to continue the cycle of social ruin that is Haiti, in every particular.

Now the christian thing to do for a place like Haiti is to sail in and take it over, shoot or hang about a half a million people the country and the world would be better off without, build a nuke plant so they'll stop cutting trees for charcoal, plant trees, start a tourism industry again, and ultimately give a reason for human talent to stay there. Only then will educating the masses there do less harm than good.

Are these measures suggested by Mr. Kratman necessary? After reading the comment, I went and looked up a few facts out Haiti's resources, population, political situation and so forth. And the conclusion was, to put it succinctly, that the patient was a walking corpse and the best thing to do was put the fellow out of his misery. I personally prefer James A. Donald's and Vox Day's prescription of segregation, which is already being carried out covertly by the SWPLs and their lovely gated communities where they don't have to experience all the diversimification they're foisting upon the rest of the populace. Hey, good enough for thee, good enough for me.

The lesson to take away from here is that good things may not always be nice. In fact, good things, in my experience, have more likely than not been anything but nice, but that's certainly one step ahead.

Do I want violence? Well, my more wrathful baser nature would say yes, but that's nothing to do with any reasoning. Oh yes, I would dance upon the ashes of this society and heap is as compost upon the green shoots of what is to come. If there was a way out of this without the need to resort to violence, though - well, why have unnecessary violence? Even abandoning the moral standpoint and looking at it from a utilitarian one, why waste time and resources into violence when it's unnecessary?

But what I want is inconsequential in the end - there is no getting out of this without a crisis, and while I'm not historically well-read enough to determine if all crises require violence to be successfully resolved, the hole we've dug ourselves into this time is definitely deep enough to pretty much necessitate it. That, after all, is what fourth turnings are all about.