The Truth

 

de Sade’s Author Appeal

"Dolmancé, let's change hands; be nimble: pass from my sister's ass to Eugénie's"

It is astonishing to see how many people take de Sade to be a sophisticated thinker. One review I read even went so far as to say that in “Philosophy in the Bedroom” de Sade is “philosophically eloquent” and “at his most learned and compelling.” To which I have to respond, “Are you kidding me?” De Sade’s ideas are intellectually shallow and self-contradictory, and in no way merit the title “philosophy.”
The whole foundation of the ideas presented in “Philosophy in the Bedroom” is faulty from the start. De Sade dispenses with the idea of God, saying it is ridiculous to feel any kind of duty towards an imaginary deity or to give any weight to moral injunctions of religion. Having done this, de Sade then promptly substitutes for God his idea of Nature, which he fully anthropomorphizes and to whom he ascribes the same kind of intentionality he denied existing in a deity.

But de Sade gives no reason why this Nature should guide our actions any more than God. This fundamental fallacy undermines the possibility of any coherence or validity in the further development of his ideas, yet he relies on it as faithfully as a theologian throughout the book.  But this is only the beginning. Supposing we were grant de Sade the premise that we should act in accordance with Nature, what follows is still equally incoherent, for de Sade simply declares certain impulses to be “natural” and others “unnatural” according to his own whims and not by any philosophical process. Everything de Sade approves of, namely licentious actions, are natural to him, and any he despises, such as selflessness or temperance, he derides and scorns as being unnatural. Yet why should we not consider all of our impulses, thoughts, wishes and desires to be natural? Indeed, if (as de Sade asserts) we are completely products of Nature with nothing higher (i.e. God) to determine a purpose for us, then even the most elaborate social conventions should be considered natural, and we have no less reason to marry, be monogamous and obey the laws than we do to commit sodomy and acts of wanton violence.

The consequence of this is that de Sade has made no real philosophical progress in determining what we should or should not do. This is the key point that everyone would do well to understand. There is simply nothing behind de Sade’s ideas but unjustified assertions. Far from being advanced, de Sade’s thinking suffers from acute retardation. In fact the whole of de Sade’s “philosophy” consists of nothing more than fallaciously dressing up the ramblings of his Id as universal maxims. Those who find that de Sade’s exhortations appeal to their own preconceptions may find him a compelling thinker, but anyone who examines his ideas with an open and rational mind will find little here except adolescent ravings.

All Tied Up At the Moment!

I have yet to see any defense of de Sade that relies on anything but vague praise for being “ahead of his time” and for influencing or anticipating the ideas of later thinkers, such as Nietzsche. This is similar to an argument from authority, where we must apparently esteem de Sade higher the more his ideas infiltrate the minds of great philosophers. I would posit that if this linkage is so essential to de Sade’s reputation, perhaps we have it backwards, and ought to be esteem the later thinkers less according to how much they have absorbed from this wholly unimpressive, shallow and simplistic mind.

Although I am all for hardcore rough sex, de Sade’s books are nothing more than Author Appeal given philosophic pretensions.

Pagans are Stupid

'Gay' is Right

Wiccans, neo-animists, nature-worshippers, polytheists and so forth are just as philosophically and empirically ridiculous as Christianity is.While Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam, bear the brunt of anti-theism and naturalism, there is another group of crackpot magic-worshipers who are not as prominent but, in some ways, even more annoying.

Christianity is so superdominant and assumed among many people in the West that it plays very little role in most people’s lives; they’re too saturated and typically unchallenged to ever give it much thought. It also actually is an ancient religion, or set of religions, which does have still existing institutions which can be more or less directly traced from around 300AD, give or take a century.

Paganism, however, has none of these ameliorating traits. Paganism is not believed by practically anybody, and outright declared mythology by most people who have ever given it any thought. Therefor Pagans are strident and flamboyant; it isn’t enough that they believe crazy nonsense, they also have to dress up like some Hippy-Goth and tell you about the soul of nature.

Paganism isn’t even real Paganism. Aside from the Greco-Roman pantheons and some of their temples, we know practically nothing about ancient polytheistic and animistic religions of the West. There are some statues, some disconnected accounts (largely by opponents) and some simple rituals, the significance of which is lost, that we are aware of. Thus ‘Paganism’ is really just what it seems, New Age mysticism deriving largely from the 19th century with a bunch of arbitrary names and symbols, which have long lost their true meaning, super imposed on it. Good evidence for this is the fact that the various ‘pagans’ demonstrate the same sort of hand-wavy, nature-oriented mysticism that the non-pagan hippies and new agers they descend from do.

An amusing point is that they claim to have some vastly divergent morality from the cruel Christian religion, in fact they’re just regurgitating left-wing liberal tropes that actually come from liberal Christianity and Protestantism in general.

Enlightenment and Liberal Myths

These are the Enlightenment/Liberalism myths that irritate me the most.

Does Not Equal

1. Equality and egalitarianism are bogus. Equality means the same. If two things are not the same thing, they are not equal. Property is not egalitarian, it defines a strict hierarchy on who may do what with a given piece of matter. Law is not egalitarian, it does not treat gangsters and proprieters equally. Any attempts to rationalize this are just a stupid attempt to cling to an exploded fallacy that never made sense to begin with. Fuck equality.

2. Democracy is not freedom. As no one owns the equity to the state, it is probably likely to be more extortionist and irrational than a monarchy. Add to that that the majority of people are stupid fucking herd animals, and it’s a recipe for hysteria and disaster.

3. Republics are not better than democracy. They are a form of democracy, and have their own unique problems: it is easier for special interests to corral the ‘representatives’ and the elected officials create a puppet show that distracts from the real power in the media, academics and bureaucrats.

4. Constitutions are useless. Like republican representatives, they just create a false sense of security and a legalistic facade to enable these people to do whatever they wanted to do anyways.

Democratic Peace = Total War

5. Democracies are not less violent. Democracies have engaged in the most prolonged, large scale, deadly, ideologically motivated and total forms of warfare  in the history of mankind. Democratic-republican governments turned two central European conflicts into world wars and established the largest empire in the history of the planet.

Fuck the Vote

If you voted, you’re what’s called a ‘useful idiot‘. First of all, democracy, republicanism and any other bullshit that relies on populism and/or majoritarian opinion is idiotic. It never has, will, or could work, because the majority is always wrong. And all you Patriotard jackoffs foaming at the mouth screaming, “ITZ A REPUBLIK NOT A DEMOCRACY,” go fucking hang yourself. The distinction is spurious, a Republic is just a variant of the democratic form, it has all the usual problems plus some unique to itself – such as being easier to bribe and corral by special interests. If you think an irrelevantly small choice between nominal ‘candidates’ selected by the existing elite to largely figurehead positions somehow makes you ‘free’, you’re corrupting the gene pool. And stop your ridiculous mystical paeans about the imaginary power of a scrap of paper or ‘limited government‘. The mafia does not abide by contracts it gets to arbitrate itself. They’re altering the deal, pray they don’t alter it any further. It’s a classical liberal fantasy with as much truth to it as the idea that world communism will free us all.

As Corporate Avenger said, voting doesn’t work.

If you voted, I hope they throw you in prison and take all your money. You deserve what you get, you are a drain on civilization.

Solopsists and Epistemic Nihilists

Ape Men? This Time You've Gone Too Far, Plato

There are certain groups of people who insist that we can know nothing, we have no way of knowing if the world of experience is reality, if the laws of logic are true, etc. I have always found this ridiculous. I’ve read my share of Wittgenstein and Aristotle, and my view would be this:

The solipsists are making a mistake in how the word ‘reality’ is used. ‘Reality’ in this context has absolutely no meaning outside of a logically consistent, material construct that exerts some power over the things within it, including the senses. This ‘ultimate reality’ they are looking for is in fact a contradiction in terms.

The people who claim that knowledge is impossible are making a mistake. Their conception of knowledge is non sense. It also fails to refer to what ‘reality’ and ‘logic’ are, and goes off on some incoherent tangent about an unimaginable anything which does or does not do undetectable things. It flat out violates the principle of parsimony.

Noam Chomsky: I’d Smash You in the Goddamn Face

Irving Kristol, the Trotskyite Dean of Neo-Conservatism

Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT,  is popular among fashionable anti-conformists and establishment radicals. He is viewed by these people as a radical, taking on the man and sticking it to those war mongering ‘Conservatives’. Of course, there hardly exist any actual conservatives in America as the Neo-Conservatives took over the movement after World War 2. Neo-Conservatives are Trotskyites and Lovestonites (Jay Lovestone was a Lithuanian-born member of the Communist Party USA) who split and became Anti-Stalinists during the Cold War. But that’s for another post – the point is that Noam Chomsky is a leftist critiquing other leftists for their insufficient ideological purity. Typical Red behavior.

He is often cited for his many books written against the usual left-wing boogeymen; corporations, the media, rich people, white people, etc. While there certainly is a lot that is retarded in modern business, media, elites and Western culture, Chomsky’s critiques are the same old cultural Marxist screed that is standard fare among academics, the media, the elites and Western culture. Chomsky claims to be ‘anti-war’, but in fact he is only against war on Communist nations and quite amenable when the United States is crushing those evil Germans while allied with the Reds. Like most leftists, Chomsky is incapable of telling the difference between laissez-faire and interventionist welfare states.

Chomsky’s critique of corporate power is similar, he regurgitates anti-capitalist arguments about the evil domination of corporate interests and some imaginary entity called the ‘far-right’ and their control over the government. Of course it is really quite the opposite, modern corporations and finance are so bizarre and counter-productive precisely because of the left-wing democratic regime they exist under. He’s obviously never read the Marxist Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, that all the left-wing social programs and anti-business regulations are the reason for the rise of cartelized industry in the United States.

His critique of the media is essentially the same thing, a generalized Galbraithian argument, that the evil powers of finance capitalism use their control of the media to force people into consumerist lifestyles and manufacture consent by promoting capitalist-militarist lies. This is true – up to a point – but Chomsky believes that this is somehow caused by private, ‘non-democratic’ ownership of the media, rather than a natural outcome of subjecting business to regulation and putting them into an incestuous relationship with a democratic state.

Chomsky, like most raving leftists, loves to make comparisons to Nazis. Bush is a Nazi, the Christian right are Nazis, etc, etc. This is, of course, absurd. Contrary to Chomsky (and Jonah Goldberg) there is no movement in the United States that can really be described as ‘fascist’ and especially not comparable to the NSDAP. The actual fact of the matter is that the fascists and NSDAP openly copied the Progressive Total State that Woodrow Wilson constructed during World War 1, and that their economic and social policies were cribbed from the Democratic-Progressive governments they were born under. Nothing they did could be described as ‘capitalism’, when property is so thoroughly regulated that individuals have no effective control over it it becomes simply socialism with a private mask. The the Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, a book by yet another Marxist, Guenter Reimann, demonstrates this perfect. What makes Chomsky’s Nazi comparisons especially ironic is that he is at pains to defend the Khmer Rouge, a Marxist regime in Cambodia that actually was a racialist, authoritarian State that operated on murder, torture and intimidation and killed the highest ratio of its countries population of any regime in known history.

Chomsky often calls himself a ‘libertarian’, but he is nothing of the sort. He is all for State interventionism and state power, as long as it is used for approved left-wing purposes. His economic views reveal that his ‘liberty’ involves replacing the modern democratic State with a direct-democratic mobocracy led by benevolent liberal elites (such as himself). He once ‘refuted’ the market anarchists by saying that (to paraphrase) hardly any conservatives actually want a free market. Well, that’s true, but it’s also an irrelevant evasion. The free-market anarchists are constantly harping on the pseudo-capitalism of the Chicago School and their kin.

Chomsky is so popular precisely because his ‘criticisms’ are in fact nothing but an application of standard fare, mainstream leftist fear-mongering; his attacks on the media, foreign policy, etc. are all channeled into safe targets like capitalism, patriarchy and inequality. Chomsky is also startlingly dishonest, many of the ‘facts’ he references in his books will have footnotes citing another of his books, which will cite an earlier book, etc. It’s as though it’s all a scheme to get people to buy more and more copies of his books. Another multi-millionaire Communist.

Chomsky’s ostensible discipline – linguistics – is another area he fails in. His theories of an innate, programmed grammar are essentially impossible given how biological tissues are actually developed from DNA. It’s a recipe, not a blueprint, and there is no way such a specific organization could arise. Which is beside the point that this isn’t even how the brain works, it is not a computational model (though it is capable of computing), it is some kind of patterning machine. While there are pre-existing patterns and connexion strength biases, the ideas, concepts and habits we form (including language) are built more or less bottom-up from associational content. Further, we know that for most of human history human beings had no language. Yet, somehow, people spread widely around the world – often with no effective interbreeding – were able to simultaneously develop a specific syntactical structure of speech, not just any at all but one which is identical? Noam Chomsky reveals, yet again, that he is simply distorting the facts to fit his ideological biases – human equality.

As the late William F. Buckley, Jr. said, Chomsky, “I’d smash you in the Goddamn face.”

Randroids: OCD Conservatives

 

Sometimes Randroids Make Unintentionally Funny Comics About Randroids

 

hankc1987 (4:55:00 PM): drugs
hankc1987 (4:55:11 PM): like pot?
Chromodynamic Girl (4:57:47 PM): Typically marijuana, beer or hard alcohol; sometimes salvia, LSD or something of that sort. I used to do adderall, but that lost its appeal in high school.
hankc1987 (4:57:58 PM): God you really are in hell
Chromodynamic Girl (4:59:35 PM): lol, whatever. I have a good time.
Chromodynamic Girl (5:00:06 PM): Methinks you are projecting.
hankc1987 (5:00:06 PM): 😦
hankc1987 (5:00:13 PM): no, unfortunately

Now, where have I seen this kind of condescending ‘I care about you’ bullshit before? Oh, yeah. Conservative Christians. That’s basically what Randroids are – a variant on the Secular Humanist, they play the ‘selfishness’ and ‘capitalism’ cards – though don’t you dare call them libertarians, those whim worshiping hippies – but in fact they’re more uptight and high strung than a lot of Bible Belt pastors I’ve met. This is because of their obsessive self-identification with a rigid personality cult disguised as philosophy. Watch an Objectivist use a word incorrectly and collapse into paroxysms of self-recrimination. It’s hilarious how conscious of sins these ‘egoists’ are. Naturally, they’re obsessed with morality. Everything in your life is supposed to be dictated by ‘morality’, which is effectively defined as whatever Ayn Rand preferred.

Randroids say they believe in ‘rational selfishness’, which essentially means living like a stock broker from the 80’s, only without the cocaine. Doing drugs would be irrational. I’ve never figured out why

 

Faces of Meth

 

Randroids have such an animus against drugs, or why they’re so confident that it’s horrible. It’s kind of funny, because Ayn Rand was on speed for decades. They also tend to be ambivalent about homos or any sort of swinger lifestyle, preferring spending money to squirreling it away or reading literature that’s anti-life, anti-mind (which means whatever they want it to). Most of them (such as Mr. Cropper) believe that children should be taught in the most boring and awkward way possible, so that the instructor becomes a cardboard character from one of Rand’s overrated novels and his lessons begin to take on her wooden prose.

Nathaniel Branden, once Ayn Rand’s lover and closest confidant in the Objectivist movement, has written several books detailing his experiences with them. Especially important to him (Branden is a psychiatrist) is the unrealistic psychological views and expectations which came out of the Objectivist circle, permeated into the philosophy, and produced such absurd caricatures as Leonard ‘The Peacock’ Peikoff. Perhaps the more entertaining assessment of Objectivist silliness is the play of anarchist economist Murray Rothbard, Mozart Was a Red. Rothbard was a piss poor philosopher, but he was funny as hell. He also wrote the Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. Also see Rand v. Rothbard.

More Moral Fantasies

A brilliant Jesus-follower at an atheism forum has taken upon himself to prove the magical origin of morality. Which is almost right, in that magic and morality have equal logical standing.

solja247 Wrote:  Whether you like it or not. There ARE things which are absolutely evil and things which are absolutely good.

 

If You Don't Swallow It, It Ain't In You

 

Whether or not you like it, there are not things which are ‘evil’ or ‘good’ at all. These words do not mean anything, they’re tropes for social signaling and psychological triggers. Just projecting your evolutionary biases onto the Universe. Reality doesn’t give a shit about your fantasies.

I know most atheists atempt to discredit this idea (There is a huge problem if there is such thing).

I wish most atheists would try to discredit this idea. Instead they spend all their time being moral masturbators; they’ve replaced the theology of God with the theology of Humanism. Our atheists are pious people.

So what is one example of something absolutely evil?
Killing a baby, an innocent baby for any reason is evil. (please dont derail this thread with attacking the Bible)

Nonsense.

If you think killing a baby is ever justified, I think it is safe to say, that you are sick and perveted.

You’re stupid if you think it makes sense to repudiate morality and talk about ‘justification’. Nothing is ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’. It’s all just your personal feelings. I also love your circular reasoning here, “Everyone agrees that killing babies is evil, and if you don’t there is something wrong with you.”
Idiot.

Some cultures did practice killing babies, however, we would call them ‘immoral’.

Perhaps you would. I don’t really care. Besides, eugenics are underrated. What good are retards, really?

Quote:Since we are the only creature on this planet, who has the ability to do evil and good and not just to respond to external stimuli. This notion of good and evil had to come from somewhere.

Well, as I explained, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ don’t exist; and humans (just like everything else) operate on a mixture of internal machinery and external stimulai. Whether or not you like it, we are animals, and machines. We just have some fancy (if ultimately disappointing) cognitive gears spinning around in our heads.

Evolutionarily speaking why should I care if a child was killed in Africa?

I don’t. I couldn’t give a damn about that. However, if you’re looking for ‘why do most people respond to this’ it has to do with sociobiological tropism, evolved herd characteristics which integrate with cultural cues and social signaling practices. You’re also stupid if you think there is some direct connexion between cognition and your biology; even if it didn’t make any sense for your DNA’s sake your DNA is not conscious and intentional; it has no opinions. What you have are a slapdash of feelings and thoughts which, historically, have assisted the survival of your DNA. There is no high-precision engineering going on in human beings, just recipes.

There is no natural explanation for the concept of good and evil. So where did it come from?

Imagination. Fantasy. Evolutionary psychology. It’s bullshit, but people believe in it because they’re built that way. Just like they usually believe survival is inherently desirable.

I personally think it came from a cosmological battle between good and evil, although I cant conclude and prove that it, it explains things much better than anything else.

That’s not even an ‘explanation’, that’s magical nonsense which means nothing, entails nothing, predicts nothing, and models nothing.
“I personally think it came from an unknowable battle between nonsensical forces in a manner which can not be described.”
Will you people go extinct, already? You clutter the world.

 

I'm Not Buying Your Bullshit at Any Price

 

Nazi Demonology

Recently Will Smith was attacked for stating the obvious: that people rationalize almost everything they do in some sort of moralistic fantasy. Smith said that Hitler “didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ … I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.'”

Stop Calling the German Military 'Nazi'. Are all American soldiers Democrats because Obama is in power?

I could go on about this for days, but I’ll take a simple example to make my point with; and if you can look for yourself you will find it more or less replicates itself everywhere in any discussion where Nazis are even tangentially brought up.It is often decried by leftists that American companies did business with ‘the third reich’. When examined closely, when it is actually true, it mostly amounts to nothing more than that some Americans did business with some Germans – many of whom they had been doing business with for decades before there was an NSDAP. On some occasions these companies did business with the German NS government – just as they did with the American and, for that matter, the Soviet governments. In some very rare cases Americans actually gave money to the NSDAP or NSDAP-related organizations. Well, so what? Probably many more Americans gave money or some other support to the German Communist parties (often called Social Democrats). Now, as far as I can tell the only thing worse about the Nazis in Germany as compared to the Commies is that the Nazis won and the Commies didn’t. In fact, after the Nazi victory, most of the NSDAP’s rank and file were recruited from the Communist, Marxist and Social Democratic parties. And if you give me a choice between living in Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany – well, let’s say it doesn’t require much detailed examination of the actual history to decide I’d take Germany any day.

M. Bison Effect: By Driving Out All Goodness, They Can Do the Impossible

One of the funniest manifestations of this in popular culture is what I call the M. Bison effect: Nazis are so evil that they can do the impossible. Summon Cthulhu, build robot zombies and engineer superhumans. Which, if true, would ironically be evidence for the Nazi claims: that Germans are better than everyone else and have their own unique ‘aryan logic’ and ‘aryan science’ far beyond that of the rest of the world.

This Progressive American Hegemonic selective history irritates me in all its forms, but especially the Nazi thing; since to most Americans history began with World War 2. Hitler was insane, or demonaical, or some bizarre reason has to be conjured up for his behavior. How about this: people are ignorant herd animals and socialism sucks. The ‘problem’ of Nazism solved. Someone give me a Nobel Prize now.