Tag Archives: Cthulhu

Swimming Right

Last week, we found that politics is moving left, a conclusion which should be obvious just from government spending numbers. So why do leftists think that politics is somehow moving rightward? I have a guess.

When we say politics are moving left we look at real, existing political laws, outputs, and outcomes. We see that laws for higher spending have been put in place, that government spending has increased, and that government spending as a percentage of GDP has increased. We see that gay “marriage” has been enforced by courts, that gays are “marrying”, and that Christians are losing their businesses anti-Christian laws.

When the left say politics is moving right, they look at only at actual outcomes as compared to intended outcomes. They look at what they expect should happen if politics moves left, see that that is not occurring and declare politics are moving right, whatever the actual laws and outputs may be.

For example, the leftist believes all men are equal and have equal abilities, if they do show these, then (right-wing) discrimination must be holding people back, so if proper left-wing policies are put in place people would demonstrate equal abilities. So, if education policy were moving left, the achievement gap would be disappearing and all students would be moving towards equally high performance. The achievement gap is not disappearing. Because of this, the leftist thinks education policy is not moving left, so, it must be moving right.

The leftist ignores that he is getting the actual laws and political outputs he wants; public education spending has been ballooning and the the staff:student ratio has been increasing. He ignores the fact that actual public policy is increasingly left because he’s only looking at outcomes and he’s not getting the outcomes he thinks should happen.

The leftist is religiously egalitarian and blank-slatist, so if government programs are not producing the desired outcomes, they must not be the desired programs, hence if the outcomes are not the expected left-wing outcomes, the programs and policies must not be left wing. He can not countenance that the achievement gap is probably genetic in origin, so failures to achieve his expected outcomes must be due to the wrong (ie: right-wing) policies being implemented.

We can see this elsewhere as well. The leftist believes that left-wing policies will reduce poverty and reduce income inequality. He looks at the charts and it’s obvious that for the last half-century poverty rates have stayed level and income inequality has risen. Therefore, policies must not be left-wing, and therefore must be right-wing.

Never mind that most of the federal budget goes to income transfer/poverty alleviation programs, never mind that spending on poverty-alleviation has been increasing at a rapid rate, never mind that we spend enough on poverty alleviation programs to simply pay every person enough to not be poor, never mind graduated tax rates, the spending and laws don’t matter. It can not be that poor people are poor because they are the kind of people whose choices, abilities, and (lack of) virtues lead to being poor, because all people are equal. Therefore, the policies must be right-wing because left-wing policies would result in equality. (In reality though, left-wing schemes usually backfire).

The reason the leftist think politics is moving rightward, is because the leftist is utopian and egalitarian. He believes that left-wing policies will necessarily bring about left-wing utopian goals. When the expected egalitarian utopia does not arrive, the leftist can not believe that this is due to the impossibility of an egalitarian utopia or because left-wing policies don’t work, so he believes the absence of utopia must be because politics is moving right-ward.

Swimming Left

Forgot to post on Friday. I’m sure you all were heartbroken.

Scott had a piece on Trump where he said:

Everyone knows that America is getting more ideologically polarized these days. The right is getting rightier. The left is getting leftier.

I responded on Twitter:

It is fairly obvious we have been moving left. I then finished the piece and looked through the comments. Many of the people there seemed to think the US is actually moving right. Are they insane?

In the US you can now lose your job or your business for having the same opinion on gay marriage that almost everyone 15 years ago would have had. This is leftward shift happening in real time with no ambiguity to it.

But maybe on other issues this is not the case, so I’m going to look at the top 10 most important political issues to Americans to see how they’ve moved. (Oddly, despite the huge amount of attention placed on it, the number of people who think gay “rights” is the most important issue ranges from “*”, almost non-existent, to 1%). I’ll ignore two of the top three as they are non-partisan issues with no discernible left or right positions: dissatisfaction with government and unemployment. Everybody hates unemployment and dissatisfaction is non-partisan. This leaves 8 issues that 4% or more of Americans thought are the most important issues.

1) Economy in General – Generally, the left is for more state economic intervention, the right for less. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is a decent proxy for state intervention. Other than a temporary dip in the late 90’s, government spending has been consistently rising. On the economy the government is moving left.

2) Immigration – The left is generally pro-immigration, the right generally anti. The proportion of immigrants has been increasing since the 1950’s, although, this mirrors a decrease in the first half of the 20th century. As well, due to the removal of country of origin laws by the left, immigration has become increasingly “diverse”. Immigration has become more left.

3) Race Relations – The president is black. 50 years ago the US legalized racial marriage and public opinion has been growing consistently in favour of it. Jim Crow laws have disappeared. The last lynching was in 1964, while today, black mobs burn down black-run Baltimore and injure over 100 cops with the establishment’s approval because a black man was killed while being arrested for possessing an illegal weapon (a crime that is only a crime because of the left). Society has moved left on racial relations.

4) Healthcare – Obamacare was just passed a few years ago. The Bush public drug plan was introduced a decade before that. Moving left.

5) Education – Public education spending, staffing levels, and funding per student have all been increasing at a rapid pace. Moving left.

 

6) Debt/Deficit – The right is generally anti-deficit, while the left is generally in favour of Keynesian deficit spending. The debt has been consistently increasing, barring a decline following WW2 and a temporary drop in the lates 90’s. We’ll say it’s been moving left.

7) Terrorism – The War on Terror continues and was right-wing in origin, although the left has instigated the Libya and Syria theatres of the war. But we’ll say the (mainstream) right won this one, now that the left is playing the game.

8) Foreign policy/foreign aid/focus overseas – I’m not actually sure how to look at this one. Foreign aid is declining, a right-wing win, but I highly doubt it is the main component driving the importance of this issue. There’s more hate against Russia and ISIS more nowadays, but those aren’t particularly partisan issues. The opening of Cuba and the Iran deal are vaguely left. The Cold War is over; NATO’s still around. Free trade agreements are increasing, but that issue is largely non-partisan: the elites vs everyone else. I don’t think this one is able to be judged along a left/right axis, so I’m not going to assign anything to it.

The following three I looked at as well, because at first I accidentally was reading the May column, not the August Column, but they’ve been written so I’ll include them:

9) National Security – See terrorism. Us defence spending as a percentage of GDP has been on a fairly steady decline since the 50’s, with a leveling-out/small rise since the mid-90’s. The number of defence personnel follows a similar trend (in absolute numbers, so, percentage wise it has been decreasing even more so). The trend has been moving left.
http://www.cfr.org/defense-budget/trends-us-military-spending/p28855

10) Gap between rich and poor –  The Gini coefficient has been rising since the 70’s, but that was following  a fall in the first half of the century. The left is opposed to the gap; the right is neutral on it. While the right isn’t in favour of a gap, they aren’t really opposed, and the left are very opposed, so we’ll say this has been moving right.

11) Ethics/Moral/Religious decline – See gay marriage above. The number of religious people has been declining and church attendance has plummeted. Marriage rates have declined. Divorce rates have increased. Fertility rates have plunged. Bastardry has increased. Female-headed households have increased. Things are moving left here.

Conclusion:

So, on a total of the 13 of the most important issues to Americans, I didn’t rate 3 of them. Of the remaining 10, 8 have been moving left and 2 has been moving right.

On the majority of the issues that matter most to Americans the left has been winning. The US is moving left.

I realized after writing this that the question I ended up answering has changed slightly from the initial question, which was where the party’s are moving, not where the country is moving.

 

Gnon and Elua

Edit 2014/08/04: A number of Christian men whose thoughts I have come to respect have made objections to this post. I have concluded that whatever my original intentions were, they do not matter at this point as, at best, the execution was flawed and deeply confused. I no longer stand behind or support what was written in this post. I’ll leave this here to read for those that may be interested, but if you decide to read it please use discernment as this post was in error. May God forgive me if this led anyone to wrong thinking. For less confused writing by on the issue at hand, see here.

Scott writes of Moloch, the demon god who traps men into sacrificing what they value most for power, and argues:

When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there is no spontaneous order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.

Instead of obeying Gnon, obeying reality, we should summon forth, Elua:

He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

Elua is just like “Love as thou wilt” and “All knowlege is worth having”. He is the patron deity of exactly the kind of sickeningly sweet namby-pamby charitable liberalism that Arthur is complaining about.”

Elua, the god of unreality, the god of progressive liberalism, who will usher forth the utopia of free love and endless pleasure. Kipling called Elua by another name:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Scott wishes to create the Gods of the Market, to uplift man with hopes for Elua will make wishes of horses. He hopes that perhaps this time we can have perpetual peace, the Fuller Life, and abundance for all, that this time, prostration before Elua, unlike all prostrations to prior Gods of the Marketplace, will not result in damnation and the return of the terror and slaughter.

This time we can escape to unreality!

What Scott misses is that we are the of Gnon. We were born, evolved, and raised under the rule of Gnon; there is no escape to Elua, for we are not born of Elua, we are born of Gnon. We can not escape Gnon, because we are Gnon and Gnon is us. The only escape is total self-annihilation. He calls Elua a god of humans, but he is not, he is a god of what progressives wish humans were. He is the most inhuman and alien of gods.

Gnon is captured in verse by Kipling, Elua is captured in doggerel by Lennon:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

This is the promised utopia of Elua: a life of peace, a life of hedonism, a terrifying hell devoid of meaning. Elua offers perpetual peace if you only value nothing, he offers eternal life if only you reject the bonds of kinship, he offers limitless pleasure if only you sacrifice your future for the hedonism of today, he offers untold joy if only you renounce meaning itself.

When the veil is lifted, Elua turns out to be Nihil, the limitless void. You can only embrace Elua by giving yourself to nothingness. You offer up not just your child, not just your body, but your very soul on the altar of hedonism. You achieve what you love most, pleasure, by sacrificing yourself, your hope, your purpose, your very being.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

If offered, would Scott attach himself to a device that injected dopamine directly into his brain, eternal bliss if only he does not move or think?

For this is what Elua offers: eternal heroin. The god of the poppy.

Even if Scott accepts Elua’s desolate hell of eternal bliss, others wouldn’t. If it meant escape from Elua, I would help Land free Cthulu. Being eaten first would be infinitely preferable to eternal self-nullifcation. I would plunge the world into holy war if Elua were to incarnate, even the most brutal savagery of Gnon is but a tender ministration compared to the blissful void.

If Nihil is, brutal savagery is the only response. If the god of civilization is also the god of the eternal nothing, I will commit human sacrifice on the altar of the gods of savagery. If the god of bliss is the god of emptiness, I will gladly embrace pain to work to his destruction. Death, war, destruction, genocide, violence, blood, savagery, fire, all are superior to the void.

I am sure I am not alone. We men were born of Gnon, it is what were evolved for, it is what we know, it is what we are. Civilization may hold back Gnon, but if embracing Gnon is the only escape from Elua, we will burn it to the ground. Man was made for struggle, man was not made for the void. Struggle may kill the body, perpetual peace devours the soul. Gnon may be a monstrous horror, but he is our monstrous horror, Elua is a greater terror far more alien.

Do not fear those who can kill only the body; fear him who can destroy the soul.

If Scott and others try to bring forth their progressive god of the blissful void, we will work to bring their dreams to ruin. We will burn civilization to the ground and salt the ruins, for savagery is preferable to the void. We will free Gnon to from his chains if only to escape; we will unleash Cthulu and be devoured first if only he will devour Elua after. We will plunge the universe into eternal war between two superintelligences if only to stop Elua from being the only one. Better a god of infinite paper-clips than Elua. We will destroy the universe itself if only to escape into death. Better the grave than eternal self-annihilation.

Gnon may be a terrible elder god from the outer void but Elua is the void itself.