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I don't disagree with any of this except I would add that a lack of police presence and priority is a big factor in the "killing anyone who gets in your way" part. I think a difference in the amount and type of violence in a child's environment probably has tentacles reaching all of the places in their life that are markers for black underachievement/oppression, and so there is also a partial feedback loop that can easily get, and has gotten, out of control. This also affects how status is attained and what qualities are signifies of status from the female perspective, as well as the purpose a woman serves, from the man's perspective. What I said originally was not really about black women. It was about women, noting that black women are in a different situation and so their womanness is expressed differently. Also, that 2 hour radio show was one of 13, and there's also some more radio appearances from him dealing with callers and their relationship issues. I only linked that one because it's the first in a series that has some very good insight from a man with no significant formal education. He actually stumbles into some Randian ideas, and some psychological theories that parallel things that Jordan Peterson says: "men test ideas; women test men," for example. Here's a clip of just the insight, without as much shooting of shit:

For my actual evidence, from listening to and observing young people including black people. If you aren't aware of how sexualized young black women are, in particular, it's pretty extreme. For the theory on the "why" I've gotten most of it from this man: Women copy men in some ways and men copy women in some ways. Men are creative sexually, while women are creative in terms of showing love.

In a more general sense it's about equality--women imitating men (the men they are familiar with). "Oh, you're freaky? I can be freaky too." Why does this happen more with black women? Because black men are harder to get commitment from. The reaction from black women is to step up their sexuality, which they learn from men. Satan isn't an alternative to God, Satan is the counter force required to get back to neutral.

I was about to create a thread with this title, but I'll just resurrect this one instead. The following is stream-of-consciousness craziness, but I think there is some good stuff that I will try to straighten out eventually. Rand says this: This is a teleological system for evaluating our actions and circumstances. Our purpose is essentially our highest value--it is our "life." The most depraved individual, according to Rand, is the man without a purpose. This is a bottom-up way of organizing one's values. Fleeting pleasure becomes the foundation for building one's "life." This is how career choices are made for many, most, or maybe even the vast majority of people. The foundation receives all the focus, and thus it is hard to make any vertical progress. It's like starting to build a structure with mud, because that's the easiest material to find. The man with a purpose decides what the foundation will be based on the end goal. The value is not to be derived immediately (the man with a purpose generally has a low time preference). But the point of bringing this subject up is to question the importance of purpose. "Purpose" is a pretty central concept to Rand's ethics, it is the equivalent to "man's life." She apparently has not said much on purpose, or at least not much is in the lexicon. I see a problem, though, being how one determines one's purpose, as well as whether a purpose can change. What comes before purpose? We can say that the bottom-up value hierarchy is childish, and we are certainly born that way. At some point we have to start looking for higher values and work our way backward. What makes a value higher, or more abstract? Time preference is an easy way to start looking at this. If eating a cookie is good, sacrificing a cookie now for two later is better. The abstract concept of the future two cookies becomes a higher value. But here we only have the same process for choosing a career that I mentioned above. Work becomes a means to an end, and a temporary sacrifice for a later payoff. This is not the same as a purpose, which involves integration, as Rand says. Meaning that there is no sacrifice vs payoff dichotomy, every part of the value hierarchy is thoroughly connected to the rest. I haven't read Rand in a while, but I feel like non-contradiction is going to be the main issue here, meaning if A has a value of X when we are considering it vs B, it's value should still be X when we consider it vs C. All value is experienced at the foundational level. So a higher value is only an abstraction that helps us achieve more fundamental values. The problem here is understanding the range of value qualities. If we don't know something is a value, we may develop a deficiency. Since value is essentially psychological (the value of our health is derived from our capacity for joy, or something along those lines), it is a very complex subject. We may constantly be learning about what is and is not valuable to us. So one's purpose will likely change. The idea of how they want to live, with the broadest consideration for types of value, will change as their understanding of value changes. This means "purpose" is not a stable, and the man without a purpose may be in between purposes. Or maybe purpose is not all it's cracked up to be... maybe there is an abstraction further, being the ability to let purposes come and go. Purpose for Rand was like a direction to grow, but perhaps real growth is the ability to change direction. If fundamental values are derived from our nature, our nature might ought be our highest value. But it is natural to repress our nature, so this is not straightforward. Honesty is uninhibited natural expression, while it is natural to be dishonest from time to time--I feel this is an exception; a safety feature like a circuit breaker. Nature, on an individual level, is the idea of "working as intended," and I think maximizing that is probably a good idea.

lol David Pakman is a weasel.

I think identifying the connection between celebrity and leadership is incisive. The two are synonymous on a primitive level--in a prehistoric battle squad, hunting group, or tribe, the celebrity is the leader; the person you look to. Why should our attention naturally be drawn to the inconsequential? To be precise we could say that celebrity is derived from any human quality that naturally draws our attention, and therefore any human quality in others that can benefit us (our genes) or, in the case of infamous celebrities, that can harm us. That which can benefit or harm us is really that which would benefit or harm our ancestors. So our criteria for celebrity and leadership are those that would have benefited (or in the case of infamy, harmed) us if we lived thousands of years ago. But how direct is this connection between celebrity and power? Surely Tom Cruise is a bigger celebrity than any of the Scientology leadership or L. Ron Hubbard, himself. I used submissive/dominant relationships to describe power dynamics, and I think that's the best way to look at it as far as I've thought of. But human nature won't change for a long time (until genetic engineering is practiced), so the ideal would probably be a culture of lesser celebrities that embrace an individualist philosophy and therefore encourage many others to seek answers there. Otherwise you need a new celebrity to take Rand's place, one who is a better role model.

There's a number of factors, technically infinite, composing your experience. That does not mean you are determined entirely by external forces, because part of your experience is internal: your experience of self (experience of experiencing). I don't want to get into this in this thread, though. I want to focus on the factors that determine behavior across entire populations.

One thing that needs to be clarified is the notion of "rules." What is a rule, and is there a difference between natural rule and social rule? Rules presuppose the importance of avoiding negative consequences. "No stealing" means "if you don't want to be punished, do not steal." The rule here is a social rule. A natural rule would be "no jumping off of a cliff." The concept of formal rules depends on the concept of formal rulers as well as the concept of "formal." Formal, in this sense, refers to the dynamics of dominant and submissive being acknowledged. A formal rule is a rule made by a dominant party who is acknowledged as such by the submissive party (some people conflate this with consent). Many rules are informal, and don't entail an obvious sub/dom dynamic. Social norms are rules abstracted from the behaviors of particular individuals through pattern recognition; here we have a situation that must be unpacked. To have effect a rule requires submission to the source of the rule (the consequences associated with breaking the rule must be significantly undesirable and the source of the consequences must be respected in that capacity), but the source of social norms is not a defined person or group. The abstract majority, or significant portion, of people are dominant here. Eccentrics may be people who do not submit to the majority in this sense. One last case to examine is the cult leader or religious figure. The dominance in this situation is derived from the "truth" that is being conveyed. The bishop's status is not due to his higher worth in the eyes of God, but in his ability to relay valuable information. The religious figure does not need to convince his followers that he is higher status, he only needs to tell them what makes them feel good ("feel good" here does not imply happiness, but more like social media stimulating dopamine production).

You don't directly control your motivation, though. This is why it's so hard to make characteristic changes. You have to rearrange your environment, possibly get new friends, start doing things that are not directly connected to the change you want to make but are still part of the process. This reminds me of the thing Jung said about you not having ideas, but ideas having you. This is all relevant to the idea of power, because if power over oneself is not absolute, then social power, being non-absolute, is still very significant.

You have power over your body. That's simple enough... But your mind? That is where it gets tricky. Power is not simple even on an individual level.

I understand the meaning. The dominant person in a relationship may alter their behavior in order to stay dominant. But I don't see how that differs from any other decision we make. The question is the true value of the desire. We may walk around a puddle, but the change in our behavior is meaningless, and so the value of staying dry is clearly greater. If we have to lose all of our other values for the sake of dominating another person, then we have made an error. Dominating an enemy military, though? There's no noose in that case. The value lost by altering your behavior in this case is worth it. And I think this is the optimal use of power: minimizing losses.

But this isn't true, if it were then reality would also be a noose. The king may fear the peasants, he may also fear a wild animal, he may also fear a patch of ice in his path. These things all inform his actions; they all influence his choices.

I haven't watched the video yet, but something I want to get to is a description of power as given by Foucault, that Thaddeus Russell invoked in his recent appearance on Michael Malice's show. The gist is that power "flows," as Thaddeus said, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top. Meaning that even though the king has power over the peasants, he still fears the peasants and thus they have some power over him. The error here is in the definition of power or, more precisely, social power, which is why I find it necessary to define. We have enough information from this description to know that the concept is not clear, but I still have to work on exactly in what way that is. It is evident, however, that the "power" that flows from top to bottom is not the same thing as the "power" that flows from bottom to top. We can also know that the power from top to bottom is the one which we are concerned with, because the one being afraid of the many is self-explanatory.

I just saw a YouTube comment on Matt Christiansen's stream: "I heard corona deaths exploded in Lebanon."

I want to keep coming back to this until I can get some kind of clarity. Again, the purpose being to understand where power comes from and how it works so I can at least know whether there's anything that can be done to help minimize the abuse. Power, influence, persuasion: these are all of the same substance as far as I'm concerned. The difference in meaning may be the difference between a drip and a flood, but it it is a difference in quantity. Persuasion doesn't seem to fit with the others until you consider that the power of holding a gun to someone's head comes from their belief that you are willing to pull the trigger. Maybe you are meek, and they have experience with killers. The real difference between persuasion and influence is that persuasion is always intentional, while influence may be coincidental. There is something else that helps clarify what power really is... that is status. In acting, status is something that actors consider to inform their actions. Holding a gun in a scene would typically make you high status, unless your scene partner is playing a really badass character; but even so, you'd be higher status with the gun than you would be without it. Status is really what we're talking about when we talk about social power. The Universities and the press both have status. What about a dictator? Does he just have social status? What about all the guns and the "force"? It doesn't seem like it could be true that a dictator is merely high status, but that is presumably how he attained that power originally (unless it was passed down to him). I believe the way this is all tied together is that the violence and the threats of violence are not used to attain or maintain status in absolute terms, but to destroy anyone else's ability to attain status. What you have in a dictatorship could theoretically be an icon of the people, but more likely than not their is some fear being exploited. That fear does not elevate the leader, or the person at the top of the social hierarchy, it just stamps out all competing hierarchies. This is why power in America is more insidious. The Universities and media earned incredibly high status in absolute terms, which has lately declined, obviously. What they are doing with that status now is using it to attack their competition, because of their decline... but their decline did not start for this reason, it started because they sold out.

He did have COVID, though. And he probably was counted as a COVID death.

Do many people here believe the cop killed him? You don't buy the excited delirium explanation? "I can't breathe" could be something said by someone experiencing anxiety and an adrenaline dump, it might not literally mean he cannot breathe, but that he is short of breath due to panic. I don't know exactly, but I know there are scientific explanations out there for how it may not have been the cop's fault.

Here's an aggregation of presumably the vast majority of international studies on HCQ to date: https://c19study.com/ All of the negative results are from late stage COVID-19.

I like this because there are obvious similarities between the two movements. It can be frightening if you don't consider what is probably the most significant difference, being the lack of organization in today's left. The Nazi's were allegiant to the party and Hitler, where as the left is allegiant to an ideology that purports to represent everyone (hence equality being the ultimate value). The history of communism is likely, and will likely be, the biggest factor in preventing significant organization on the left, as such organization would necessarily draw parallels to the failed attempts of actualizing "Real Communism" in the past. In other words, equality can not eliminate inequalities, inequalities must be embraced for this purpose (thus the paradox of Anarcho Communism) and leftists have identified the employment of inequalities, even for the purpose of leveling out other inequalities, as harmful to their cause ("that's not Real Communism"). The intellectual left will not put a party above the people the way the Bolsheviks did, which will limit how much they can actually achieve. Their reasons for why Communism has always failed are actually reasons for why it's always succeeded.

Next he's gonna say we should be disinfecting our lungs, and the left will agree.

Something else: If it is true that human evolution largely happened during a time where people survived in groups of 150-250, then we can say it is probable that power dynamics are natural to us. Though we are physically not part of a collective, abstractly we are, and this abstraction has real world implications. 10 people are much more productive as parts of an organized group than they would be if we combined their individual productivity without such organization, as Adam Smith taught us. So even though there is no direct empirical evidence that a collective is anything more than an abstraction, we do have indirect empirical evidence. For this reason there is an inherent weakness in the ideal of freedom of association. This reminds me of something my favorite comic, the late Patrice O'Neal, said about prison... I can't find the quote, but it was essentially that in reality, opposed to what we see in movies, there is no quiet loner in prison that everyone leaves alone. There are natural leaders and natural followers. Dominance and submission are inherent in human relations to varying degrees because the freedom of association is a new privilege and certainly not absolute. Safety is a basic human need, and safety must emerge from a lack of safety. Safety depends on organization, and organization under unsafe conditions is how social power first emerges. If we accept that power dynamics are natural and unavoidable, we still have to deal with the scale. We are now associated to some extent with millions of people whether we like it or not, and this is vastly different than the societies of prehistoric man. Although not everything good is natural, and not everything unnatural is bad, unnatural things and behavior should be held to a higher scrutiny than that which is natural because we have finite time and resources to investigate every aspect of our lives, and we can assume that unless a change is immediately necessary, it is safer to avoid negative change than to pursue positive change. Since wars happen on unnatural scales, and avoiding/winning wars is necessary for our survival, we must accept some unnatural level of association if only for the benefit of a common military. Anarcho-capitalists would argue that it is possible to fund and man a military completely voluntarily. The point here is presumably to avoid power dynamics, but if we assume that is impossible, since organization without power dynamics would necessitate a state of general safety, and that safety cannot be attained without prior organization, then we should attempt to identify the inherent power dynamics in such a system before can compare it to the current system.

Just for context, the reason I brought up capital at all was because it's basically the most important concept leftists have for justifying socialism/communism. Marxism, and all of the accelerationisms, assume that owning capital guarantees profit and will necessarily lead to the concentration of all capital/means of production in the hands of a small majority. For an economist to look at the amount of capital in a country as some kind of indicator of economic growth/decline is fine, but it's not a precise indication of anything except that people expect those assets and moneys to be profitable, and any policy based on this information (according to Hoppe's reasoning, ANY economic policy is necessarily arbitrary, which I agree with) is based on arbitrary information. So as an approximation, sure, capital exists. But as a real, defined feature of assets and money that can be considered in terms of a massively complex national or global economy? It's a floating abstraction filling in a gap created by strictly top-down thinking: this gap is labeled "how rich people exploit the lower classes." How come it's called "Capitalism" instead of "Propertyism"? Who chose the name? Socialists. "Capitalist" was a sort of slur before "Capitalism" was ever used to describe the style of economic system.

Leftism is basically a collection of bluffs. Unless you're under a repressive regime how are people really gonna revolt? It's an unconscious bluff, because they don't know if it will work or not... they're just experimenting at the cost of innocent people's livelihoods and sometimes lives.

I don't know about civil war, or if that will be the path... I wonder with all this censoring if alternative social media platforms are going to divide people based on their stance on free speech (which is the issue as long as these companies are granted immunity under Section 230 of the CDA).

This is the modern definition (from Merriam-Webster) as it applies most to economics: "(1) : net worth : excess of assets over liabilities" That definition is a derivative of this one: "(2) : accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods" Without first the concept of goods that can be used to produce other goods, we would not connect the monetary value of assets directly to production of goods. One thing to note is that the concept of capital originates from the businessman's perspective, and had nothing to do with macroeconomics. The concept was for personal use. Technically both of these definitions are arbitrary. The second, more basic definition relies on the concept of "production" and "goods," which means that someone must first buy the products before we can say they have market value. The first definition is more derivative, but seems less arbitrary. You can do an inventory of everything a business owns, as well as it's cash balance, and come up with some dollar number to equal the capital. Technically there would be some arbitrary valuation of the non-liquid assets because unless someone buys them, they don't have a price. However, let's ignore that and say everything up until this point is non-arbitrary and the monetary number is absolutely correct, the main problem is how these assets were acquired... The business has assets in the first place because people invested in the business arbitrarily. They didn't have a guarantee that their investment would pay off. So it's not arbitrary to say "capital is the monetary total of assets minus liabilities of a business," but ultimately that says nothing about whether value is being produced or not. I don't really understand this sentence, but I'll try to reply. "Goods" and "services," like prices, are only non-arbitrary after the fact. If you try to sell your art for $1,000,000 and nobody buys it, that's not the price. If you still can't sell it for $1 the value is likely nothing or less. Your paint brush is not capital, even though you thought it was. I'm doing my best here, but the Austrian economists have already done it. Here's Mises: https://mises.org/library/capital-goods-and-capital (My bold--the purpose of economics.) "The money equivalent of the various factors of production owned by a business unit can be determined and summed up. But if we abstract from such an evaluation in money terms, the totality of the produced factors of production is merely an enumeration of physical quantities of thousands and thousands of various goods. Such an inventory is of no use to acting. It is a description of a part of the universe in terms of technology and topography and has no reference whatever to the problems raised by the endeavors to improve human well-being. We may acquiesce in the terminological usage of calling the produced factors of production capital goods. But this does not render the concept of real capital any more meaningful." And his conclusion: "The notion of capital makes sense only in the market economy. It serves the deliberations and calculations of individuals or groups of individuals operating on their own account in such an economy. It is a device of capitalists, entrepreneurs, and farmers eager to make profits and to avoid losses. It is not a category of all acting. It is a category of acting within a market economy."