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Devon Eriksen

@Devon_Eriksen_ • 119,842 subscribers

Scifi Author, Engineer, Sharpshooter, part-time Dæmon Prince of Tzeentch. Not a cat. https://t.co/TKQzarK7SE

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But are we prepared to do what it takes to secure these things?

But are we prepared to do what it takes to secure these things?

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This is what will matter 1000 years from now. Not your politics. Not your stupid tantrums about who platformed who on some website. Not your incomprehensible desire to send NASA's entire budget to the third world. This guy reignited the Space Age. He spent his own money, hired a bunch of dudes, and reignited the Space Age. And together, they underbid and outdid NASA and its pet dinosaur corporations on every conceivable level. This is history happening before you. If you are a puddlefish, if you think this is a wasteful showpiece or science project, then you don't understand physics, economics, astronomy, or in fact the basic layout of the universe you live in. We live in a tiny puddle at the bottom of a well. Out there is an entire universe, full not only of stuff to explore, but full of stuff to build things out of. Big things. Wonderful things. Things that are going to make all of the cool stuff you have today, all of human civilization to date look like early Assyrians writing stuff down on wet clay with a reed. Infinite resources. Infinite energy. Infinite space. Instead of fighting over little patches of land, we will have an infinite 3d volume. Enclose it in steel, pump it full of air, spin it, and it's a habitat. Instead of scratching tiny scraps of metal out of the crust of one planet, we will break down entire asteroids and smelt them. Instead of drilling for hydrocarbons and turning water wheels, we will harness entire suns, split the atom, and eventually draw our fuel from the substance that makes up 99% of the entire universe. None of your local, temporal Earth politics matter compared to this. This is more important than pride parades and abortions, more important than tribal conflicts in eastern Europe and southwest Asia, more important than tensions with Russia and China. More important, in the long run, than the United States of America. America's most important function, its one most vital purpose, is to serve as an incubator for this. Because this changes everything. All of our arguments about conditions on this planet become obsolete, because the whole planet becomes just one suburban neighborhood. All of our wars over resources and territory become obsolete, because no one has time to brawl when we're all sitting on top of a dragon horde with sacks and shovels. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when Kennedy died in Dallas. When the towers fell. When the Eagle landed. When the Wall came down. But this... this is the real moment, one of the first of many. They are what every child will know about a thousand years from now, even if they have four arms and are genetically engineered for zero-g, or are sentient blocks of code running on a sphere of computronium enclosing an entire star. You may not live to see that, depending on what we do or don't invent, and when. But it will happen, and you will live to see wonderful things. If the puddlefish don't get in the way. Don't be a puddlefish.
0:59
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

This is what will matter 1000 years from now. Not your politics. Not your stupid tantrums about who platformed who on some website. Not your incomprehensible desire to send NASA's entire budget to the third world. This guy reignited the Space Age. He spent his own money, hired a bunch of dudes, and reignited the Space Age. And together, they underbid and outdid NASA and its pet dinosaur corporations on every conceivable level. This is history happening before you. If you are a puddlefish, if you think this is a wasteful showpiece or science project, then you don't understand physics, economics, astronomy, or in fact the basic layout of the universe you live in. We live in a tiny puddle at the bottom of a well. Out there is an entire universe, full not only of stuff to explore, but full of stuff to build things out of. Big things. Wonderful things. Things that are going to make all of the cool stuff you have today, all of human civilization to date look like early Assyrians writing stuff down on wet clay with a reed. Infinite resources. Infinite energy. Infinite space. Instead of fighting over little patches of land, we will have an infinite 3d volume. Enclose it in steel, pump it full of air, spin it, and it's a habitat. Instead of scratching tiny scraps of metal out of the crust of one planet, we will break down entire asteroids and smelt them. Instead of drilling for hydrocarbons and turning water wheels, we will harness entire suns, split the atom, and eventually draw our fuel from the substance that makes up 99% of the entire universe. None of your local, temporal Earth politics matter compared to this. This is more important than pride parades and abortions, more important than tribal conflicts in eastern Europe and southwest Asia, more important than tensions with Russia and China. More important, in the long run, than the United States of America. America's most important function, its one most vital purpose, is to serve as an incubator for this. Because this changes everything. All of our arguments about conditions on this planet become obsolete, because the whole planet becomes just one suburban neighborhood. All of our wars over resources and territory become obsolete, because no one has time to brawl when we're all sitting on top of a dragon horde with sacks and shovels. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when Kennedy died in Dallas. When the towers fell. When the Eagle landed. When the Wall came down. But this... this is the real moment, one of the first of many. They are what every child will know about a thousand years from now, even if they have four arms and are genetically engineered for zero-g, or are sentient blocks of code running on a sphere of computronium enclosing an entire star. You may not live to see that, depending on what we do or don't invent, and when. But it will happen, and you will live to see wonderful things. If the puddlefish don't get in the way. Don't be a puddlefish.

Devon Eriksen

3,438,313 просмотров • 1 год назад

I'll tell you this one right now. Most companies are breathtakingly inefficient. Because no one gets fired for doing what "we have always done". Because boomer middle managers hate engineers, and most their interactions with them are for the purpose of micromanaging them or emphasizing their own status. Because three hour meetings including everyone they can think of allow nonproductive people to look busy. Because boomer c-suite executives couldn't inspire an autistic nine year old boy to talk about trains. This results in companies that are process-oriented, rather than result-oriented. The purpose of a process-oriented culture is to dilute responsibility so no one can be held accountable for failure. The only way such companies succeed is by eventually, mechanistically running out of mistakes to make, and grinding their way across the finish line. This means that it's actually pretty easy, in principle, to make most companies far more competent and efficient . But you have to be willing to break social rules and offend people. In other words, you have to be a sperg. What you do is simple. Create a culture of accountability. Every single act, every single component, every single product, every single decision, must be connected to a single name, who owns it and is accountable for it. Cripple meeting culture by allowing anyone to not show up, or to walk out at any time, if they deem their presence unnecessary. Most meetings serve no purpose other than to dilute responsibility by artificially adding consensus to what should be an individual decision. Eliminate any role which doesn't directly and obviously contribute. Focus on results, and remove anyone who plays it safe instead of pushing forward. But never punish failure, if the failure resulted from a reasonable decision that turned out to be wrong. Failure is inevitable. Learning from failure is what brings success. Don't allow HR to have any power in hiring decisions. Their job is to handle payroll, benefits, sick leave, and paperwork, and that's it. They shouldn't even be allowed to talk to candidates before they are hired. Hiring, like any other decision, cannot be by consensus. No dilution of responsibility can be permitted. Team leaders hire their teams. Power in the company must rest firmly in the hands of its core function. If you are an engineering company, designing and building new technology, power must rest with the engineers. Not sales, not marketing, not accounting. Engineers. Above all, know how to inspire your people. This must be done with real, meaningful action, not pretty speeches. Engineers are some of the smartest people on Earth, and have high levels of integrity, but boomer middle managers despise them because they speak without subtlety, and don't care about professional appearance games... so they tend to treat engineers as irresponsible children. In reality, middle managers are the ones playing games. To earn an engineer's loyalty, you need do only three things: - Shield him from having to play, or even know about, office politics, and from unnecessary busywork. An engineer's time should not be spent doing unproductive things he is not good at. - Treat him fairly in pay, benefits and job expectations. Engineers expect not to have to argue for what they get. They create value, and their share of that value should not be gated behind the exercise of a set of skills that are not necessary for job performance. - Give him something important to do, something that he can be proud of. An engineer's profession is an important part of his identity and sense of self, and he needs to feel as if he is dedicating that part of himself to something that matters. What does this look like? Watch the video with the sound on. Hear the cheering. Watch the people's reactions in the left half of the screen. Listen to the announcer. She's crying. When people believe like this, they will work harder than they ever have. They will pull together and resolve problems. They will treat each other like trusted members of their tribe. They will set team goals above their own. So what is Elon Musk's secret sauce? Asperger's Syndrome, that's what.
0:35
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

I'll tell you this one right now. Most companies are breathtakingly inefficient. Because no one gets fired for doing what "we have always done". Because boomer middle managers hate engineers, and most their interactions with them are for the purpose of micromanaging them or emphasizing their own status. Because three hour meetings including everyone they can think of allow nonproductive people to look busy. Because boomer c-suite executives couldn't inspire an autistic nine year old boy to talk about trains. This results in companies that are process-oriented, rather than result-oriented. The purpose of a process-oriented culture is to dilute responsibility so no one can be held accountable for failure. The only way such companies succeed is by eventually, mechanistically running out of mistakes to make, and grinding their way across the finish line. This means that it's actually pretty easy, in principle, to make most companies far more competent and efficient . But you have to be willing to break social rules and offend people. In other words, you have to be a sperg. What you do is simple. Create a culture of accountability. Every single act, every single component, every single product, every single decision, must be connected to a single name, who owns it and is accountable for it. Cripple meeting culture by allowing anyone to not show up, or to walk out at any time, if they deem their presence unnecessary. Most meetings serve no purpose other than to dilute responsibility by artificially adding consensus to what should be an individual decision. Eliminate any role which doesn't directly and obviously contribute. Focus on results, and remove anyone who plays it safe instead of pushing forward. But never punish failure, if the failure resulted from a reasonable decision that turned out to be wrong. Failure is inevitable. Learning from failure is what brings success. Don't allow HR to have any power in hiring decisions. Their job is to handle payroll, benefits, sick leave, and paperwork, and that's it. They shouldn't even be allowed to talk to candidates before they are hired. Hiring, like any other decision, cannot be by consensus. No dilution of responsibility can be permitted. Team leaders hire their teams. Power in the company must rest firmly in the hands of its core function. If you are an engineering company, designing and building new technology, power must rest with the engineers. Not sales, not marketing, not accounting. Engineers. Above all, know how to inspire your people. This must be done with real, meaningful action, not pretty speeches. Engineers are some of the smartest people on Earth, and have high levels of integrity, but boomer middle managers despise them because they speak without subtlety, and don't care about professional appearance games... so they tend to treat engineers as irresponsible children. In reality, middle managers are the ones playing games. To earn an engineer's loyalty, you need do only three things: - Shield him from having to play, or even know about, office politics, and from unnecessary busywork. An engineer's time should not be spent doing unproductive things he is not good at. - Treat him fairly in pay, benefits and job expectations. Engineers expect not to have to argue for what they get. They create value, and their share of that value should not be gated behind the exercise of a set of skills that are not necessary for job performance. - Give him something important to do, something that he can be proud of. An engineer's profession is an important part of his identity and sense of self, and he needs to feel as if he is dedicating that part of himself to something that matters. What does this look like? Watch the video with the sound on. Hear the cheering. Watch the people's reactions in the left half of the screen. Listen to the announcer. She's crying. When people believe like this, they will work harder than they ever have. They will pull together and resolve problems. They will treat each other like trusted members of their tribe. They will set team goals above their own. So what is Elon Musk's secret sauce? Asperger's Syndrome, that's what.

Devon Eriksen

1,299,640 просмотров • 1 год назад

In the back of my 9th grade English class, there was a poster hung on the wall by my boomer English teacher. It said "What if they gave a war and nobody came?". A simple boomer hippie sentiment. I always wondered about that poster. Fourteen year old me didn't know the words "game theory", but I still understood some basic concepts of the field just from being alive. And so I knew that if "they" gave a war, and only one side showed up, that side won, and could do whatever they wanted to the losers. And that not showing up for a war doesn't do a thing to prevent the other side from showing up. In fact, it incentivizes them to do the opposite. So I wondered... why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? I quickly learned that asking this question of boomer adults produced nothing but a blank look. The TV never told them how to answer questions like that. So I continued wondering, and thinking about it. Why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I figured it out. They were. They were putting it in the enemy classroom. Because I was the enemy. We, all of us, the white western children of GenX, were the enemy they wanted to defeat. I didn't realize that at first, because I thought of that English teacher, who hung the poster, as a full and complete human being, equipped with her own ideas and opinions, who decided to hang that poster. But she wasn't. She was a boomer. Which means she was a programmable tool in the hands of those who wished to rob western civilization of the will to commit violence in our own interests. She had no idea what she was dong. She wasn't thinking philosophically. She probably thought philosophy was a bunch of books written by Wittgenstein about the "nature of selfness" or whatever. She had no mental tools to think about game theory. She had simply been programmed by books, newspaper, magazines, and television, to think of certain things as "bad". War? Bad. Violence? Bad. Colonialism? Bad. Racism? Bad. Patriarchy? Bad. Talking back to the teacher and asking uncomfortable questions that the TV didn't tell her how to answer? Bad. This fully programmable unit, equipped with no more sophisticated thinking mechanisms than assigning a binary "good" or "bad" label to various concepts, was simply acting out a program written by someone else when she hung that poster. But who wrote those TV scripts, news stories, magazine articles? Were they the enemy, or were they more idiots? And who programmed them? Still more idiots? I had no way of knowing. I only knew that there was a chain of programmable NPCs, and at the other end was the enemy. I couldn't trace the chain back, of course. I was an impoverished twentysomething, not a team of investigative reporters. But I knew damn well it had to be the Soviets on the other end. Who else would want the children of the West to be unconditional pacifists, and had the money, organization, power, and above all, patience, to spend decades manipulating the Western media that the boomers uncritically sucked down? And later, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own socialism... oh, look, I was right. The USSR is gone, of course, but that web of useful, progammable idiots still exists, ready both to be idiots, and to teach children to be idiots. And there is no shortage of people who hate Western civilization and are willing to plant themselves in the programmer's chair. Chase Oliver is a programmable idiot. He has been programmed to abhor violence under any circumstances, even in defense of Western civilization, and to program children with his pacifism. He has been programmed not to reproduce, and to groom children into sterility. He has been programmed not to defend the borders of our nation, and to program others not to do so. He has been programmed to prefer other races and cultures to what is nominally his own, and to program others to denigrate their own culture as well. He has now successfully been integrated as the candidate of a party whose original philosophy was the very antithesis of everything he stands for. By himself, he is a joke... a mincing little queer who couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But in concert with other useful idiots, he managed to infiltrate and destroy the Libertarian party, to render it no longer libertarian. A drop of water is weak. But a flood can wash away anything. These people are dangerous, and to oppose them, you need the proper philosophy. How are you to know what that is? Simple. It's everything they are trying to program you against. You must be willing to commit violence, rather than unwilling to defend what you claim to value. You must unashamedly prefer your race, culture, and civilization to other races, cultures, and civilization, rather than being too broadminded to take your own side. You must reserve your compassion, and your loyalty, for those who make common cause with you, rather than valuing all humans equally. You must have children if you can, and find ways to support others of your tribe having children if you can't, rather than being sterile and allowing yourself to be replaced. You must raise those children to be strong, willing to commit violence, and able to understand and pursue their own interests, rather than reflexively obedient... even if reflexive obedience on the part of your children would make parenting easier. You must treat useful idiots of the enemy as enemies, remembering Grey's First Law: Any insufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. and Grey's Second Law: Any sufficiently subtle malice can be disguised as incompetence. Your civilization is under threat from those who wish to use the Chase Olivers of the world to accomplish what they could never hope to do with military force. Do not reject political violence. Be willing to fight.
14:53
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

In the back of my 9th grade English class, there was a poster hung on the wall by my boomer English teacher. It said "What if they gave a war and nobody came?". A simple boomer hippie sentiment. I always wondered about that poster. Fourteen year old me didn't know the words "game theory", but I still understood some basic concepts of the field just from being alive. And so I knew that if "they" gave a war, and only one side showed up, that side won, and could do whatever they wanted to the losers. And that not showing up for a war doesn't do a thing to prevent the other side from showing up. In fact, it incentivizes them to do the opposite. So I wondered... why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? I quickly learned that asking this question of boomer adults produced nothing but a blank look. The TV never told them how to answer questions like that. So I continued wondering, and thinking about it. Why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I figured it out. They were. They were putting it in the enemy classroom. Because I was the enemy. We, all of us, the white western children of GenX, were the enemy they wanted to defeat. I didn't realize that at first, because I thought of that English teacher, who hung the poster, as a full and complete human being, equipped with her own ideas and opinions, who decided to hang that poster. But she wasn't. She was a boomer. Which means she was a programmable tool in the hands of those who wished to rob western civilization of the will to commit violence in our own interests. She had no idea what she was dong. She wasn't thinking philosophically. She probably thought philosophy was a bunch of books written by Wittgenstein about the "nature of selfness" or whatever. She had no mental tools to think about game theory. She had simply been programmed by books, newspaper, magazines, and television, to think of certain things as "bad". War? Bad. Violence? Bad. Colonialism? Bad. Racism? Bad. Patriarchy? Bad. Talking back to the teacher and asking uncomfortable questions that the TV didn't tell her how to answer? Bad. This fully programmable unit, equipped with no more sophisticated thinking mechanisms than assigning a binary "good" or "bad" label to various concepts, was simply acting out a program written by someone else when she hung that poster. But who wrote those TV scripts, news stories, magazine articles? Were they the enemy, or were they more idiots? And who programmed them? Still more idiots? I had no way of knowing. I only knew that there was a chain of programmable NPCs, and at the other end was the enemy. I couldn't trace the chain back, of course. I was an impoverished twentysomething, not a team of investigative reporters. But I knew damn well it had to be the Soviets on the other end. Who else would want the children of the West to be unconditional pacifists, and had the money, organization, power, and above all, patience, to spend decades manipulating the Western media that the boomers uncritically sucked down? And later, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own socialism... oh, look, I was right. The USSR is gone, of course, but that web of useful, progammable idiots still exists, ready both to be idiots, and to teach children to be idiots. And there is no shortage of people who hate Western civilization and are willing to plant themselves in the programmer's chair. Chase Oliver is a programmable idiot. He has been programmed to abhor violence under any circumstances, even in defense of Western civilization, and to program children with his pacifism. He has been programmed not to reproduce, and to groom children into sterility. He has been programmed not to defend the borders of our nation, and to program others not to do so. He has been programmed to prefer other races and cultures to what is nominally his own, and to program others to denigrate their own culture as well. He has now successfully been integrated as the candidate of a party whose original philosophy was the very antithesis of everything he stands for. By himself, he is a joke... a mincing little queer who couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But in concert with other useful idiots, he managed to infiltrate and destroy the Libertarian party, to render it no longer libertarian. A drop of water is weak. But a flood can wash away anything. These people are dangerous, and to oppose them, you need the proper philosophy. How are you to know what that is? Simple. It's everything they are trying to program you against. You must be willing to commit violence, rather than unwilling to defend what you claim to value. You must unashamedly prefer your race, culture, and civilization to other races, cultures, and civilization, rather than being too broadminded to take your own side. You must reserve your compassion, and your loyalty, for those who make common cause with you, rather than valuing all humans equally. You must have children if you can, and find ways to support others of your tribe having children if you can't, rather than being sterile and allowing yourself to be replaced. You must raise those children to be strong, willing to commit violence, and able to understand and pursue their own interests, rather than reflexively obedient... even if reflexive obedience on the part of your children would make parenting easier. You must treat useful idiots of the enemy as enemies, remembering Grey's First Law: Any insufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. and Grey's Second Law: Any sufficiently subtle malice can be disguised as incompetence. Your civilization is under threat from those who wish to use the Chase Olivers of the world to accomplish what they could never hope to do with military force. Do not reject political violence. Be willing to fight.

Devon Eriksen

703,832 просмотров • 1 год назад

Dear Lexxie (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)... (May I call you Lexxie? You can call me Dev. ) We probably wouldn't get along very well. I'm a throw-the-communists-out-of-helicopters anarchocapitalist, and that's probably too big a political gap to bridge with a few interpersonal gestures. However, like each other or not, I'm going to assume you are asking in good faith, and I'm going to answer you. I'm not going to answer your exact question, though. It's the wrong question. An answer wouldn't get you the information I think you are actually looking for. It looks like you're assuming that the neo-republican "MAGA" movement works like a traditional campaign. You develop a message about how your platform will be good for people, and your opponent's platform will be bad for them, then you get that message out on various channels, and it persuades some people to vote for you. That's definitely how democrats work. You are the party of television. And it's how old, pre-2015 republicans worked, too. You know, all those guys like Romney, who have been exiled to the wilderness, or, in the case of Cheney, have joined the democrats. MAGA doesn't work like that. We didn't vote for Trump because he persuaded us by getting XYZ message out on the UVW channel. We voted for Trump because we were waiting for someone like Trump to come along, so we could vote for him. That's why Trump didn't really have to do much of anything to beat you. He just had to position himself as the anti-establishment candidate, then get out of the way and let things happen, without making any major mistakes. The field was primed for him before he ever announced that he would run. Why? Because of one key insight that I don't think democrats have ever had. Elections are not about policy. They are not about personality. They are not about experience. They are not about charisma. Elections are about trust. Trump was elected in a landslide in 2016, 2024, and probably 2020 as well if you discard all the fake ballots, because more people trusted him, and less people trusted Clinton, Biden, or Harris. If you think about it, it's really pretty obvious that trust is the only issue that matters. Here's an example. Democrats campaigned against Trump by pounding on the abortion issue and cosplaying as fictional sex slaves from a kink novel for lonely cat ladies. And it worked with your base. Despite the fact that Trump had released a public statement that he would veto any national level restrictions on abortion, and that it was the Supreme Court, not he, who had overturned Roe-Wade in the first place, not even on ideological grounds, but because it was bad lawyering. Why did it work? Because those people didn't trust Trump. So anything he said about his intentions on the abortion issue was meaningless to them. It's all about trust. So why did more people trust Trump? And why do I say they were waiting to vote for him before he even came along? Because trust in Trump is rooted in distrust of the Machine. The Machine is the system of informal, unacknowledged relationships between people who have clout in the federal government and use it to benefit themselves, to benefit each other, and to protect their power base from outsiders. In other words, the federal government is corrupt, and the majority of Americans know it. Resist the temptation to argue with me here, even inside your own head. We are talking about why people voted for Trump. It's important what they believe, not whether you agree with them. Now, I could go on all day with examples of the Machine, and its fairly obvious abuse of power and funds. I could talk about fake vaccines that turned out to be neither safe nor effective, which made a lot of money for people who are vaccinated against any liability by your own organization... Congress. But that would sidetrack us, because you'd succumb to the temptation to argue about each one, and it's not important whether you agree. What's important, once again, is what the majority of Americans agree on. They agree on the existence of a Machine. They agree that the Machine has political influence which does not come from the "just consent of the governed". They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by enacting policies which hurt them. They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by spending their money on things that are not in their interest. They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by failing to faithfully carry out the actual duties of the federal government. They hate and distrust the Machine. All of this has nothing to with Trump, because all of this became true before Trump announced he was running. As I said, people were waiting for a Trump they could vote for. This is why. But how did distrust in the Machine translate into trust in Trump? Simple. Because Trump is the enemy of the Machine. How do we know that? Simple. It's not just because Trump told us so. If it were merely Trump telling us so, he could have been lying. We know Trump is the enemy of the Machine, because the Machine told us so. We saw how desperate the Machine was to convince us that Trump was an icky superplusungood double-Nazi, when his actual platform was just straight-up 1960s democrat, John Kennedy style. We saw them hurling accusation after accusation, as if they were throwing pasta at the wall, seeing what would stick. We saw the press elements of the Machine continuing to hold to those accusations, long after they had been proven to not just be false, but to be deliberate lies. Every time the Machine told us that Trump was horrible, all it did was confirm what Trump was telling us... that he intended to fight the Machine. In 2016, that was enough to get him elected. Check the video below. Michael Moore was the only person who understood this in 2016. Thing is he understood Trump voters, but not Trump. He thought a Trump presidency would be disastrous. Turned that nothing much happened at all. The Machine fought him more or less to a standstill, and the only major way he moved the needle was in putting three constitutionalists on the Supreme Court. Now, that's no small feat. Helped us a lot, and will for years to come. But the border security system didn't get finished, Mexico didn't pay for it, etc. Thing is, that's not important. What's important is why. We saw the fight between Trump and the Machine. It wasn't about whether he could beat the Machine or not. It was the fact that he willing to fight it, and the fact that we could see the fight. And that proved that his intentions were at least partially what he said they were. In 2024, he looks a lot more prepared, and has a team of heavy hitters backing him But there's one more set of questions to ask, here. Why did Trump run as a republican? Why is it Democrats, in particular, who are identified with the Machine? Well, the easy answer is that you keep running Machine candidates. Obama looked like an outsider, but he integrated into the Machine with great enthusiasm the microsecond he took office. Clinton and Biden were personifications of the Machine. Harris was the same, only dumber. But the deeper answer is that democrats have been in power for 12 of the past 16 years. And what y'all chose to do with that time was expand the Machine and integrate yourselves with it for ego-gratification and profit. Again, resist the impulse to argue. We may be at a disadvantage against you because we don't sign the paychecks of a legion of armed thugs, but that doesn't make us somehow dumber than you, or oblivious to what's going on. We know what "Ten percent for the big guy" means. And we don't stop knowing it when Comrade Squealer gets on MSNBC and launches some convoluted deflection filled with mental gymnastics we aren't morally flexible enough to replicate. Now, you, Lexxie, can argue that you're not a part of that. Maybe it would even be true. Or partially true. Maybe, through the awesome power of wishful thinking and historical ignorance, you actually are a sincere socialist, who thinks that statist, collectivist policies will actually benefit people, rather than just provide politicians with opportunities to steal and ruin people's live with a stroke of the pen out of sheer sadism. But you're not asking why you lost. You didn't lose. Harris lost. You're asking why Harris lost. Harris lost because we are aware of the Machine, and we don't like it. Trump is just our plan A to dismantle it. Let's all just hope we don't have to go to plan B. Plan B wouldn't be fun for anybody.
4:30
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

Dear Lexxie (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)... (May I call you Lexxie? You can call me Dev. ) We probably wouldn't get along very well. I'm a throw-the-communists-out-of-helicopters anarchocapitalist, and that's probably too big a political gap to bridge with a few interpersonal gestures. However, like each other or not, I'm going to assume you are asking in good faith, and I'm going to answer you. I'm not going to answer your exact question, though. It's the wrong question. An answer wouldn't get you the information I think you are actually looking for. It looks like you're assuming that the neo-republican "MAGA" movement works like a traditional campaign. You develop a message about how your platform will be good for people, and your opponent's platform will be bad for them, then you get that message out on various channels, and it persuades some people to vote for you. That's definitely how democrats work. You are the party of television. And it's how old, pre-2015 republicans worked, too. You know, all those guys like Romney, who have been exiled to the wilderness, or, in the case of Cheney, have joined the democrats. MAGA doesn't work like that. We didn't vote for Trump because he persuaded us by getting XYZ message out on the UVW channel. We voted for Trump because we were waiting for someone like Trump to come along, so we could vote for him. That's why Trump didn't really have to do much of anything to beat you. He just had to position himself as the anti-establishment candidate, then get out of the way and let things happen, without making any major mistakes. The field was primed for him before he ever announced that he would run. Why? Because of one key insight that I don't think democrats have ever had. Elections are not about policy. They are not about personality. They are not about experience. They are not about charisma. Elections are about trust. Trump was elected in a landslide in 2016, 2024, and probably 2020 as well if you discard all the fake ballots, because more people trusted him, and less people trusted Clinton, Biden, or Harris. If you think about it, it's really pretty obvious that trust is the only issue that matters. Here's an example. Democrats campaigned against Trump by pounding on the abortion issue and cosplaying as fictional sex slaves from a kink novel for lonely cat ladies. And it worked with your base. Despite the fact that Trump had released a public statement that he would veto any national level restrictions on abortion, and that it was the Supreme Court, not he, who had overturned Roe-Wade in the first place, not even on ideological grounds, but because it was bad lawyering. Why did it work? Because those people didn't trust Trump. So anything he said about his intentions on the abortion issue was meaningless to them. It's all about trust. So why did more people trust Trump? And why do I say they were waiting to vote for him before he even came along? Because trust in Trump is rooted in distrust of the Machine. The Machine is the system of informal, unacknowledged relationships between people who have clout in the federal government and use it to benefit themselves, to benefit each other, and to protect their power base from outsiders. In other words, the federal government is corrupt, and the majority of Americans know it. Resist the temptation to argue with me here, even inside your own head. We are talking about why people voted for Trump. It's important what they believe, not whether you agree with them. Now, I could go on all day with examples of the Machine, and its fairly obvious abuse of power and funds. I could talk about fake vaccines that turned out to be neither safe nor effective, which made a lot of money for people who are vaccinated against any liability by your own organization... Congress. But that would sidetrack us, because you'd succumb to the temptation to argue about each one, and it's not important whether you agree. What's important, once again, is what the majority of Americans agree on. They agree on the existence of a Machine. They agree that the Machine has political influence which does not come from the "just consent of the governed". They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by enacting policies which hurt them. They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by spending their money on things that are not in their interest. They agree that the Machine is materially harming them by failing to faithfully carry out the actual duties of the federal government. They hate and distrust the Machine. All of this has nothing to with Trump, because all of this became true before Trump announced he was running. As I said, people were waiting for a Trump they could vote for. This is why. But how did distrust in the Machine translate into trust in Trump? Simple. Because Trump is the enemy of the Machine. How do we know that? Simple. It's not just because Trump told us so. If it were merely Trump telling us so, he could have been lying. We know Trump is the enemy of the Machine, because the Machine told us so. We saw how desperate the Machine was to convince us that Trump was an icky superplusungood double-Nazi, when his actual platform was just straight-up 1960s democrat, John Kennedy style. We saw them hurling accusation after accusation, as if they were throwing pasta at the wall, seeing what would stick. We saw the press elements of the Machine continuing to hold to those accusations, long after they had been proven to not just be false, but to be deliberate lies. Every time the Machine told us that Trump was horrible, all it did was confirm what Trump was telling us... that he intended to fight the Machine. In 2016, that was enough to get him elected. Check the video below. Michael Moore was the only person who understood this in 2016. Thing is he understood Trump voters, but not Trump. He thought a Trump presidency would be disastrous. Turned that nothing much happened at all. The Machine fought him more or less to a standstill, and the only major way he moved the needle was in putting three constitutionalists on the Supreme Court. Now, that's no small feat. Helped us a lot, and will for years to come. But the border security system didn't get finished, Mexico didn't pay for it, etc. Thing is, that's not important. What's important is why. We saw the fight between Trump and the Machine. It wasn't about whether he could beat the Machine or not. It was the fact that he willing to fight it, and the fact that we could see the fight. And that proved that his intentions were at least partially what he said they were. In 2024, he looks a lot more prepared, and has a team of heavy hitters backing him But there's one more set of questions to ask, here. Why did Trump run as a republican? Why is it Democrats, in particular, who are identified with the Machine? Well, the easy answer is that you keep running Machine candidates. Obama looked like an outsider, but he integrated into the Machine with great enthusiasm the microsecond he took office. Clinton and Biden were personifications of the Machine. Harris was the same, only dumber. But the deeper answer is that democrats have been in power for 12 of the past 16 years. And what y'all chose to do with that time was expand the Machine and integrate yourselves with it for ego-gratification and profit. Again, resist the impulse to argue. We may be at a disadvantage against you because we don't sign the paychecks of a legion of armed thugs, but that doesn't make us somehow dumber than you, or oblivious to what's going on. We know what "Ten percent for the big guy" means. And we don't stop knowing it when Comrade Squealer gets on MSNBC and launches some convoluted deflection filled with mental gymnastics we aren't morally flexible enough to replicate. Now, you, Lexxie, can argue that you're not a part of that. Maybe it would even be true. Or partially true. Maybe, through the awesome power of wishful thinking and historical ignorance, you actually are a sincere socialist, who thinks that statist, collectivist policies will actually benefit people, rather than just provide politicians with opportunities to steal and ruin people's live with a stroke of the pen out of sheer sadism. But you're not asking why you lost. You didn't lose. Harris lost. You're asking why Harris lost. Harris lost because we are aware of the Machine, and we don't like it. Trump is just our plan A to dismantle it. Let's all just hope we don't have to go to plan B. Plan B wouldn't be fun for anybody.

Devon Eriksen

477,128 просмотров • 1 год назад

This isn't alien technology, literally or metaphorically. The breakthrough here isn't in engineering at all — it's in corporate organization. See, most machines are broken because the organizations that make them are broken. As an engineer, I would estimate that at least 30% of the parts of any given device exist only to correct for the design flaws in the other 70%. Works like this. Suppose I, an engineer, design a set of pipes and injectors to feed fuel to a combustion chamber at a consistent and controllable rate. Except in testing, there's some corner cases it doesn't handle well. Now, if you're an engineer, you understand this is normal. Nobody ever gets a design right the first time, unless it's so trivial that it's probably been done before. Your first design doesn't survive the wind tunnel, your first code doesn't compile right away, and if does, it segfaults. Your rockets blow up. And there's a flow problem with your fuel feed lines. It happens. Doesn't mean you're stupid. Means you didn't have enough information. But you have an even bigger problem. Middle management. Middle management is a special variety of hazmat suit, which is worn by the finance, sales, or market guys who run companies, so they don't have to touch the icky engineers. C-suite guys hate hate hate engineers, because it's a terrifying sensation to be dependent on someone you cannot understand, who doesn't appear to respect you much. (It does not occur to them that it is also extremely frustrating to have your work paid for, and thus controlled, by someone who cannot understand what you do, who doesn't appear to respect you much.) The primary role of middle management is talk to engineers so C-suite guys won't have to, and the primary qualification is to be a member of the right social class, and to hate engineers. This qualification is dressed up in secret handshake buzzwords like "management experience", as used in the sentence "I know you have been an engineer for twenty years and the other engineers all come to you for advice and leadership, but you don't have management experience, so I am going to hire my golfing buddy's 23 year old kid, who just graduated business school." So the fact that the fuel lines lines are not working quite right isn't your problem. That's part of the normal engineering process. Your problem is that your manager hates you and everything you stand for, and doesn't trust you or take your word for anything. He think his job is to keep you in line rather than help or empower you. So when you say "the fuel feed lines need to be redesigned", he says "we already spent six months and seventeen million dollars design the fuel feed system, we can't let you do it again." He thinks you are telling him seventeen million dollars worth of work needs to be thrown away and redone, and he cannot be told otherwise, because he cannot be told anything. So he says "you have two weeks and fifty thousand dollars to fix it". So you add another turbopump. What else can you do in two weeks? Now there's a new part. And if something goes wrong with that, another new part will be added to fix it. Because the company's actual priority isn't what you are responsible for — the design. It's what middle management is responsible for — the schedule and the budget. You have to play the villain so they can play the hero. What middle management doesn't understand, is paid to not understand, is what engineering actually is. Engineering is the process of making mistakes until you run out of mistakes to make. So when you spend six months and seventeen million dollars, and ended up with a design that doesn't quite work right in all cases, you weren't throwing away money, you were burning through mistakes. You've gotten a lot of them out of the way and won't make them again. But you have to get rid of some more before the design is actually right and doesn't require extra parts. The work of engineering isn't making the thing. It's teaching yourself to make the thing. Once you've done that, you can make the thing with minimal effort and time, because you know how to make the thing. C-suite financiers would hate this idea if they understood it. Why? Because it's unpredictable. Financiers like safe investments that make money. Not knowing how long something will take or how much it will cost is terrifying to them. So they train engineers to lie to them, by hiring a middle managers who try to force them to lie, and just interpret every guess as a promise if engineers still refuse to do so. But lying to yourself doesn't make the truth go away. The truth is that engineering projects take as long as they take, and cost as much as they cost. And that no one knows how long or how much they will be, because no one knows how many mistakes are waiting to be made, until they actually make them. The only thing you thing you can do about this is hire really good engineers, who catch more of their mistakes on the white board, leaving fewer to be caught in the wind tunnel, and this makes engineering faster... but it doesn't make engineering more predictable. Gantt charts are nothing but a collection of lies that corporations have taught themselves to tell themselves, lies that middle managers try to make true by enforcing them as promises. The ultimate reason that machines are 30% unnecessary parts is that the corporations that build them are 30% unnecessary people. This is what's different about Elon Musk. It's not that he's a better engineer. It's that he's a better manager. He understands engineers and engineering, and he doesn't hate them because he is one. He understood all along that green-field design is full of unknown-unknowns, and that there is absolutely no number-crunching, pie-chart, MBA magic that can eliminate this risk... it can only be hidden from view. The critical understanding is in the video clip below, where he says that SpaceX only had a 10% chance of success. You cannot say something like that unless you get it. And when you get it, you are free. Free from artificial anxiety about schedules and budgets. Anxiety about schedules and budgets is based on the delusion of control. Managers can't make a project finish "on time". They never could. The only power they have is the power to screw it up. The fate of a project is already written in the unknown unknowns before it ever starts. And the best, the absolute best, an engineering team can ever do, under any circumstances, is to confront those unknowns with clear-eyed honesty, and a willingness to adapt. Well, when you say to yourself, "This project has a 10% chance of succeeding", you've already confronted the pain of those admissions, which means you have already conquered the fear. The fear that makes you try to treat a prediction as a promise. The fear that makes you insert an extra turbopump, when what you really need to do is get busy redesigning the pipes, even though you have no idea how long it will take or much it will cost. Even when your rockets blow up. The SpaceX Raptor engine isn't just, or even primarily, a triumph of engineering smarts. It's a triumph of character. It's about an entire team with virtues MBAs lack: self-awareness, persistence, courage, humility, and, ultimately, hope. Because that's what it takes to pursue the best design, the RIGHT design, not even knowing if it exists to be found, much less whether you'll find it before you run out of money. Great things are not accomplished by middle managers with spreadsheets and Gantt charts. They are accomplished by teams of experts with passion and vision. Who are willing to risk failure so they can succeed. So what's the point in me saying all this? Am I just writing a puff piece on SpaceX and the Raptor engine? No. The point is that this is not special, one-off, magic alien technology. It's the systematic result of a correct understanding of engineering. Which means that EVERY COMPANY CAN BE LIKE THIS. If the people who control the purse strings are willing to learn from this example, and stop managing with spreadsheets and fear.
0:40
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

This isn't alien technology, literally or metaphorically. The breakthrough here isn't in engineering at all — it's in corporate organization. See, most machines are broken because the organizations that make them are broken. As an engineer, I would estimate that at least 30% of the parts of any given device exist only to correct for the design flaws in the other 70%. Works like this. Suppose I, an engineer, design a set of pipes and injectors to feed fuel to a combustion chamber at a consistent and controllable rate. Except in testing, there's some corner cases it doesn't handle well. Now, if you're an engineer, you understand this is normal. Nobody ever gets a design right the first time, unless it's so trivial that it's probably been done before. Your first design doesn't survive the wind tunnel, your first code doesn't compile right away, and if does, it segfaults. Your rockets blow up. And there's a flow problem with your fuel feed lines. It happens. Doesn't mean you're stupid. Means you didn't have enough information. But you have an even bigger problem. Middle management. Middle management is a special variety of hazmat suit, which is worn by the finance, sales, or market guys who run companies, so they don't have to touch the icky engineers. C-suite guys hate hate hate engineers, because it's a terrifying sensation to be dependent on someone you cannot understand, who doesn't appear to respect you much. (It does not occur to them that it is also extremely frustrating to have your work paid for, and thus controlled, by someone who cannot understand what you do, who doesn't appear to respect you much.) The primary role of middle management is talk to engineers so C-suite guys won't have to, and the primary qualification is to be a member of the right social class, and to hate engineers. This qualification is dressed up in secret handshake buzzwords like "management experience", as used in the sentence "I know you have been an engineer for twenty years and the other engineers all come to you for advice and leadership, but you don't have management experience, so I am going to hire my golfing buddy's 23 year old kid, who just graduated business school." So the fact that the fuel lines lines are not working quite right isn't your problem. That's part of the normal engineering process. Your problem is that your manager hates you and everything you stand for, and doesn't trust you or take your word for anything. He think his job is to keep you in line rather than help or empower you. So when you say "the fuel feed lines need to be redesigned", he says "we already spent six months and seventeen million dollars design the fuel feed system, we can't let you do it again." He thinks you are telling him seventeen million dollars worth of work needs to be thrown away and redone, and he cannot be told otherwise, because he cannot be told anything. So he says "you have two weeks and fifty thousand dollars to fix it". So you add another turbopump. What else can you do in two weeks? Now there's a new part. And if something goes wrong with that, another new part will be added to fix it. Because the company's actual priority isn't what you are responsible for — the design. It's what middle management is responsible for — the schedule and the budget. You have to play the villain so they can play the hero. What middle management doesn't understand, is paid to not understand, is what engineering actually is. Engineering is the process of making mistakes until you run out of mistakes to make. So when you spend six months and seventeen million dollars, and ended up with a design that doesn't quite work right in all cases, you weren't throwing away money, you were burning through mistakes. You've gotten a lot of them out of the way and won't make them again. But you have to get rid of some more before the design is actually right and doesn't require extra parts. The work of engineering isn't making the thing. It's teaching yourself to make the thing. Once you've done that, you can make the thing with minimal effort and time, because you know how to make the thing. C-suite financiers would hate this idea if they understood it. Why? Because it's unpredictable. Financiers like safe investments that make money. Not knowing how long something will take or how much it will cost is terrifying to them. So they train engineers to lie to them, by hiring a middle managers who try to force them to lie, and just interpret every guess as a promise if engineers still refuse to do so. But lying to yourself doesn't make the truth go away. The truth is that engineering projects take as long as they take, and cost as much as they cost. And that no one knows how long or how much they will be, because no one knows how many mistakes are waiting to be made, until they actually make them. The only thing you thing you can do about this is hire really good engineers, who catch more of their mistakes on the white board, leaving fewer to be caught in the wind tunnel, and this makes engineering faster... but it doesn't make engineering more predictable. Gantt charts are nothing but a collection of lies that corporations have taught themselves to tell themselves, lies that middle managers try to make true by enforcing them as promises. The ultimate reason that machines are 30% unnecessary parts is that the corporations that build them are 30% unnecessary people. This is what's different about Elon Musk. It's not that he's a better engineer. It's that he's a better manager. He understands engineers and engineering, and he doesn't hate them because he is one. He understood all along that green-field design is full of unknown-unknowns, and that there is absolutely no number-crunching, pie-chart, MBA magic that can eliminate this risk... it can only be hidden from view. The critical understanding is in the video clip below, where he says that SpaceX only had a 10% chance of success. You cannot say something like that unless you get it. And when you get it, you are free. Free from artificial anxiety about schedules and budgets. Anxiety about schedules and budgets is based on the delusion of control. Managers can't make a project finish "on time". They never could. The only power they have is the power to screw it up. The fate of a project is already written in the unknown unknowns before it ever starts. And the best, the absolute best, an engineering team can ever do, under any circumstances, is to confront those unknowns with clear-eyed honesty, and a willingness to adapt. Well, when you say to yourself, "This project has a 10% chance of succeeding", you've already confronted the pain of those admissions, which means you have already conquered the fear. The fear that makes you try to treat a prediction as a promise. The fear that makes you insert an extra turbopump, when what you really need to do is get busy redesigning the pipes, even though you have no idea how long it will take or much it will cost. Even when your rockets blow up. The SpaceX Raptor engine isn't just, or even primarily, a triumph of engineering smarts. It's a triumph of character. It's about an entire team with virtues MBAs lack: self-awareness, persistence, courage, humility, and, ultimately, hope. Because that's what it takes to pursue the best design, the RIGHT design, not even knowing if it exists to be found, much less whether you'll find it before you run out of money. Great things are not accomplished by middle managers with spreadsheets and Gantt charts. They are accomplished by teams of experts with passion and vision. Who are willing to risk failure so they can succeed. So what's the point in me saying all this? Am I just writing a puff piece on SpaceX and the Raptor engine? No. The point is that this is not special, one-off, magic alien technology. It's the systematic result of a correct understanding of engineering. Which means that EVERY COMPANY CAN BE LIKE THIS. If the people who control the purse strings are willing to learn from this example, and stop managing with spreadsheets and fear.

Devon Eriksen

125,899 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад

Imagine, just for a moment, that you are Neil Degrasse Tyson. No, no, no. Stop tying that network cable into a noose. It's just for a moment. We'll change you back as soon as we're finished here, I promise. You're smart enough to get a graduate degree, a charismatic enough speaker to get cameras pointed at you, and, to cap it all off, your degree is in astrophysics, so you understand, as well as humans are capable of understanding, just how much stuff is in the universe, and how tiny a speck the Earth is in comparison. This would be a good moment for a clever science fiction writer to craft some analogy where he compared one grain of sand to all the world's oceans, or a gnat to the sun. But in reality, it's hopeless. Any analogy we could picture would be a gross understatement, and any analogy that captured the difference would be inconceivable to us. So, now, if you're guy whose very job it is imagine the unimaginable, to eff the ineffable... how borked would your thinking have to be to conclude that 100% of the valuable stuff in the universe is on the speck? And nowhere else? How twisted would you have to become to be completely unexcited by the prospect of exploring even the merest fraction of all that space? Got a mental image of that? Now, imagine, not just that you are that man, but that started out as the man in this video here, in 2008, and became the man in the other one, in the 2024. What would have had to happen to you? What would take to bring you from rhapsodizing about the "The Saturn V... the Mightiest Rocket Ever Launched... The Only Piece of Hardware to Ever Take Humans to Another World!" ... To being completely and utterly unexcited about the prospect of sending humans to another world. And about the newer, even mightier piece of hardware which will take them there? How much would you have to hate a man, to spit on him for accomplishing your childhood dreams? How much would you have to hate a man, to give away the core of your heart? What would have to happen to you, to be so ideologically captured, that you disown your life's entire mission on national television? We could speculate about the psychological challenges of fame, about money in large amounts, about compromising video recordings or someone kidnapping his dog. But that's purely academic. Historical. It doesn't matter. Once you sell your soul, you can't buy it back, because you have nothing to buy it back with. There is no Neil Degrasse Tyson. There is only Zuul.
3:51
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

Imagine, just for a moment, that you are Neil Degrasse Tyson. No, no, no. Stop tying that network cable into a noose. It's just for a moment. We'll change you back as soon as we're finished here, I promise. You're smart enough to get a graduate degree, a charismatic enough speaker to get cameras pointed at you, and, to cap it all off, your degree is in astrophysics, so you understand, as well as humans are capable of understanding, just how much stuff is in the universe, and how tiny a speck the Earth is in comparison. This would be a good moment for a clever science fiction writer to craft some analogy where he compared one grain of sand to all the world's oceans, or a gnat to the sun. But in reality, it's hopeless. Any analogy we could picture would be a gross understatement, and any analogy that captured the difference would be inconceivable to us. So, now, if you're guy whose very job it is imagine the unimaginable, to eff the ineffable... how borked would your thinking have to be to conclude that 100% of the valuable stuff in the universe is on the speck? And nowhere else? How twisted would you have to become to be completely unexcited by the prospect of exploring even the merest fraction of all that space? Got a mental image of that? Now, imagine, not just that you are that man, but that started out as the man in this video here, in 2008, and became the man in the other one, in the 2024. What would have had to happen to you? What would take to bring you from rhapsodizing about the "The Saturn V... the Mightiest Rocket Ever Launched... The Only Piece of Hardware to Ever Take Humans to Another World!" ... To being completely and utterly unexcited about the prospect of sending humans to another world. And about the newer, even mightier piece of hardware which will take them there? How much would you have to hate a man, to spit on him for accomplishing your childhood dreams? How much would you have to hate a man, to give away the core of your heart? What would have to happen to you, to be so ideologically captured, that you disown your life's entire mission on national television? We could speculate about the psychological challenges of fame, about money in large amounts, about compromising video recordings or someone kidnapping his dog. But that's purely academic. Historical. It doesn't matter. Once you sell your soul, you can't buy it back, because you have nothing to buy it back with. There is no Neil Degrasse Tyson. There is only Zuul.

Devon Eriksen

210,308 просмотров • 1 год назад

The Neocon, or neo-conservative, can be distinguished from the paleoconservative because he wishes to conserve the new, rather than the old. He is essentially a liberal. Not a leftist, but a liberal, and what he wishes to conserve, and defend against leftism, is the globalist new world order. To him, the ultimate political evil is represented not by Stalin or Lenin or Mao, but by Hitler. And the solution to this ultimate evil is Liberal Hegemony. This is the idea that liberal democracy must be spread to cover every person and every place in the world, because it is the opposite of the ethnostates of the old world, which are nothing but Hitler in his mind. To him, every single ethnostate or ethnic society, past or present, but modern Israel, is Hitler. (Israel gets a pass because Hitler hated Jews.) Ancient Rome? Hitler. Sumeria? Hitler. Egypt? Hitler. The British Empire? Hitler. Vikings? Hitler. Mongols? Hitler. Aztecs? Hitler. Japanese, ancient and modern? Hitler and Hitler. Ming Dynasty? Hitler. You get the idea. All racial and cultural divisions must be bulldozed flat, leaving nations as nothing but arbitrary political divisions and economic zones, which can gradually be merged into one vast, planet-spanning, humanity-encompassing liberal democracy, with no interest groups at all, only atomized, disconnected individuals ruled over by an all-powerful, unaccountable, but somehow perfectly just, State, which counts all the votes and never cheats at all. Often with neocons, this mission takes on a religious flavor, the goal of uniting all nations under Jesus Christ. Except they're going to do it without waiting for Jesus Christ to come along and tell them what he wants, because messiahs are awfully convenient when you can use them as sock puppets to repeat your message, and decidedly less convenient when they show up with opinions of their own. It's tempting to think of Liberal Hegemony, and the new world order as leftist, democrat, or communist projects. But they aren't. They are much broader than that. It was the neocons who first pioneered an aggressive US foreign policy, overthrowing functioning foreign states and trying to replace them with clones of America's political system. The democrats only inverted what the republicans began, by trying to bring the world to America, rather than America to the world. But both ideas, both versions of the project, are absolutely dependent on two philosophical precepts: 1. America is special, and better than every other place in the world. 2. America's specialness is completely transferable to anyone and everyone else who is not currently American. This is why neocons worship the constitution as a sacred document which created righteous liberal democracy, rather than as a patchwork political compromise which reflected the values and needs of 18th century Americans. And it's why they revere the "Founding Fathers" as icons who panned that constitution and the declaration of independence, but are distinctly unenthusiastic about them as actual people who might have also written their opinions elsewhere as well. The neocons need to believe the magic resides in the constitution and the formal structure of US law, because if they believed it resided anywhere else, then they would immediately be confronted by the inescapable conclusion that Liberal Hegemony is unworkable and doomed. Because nothing else about the United States is transferable. If the United States is special because of the genetics of its people, then it cannot be spread to other peoples. If it's special because of culture, then it cannot be spread to other cultures. If it's special because of religion, then it cannot be spread to Muslims and Jews. American liberal democracy, must, therefore, be solely a result of following a certain magic legal recipe: divide up government power into these piles, vest it in these institutions, have elections in this way with these results. It must work, it has to work, it's inconceivable that it might not work lalalalalala I can't HEAR you. Why is this so important to neocons? Why are they so invested in making the world America? Because what the television told them about WW2 broke their brains. To them, politics exists on a one-dimensional line between Washington and Hitler, and if we can't make the world into America, then everything everywhere will be Hitler forever. This kindergarten view of history has caused them to paint themselves into a philosophical corner from which they cannot escape without revising their entire worldview. They cannot admit that the constitution was a political compromise containing grave mistakes like countenancing slavery, and leaving the judiciary unaccountable. They cannot admit that the founders, while absurdly talented and extremely well-intentioned, were mere human beings, some beliefs that the neocons themselves would find unpalatable, and equate with the Hitler axis. They have to believe that no matter how many times their experiments fail, no matter how many millions of actual human beings they kill with their naivety and hubris, that somehow, if they just jam the same fork in the same light socket over and over again, this time, this next time, will somehow be different.
1:39
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

The Neocon, or neo-conservative, can be distinguished from the paleoconservative because he wishes to conserve the new, rather than the old. He is essentially a liberal. Not a leftist, but a liberal, and what he wishes to conserve, and defend against leftism, is the globalist new world order. To him, the ultimate political evil is represented not by Stalin or Lenin or Mao, but by Hitler. And the solution to this ultimate evil is Liberal Hegemony. This is the idea that liberal democracy must be spread to cover every person and every place in the world, because it is the opposite of the ethnostates of the old world, which are nothing but Hitler in his mind. To him, every single ethnostate or ethnic society, past or present, but modern Israel, is Hitler. (Israel gets a pass because Hitler hated Jews.) Ancient Rome? Hitler. Sumeria? Hitler. Egypt? Hitler. The British Empire? Hitler. Vikings? Hitler. Mongols? Hitler. Aztecs? Hitler. Japanese, ancient and modern? Hitler and Hitler. Ming Dynasty? Hitler. You get the idea. All racial and cultural divisions must be bulldozed flat, leaving nations as nothing but arbitrary political divisions and economic zones, which can gradually be merged into one vast, planet-spanning, humanity-encompassing liberal democracy, with no interest groups at all, only atomized, disconnected individuals ruled over by an all-powerful, unaccountable, but somehow perfectly just, State, which counts all the votes and never cheats at all. Often with neocons, this mission takes on a religious flavor, the goal of uniting all nations under Jesus Christ. Except they're going to do it without waiting for Jesus Christ to come along and tell them what he wants, because messiahs are awfully convenient when you can use them as sock puppets to repeat your message, and decidedly less convenient when they show up with opinions of their own. It's tempting to think of Liberal Hegemony, and the new world order as leftist, democrat, or communist projects. But they aren't. They are much broader than that. It was the neocons who first pioneered an aggressive US foreign policy, overthrowing functioning foreign states and trying to replace them with clones of America's political system. The democrats only inverted what the republicans began, by trying to bring the world to America, rather than America to the world. But both ideas, both versions of the project, are absolutely dependent on two philosophical precepts: 1. America is special, and better than every other place in the world. 2. America's specialness is completely transferable to anyone and everyone else who is not currently American. This is why neocons worship the constitution as a sacred document which created righteous liberal democracy, rather than as a patchwork political compromise which reflected the values and needs of 18th century Americans. And it's why they revere the "Founding Fathers" as icons who panned that constitution and the declaration of independence, but are distinctly unenthusiastic about them as actual people who might have also written their opinions elsewhere as well. The neocons need to believe the magic resides in the constitution and the formal structure of US law, because if they believed it resided anywhere else, then they would immediately be confronted by the inescapable conclusion that Liberal Hegemony is unworkable and doomed. Because nothing else about the United States is transferable. If the United States is special because of the genetics of its people, then it cannot be spread to other peoples. If it's special because of culture, then it cannot be spread to other cultures. If it's special because of religion, then it cannot be spread to Muslims and Jews. American liberal democracy, must, therefore, be solely a result of following a certain magic legal recipe: divide up government power into these piles, vest it in these institutions, have elections in this way with these results. It must work, it has to work, it's inconceivable that it might not work lalalalalala I can't HEAR you. Why is this so important to neocons? Why are they so invested in making the world America? Because what the television told them about WW2 broke their brains. To them, politics exists on a one-dimensional line between Washington and Hitler, and if we can't make the world into America, then everything everywhere will be Hitler forever. This kindergarten view of history has caused them to paint themselves into a philosophical corner from which they cannot escape without revising their entire worldview. They cannot admit that the constitution was a political compromise containing grave mistakes like countenancing slavery, and leaving the judiciary unaccountable. They cannot admit that the founders, while absurdly talented and extremely well-intentioned, were mere human beings, some beliefs that the neocons themselves would find unpalatable, and equate with the Hitler axis. They have to believe that no matter how many times their experiments fail, no matter how many millions of actual human beings they kill with their naivety and hubris, that somehow, if they just jam the same fork in the same light socket over and over again, this time, this next time, will somehow be different.

Devon Eriksen

37,070 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

If Matt Walsh has been looking and sounding a little stiff and shrill lately, it's probably because he is not able to sit comfortably. This is due to the Big Hand, which had to be inserted fairly deep so that it could move his mouth well enough to create the appropriate noises. The appropriate noises, in this case, being "you have offered no individual solution". Note that word, "individual". The Big Hand is very keen to slip that word into the premises of any debate, lest the discussion turn to solutions that involve collective action. The Big Hand does not want you to discuss collective action, because collective action might actually end up changing the status quo. It is, in fact, transparently obvious that nothing else will. No detailed examination of the problem is required. We need only look at who has the problem. A problem that a few individuals have is a personal problem, requiring a personal solution. A problem that a whole society has is a political problem, requiring a political solution. The problem we have is slave labor. Why is this a problem? It's certainly not a problem for the Big Hand which is moving Matt Walsh's mouth. It's not a problem for the boomers, who need... well, want... cheap workers for the business they own. (Businesses they were able to start or buy because their own labor, in their younger years, was highly compensated.) But it is a problem for them. They just don't realize it, because right all they see is the cheap labor. The bad consequences come along later. Slave labor destroys empires. How? Why? Well, what is a slave? In the political sense, a slave is a worker who cannot participate in the free market, because he is constrained by physical force. He cannot sell his labor to the highest bidder, and therefore he cannot negotiate. He must take what he is given. A literal slave cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because his employer is legally allowed to use force to make him stay. An prisoner in a labor program cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because he cannot go where other employers are. An indentured servant cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because the state will use force on him to compel him to complete his contract. A work visa immigrant cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because if he quits or is fired, he will be banned for the economy altogether, and must return to where he came from. That's what a slave is. So what is a free market? A free market is an economy where all actors are free from forcible constraint on their economic choices. Obviously, no market is totally free — you're not allowed to start an assassination service, and if you were, it could be used to constrain the economic freedom of others. But nations prosper when their markets are as free as possible, and fail when they are not. When you introduce slavery, whether it is called slavery, or slipped in the back door under some softer name, you destroy the free market. It is impossible for a free worker to economically compete with a slave without becoming a slave himself. Because a slave cannot negotiate, and must take what he is unilaterally given, a free worker must be more expensive until and unless he accepts what a slave receives. And what a slave receives is unilaterally set by his employer. Where slavery exists, a free worker is left with three options: 1. Take what a slave takes, and be treated as a slave is treated, thereby becoming equivalent to a slave. 2. Be unemployed, and subsist through government handouts, charity, or crime. 3. Become an entrepreneur, and own slaves rather than being one... if he can. If he succeeds in ascending to the business owner class, he will become a slaver himself. He will have no choice. If other businesses employ slaves to reduce labor costs, so must he. Obviously, all of this is bad for the free worker. But... so what? What if we are amoral, and we want to be slavers? What if we want to be mob bosses? What if we want America to be a slave empire, built by slave workers and defended by slave soldiers? What if we want an entire world composed of 0.1% white and jewish slave owners, supported by a massive underclass of brown slaves? Sure, those pesky middle class libertarians would fuss, until we got rid of them, but wouldn't it all just work? Wouldn't it be awesome for the 0.1%? All we'd need to do is implement massive technological control programs over news and information to prevent those dumb brown slaves from revolting. And the Big Hand will never be short of an extra Matt Walsh to wield as a puppet. So this sounds awesome, right? Global slave empire, and if you object, you're a loser who gets money from doing work, instead of owning things, and you deserve to be a slave. Well... it sounds awesome until you crack a history or economics textbook. Slavery collapses economies. Collapsed economies collapse empires. You see, when you import slaves, and pay them slave wages, you are able to save money on labor, and produce goods and services more cheaply. That would be great for you... if the economy were a zero sum game. It's not. Because when you produce goods and services, you need someone to sell them to. Has everyone suddenly forgotten how a depression works? What is it that is depressed, in a depression? Wages, that's what. When wages are depressed, the people earning them spend less on goods and services. When they spend less on goods and services, producers of those goods and services must produce them more cheaply so they can sell. Which means they need to save on materials and labor. This drive wages down, both directly when companies cut labor costs, and indirectly when the companies that serve them with material goods need to produce those goods more cheaply. Which depresses spending even further. And then the government starts printing money, because impoverished slaves can't pay taxes. So now the money is worthless, too. That's what a depression is. It's a downward spiral. And slave labor is a fast track ticket to depression and economic collapse. Rome survived Carthage. Rome survived perpetual war. Rome survived rebellion, political coups, assassinations, chaos. Rome couldn't survive this. Neither can America. You cannot prosper alone. If you get rich by making others rich, you have allies. You have a system of mutual support. You have free market capitalism. If you get rich by making others poor, there will be no one to trade with. The most insidious part of this is that it's not a choice that individual business owners can make. Once the gates of slavery are open, and competitors in your industry begin to use slave labor, your only choice is either to be undercut and go bankrupt, or to follow suit and survive... until the economy collapses and everyone goes bankrupt. Whether it is importing foreign indentured servants, or exporting entire industries to places where workers are slaves, slavery has a gravitational force that pulls all economies to it, then gradually destroys them. Slavery anywhere is slavery everywhere. Steep tariffs on H1B and imported goods are not DEI for Americans, because Americans can compete with any workforce on the planet so long as those workers are free. Tariffs on imported workers, goods, and services, are incentive barricades against slavery. They are a temporary measure until we can eradicate slavery from the planet. Which we must do, or any advanced civilization, including America, will not survive. Some may not care if America survives, but you need to. It's where you keep all your stuff.
1:29
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

If Matt Walsh has been looking and sounding a little stiff and shrill lately, it's probably because he is not able to sit comfortably. This is due to the Big Hand, which had to be inserted fairly deep so that it could move his mouth well enough to create the appropriate noises. The appropriate noises, in this case, being "you have offered no individual solution". Note that word, "individual". The Big Hand is very keen to slip that word into the premises of any debate, lest the discussion turn to solutions that involve collective action. The Big Hand does not want you to discuss collective action, because collective action might actually end up changing the status quo. It is, in fact, transparently obvious that nothing else will. No detailed examination of the problem is required. We need only look at who has the problem. A problem that a few individuals have is a personal problem, requiring a personal solution. A problem that a whole society has is a political problem, requiring a political solution. The problem we have is slave labor. Why is this a problem? It's certainly not a problem for the Big Hand which is moving Matt Walsh's mouth. It's not a problem for the boomers, who need... well, want... cheap workers for the business they own. (Businesses they were able to start or buy because their own labor, in their younger years, was highly compensated.) But it is a problem for them. They just don't realize it, because right all they see is the cheap labor. The bad consequences come along later. Slave labor destroys empires. How? Why? Well, what is a slave? In the political sense, a slave is a worker who cannot participate in the free market, because he is constrained by physical force. He cannot sell his labor to the highest bidder, and therefore he cannot negotiate. He must take what he is given. A literal slave cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because his employer is legally allowed to use force to make him stay. An prisoner in a labor program cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because he cannot go where other employers are. An indentured servant cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because the state will use force on him to compel him to complete his contract. A work visa immigrant cannot find a higher bidder to sell his labor to, because if he quits or is fired, he will be banned for the economy altogether, and must return to where he came from. That's what a slave is. So what is a free market? A free market is an economy where all actors are free from forcible constraint on their economic choices. Obviously, no market is totally free — you're not allowed to start an assassination service, and if you were, it could be used to constrain the economic freedom of others. But nations prosper when their markets are as free as possible, and fail when they are not. When you introduce slavery, whether it is called slavery, or slipped in the back door under some softer name, you destroy the free market. It is impossible for a free worker to economically compete with a slave without becoming a slave himself. Because a slave cannot negotiate, and must take what he is unilaterally given, a free worker must be more expensive until and unless he accepts what a slave receives. And what a slave receives is unilaterally set by his employer. Where slavery exists, a free worker is left with three options: 1. Take what a slave takes, and be treated as a slave is treated, thereby becoming equivalent to a slave. 2. Be unemployed, and subsist through government handouts, charity, or crime. 3. Become an entrepreneur, and own slaves rather than being one... if he can. If he succeeds in ascending to the business owner class, he will become a slaver himself. He will have no choice. If other businesses employ slaves to reduce labor costs, so must he. Obviously, all of this is bad for the free worker. But... so what? What if we are amoral, and we want to be slavers? What if we want to be mob bosses? What if we want America to be a slave empire, built by slave workers and defended by slave soldiers? What if we want an entire world composed of 0.1% white and jewish slave owners, supported by a massive underclass of brown slaves? Sure, those pesky middle class libertarians would fuss, until we got rid of them, but wouldn't it all just work? Wouldn't it be awesome for the 0.1%? All we'd need to do is implement massive technological control programs over news and information to prevent those dumb brown slaves from revolting. And the Big Hand will never be short of an extra Matt Walsh to wield as a puppet. So this sounds awesome, right? Global slave empire, and if you object, you're a loser who gets money from doing work, instead of owning things, and you deserve to be a slave. Well... it sounds awesome until you crack a history or economics textbook. Slavery collapses economies. Collapsed economies collapse empires. You see, when you import slaves, and pay them slave wages, you are able to save money on labor, and produce goods and services more cheaply. That would be great for you... if the economy were a zero sum game. It's not. Because when you produce goods and services, you need someone to sell them to. Has everyone suddenly forgotten how a depression works? What is it that is depressed, in a depression? Wages, that's what. When wages are depressed, the people earning them spend less on goods and services. When they spend less on goods and services, producers of those goods and services must produce them more cheaply so they can sell. Which means they need to save on materials and labor. This drive wages down, both directly when companies cut labor costs, and indirectly when the companies that serve them with material goods need to produce those goods more cheaply. Which depresses spending even further. And then the government starts printing money, because impoverished slaves can't pay taxes. So now the money is worthless, too. That's what a depression is. It's a downward spiral. And slave labor is a fast track ticket to depression and economic collapse. Rome survived Carthage. Rome survived perpetual war. Rome survived rebellion, political coups, assassinations, chaos. Rome couldn't survive this. Neither can America. You cannot prosper alone. If you get rich by making others rich, you have allies. You have a system of mutual support. You have free market capitalism. If you get rich by making others poor, there will be no one to trade with. The most insidious part of this is that it's not a choice that individual business owners can make. Once the gates of slavery are open, and competitors in your industry begin to use slave labor, your only choice is either to be undercut and go bankrupt, or to follow suit and survive... until the economy collapses and everyone goes bankrupt. Whether it is importing foreign indentured servants, or exporting entire industries to places where workers are slaves, slavery has a gravitational force that pulls all economies to it, then gradually destroys them. Slavery anywhere is slavery everywhere. Steep tariffs on H1B and imported goods are not DEI for Americans, because Americans can compete with any workforce on the planet so long as those workers are free. Tariffs on imported workers, goods, and services, are incentive barricades against slavery. They are a temporary measure until we can eradicate slavery from the planet. Which we must do, or any advanced civilization, including America, will not survive. Some may not care if America survives, but you need to. It's where you keep all your stuff.

Devon Eriksen

66,175 просмотров • 1 год назад

Fundamentally wrong on multiple levels. First of all, if your reaction to the defeat and removal of a swarm of foreign invaders is "that's cruel", then you are not ready to make adult judgements about foreign policy, and shouldn't be allowed to vote. Let me make it simpler: You are supposed to be cruel to your enemies, you silly person. They are not your friends you haven't met yet. They are your enemies. They mean to hurt you, either because they hate you, or because they want what you have, and don't care what happens to you when they take it. Sacrificing your countrymen and your civilization over naive principles you learned from your midwit kindergarten teacher is a disgusting moral betrayal. It is your countrymen, and your civilization, that defend you, sustain you, and provide for you every good thing that you have, including everything from the right to say silly things online to the smartphone you say them with. To set all that at nothing so you can virtue signal is not only silly... it's ungrateful. And ungrateful people are trash. Secondly, if you describe deporting the dregs of the third world back to where they belong as "warlord" behavior, you not only have no idea what a warlord is, you have no idea what most of the world is like, and you are unqualified to vote in elections that effect foreign policy. Warlords do not chain their enemies up, load them onto planes, bring them back to their homelands and set them free. Warlords feeds their enemies to dogs. Was your best friend dragged out of his home by masked men, in front of his wife and child, and stuffed into a waiting van? Was his naked corpse found hanging from a lamp post the next day, covered in burn marks and puncture wounds from an electric drill? That's what warlords do. So save the term for when you actually need it. Trump was and is the soft option. If you somehow manage to thwart him, I promise you that you really, really will not like who comes next. Third, western civilization has been brought to the brink of inevitable collapse because you listened to silly women who think military-age males from Ethnicklashistan are cute puppies who need love and understanding. You have to stop caring what silly women think. Because you will not reason them out of this. They will continue to believe in Cute-Puppy Theory, right up until the moment they get raped, stabbed, or both. People from places where human life is cheap, behave as if human life is cheap. But silly women cannot imagine this. Their definition of the word "attack" is someone saying mean things about them on twitter, kind of like I'm doing right now. People like this have been sheltered so well, for so long, by others who capable of ruthlessness and violence, that they forget what they are being sheltered from, or what ruthlessness is for. And then they start interfering with the very people and processes that protect their safe space, and indeed their lives. Because defending your tribe is mean to Cute Puppies or something. Fourth, anyone who think political power is maintained by appeasing your enemies has clearly never had any power to maintain. Your must energize and reward your friends, and discredit and demoralize your enemies. The left isn't going to stop hating western civilization if we keep our sober faces on and pretend we're not overjoyed about winning out over obvious evil and depravity. Appeasing the left has no value at all, because what the left wants is "everything", and they destroy anything they get their hands on, then demand more. Anyone who thinks deportations are "mean" is part of the same set of people who gave us this problem in the first place. And the only reason things are better now is that we stopped caring what they think.
2:17
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

Fundamentally wrong on multiple levels. First of all, if your reaction to the defeat and removal of a swarm of foreign invaders is "that's cruel", then you are not ready to make adult judgements about foreign policy, and shouldn't be allowed to vote. Let me make it simpler: You are supposed to be cruel to your enemies, you silly person. They are not your friends you haven't met yet. They are your enemies. They mean to hurt you, either because they hate you, or because they want what you have, and don't care what happens to you when they take it. Sacrificing your countrymen and your civilization over naive principles you learned from your midwit kindergarten teacher is a disgusting moral betrayal. It is your countrymen, and your civilization, that defend you, sustain you, and provide for you every good thing that you have, including everything from the right to say silly things online to the smartphone you say them with. To set all that at nothing so you can virtue signal is not only silly... it's ungrateful. And ungrateful people are trash. Secondly, if you describe deporting the dregs of the third world back to where they belong as "warlord" behavior, you not only have no idea what a warlord is, you have no idea what most of the world is like, and you are unqualified to vote in elections that effect foreign policy. Warlords do not chain their enemies up, load them onto planes, bring them back to their homelands and set them free. Warlords feeds their enemies to dogs. Was your best friend dragged out of his home by masked men, in front of his wife and child, and stuffed into a waiting van? Was his naked corpse found hanging from a lamp post the next day, covered in burn marks and puncture wounds from an electric drill? That's what warlords do. So save the term for when you actually need it. Trump was and is the soft option. If you somehow manage to thwart him, I promise you that you really, really will not like who comes next. Third, western civilization has been brought to the brink of inevitable collapse because you listened to silly women who think military-age males from Ethnicklashistan are cute puppies who need love and understanding. You have to stop caring what silly women think. Because you will not reason them out of this. They will continue to believe in Cute-Puppy Theory, right up until the moment they get raped, stabbed, or both. People from places where human life is cheap, behave as if human life is cheap. But silly women cannot imagine this. Their definition of the word "attack" is someone saying mean things about them on twitter, kind of like I'm doing right now. People like this have been sheltered so well, for so long, by others who capable of ruthlessness and violence, that they forget what they are being sheltered from, or what ruthlessness is for. And then they start interfering with the very people and processes that protect their safe space, and indeed their lives. Because defending your tribe is mean to Cute Puppies or something. Fourth, anyone who think political power is maintained by appeasing your enemies has clearly never had any power to maintain. Your must energize and reward your friends, and discredit and demoralize your enemies. The left isn't going to stop hating western civilization if we keep our sober faces on and pretend we're not overjoyed about winning out over obvious evil and depravity. Appeasing the left has no value at all, because what the left wants is "everything", and they destroy anything they get their hands on, then demand more. Anyone who thinks deportations are "mean" is part of the same set of people who gave us this problem in the first place. And the only reason things are better now is that we stopped caring what they think.

Devon Eriksen

43,808 просмотров • 1 год назад

Here's a sneak preview of something we worked very hard on. Yep, as it so happens, I'm not just a professional social media loudmouth. I'm a science fiction author. Somewhat embarrassingly, I seem to have become moderately well known after my very first novel. Usually people get to have a substantial body of work to point to by the time people know who they are. So I'm working very hard on the sequel, which is why less twitter lately. What I have for you today is a sneak preview of the full-cast, professionally acted, perfectionisticly directed, insanely overengineered audiobook version of my first novel, "Theft of Fire". Seriously overengineered, people. I spent two weeks working with my sound engineer just selecting filter to distinguish between the narrator's spoken voice and his thoughts. So this is it. The one-chapter preview, showcasing the voice talents of Dain Little (K. Dain Little), Emma Rae (Emma Rae), and the sound engineering of the extremely young but extremely talented kanen VA 🍗. Soon to be available everywhere but Audible. Because fuck those guys.
20:11
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

Here's a sneak preview of something we worked very hard on. Yep, as it so happens, I'm not just a professional social media loudmouth. I'm a science fiction author. Somewhat embarrassingly, I seem to have become moderately well known after my very first novel. Usually people get to have a substantial body of work to point to by the time people know who they are. So I'm working very hard on the sequel, which is why less twitter lately. What I have for you today is a sneak preview of the full-cast, professionally acted, perfectionisticly directed, insanely overengineered audiobook version of my first novel, "Theft of Fire". Seriously overengineered, people. I spent two weeks working with my sound engineer just selecting filter to distinguish between the narrator's spoken voice and his thoughts. So this is it. The one-chapter preview, showcasing the voice talents of Dain Little (K. Dain Little), Emma Rae (Emma Rae), and the sound engineering of the extremely young but extremely talented kanen VA 🍗. Soon to be available everywhere but Audible. Because fuck those guys.

Devon Eriksen

21,045 просмотров • 1 год назад

The word that Zero is looking for is woke-lite, which describes James Lindsay and his fellow hand wringers and pearl clutchers precisely. They claim to oppose the result of the far left "woke" recipe for the disaster we now find ourselves in, but have a deep emotional attachment to every single ingredient and every step in the baking process. They simply want to reset the clock to 1964, or perhaps 1946, then stick the same fork in the same light socket, think happy thoughts, and hope they won't get zorched. Woke was not some sort of ideological accident that happened along the way to paradise, suddenly and for no reason at all. It was the inevitable result of the postwar liberal philosophy. Not because its conclusions are in any way logical, or can be derived from classical liberal premises, but because woke is a hack exploiting code vulnerabilities in postwar liberalism.
1:51
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

The word that Zero is looking for is woke-lite, which describes James Lindsay and his fellow hand wringers and pearl clutchers precisely. They claim to oppose the result of the far left "woke" recipe for the disaster we now find ourselves in, but have a deep emotional attachment to every single ingredient and every step in the baking process. They simply want to reset the clock to 1964, or perhaps 1946, then stick the same fork in the same light socket, think happy thoughts, and hope they won't get zorched. Woke was not some sort of ideological accident that happened along the way to paradise, suddenly and for no reason at all. It was the inevitable result of the postwar liberal philosophy. Not because its conclusions are in any way logical, or can be derived from classical liberal premises, but because woke is a hack exploiting code vulnerabilities in postwar liberalism.

Devon Eriksen

17,645 просмотров • 1 год назад

Meet K. Dain Little. (Captain Doombeard) The voice of Marcus Warnoc for the Theft of Fire audiobook (and future installments in the series). It's all undiscovered talent... all the way down.
1:16
Devon_Eriksen_'s profile picture

Meet K. Dain Little. (Captain Doombeard) The voice of Marcus Warnoc for the Theft of Fire audiobook (and future installments in the series). It's all undiscovered talent... all the way down.

Devon Eriksen

15,750 просмотров • 1 год назад

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