SelfAdoration.com

Start here: I am not a Trump fan-boy. Never was, and, while I haven’t written much here lately, you can follow my trajectory of Trump affination in these pages over the last five years. At first I feared what everyone does: Demagogue becomes tyrant. Willie wrote a story about that. Instead, Trump has become the great Federalist – as exhibited most extremely this year in his responses both to the Coronavirus and to this Summer’s riots.

With that said, I am fascinated by the man in ways that surprise me. Trump taught me what I want in a politician: Puts Ci on tilt. It was Sarah Palin who first showed us that, but we didn’t know what we were seeing. Trump puts Ci on tilt simply by existing, and that has proved hugely edifying. When he’s on his game, he deflects every Ci display – every order they give him. Frustrated displays escalate and amplify – and here we are.

I think the President is Id, but I can surmise, instead, that he is Di affecting Id as his table image – in other words, that he is perfectly executing a long con. How perfectly? For years now, I have been assiduously watching for just those tells – for giveaways that Trump is Di affecting Id, playing Queens-dumb to sucker the city-slickers. They seem to be there, sometimes, too; for example when Barr shares the press-briefing podium.

But: I am led to today’s analysis by a remark I saw on Twitter: “Have you ever known Trump not to be prepared?” I never have the impression that Donald Trump is ever fully-prepared for anything. I am a sales monster, and I evaluate him that way. He has two speeds: Winging it, when he likes what he’s talking about, and phoning it in, when he doesn’t. He has deft speechwriters, but he kicks their words around like pebbles in a parking lot, killing time until the next impulse to ramble off script.

Here’s the truth of Trump and of Trumpism globally: If old-school politics is Hollywood for ugly people, Trumpian politics is stand-up comedy – without the (more…)

Thanks to Google, now even girls know how to shop for just what they want, ignoring everything else.

We live in a Ci culture – and it is collapsing.

We need to supplant Ci with Ds or live with the grave consequences of letting Dc take over instead.

That’s Chess, huh? It’s practically a Marvel Comics plot summary.

And none of this is meant to malign Ci’s or Ic’s as people. The everyday world needs actuaries and undertakers – just not very many.

By making a fetish of Ci displays, we have encysted the world with insistence, but that’s easily dealt with. You do it all the time already.

Do you see? You are met with Ci/Ic displays – with compliance displays – all the time, and you successfully manage to resist those demands almost all the time.

What am I talking about?

Advertising.

Image advertising is all Ic: “He can’t be a man if he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.” Persuasive marketing is typically FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt. Every bit of it is devised to induce in you a compliant itch that can only be scratched by compliance – by buying the product being promoted.

Does it work? Hugely well on I’s, less so on S’s, only with DISC-focused value propositions – money or time – on C’s and D’s.

Does it work better, in return on investment, than doing nothing – or doing something else? Asking that question will get you fired up and down Madison Avenue.

Does it work on you? Almost never. How do I know that? Because however many purchases you have made today, you’ve been hit by a thousand times that many marketing messages. More than likely, you responded to none of them, or none more elaborate than mere signage.

Big hero you: You were met with thousands upon thousands of compliance displays and you defied them all with a skilled, studied and well-practiced indifference. Well done!

Your indifference warrants scrutiny, of course. How can we study nothing? Because it’s not nothing, it’s two (more…)

Me and my smokin’ hot blonde wife. I try to give her good cause to look at me that way.

Why am I telling you this? So you’ll know.

I got an internet shake-down letter yesterday from someone who has apparently bought some hacked passwords. My pasty-faced blackmailer threatens to expose me to my contacts list – today – with a webcam-captured video of me watching porn unless I pay him $2,900 in Bitcoin.

Wow…

In the third place, I find the threat hugely implausible. The password referenced is an antique, not that I’m terribly good at that stuff. My current password solution is to register for nothing – not because I fear exposure but because I hate having to memorize login credentials. In any event, my webcam has been taped over since long before Ed Snowden made that a fad, so my half of the movie is likely to be pretty boring. I can’t guess what the porn half might be, but I’ll look at pretty much anything, so that much might be edifying.

In the second place, I don’t care. I think internet privacy is a bad joke, and I’ve been saying that in public for more than ten years. Most of what people dread having exposed is universal and ubiquitous. Can it come as a revelation that I, too, move my bowels periodically? Big frolicking deal. If it comes as news that I masturbate when my smokin’ hot blonde of a wife is unable to come hither for me, you are now in possession of a banality of no cash value.

But in the first place, my attitude toward every attempt to dominate me is: Molon labe, mofo. I am indomitable. I have been for my entire life, but I’ve spent my adult life proving – as philosophy – why (more…)

“The don’t want to live. They want you to die.” –Ayn Rand

Blank-out.

This is me fisking the arguments for abortion set forth in The Ayn Rand Lexicon. I don’t consider these very good arguments, so if there’s something I’m missing, send me a link and I’ll take a look.

Why bother with this? Because abortion is the hook on which the pro-liberty movement is snagged. Worse, if liberty-seeking people do not correct this awful error, the utilitarianism undergirding their political arguments will lead them, in due course, to complicity in mass murder.

Rand is quoted in bold with the > symbol, Usenet style. All quoted italics are in the original.

> An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being.

I’m not quarreling with Rand’s arguments of rights here, though those claims are also poorly defended. The assertion quoted here fails because an intrauterine Homo sapiens is already a real existent, not a product of the imagination. A is A. A thing is itself. This is simply Rand defining an inconvenient fact out of existence.

> A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.

How then? What in the essence of the entity has changed, as a matter of identity?

> The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Utilitarianism defended with a false representation of fact: The baby is a discrete living organism at the instant of conception. Just as a heads-up, when people start talking about which life takes “precedence,” it’s a good bet your life doesn’t. The purpose of utilitarianism is to rationalize your eventual murder, should that prove necessary.

> Abortion is a moral right – which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what (more…)