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"

We are a lot more religious than we look - we just have a religion without a named god, and a theology disguised as an ideology. The state religion of the American Empire (and the British Empire before it) is shared by the bulk of the developed world:

Progress.

Every sacrifice, atrocity, and grand achievement we create is done in its name. Every major ideology - conservative, liberal, fascist, communist, socialist, or traditionalist - is but a denomination of this grand church.

"

https://substack.com/home/post/p-160043743

https://substack.com/home/post/p-165004319

Israel has become a “spiritual anachronism.” It is a nation very much of the 1930’s and has been scrambling to find a justifying principle, or at least some public relations principle, outside of that world that is now gone.

...

The definition of evil, the opponent, of the Western world is national socialism; a national socialism that is the dominant intellectual strain in Israel’s foundation.

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public principles have to correspond to feelings, not to intellectual demands, and there’s no feeling like the desire for survival.

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Israel is hardly a theological state now, nor could it be unless it is ruled by judges of the Talmudic law. But public authorities as well as the people at large seem to have settled on a religious flavor, if not exactly a full or clear religious justification, let alone a pious religious life, for Israel’s existence.

Cultural assumption in modernity:
- Each interaction is standalone by default.
-- This is the "normal" / "default" case.
--- Example: Calendly meeting
---- We assume two strangers meet.
---- In the case where the two people know each other well, we don't treat this as a different case mechanically. The software is the same.

- This is quite strange, historically speaking.

- The way human activity actually works is that most transactions flow through established relationships. Including talking to each other, a drink, a meal, a business opportunity, a job, a project. This is 90%, or even 95-98%, of all human socially-mediated activity (as opposed to individual).
-- Therefore, ideally, a social software system should be weighted towards supporting the happy path(s), instead of assuming the strangers-meet path and supporting that over other paths.
-- Tela: A public log is a piece of shared social reality / facts, on which items arrive by consensus. So there must be a consensus protocol.

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When you communicate because you engage in local trade and you all share economic bonds that will continue from generation to generation, you will become cohesive. This bond is broken when the federal government allows companies to relocate their foreign workforce into your neighborhood, destabilizing local cultural bonds and disrupting the intergenerational structure; the entire community becomes atomized. People stop participating in civic life because if their children will not inherit their efforts, why should they continue to put in the effort?

/

https://tompnoid.substack.com/p/part-2-white-people-dont-exist

In 1991 Georgy Arbatov, Gorbachev's diplomatic adviser, said:

"We are going to do you the worst of services: we are going to deprive you of the Enemy."

In response to this, General Maisonneuve, Canadian Army lieutenant general and NATO chief of staff, wrote:

"The Soviet Enemy had all the qualities of the good enemy: solid, constant, coherent. Militarily, it resembles us and is built on the purest Clausewitzien model. Disturbing, yes, but known and predictable. Their disappearance weakens our cohesion and renders our power useless."

-
Elvira Roca Barea, 'Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y El Imperio Español'. Chapter 5. (2016)

(Translation and minor edits are mine)

Brains (or brain regions) undergo model collapse just like AI systems.

...

Urban people often behave as if they’re retarded. Socially (they’ve never been punched in the face), Geospatially (they have no idea how to navigate by the sun or shadows), Culturally (without some pop-fiction touchstone, culture doesn’t exist), etc. They’re entirely bound to a world of artificial ideas: human-produced data, and unable to accurately model from first principles anything outside their extremely limited sphere of artificial experience.

The bugman’s neurological model of reality is divorced from reality. They hallucinate truths that make no sense, and they delude themselves into provably false ideas, and violently attack anyone with a model of reality more accurate than their own.

They don’t understand violence, hunger, or (real) social organization because they’ve never encountered those things.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-178113467

To expand:
- modern software treats human interactions as _stateless_.
- whether I've booked a meeting with you 40 times or 0 times, the underlying interaction primitive does not vary.
- this is simpler to build.
- it also scales much more rapidly. it helps to maximises engagement.
- but it has the effect of treating the "stranger meets stranger" case as the default case.
-- which is strange and causes uncanny ripples through our social fabric.
-- the effect reminds me of Annihilation / The Backrooms.
-- it pushes everyone towards interacting with each other as though they were strangers or light acquaintances.
- So: A missing primitive in modern social software is the _shared history_.
- Shared history is what makes social life meaningful.
- Today we are making do with posts, likes, and comments to construct meaningful shared history, and it doesn't work very well.
- we should build "thicker" connections rather than "more" connections.

/

The era of the printing press was not normal times, and it led to centuries of intense conflict and turbulent technological growth after centuries of sleepy normalcy. The period of the American and French Revolutions was not normal times, and Americans flourished while France entered a period of repeated wars, regime changes, and social uncertainty before a new order asserted itself. The Age of Wonders, called by some the Gilded Age, was not normal times, and those born in 1875 in frontier cabins without plumbing or electricity lived to see almost nothing but abnormal times, as electricity and cars and airplanes and two world wars and nuclear bombs and the space race fundamentally and irrevocably changed the nature of the world they lived in. ... Each time, people in the moment felt both the blessing and the curse of living in interesting times.

/

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/we-will-never-have-normal-times-again

In the modern West there is not much reason an average woman would want to pair-bond with an average man. This doesn’t necessarily imply any moral fault of the individual female, although it does have catastrophic social consequences. She doesn’t need his work, she isn’t attracted to him, she also isn’t coerced to accept him lest she remains a spinster. Sure, she would like pair-bonding and children with a high-value male: but a woman cannot pair-bond with a man she doesn’t find attractive. Because woman are hardwired to be attracted to men firmly above them, in a gender-equal society the pool of attractive men is necessarily small. Emancipated women don’t see average men as suitable partners for family formation. The few guys women would start a family with would rather enjoy being the minority of men who get to have copious sex than found a family with any of the applicants. Without pair-bonding and stable relationships, birth rates crater.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-201446551

There are eras of media, and each era has its own rules for how to craft an effective message.

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There was a time when brands or individuals could rely on the organic reach of their efforts, but the pay-to-play model has been standard for years.

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There exist several networks which gather freelancers to produce and distribute podcast clips.

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There are of course creators who achieve this by partnering with a talent agency offering essentially the same services under the hood.

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Creators can also replicate this on a smaller scale by employing a team to chop, bedazzle, and post clips designed to punish the algorithm with exposure until something hooks.

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there is a dollar rate, there is frequency, and there is duration. It operates like any other campaign.

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It should be noted that this isn’t a cheat code and the content itself must be remarkable in some way.

Source:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-197483620