justice – Page 82

The Two Faces of Trolling

The distinction between good trolls and bad trolls is subtle

Trolling is more than just an art; trolling is a lifestyle. It attracts a very wide range of people. So wide a range that some of the people who troll are quality, while many others are dogshit. This essay attempts to distill the range of trolling behaviours on the Internet into two major categories: bullying and challenging.

Not everyone can tell the difference, and the more narcissistic a person is, the more likely they are to confuse a challenge for bullying. Moreover, the more a person dislikes the person making that challenge, the more likely they are to confuse a challenge for bullying. Keeping on the right side of this fine balance is where much of the art of trolling takes place.

In short, bullying is attempting to knock down something good while challenging is attempting to knock down something bad. For the person who values the target of the knockdown attempt, the distinction is seldom meaningful. But for the person who regards that target with low or negative value, the distinction is colossal.

Challenging in the form of gentle pisstaking and banter is a regular part of verbal discourse between friends. In essence, friends challenge each other for the sake of knocking down that which is weak in the other, so that their friend might replace it with something strong. The friend might not know they are weak in a certain area, or perhaps they cling stubbornly to the weakness and need to be disabused of it for their own good.

This pisstaking is an essential part of the culture in New Zealand and Australia, and in the other Anglo countries to a lesser extent. It’s how we keep ourselves humble in the absence of a shared spiritual tradition. The idea is that anyone who becomes too prideful is mocked back down into a more socially useful level of humility.

Bullying is different, because it seeks to shame for qualities that cannot be changed. Ripping someone down because they are short, or because their parents are poor, or because they are of a certain race or hair colour are all acts of aggression because the person targeted cannot do anything about those things. There’s no mutual exchange of sentiment.

The intent of pointing out these qualities is to humiliate, not for the betterment of a person who may have become too prideful but for the self-aggrandisement of the bully. Thus, the targets of bullying need not have become too prideful to get attacked. For these reasons, bullying is in most cases vile and gratuitous.

The art of trolling is to skate close to that edge where challenging becomes bullying, for the closer to it one skates the more effective the challenge will be (especially if there are neutral onlookers). Too much bullying and the troll will look crude and aggressive; too little bullying and the troll will appear meek and ineffective.

The best kind of trolling is when you can get an egotistical person to make an arse of themselves. Hopefully they learn something in the process, becoming less of an arse and thereby more pleasant for others to deal with, but that’s not the main concern. The important thing is that the egotist is made to look like a chump, thereby lessening the chances that anyone observing the interaction will go on to behave like them.

Usually this is achieved by goading them into telling obvious lies or making transparently false boasts about their current or future prowess. If the troll can bait an egotistical person into destroying their own reputation through rank hypocrisy, logical incompetence or descending into mindless abuse then the troll wins (and so does society).

The worst kind of trolling is to cause suffering for suffering’s sake. In fact, this sort of behaviour is unjustly dignified by calling it ‘trolling’. Really it’s just rank bullying of the kind inflicted by schoolchildren before they develop the wit to examine their own motives – the discharging of a sadistic animal impulse. It’s very different from a challenge that brings out the best of someone.

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Why Immigration Is a Weapon Of The Parasitic Rich

The parasitic class has many different strategies for destroying the mutual trust among the people – and opening the borders achieves several of them at once

Many were surprised, and many were not, by the news that the New Zealand Bus Drivers Union was opposing the request of Ritchies to import 110 indentured servants in the form of “migrant bus drivers”. Those who were surprised were those who thought that the union, being comprised ostensibly of leftists, ought to support bringing third-world people in to compete with the indigenous working class, because leftists are supposed to be all about solidarity for poor brown people.

Those who were not surprised were those who understand how reality works. The reality is that Ritchies put in such a low bid for the bus drivers’ contract that they couldn’t fill the positions with Kiwi staff, because the supply of people willing to work at wages that they can’t live off is almost nil. There is now an established precedent, however, for Kiwi employers who can’t find enough local suckers to subsidise their parasitic lifestyles: immigration.

Much like American employers with illegal Mexicans, Kiwi employers have cottoned on to the fact that maximising profitability is a function of minimising wages, and that minimising wages is a function of the leverage the employer has in the negotiation, and that this leverage is vastly increased if the worker is illegally in the country or wholly dependent on the whims of the employer for future work.

Not only does immigration give the local ruling class great power by populating the land with people dependent on them, but it also strengthens their economic position by destroying the leverage that local workers have in employment negotiations. This destruction of leverage is achieved by destroying the amount of trust that people have for each other, because solidarity is necessary to resist the depredations of the parasitic class and solidarity is primarily a matter of trust.

Game theory* tells us about the factors necessary for the evolution of trust.

The first is repeated interaction. People rarely trust others if they believe that they will never meet that other again, and for good reason: it makes sense from a game theory perspective to be more likely to exploit a person who you will never see again, for the reason that they will not be able to take revenge.

The greater the flow of people, the less repeated interaction there is. At one extreme end, there is very little solidarity in an airport terminal, for the reason that the vast majority of interactions here will not be repeated. At the other extreme, there is immense solidarity among members of a pioneer family deep in the Canadian wilderness, for the reason that virtually all interactions will be repeated.

The second important factor is the capacity for social interactions to be non-zero-sum games. In other words, trust only develops when social interactions result in clear mutual benefit. If either side feels like they lost out from the exchange, trust will dissipate.

Many people will make the claim here that immigration grows the overall size of the pie, for the reason that each new immigrant, even if they take up a job, creates at least one job’s worth of demand for other goods and services. This argument is often touted as a counter to the “Lump of Labour Fallacy” and, to that end, it has merit. But this argument ignores the impact of social status on a person’s well-being.

Social status is a zero-sum game in the sense that the higher one person is up the dominance hierarchy, the lower someone else must be. Low social status is extremely stressful – perhaps it wouldn’t have to be experienced as such in an ideal world, but we don’t live in one. In our world, a native person having to accept a lower social status than an immigrant is regularly experienced as a humiliation, for the reason that the native feels pushed out, as if by a cuckoo hatchling.

In a social environment where immigration means that the natives have to accept lower positions (such as an unemployment benefit in lieu of a living wage, as in the case of the indigenous bus drivers in the opening paragraph), there will naturally and understandably be resistance from those natives. This means that forcing it on those natives, against their will, will inevitably have the effect of causing those natives to hate the immigrants instead of trusting them.

The third important factor for the development of trust is to have low levels of miscommunication. As everyone who has spent any time on the Internet knows, clarity and precision are the cornerstones of communication, and when you have hordes of jabbering retards you end up having arguments and fights.

The greater the diversity, the greater the levels of miscommunication. This is because you have more languages and dialects to contend with, and any given person has an upper limit as to how many of these various forms of communication they can master. Exceeding this limit – which is guaranteed to happen if diversity keeps increasing – will cause miscommunication to happen.

Increasing the rates of immigration has the effect of bringing a diverse range of different forms of communication into everyday life, which increases the likelihood of someone misunderstanding someone else. So the greater the levels of immigration, the greater the levels of miscommunication and therefore the lower the levels of trust.

Who benefits from all this destruction of trust? The cheaters. The very same parasite class who entreats the Government to let them import indentured servants instead of paying a fair wage to local workers who are looking for employment. They benefit immensely from the destruction of trust, because an environment of distrust makes the people less able to organise to resist the hoarding of wealth, and this shifts the balance of power in favour of the wealthy.

The greatest trick the rich ever pulled on the poor was to convince them to open the net of solidarity so wide that no-one in it has anything in common with each other any more. The circle of trust has been cast so wide that it has fallen apart, and the traditional ways of re-forming bonds of trust have been destroyed or are severely discouraged.

This makes about as much sense as opening your pantry for the neighbourhood rats and mice to come and take their fill, on the grounds that rodents are disadvantaged compared to humans and therefore solidarity with other humans is a form of supremacism.

* For an outstandingly brilliant demonstration of the basic principles of game theory as it pertains to trust, see http://ncase.me/trust/

The Ultimate Evil Is To Continue To Exist

You! You are an aggressor! There is no way that you can exist on this planet otherwise. All of us have to carve a niche out of Nature, with violence or treachery, for there is simply no other way to survive. So malicious are you that you commit the ultimate evil – to continue to exist!

Every living creature has a need to metabolise in order to stay warm. This metabolisation requires energy, which means food, which means a need to eat, which means a need to kill. In order to live, you have to kill!

Every bit of food you have ever eaten was a living being that had to be killed so that you could eat it! What right do you have to assert the primacy of your own existence over that of another being, over a fellow creation of God? The morally correct thing to do, in order to avoid bringing suffering into the world, is to lie down and starve to death!

Worse, as a mostly hairless ape, you also have a need for shelter – and there’s no other way to build a house than by carving a space out of Nature for yourself. This means destroying the habitats of other creatures.

150 square metres of floor space means 150 square metres of land on which no forests can grow, and through which no streams can run. It’s 150 square metres worth of trees that had to be chopped down, with all the bird and insect life supported by it destroyed.

Neither can you escape your own energy needs. Driving a car around consumes oil – a finite energy source, and one that has to be extracted at the price of more environmental damage. Reading this website requires electricity, which requires energy. All the goods in your house were shipped to you by transportation methods that required energy.

Collectively, these demands meant even more coal mines put down, even more oil wells sunk, even more valleys wiped out by hydroelectric dams. To use energy is to render parts of the Earth to chaos!

There’s nothing you can do about any of these things! To continue to exist is to destroy – for only through destruction can one continue to exist!

To reproduce causes even more damage. The facts are stark: the single most ecologically destructive move a person can make is to bring another human being into the world – a human who will have to eat, to shelter themselves and to use energy, and at ever-increasing appetites!

Worst of all, merely to keep existing means you run the risk of bringing more conscious life into the world to suffer. Even if you don’t intend to breed, you might meet a certain person who causes a massive dump of some hormone to be released by your brain and then you fall in love and nek minnit you have eight children, all of whom must find their own way to come to terms with the fact that they are mortal creatures in a world of ceaseless slaughter!

If you should stop existing, on the other hand, not only does it become impossible to bring more conscious suffering into the world in the form of human offspring, but one also vacates a niche within the biosphere that can (and will) be occupied by gentler, kinder forms of life.

Think of the biomass of the worms that would eat your corpse!

You should be killed!

Should There Be A Ministry of Men’s Affairs?

Life is so much harder for men in New Zealand that they kill themselves at almost three times the rate of women

Many people were shocked, and many were not, by Julie Anne Genter’s comments this week about old white men. Speaking to Cobham Intermediate School pupils, Genter made the point that some of these old white men “need to move on and allow for diversity and new talent.” These statements were made in her capacity as Minister for Women, but if you look at the statistics, it seems like there’s more need for a Minister for Men.

The reason for a Ministry of Women’s Affairs was ostensibly to close the gaps between the well-being of women and men. Since the advent of Abrahamic religion in the West, women have been forced into a subservient role, being forced to take the blame for the fall of man as well as for invoking the horror of Nature. Biblical passages such as Timothy 2:12 instructed Christendom that “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she is to remain quiet.”

Ever since these male supremacist religious cults invaded the West, our women have been forced to endure structural abuse. Divorce was banned, forcing women to endure permanent relationships with violent men. Prostitution was banned, denying women natural opportunity for economic advancement. Abortion was banned, forcing women to carry unwanted children to term or else risk a back-alley abortion from a “doctor” with no licence.

By any objective measurement, women had the worst of it for a very long time, and, when we realised this, we tried to make up for it with things like feminism and Ministries for Women’s Affairs. What we’ve been slow to realise is that, now that advantage is mostly a matter of obedience to the political, educational and commerical authorities, women have it better than men in many regards.

Most obviously, women have a much easier time of things in academic settings. Page 38 of the document linked in this paragraph demonstrates that women get better grades in literacy, and page 42 shows that they also get better grades in numeracy. This disparity is even worse for men at university level, which New Zealand women are 40% more likely to participate in.

When men had higher university participation rates than women, the media couldn’t keep quiet about how sexist and evil this state of affairs was. Indeed, this was one of the stated reasons for bringing in a Ministry of Women’s Affairs in the first place. An inequality of outcome in terms of education and gender was simply impermissible, immoral, outrageous.

In 2015, 527 New Zealanders killed themselves, of who 384 were men (72.8%). That means for every Kiwi woman who feels so rejected by society that she is compelled to take her own life, there are almost three Kiwi men who feel the same way. This is greater than the gap between Maori and non-Maori suicide rates, which is itself considered a large enough gap to be a national tragedy that demands immediate action (indeed, there is a Ministry of Maori Development).

So if society is so bad for Maori people that they need their own Ministry, as evidenced by suicide rates, and if society was so bad for women that they needed their own Ministry, as evidenced by tertiary participation rates, then surely there is sufficient cause to say that New Zealand men need someone looking out for them as well?

It’s absurd to claim that women are disadvantaged compared to men because men earn 20% more, when at the same time men are killing themselves at almost 300% the rate of women. It’s doubly absurd when it’s considered that women are benefitting immensely from the way that the pension system is set up, at the expense of predominantly male workers.

If the experience of being a man in New Zealand is so much less pleasant than the experience of being a woman that it carries triple the risk of suicide, it’s time to take steps to redress the balance by instituting a Ministry of Men’s Affairs to make up for all the privilege that women hold.