Category: philosophy

People Like To Watch What Others Are Naturally Good At

Vladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua are both close to 2m tall and 110kg heavy – and it follows naturally that more people want to watch them fight than have sex

Why does the world’s most popular female porn star get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular male one? And why does the world’s most popular male athlete get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular female one? The current fashion is to attribute all manner of prejudice behind these two facts, but the reality is that it’s just a reflection of nature.

A bird looks awesome swooping through the air, but there’s nothing graceful about a waddling duck. A shark looks awesome sliding through the water, but on the floor of a boat a fish looks ridiculous. A cat looks awesome stalking some prey, but looks much less so when licking its own arse, as cats do.

There is a reason behind all of this. We humans appear to derive some aesthetic pleasure from observing parts of nature doing what they have developed to be the best at.

A bird is a creature of the air; naturally it looks best when in the air and not on the ground. A fish is a creature of the water; naturally it looks best when in the water and not on the ground.

Every creature looks the best in the environment that they have adapted the most to thrive in. This follows naturally from an appreciation of basic principles of biology.

And this is why the world’s highest paid porn star is, and always will be, a woman, and why the world’s highest paid sportsperson is, and always will be, a man: women are made to make love and men are made to make violence.

Both of those truths are highly unfashionable at the moment, because the zeitgeist is that all are equal in every single way. The trend at the moment is to insist on equality to the point of rejecting all evidence to the contrary (which even goes as far as some suggesting that the skill levels are equal in international men’s and women’s soccer, for example).

They are true nonetheless. Females were more than capable of reproducing asexually – the point of sexual reproduction is develop a subgroup within each species that is specially adapted to violence so that they can better protect those not adapted to it.

But because women are made to make love, the demand for watching them make love is (and always will be) much greater than it is for men. A woman is in her natural element when making love, and so looks better making love than fighting, and therefore people are much more willing to pay money for a chance to watch one do so.

And because men are made to make violence, the demand for watching them fight (and play sport, which is just ritualised violence) is and always will be much greater than it is for women. A man is in his natural element when fighting, etc.

Women’s sport can only catch on to the extent that it is a contest of skill, because that is essentially a contest of brainpower and men and women are not different there. So a sport such as cricket has a much greater chance of becoming a mainstream phenomenon than one such as soccer or rugby, much less boxing or MMA.

Even so it will never be as popular as the men’s version, because the demand (among both men and women) to watch men compete at sport will always be much greater. This will be true as long as men are better at fighting than women.

If Materialism Is False, Death Is Nothing To Fear

Materialism is such a dominant perspective in today’s culture that we’ve almost forgotten that it is a perspective. The near-universal assumption is that consensual reality is a mindless collection of atoms and molecules, and of temperature and energy, and that the brain generates consciousness. This essay is a reminder that this perspective is just a perspective, and not necessarily the truth.

Thinking logically, it soon becomes apparent that there’s nothing especially rational about adopting the perspective of materialism, although doing so may be temporarily useful for anyone trying to run a scientific experiment.

From an existential perspective, the only thing you know for sure is that you’re conscious. That’s it. Existence precedes essence – this is another way of saying that consciousness precedes the contents of consciousness.

At this point, most people will protest that they are also aware of the material world. This conclusion follows naturally from the assumption that the brain generates consciousness, because once a person has made this assumption it seems natural to think that the brain has developed to become aware of the material world.

But no-one knows for sure that what they are aware of is a material world. A person might be conscious of a perspective that relates to some mental attempt to make sense of the stimuli that they have received from what appears to be a material world, but this is in no way evidence that such a material world exists – the map is not the territory.

Some might argue here that the sensory impressions that impact upon our consciousness are, nonetheless, impressions from the material world, and that we know that our sensory organs have made accurate impressions of this material world because of our successful adaptation to it.

But the worlds that we encounter in our dreams, which can be as real and as detailed as this material world, are evidently not creating impressions on our eyes, because those are closed and we are asleep. From this we can deduce that eyes are not necessary to create an illusion of a material world realistic enough for a consciousness to want to survive in it.

And from this it follows that a material world is itself entirely unnecessary, because consciousness could simply dream one up in its absence and would be unable to tell the difference.

At this point a materialist might continue to object, claiming that although the dreamworld that the dreamer experiences is evidently non-material (despite being equally as real from an existential perspective), the appearance of it is nonetheless created by the brain, wherein it resides.

But at this point the materialist has allowed themselves to become a magical thinker. The belief that consciousness resides in the brain does not follow from any logical process.

Usually the materialist will continue to profess that science will one day prove what the “origin” of consciousness is, and that when it does so this origin will doubtlessly be material, but this line of reasoning is just the mirror opposite of what materialists deride as “the god of the gaps”.

In other words, it’s magical thinking, not rational thinking.

Talking to a materialist about the idea that consciousness itself has generated the contents of consciousness (i.e. it has dreamed up the material world as a particularly convincing delusion) is like talking to a medieval theologian about the idea that man has generated the idea of the Christian god – their basic existential assumptions about reality make a conversation about it essentially impossible.

If one refuses to make the assumption that the brain generates consciousness, then there is no reason to believe that the death of the physical body and brain should affect the experience of being conscious. Therefore, it follows that, if the existence of consciousness is not predicated on temporal phenomena, consciousness must be eternal.

And if consciousness is eternal, then all the contents of consciousness are just forms – things that come and go. And your body, being nothing more than some of the contents of your consciousness, is one of those things that comes and goes – but it isn’t you.

Therefore, there is no significant difference between the death of the physical body and any other major change in the contents of consciousness. The death of the physical body might portend a great change in the contents of consciousness, but there is no logical reason to think that this necessitates a change in consciousness itself.

Tall Poppy Syndrome Is A Slave Morality

Artistic representations of nationhood in a country with healthy self-confidence (left) are very different to what we get in New Zealand (right)

The Scandinavians call it Jantelagen, Nietzsche called it slave morality, we call it the Tall Poppy Syndrome, but it all amounts to the same thing – a horizontalisation of social attitude that bitterly refuses to give credit where it’s due; a sneering, snivelling resentment that seeks to rip down anyone who distinguishes themselves for any reason.

Unlike us, the Scandinavians and the Continental Europeans are sophisticated enough to appreciate that this is a phenomenon of their culture and are able to consciously work against it. So too do the British recognise that their tolerance of eccentricity has enabled them to produce the geniuses necessary to remain a world power.

The gormless peasants that make up the bulk of the New Zealand populace are yet to comprehend such a thing, however, and so the lawnmower mows on.

So neglected are we down here in the world’s arsehole, so starved of genuine regard from those of other nations that we have gone blind in the darkness and turned on each other.

We should be ashamed for our Tall Poppy Syndrome. It really makes us look like a nation of cucks.

After all, it’s a classic expression of slave morality. Tall Poppy logic is even more resentful than Christianity.

Resentful Christians tell themselves that “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to make themselves feel better about how easily their massively egotistical selves can be made to feel fear and consequently how easily they can be intimidated away from conflict.

The modern Kiwi tells himself something very similar. His byword is “the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.”

In this environment, the worst insult of all is to be a “try-hard”. This is to commit the sin of putting an effort into something, as opposed to the socially approved method of doing a half-arsed job that soon has to be fixed.

The logic appears to be that if anyone did anything properly, then overall standards would soon rise and soon people would be demanding that we did everything properly. And that’s just a hassle.

Therefore it’s better to half-arse everything so that no-one has to feel bad for being incompetent.

This is how we arrived at the Orange Man animation that the television shows us to try and entice us into giving our consent to be ruled by the political class.

Whichever creative agency that invented the Orange Abortion no doubt would have paid due caution to ensuring that the image intended to represent the New Zealand voter didn’t exclude anyone.

Because if it did, they would have resented the shit out of it. We know this because that’s our culture.

Therefore, the New Zealand voter ends up being represented by an amorphous orange blob – one that stirs precisely zero national sentiment in the viewer.

This feeble absence of passion is the inevitable result of a national morality based on resentment. Nobody gets to have anything interesting or do anything interesting.

We have created a culture so boring that our young people would rather cheat death by smoking random chemicals sprayed on dried plant matter purchased from known criminal gangs than partake in society.

A nation so petty that the Government pissing $400,000,000 up the wall every year on the War on Cannabis goes without censure, but a future Green MP defrauding the same Government out of a few hundred dollars to feed a dependent child twenty years ago sparks a national outrage.

It’s time for a radical revaluation of values in New Zealand.

New Zealand Should Only Let Female Refugees In

The hordes of refugees that Europe has let in have mostly been male, and the results have been catastrophic – let’s do the exact opposite

New Zealand, like much of the rest of the Western world, is stuck between a rock and a hard place on the refugee issue. On the one hand there are humanitarian concerns, on the other there is evidence that letting people from certain cultures into your own country drastically lowers your own quality of life. This essay explores a middle ground: only let female refugees in.

With regards to the humanitarian concerns, it can fairly be stated that one refugee life saved is equal to any other refugee life saved. Therefore, if New Zealand could take an extra 1,000 female refugees at the cost of taking 1,000 male refugees, it would not be a net loss on utilitarian grounds.

So this policy is neutral in terms of humanitarian impact. But with regards to lowering one’s own quality of life, it’s obvious that the refugees who do lower the life quality of their host societies are almost always men.

The European experience has demonstrated that to open the door to males from the sort of cultures that are currently producing the majority of refugees is to betray your own womenfolk.

It’s now common for European women to report feeling too afraid to go outside at night – an absolute disaster from the perspective of law and order, let alone the perspective of needing to protect your society’s most vulnerable.

Given that letting male refugees into your country has had the proven effect of inviting the sexual harassment and rape of your own women, why not simply refuse to let in male refugees full stop?

Female refugees don’t commit crimes at anywhere near the rate of males, and they almost never commit the violent sex crimes that often create life-long psychological trauma. So why not cut the supply of these criminals off at the source?

Doing so would also have the effect of greatly allaying the entirely reasonable fears that members of the host society have about mass resettlement of refugees in their neighbourhoods. Banning men would have the effect of banning virtually all crimes of sexual or physical violence, which ought to make the host population much more receptive to the humanitarian needs of the women who would be let in.

So if there are genuine humanitarian reasons that obligate the West opening its borders to the world’s rejects, it’s best to do so in a way that minimises the potential blowback from the host society. This means filtering out those among the refugees who cause most of the blowback.

After all, not much makes a person want to burn down a refugee shelter more than hearing news about another young girl molested by an adult male refugee.

From the perspective of the other side, nothing would incentivise the remaining men in fucked-up countries to unfuck themselves more powerfully than raising the spectre of a future without women.

They would be forced to choose between settling their petty squabbles and religious shitheadedness and finding a way for everyone to live in peace, or living in a world where sexual opportunities were limited to goats and camels.

Some critics might contend that such a policy will just make those places crack down on women’s rights harder and restrict their freedom of travel even more.

If that was the result, that would simply prove that the culture of these places was fundamentally opposed to women’s rights and to freedom in general, and thereby demonstrate the moral obligation that we have in the West to give women shelter from the men enforcing the values of that culture.

Perhaps the best aspect of this policy is that it appeals to the innate sense of justice that most people have. After all, it is the men of these places that are creating all the conflicts that are causing each other to flee, so why should women be punished for any of it?

Let the men sort it out in the absence of women, as they were forced to do in Lysistrata.