I’m a vibecoder to my mom

I’ve moved to Serbia, rented an apartment, spending almost all my money, and ideally, I should be looking for a job, but it’s quite tough here: to legalize my stay in the country, I need legal employment, and the main condition for being hired almost everywhere is having a residence permit: nobody wants to deal with the local bureaucracy and fight for a residence permit for a potential employee. So for now, I’m procrastinating: I walk around the neighborhood a lot, I’m researching where to buy pots and pans, I overthrew Vučić, signed up as a game master for a city-wide vampire game, and vibe-coded a publisher for Telegram, which is essentially what this post is about.

Telegram has many different formats for publishing: there are regular messages, to which you can attach a single picture or a YouTube video using a clever life hack; there are trendy rich messages, available to premium account holders (I was recently gifted one, but I don’t use it) and bots; there are albums of up to ten media files—and each format has its own limitations: some have truncated text formatting, some have expanded, some have a maximum text volume of 1024 characters, and some have 32k—in short, it’s a mess. So, to avoid getting lost in this zoo, I gathered the ability to publish in any available format into a single application.

To do this, however, you need to start a channel, create a bot, give the bot administration rights to the channel, and enter the channel and bot data into the app settings. You can create many channels, and you can either give each one its own bot or use the same one everywhere, but in my publisher, you can save profiles for each of the channels.

It seemed to me that this pet project is already quite worthy of being presented to the public. So download the app from GitHub, check how it works, and throw suggestions into the issues about what to add where. The interface is unrefined, even the icon is still standard, but I’m tired of endlessly tweaking the code and just want to share it.

Of course, donations are very welcome if you find that this thing has been useful to you.

And, to save time, I’ll mention other cool things I’m involved in and could theoretically earn something from.

  1. My book about ancap, published on paper at the Svoboda publishing house. There is also a little bit of Friedman’s “The Mechanics of Freedom” left in my translation, along with other good things. I have also been hired to typeset Tallock and Buchanan’s book “The Calculus of Consent”; we will send it to print soon, and I will announce it once it is available for sale.
  2. A VPN service, for which I was hesitant to advertise, doubting how worthwhile it actually was; however, as far as I can tell, people occasionally register via my referral link, and they don’t seem to message me privately complaining that they bought crap.
  3. A Telegram sticker pack with me, in which the main contributor became Soz.

From legalization to the Gulag – one step away? Analyzing the main mistake of conservatives and life hacks for persuading them

You are likely familiar with the situation where you try to explain to a friend with conservative views why decriminalization is normal, or why the state should not meddle in your bedroom, and in response, you get something like this:

– Today you allow same-sex marriage, and tomorrow they’ll start marrying dogs!
– Today you don’t imprison a drug addict, and tomorrow we’ll have a zombie apocalypse on our streets!

Of course, such argumentation will seem absurd to you, and it will be difficult to find meaning in it. But science has finally explained what is happening in the heads of our authoritarian opponents. And, most importantly, it has given us the keys to how to work with this. Recently, a fresh study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which puts everything in its place. So, let’s analyze how we can use this for the benefit of freedom.

The study confirmed what we already suspected: conservatives are much more prone to believing in arguments like the “Slippery Slope.” This is when a small, seemingly harmless action (eating a cookie) inevitably leads to a catastrophe (gaining 300 kg and dying). For a conservative, the world is a very fragile system. Pull out one brick (a tradition, a law), and the entire building of civilization will collapse. But here’s the thing: the study showed that this tendency is based on intuitive thinking. It is a “gut feeling,” an evolutionary mechanism, similar to how hearing a rustle in the bushes might make us immediately think it’s a tiger and that it’s better to run.

The most interesting part of the study is the experiment that showed how to switch this effect off. Scientists made conservatives wait 10 seconds before responding and asked them to “think carefully.” After this, the gap between liberals and conservatives narrowed to a minimum. As soon as “slow thinking” (analytics) is activated, the fear of the slippery slope evaporates.

How, then, can one effectively persuade conservatives? Based on this data, we obtain the following strategy for debating conservatives (and statists of all kinds):

First, it is important to slow down the pace and remove emotion. You need to switch your opponent’s brain from the “fast response system” (intuition) to the “deep analysis system.” Do not press; instead, ask questions that require a pause and reflection. You are unlikely to convince someone by saying that legalization reduces crime, here is Portugal’s statistics. It is better to ask: “Do you think if a person drinks a beer on Friday, they will inevitably become an alcoholic in a year? No? Then why should it be different with weed? Let’s break down the chain!”

Second, you need to fill in the gaps in the chain. Research has shown that conservatives believe in the “slippery slope” only if the intermediate steps are unclear to them. You must always argue step-by-step: A leads to B, B leads to C. If you skip steps, your opponent’s intuition will fill in the gaps with monsters.

Third, use their own weapons. Libertarians also frequently resort to the “slippery slope.” For example, “taxes are robbery, and even the slightest regulation is a direct path to slavery.” Use this!

Are conservatives afraid of chaos? Show them that expanding state powers is the most dangerous slippery slope of all. “If we allow an official to decide what we read/watch/smoke today, then tomorrow they will decide where we work and how we pray. Do you really want to give a Major Comrade that kind of power?”.

Are conservatives afraid of terrorism? Show them that the development of scientific and technological progress in a society where psychopaths with a weak version of the violence inhibitor are present will inevitably lead to global catastrophe and the self-destruction of all humanity, whereas attempting to mitigate these risks through increased surveillance and state regulation will make normal life impossible, turning it into an endless airport security check, but without any guarantee that some psychopath won’t still manage to “slip under the radar.” Consequently, a technologically advanced society has no way to avoid the practice of strengthening the violence inhibitor in psychopaths!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Makhnovshchina 2

In the first part I attempted to demonstrate the specific logical twist that allows libertarians (in our hypothetical past, these are urban workers and primarily the technical intelligentsia, who simultaneously embraced the radically liberal ideas of Gustave de Molinari—who had given lectures in Russia not so long ago—the economic theories of the Austrians Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, and Kropotkin’s anarchism) to take an active part in the Russian Civil War on the side of those wishing to redistribute property, namely the practical rural anarchists under Makhno’s command.

How can the city and the countryside interact on equal terms under conditions of external threat? The village is capable of providing the army with people, horses, and food. The townspeople are far fewer in number, but they can provide the army with technological equipment, from spring-loaded carriages for tachankas to rails and wagons, plus repair everything from rifles to locomotives and artillery. It is precisely the city that provides artillerymen, engineers, and telephone operators. But Yekaterinoslav, while highly industrially developed, is still just one city, and it is incapable of producing the full range of military equipment. It doesn’t even produce ammunition or textiles. This means that the free land needs not only to somehow establish an exchange between the city and the countryside but also to trade with distant places, taking into account the hostile environment. Not everything can be obtained from this very hostile environment as a trophy in battle.

The historical Makhno entered into a military alliance with the Bolsheviks, falling into a critical dependence on their ammunition supply, while paying with the blood of his fighters. Ours, convinced by the libertarian preaching that freedom is not for sale and that the market is better than bondage, will attempt direct trade with the Entente powers and beyond, utilizing access to the port of Berdyansk and the railway leading there from Yekaterinoslav. This will help not only to purchase missing industrial goods in exchange for grain but also, for example, to revive the pipe factory by establishing the sea transport of its products to Batumi, and from there to the Caspian oil fields. Makhno is made to understand that the guarantee of peace is interdependence, not just the readiness to slash anyone who invades the native steppes with a saber. Neighbors should be interested in you living and prospering, rather than in quickly wiping you off the face of the earth.

An emissary is sent to Denikin, explaining that American President Wilson is declaring the right of nations to self-determination, and therefore the slogan of a single and indivisible Russia should be pushed into a corner, since he is your ally. If you want, raise slogans about protecting civilization from Bolshevik barbarism. If you want, defend the idea of indeterminacy and the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. But you will have to forget about our free land, just as about Finland, the Baltics, Poland, two Ukraines, the Far Eastern Republic, and many other lands that will find it useful to do without the authority of Petrograd or any other city. In short: your truth is yours, ours is ours, don’t tread on us. Roughly the same is brought to the attention of Lenin’s government. Namely, we aren’t interfering with you in Petrograd, and you aren’t interfering with us in Hulyai-Pole, and if we need to exchange bread for calico, we are always happy to do so. It is more complicated with Petliura’s Ukraine, since we cannot prevent the peasants in his zone of influence from defecting to our side, and we inevitably find ourselves his enemy. But he will have so many problems with the Volunteer Army, which is neutral to us, that one needn’t worry about him especially much.

Will the Volunteer Army defeat the Bolsheviks if we do not operate in their rear? Perhaps not, but it will certainly be much harder for the Bolsheviks, and they definitely won’t take Crimea (we are on the way to Crimea, and we will let the retreating Denikinites pass, bartering artillery for bread from them). And later, the Reds will also get a thrashing from Pilsudski. The latter might, of course, poke his nose around here too, but that is unlikely: a prosperous land where there has been no war for a year, and where there is trade, including with Pilsudski’s allies, is unlikely to seem like a convenient target to him, unlike the capture of Smolensk. Again: Pilsudski needs buffer territories between himself and Russia—and here we are.

What will we get in the end? The collapse of the Russian Empire into a dozen sufficiently stable sovereign regions with all sorts of self-governance models. Against this backdrop, Gulyaipole will not be the most exotic — after all, there are also the Bolsheviks and some place like Mongolia with Baron Ungern. None of the regions will have the ability to subjugate the others, which was a completely natural state for the world at that time: the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Chinese empires all collapsed.

Here, perhaps, a paragraph with a very brief description of the free region’s self-governance model is needed. The land has become heavily depopulated and has ceased to be a scarce resource for a time. Anyone who wishes can take a piece and cultivate as much as they can manage. In the cities, at large enterprises, workers’ assemblies appoint and control guild masters and other management, which results in a certain amount of chaos, as is typical in egalitarian democracies. Small enterprises are either sole proprietorships or cooperatives. There are many consumer cooperatives — a useful form of organization, whether for hiring a janitor or for joint purchases in a village. The gold karbovanets is in circulation, though large denominations are initially quite scarce. For small transactions, anything and everything is used at first, but gradually the market for small change is taken over by tokens issued by the Yekaterinoslav tobacco factory, which guarantee exchange upon presentation for a pack of cigarettes. Following the development of foreign trade, foreign industrialists also appear. However, there is no central authority that could protect their interests. They must negotiate with elected representatives of workers’ collectives and other authoritative figures regarding the terms under which they will be allowed into the market. This usually implies a collective agreement with workers and cartel agreements to coordinate prices with adjacent enterprises. The commune, damn it! The army remains voluntary, yet it sits on a good ration and, in peacetime, engages mainly in border patrolling, so there is a certain surplus of those wishing to serve. Thus, gradually becoming accustomed to a peaceful, civilized life, marred only by skirmishes with Soviet Russia due to Soviet peasants fleeing to the free region, we experience the twenties.

And what next? Will Hitler be able to cope with a much stronger Poland? Will a much weaker Soviet Russia invade Finland? Will Japan go to war with the United States without the Reich as an ally, or limit itself to Asian conquests? Will Great Britain and France retain most of their African colonies? Will the foolish state of Israel appear? Most likely, the world in the twentieth century will be a much less insane place, much more like a natural continuation of the nineteenth century, where the Great War remains the most terrible monument to human arrogance.

Nevertheless, even this branch of development will not avoid the rise of statism and even, for example, the Great Depression. However, if in the actual twentieth century the communists of the whole world had a shining beacon in the form of a thoroughly mythologized Soviet Russia, then in our hypothetical reality, the anarchists of the whole world will also have such a beacon in the form of Hulyaypole. This world will certainly be no less complex and interesting, and therefore thanks to Nihilist for the question; it gave me great pleasure to speculate on this topic.

A license for one’s own mouth: illusions about freedom of speech in the USA are time to bury

It is hard not to notice that our domestic liberals possess an incurable form of cargo cult. They still fervently believe that across the ocean, a shining city on a hill has been built, where the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects any citizen better than tank armor. They claim that in the “civilized world,” even the most vengeful president or an out-of-control official would not dare to gag a TV presenter, and that freedom of broadcasting to a million-strong audience is an unshakeable sacred cow. But it seems it is time for them to take off their rose-colored glasses.

Recently, a demonstrative drama unfolded in the USA, which even the witnesses of “free America” certainly cannot ignore. Jimmy Kimmel’s immensely popular late-night show on the national ABC television channel simply cut out a full interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico from the broadcast. They weren’t afraid of viewer boycotts or advertiser whims. The leadership of the media giant panicked and tossed the conversation from the broadcast schedule to the backwaters of YouTube simply because officials from the Trump administration unequivocally cocked the hammer of the regulatory club known as the FCC (Federal Communications Commission).

But what about the First Amendment, under which the state has no right to silence anyone? Watch closely, for we are witnessing a classic trick of state-level swindling. Why should the Leviathan crudely ban words if it can instead subjugate the infrastructure? Officials do not enter the studio shouting about the introduction of censorship. No, they simply politely state that the airwaves are a scarce public resource, that there is a sacred “Equal Time Rule” and a doctrine of serving the public interest. And also that the local ABC network television stations happen to have broadcasting licenses up for renewal, and it would be extremely unfortunate if the commission perceived a political bias in their evening jokes and delayed the review by a couple of years or so.

Trump’s new appointee as head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, demonstratively threw away years of leniency for entertainment news and openly threatened the Disney holding company with the cancellation of its licenses. And what did the multi-billion dollar corporation do? It instantly tucked its tail between its legs and engaged in primitive self-censorship.

Now is the perfect time to open a libertarian classic. As early as 1959, future Nobel laureate Ronald Coase released a devastating scientific paper on the creation of the FCC. Coase literally demonstrated with simple examples: the radio frequency spectrum is fundamentally no different from plots of land. It is an ordinary limited resource that should belong to broadcasters as full private property based on the principle of first use (homesteading). All overlaps, noise, and frequency disputes are elementary solved through the institution of private property and courts—without a single ministerial parasite.

But a century ago, the American state intentionally nationalized radio waves, declaring them “public domain.” Why? The answer is obvious: solely for the sake of political control. So that over everyone who picks up a microphone hangs the sword of Damocles of bureaucratic favor, and at the same time, no one could complain that some amendment was being violated.

It is time for libertarians to take note: a state license is an absolute oxymoron for freedom. What is licensing by its very nature? The state first forcibly steals your natural right to speak, broadcast, trade, or produce, and then, for money and an oath of submission, sells you a scrap of stamped paper: “Fine, we allow it for now, but if you behave badly, we’ll take it away.” A right, reduced to the status of a licensable handout from an official, instantly ceases to be a right.

Therefore, it is time to finally purge the provincial cargo cult from within and stop praying to the stars and stripes. American statism is exactly the same predatory stationary bandit, it has simply learned to hide its claws behind complex bureaucratic procedures.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Makhnovshchina

Could you please review a YouTube video about Makhnovshchina? In particular, I am interested in the context of the Civil War. Let’s imagine that you are a libertarian living in Russia during those years. For whom would it be more logical to root: for the Cadets with their parliamentarism, market economy, and civil liberties, or for the Makhnovists with their anarchism, land redistribution, and collective self-governance?

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00012BTC)

Here is the video:

The question is interesting, but it’s not too difficult to give a short answer: of course, it would have made sense for libertarians at that time and in those places to support the Makhnovists specifically. Under the conditions of a civil war, it is impossible to build a normal free market anyway, but functional institutions of anarchy are more or less realistic.

Nevertheless, that key thesis regarding the Makhnovist movement, which is repeated twice in the proposed video — the state always defeats those who refuse to be it — requires an adequate response. Therefore, let’s try to estimate what joining the Makhnovist movement could have provided for libertarians.

To start with: where could they have even come from? Obviously, from the city. The works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk had already been published in Russian and served as the foundation for the scientific critique of Marxism. So our hypothetical libertarians are a sort of reading club that could have continued to peacefully study all this theory, if practice hadn’t arrived right on their doorstep. In the conditions of the general revitalization of political thought before the February Revolution, they could have been arguing in journals with Milyukov and Struve about how to organize Russia, but when Soviets began to appear across the country, it became obvious that the workers’ striving for self-governance could not be ignored.

The main libertarian thesis regarding historical private property during periods of turbulent social transformation is this: Yes, the peaceful exchange of property titles is an obvious basis for continued ownership. But the forced seizure of property is an equally obvious basis for restitution. And in conditions where a thoroughly corrupt tsarist regime distorted all relationships through its abuses, including those concerning property, no one can truly establish to what extent each transfer of property titles was voluntary and to what extent it was forced. This means that defending all historical property rights indiscriminately means primarily defending injustice. And the grand war for the redistribution of property and social relations themselves occurring right now on our doorstep fully confirms this thesis.

Therefore, with all due respect to the representative of the Kadets, Mr. Struve, a member of the Special Council under General Denikin, the truth is more likely on the side of Batka Makhno. The peasants are fully entitled to redistribute the land so that everyone cultivating the land disposes of the fruits of their labor, and the workers are fully entitled to organize their own labor self-management. But this is precisely restitution, not the permanent order of things, and gradually property rights must stabilize so that they may thereafter pass from subject to subject exclusively through peaceful means. The permanent revolution that Comrade Trotsky dreams of is for those for whom war is a mother, whereas for us, peaceful labor is closer—unlike that Trotsky, who neither plowed the land nor worked in a factory. But Comrade Trotsky is right about one thing: we must permanently rid ourselves of anyone who would attempt to establish political power until those who desire it move on, otherwise all the conquests of the revolution will go to waste, for power is coercion, and the forced transfer of property rights will give rise to new demands for restitution.

In short, when in our hypothetical reality in October 1919 the Makhnovists entered Ekaterinoslav, they discovered a well-organized grassroots libertarian workers’ movement there, and their subsequent interaction was conducted on quite equal terms. How did the libertarian workers propose to organize the interaction between the city and the countryside?

I will write about this in my next post so as not to delay the publication, as I have already had a long pause due to my move to Serbia.

How the state filtered migrants so that only psychopaths were left on the streets

Ceuta is a tiny Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast. And recently, a real drama has unfolded there. An interview with a local resident, who went out to protest against the dominance of illegals, went viral online. She described an interesting dynamic: once the guys who sailed in from Morocco realized that the Spanish state had no intention of handing out legalization and documents on a silver platter, the vast majority left the city. It would seem that bureaucracy won? Far from it.

The most sane people left. Those who wanted to work honestly, did not want problems with the law, and were looking for a normal life. But who stayed? Aggressive psychopaths, thugs, and degenerates, of course. They don’t care about legal status, the police, or the laws. In the end, normal people left, and concentrated crime settled on the streets. Now, Spanish women are simply afraid to leave their homes after sunset.

It turned out to be a classic, crystal-clear example of the law of negative selection. But let’s step back a little to understand how Spain even reached this state of affairs.

The Spanish authorities have been complaining for years about the demographic pit, about the fact that there is no one to earn pensions. And that means mass legalization of hundreds of thousands of migrants is urgently needed! But why did this hole form in a warm, fertile country? Because the state has suffocated its own population with care and regulation. Incredible tax pressure, a bloated state apparatus, draconian labor laws (where hiring a young man is a lifelong risk, because firing him later will cost you more), insane housing prices due to urban planning restrictions. And on top of that—thousands of absurd laws about victimless “crimes,” turning the average citizen into a perpetual neurotic and potential lawbreaker. A person lives in permanent stress under the microscope of a bureaucrat. And as any biologist knows, animals in captivity simply do not reproduce.

And now let’s see what happens when the state begins to clumsily “fight” immigration using its usual prohibitive methods.

If a person is a normal, sane hard worker, then he respects private property and personal boundaries. Yes, he might have crossed the strait illegally in search of a better life. But if he is told that he won’t be allowed to work legally here, that he will have no rights, and that deportation awaits him at the slightest stir, what will he do? He will go somewhere where there are chances, or return home. He has something to lose: his own safety, his reputation, the prospect of a stable income.

And who has nothing to lose? A completely broken sociopath. He deeply doesn’t care about residence permits, employment contracts, or the police. The police didn’t scare him in his homeland, and they won’t scare him here (especially knowing the toothlessness of European justice). He had no intention of integrating into the economy. His craft is robbery and violence.

By banning or making legal stay as difficult as possible, the state builds a barrier that filters out the cautious, the moderate, and the constructive. But only predators step over it. This works exactly the same as with gun bans: when authorities ban pistols, they disappear from law-abiding citizens but do not go anywhere for bandits. When the state bans drugs, it does not destroy demand – it simply hands the market over to bloody cartels instead of civilized pharmacies. And when the state bluntly “bans migration” instead of making way for free trade, private hiring, and strict protection of private property from encroachments – it is guaranteed to result in streets overwhelmed by a wave of violence.

In the end, we get a weeping simple woman from Ceuta, who cannot walk to the store in the evening. First, the stationary bandit stripped her of taxes and deprived her fellow citizens of a future, and then created a perfect sanctuary for those who recognize no rules at all. However, there is nothing new: any state intervention always only makes things worse. Even where it hypocritically promises to “restore order”!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

The Illusion of a Satiated Demographic Sunset: Why There Will Be No One to Fix Robots in a Half-Empty World

We always say that if you regulate every step, burden a person with a million prohibitions, licenses, and fines for every sneeze, people will simply stop having children. A human is a biological being, and animals in cramped cages do not reproduce. But the response we get is simply, “So be it; there are too many people as it is, and if there are fewer, there will be no traffic jams, nature will cleanse itself, and silence and beauty will prevail.” Usually, we counter with economics: infrastructure will collapse, the solidarity pension system will burst, and markets will shrink to the size of a street stall. That is exactly what will happen. But behind this facade hides something far more terrifying—technological regression and the risk of a slow but certain extinction of humanity as a species.
 
Population reduction enthusiasts stubbornly see a human only as an “extra mouth,” a “source of carbon footprint,” and a walking problem. But a human is not just a mouth, but also a brain. It is the entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and labor. So let’s break down in simple terms why the dream of a “small, cozy humanity” is a most dangerous illusion.
 
First, rare talents. Geniuses capable of driving fundamental science do not appear by government decree. They are born statistically rarely—roughly one in a million. If you have a population of 8 billion, you have a pool of eight thousand potential Einsteins, von Neumanns, and Turings. Cut the population in half, and you cut that pool by exactly 50%. Cut it even more, and breakthrough ideas will become many times fewer. And yet, it is these individuals who create the technologies that later feed and heal everyone.
 
Second, the specialization trap. Modern scientific and technological progress relies on an incredibly deep division of labor. In the 18th century, an erudite person could understand mechanics, botany, and philosophy. But today, the low-hanging fruit of science has already been picked. To move the edge of knowledge even a millimeter, thousands of ultra-specialists are needed. One person cannot design a lithographic scanner for chips, synthesize a molecule for a rare cancer, and build a thermonuclear reactor all at once. The larger the society, the more unique, niche professions it can afford. A small society, even if everyone has three higher education degrees, is physically incapable of maintaining millions of complex competencies simultaneously.
 
Thirdly, economies of scale and technological accessibility. Developing a new processor or medication costs billions of dollars. In a global market of billions of people, these colossal costs are spread thin—resulting in penny-priced pills and affordable smartphones. Shrink the market, and the most complex projects will cease to be profitable. Businesses simply will not invest in something they have no one to sell to. First, niche drugs for rare diseases will disappear, then specialized equipment, and eventually entire industries. The state, of course, will attempt to save the situation with “subsidies,” but taking money from a shrinking economy is a path toward an even faster collapse.
 
Fourthly, knowledge does not live in books. Blueprints without a living chain of succession are just dead terabytes of data. Complex technology lives only in the hands of practitioners: when a gray-haired engineer passes on implicit skills to a young graduate student right at the machine tool or in the laboratory. If one generation is replaced by a much smaller one, the chains break. Humanity has lost technologies more than once—from the recipe for Roman concrete to the ability to quickly reproduce the rocket engines of the moon program.
 
And finally, we cannot simply stand still. Nature does not take pauses for a “cozy life.” Bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. The climate presents surprises, infrastructure decays, and space threats have not gone anywhere. For civilization to simply maintain its current level of security, it must run as fast as it can forward—discovering new energy sources, creating new materials, and new medicines. If we slow down the scientific and technological progress due to a shortage of brains, we are not staying in place, but beginning to slowly slide into a new dark age.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Horn of Plenty

Alex Rozov in the comments of my channel, and before that, in the channel “Myth Eaters”, proposed an interesting problem:

There is a myth that the nymph Amalthea, daughter of Ocean, in the form of a goat, suckled the infant Zeus in a cave on Crete. Amalthea had a horn of plenty, from which, upon a magic word, the fruits of the earth poured out in an endless stream… When Amalthea cast off her goat skin and disappeared, the horn was lost somewhere.

Suppose Amalthea’s horn was suddenly found where it was lost: on Crete.

How will this affect world politics and the economy?

Well, let me try to fantasize.

So, after another earthquake, a landslide revealed an ancient cave, and a couple of days later, some hiker tourists climbed in. In the cave, they discovered a stone bed, a table, and on the table, a goat’s horn in excellent condition. Since everyone on Crete has been badgered about Zeus’s caves and the myth of his foster mother, the hikers chuckle, thinking, “here’s another one, and even the horn is in place. Hey, Horn, what will you give us? At least give us a couple of oranges.” The Horn provides. After recovering from their initial shock, the hikers begin spamming requests and quickly find out that the Horn doesn’t pour beer and doesn’t give meat. It said “fruits of the earth,” so it will be fruits of the earth, period. A command recorded and played back from a phone works perfectly: the Horn does not require personal presence to execute an order; it only needs an instruction on what to serve. It also turns out that outside the cave, the Horn loses its magical properties. This is precisely what determines that the Horn will not leave Crete, and its further fate will be tied specifically to this island. Otherwise, of course, tourists would have no trouble smuggling a goat’s horn out of Greece, since it’s not exactly a golden treasure.

What happens next? Tourists disciplinedly turn to the Euphoria of Antiquities, and some legal complications begin. The object is clearly older than 1453, which means it undoubtedly belongs to the state. Theoretically, its place is in a museum, and tourists are entitled to a reward for the find. But the object is useless outside the cave, and the cave is located on private land. Unlike mainland Greece, in Crete, deep in the island, most land is either private or municipal, rather than state-owned. Thus, local archaeologists begin studying the cave, while the horn itself is also being studied by various other specialists who, of course, are interested in the physics of the materialization of the earth’s fruits. The owner of the cave, a certain Manolis Petrakis, sets up the “Amalthea” restaurant nearby, where he treats guests to vegetarian cuisine, and starts wine production right there, because in Greece it is difficult to think of a more high-margin way to process the fruits of the earth than making wine with a beautiful legend. Thus, during the day, eggheads study the horn, and at night it provides the location owner with raw materials for processing.

Next, large-scale business by local standards enters the game. The state, Mr. Petrakis, and the agro-industrial company AGROCRETA agree to create a special public-private partnership, the “Amalthea Consortium.” The concession agreement states that the state grants the consortium the exclusive right to use the Horn for 30 years and ensures permits for infrastructure installation, in exchange for which it receives a fixed annual payment of 50 million euros and 20% of the consortium’s net profit. Mr. Petrakis provides his real estate for the consortium’s use for 30 years, receiving a fixed annual payment of 2 million euros and 10% of the consortium’s net profit. The AGROCRETA company invests money, manages the consortium, bears the entrepreneurial risks, and receives 70% of the net profit from this.

Now the consortium’s task is to build logistics from the cave to the port of Heraklion, located 50km away across rugged mountainous terrain, which at its peak had a turnover of about 3 million tons per year. The “Princess Xenia” highway in Montenegro took 7 years to build, and with a length of 41km, it cost almost a billion euros. OK, the consortium doesn’t need a highway, just a good road for serious freight turnover. But even so, one must budget at least 4 years and at least 500 million, and, of course, the construction will be contracted to the Chinese. In the meantime, they will have to lay down gravel, then pour concrete up to the nearest local road, and be limited by its modest capacity.

Thus, from the very beginning, the consortium management will face the question: what to produce?

While all traffic is provided by ATVs and helicopters, they will have to work on special orders, such as “deliver 100kg of coffee beans to Mr. Papadakis’s craft roaster, full analogs of the lot sold at an auction in Costa Rica for 50 dollars per kilo” — but such a delivery will satisfy all the hipsters on the entire island for long, and the rest simply won’t understand why they should buy such expensive coffee when Lavazza is available in the supermarket.

When the first trucks start coming, they can already be loaded, for example, with cocoa beans, because there is a more than solid price per ton of raw material, and the global market is quite large. As freight turnover further expands, one could think about natural rubber, but here is the problem: you can’t eat it. The stupid artifact is enchanted to provide the owner with fruits of the earth for food, not for just anything. So, rubber, mahogany, and the like will unfortunately have to be left to the local producers, but on saffron or natural vanilla, one can make up for it completely, simply by driving all other producers out of the global market, because why would they even be needed.

But when, finally, a full-fledged highway designed for the heavy traffic capable of fully loading the port will be built, the main cargoes will essentially remain the same cocoa and coffee, and the consortium’s capacity will only be enough to bite off a certain share of the global market for these goods; logistics will not allow for more. Of course, in addition to this, all of Crete will have access to cheap durian, coconuts, and other exotic items that previously were expensive solely due to the long logistical arm. But there is no point in shipping these tropical goods beyond the EU, as tariffs begin there, and Asia can fend for itself—Heraklion is not made of rubber.

And if anyone fears that an endless stream of rice, wheat, and potatoes will pour from Crete, they are fearing in vain. This will only happen in years of local crop failures, military crises, and the like. The Horn must not leave the cave, and no matter how much you expand or reinforce its vault, it will still be a hole of a fixed width, through which a conveyor belt travels one way with empty packaging and the other way with filled containers, then reloads onto trucks, goes to the port, is loaded onto container ships, and is distributed around the world. From one single port, and there are thousands of such ports in the world.

In order for the Horn of Plenty to truly crash all global food markets, and the energy market along with it due to biodiesel, a new transport revolution will be required. Someday, perhaps, this will happen, but I see another event as far more likely. It is not for nothing that at the very beginning of the story, scientists began to study the horn. It is they who will eventually find that physical principle on which it operates. And when a universal synthesizer stands in every home, the goat Amalthea will finally be able to consider her mission on Earth accomplished. Where to look for her after that? I suppose on the Jupiter moon of the same name, but for a description of that stage—turn to the Strugatskys.

Psychopathy – a zombie idea? Not quite!

Recently, the article by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen has made waves, attempting to completely refute the concept of psychopathy and labeling it a “zombie idea.” The author concludes that psychopathy does not exist in principle, and that the scientific community’s interest in this idea is fueled only by the cultural popularity of the concept. But do such claims actually hold water, or is this just another attempt to ride the hype by denying the obvious? Let us examine everything in order.

First of all, the author refers to his own meta-analysis, in which he finds that, according to research data, psychopathic personalities perform no worse than ordinary people on empathy tests. However, it is extremely important to note that modern science does not claim an absolute inability of psychopaths to empathize. Often, the discussion concerns a deficit in affective empathy (the ability to feel the emotions of others while observing them) to varying degrees, while simultaneously, cognitive empathy (the mere ability to read others’ emotions without feeling them) is frequently fully intact. The author of the article primarily uses empathy as a monolithic construct, which is fundamentally incorrect.

Furthermore, such results may have a rather interesting explanation—psychopathy may consist not in the absence of empathy itself, but merely in the absence of its automatic activation. For instance, in one experiment, psychopaths were found to have the same level of mirror neuron activation (which is typically associated with empathy) as ordinary people. But this only occurred when they were given the task of manifesting it intentionally! As for spontaneous empathy, they demonstrated a clear deficit in neural activity in that case. Another experiment similarly proved the ability of psychopaths to take the perspective of others (to understand their state and thoughts), but only when it is an intentional task. At the same time, automatic (reflexive) perspective-taking occurs only in low-psychopathic personalities.

The author also uses psychopathy itself as a monolithic construct, without paying particular attention to its individual traits and the connections between them. This is also an extremely incorrect approach, as in modern research, results and conclusions are often presented within the framework of multi-factor models of psychopathy, which are perfectly functional.

There are also moments where the author has explicitly lied. He claims that frequently cited studies in favor of the psychopathy concept—for example, neurobiologist James Blair’s article on the mechanism of violence inhibition, which normally deters a person from harming others, the presence of moral-psychological impairments in psychopaths, as well as certain neurophysiological studies—are merely isolated pieces of evidence and therefore cannot be taken seriously. However, Blair’s core positions and his violence inhibitor model, such as the reduced ability of violent and psychopathic personalities to perceive distress signals (sadness, fear, etc.) from others, have been replicated by dozens of studies! Furthermore, there is already a great deal of evidence regarding the link between structural brain impairments and psychopathy.

Finally, the author decided not to mention the strongest argument in favor of the psychopathy concept at all: its extremely high predictive power regarding violent crime, and especially murder. This, for example, is supported by numerous studies and meta-analyses by criminologist Matt DeLisi. Moreover, so far there is not a single study that refutes such a link. As forensic psychologist John Marshall notes in one of his articles, psychopathy is the strongest indicator of violence, it is difficult to ignore in the matter of predicting such behavior, and the fact that the “average” criminal who commits a murder demonstrates moderate manifestations of psychopathy underscores that this is not just a rare subtype of murderers, but a general trend for all cases of lethal violence.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Debates on enemy platforms

I have a friend who is a freshman. His university has introduced mandatory, useless subjects at the expense of the rest of the learning process. I am mainly talking about “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.” It is terrible propaganda, a twisting of facts, and the omission of others, all heavily seasoned with emotions and the speaker’s personal opinion.

I have the opportunity to attend this lecture without being a student and to publicly leave the instructor exposed, as the fairy tales coming out of his mouth are easily shattered by logical inconsistencies and objective reality.

The question itself: Is it worth the candle?

Anonymous question

Your doubts are completely justified. The question of whether it is worth the candle arises when the inevitable costs of an activity are large enough, while the potential gain is small. For example, if you played cards at night before the Industrial Revolution with tiny stakes, it is quite possible that even the person who hits the jackpot would not recoup the cost of the burned candles from their winnings. If, in a police state where the public expression of non-enthusiastic views is punished by imprisonment, you were to hold a debate with a state propagandist before an audience of a couple of dozen people, even a total rhetorical rout of the opponent might not be worth the subsequent lost years. However, blowing up a drone manufacturing plant might justify the risks of criminal prosecution in the eyes of many.

Of course, to make the game worth the candle, it is not necessarily about raising the stakes. You can limit yourself to reducing the costs. For example, participating in online debates under a pseudonym. Or moving to a less repressive state. Or engaging in a public dispute with a state lecturer on the subject of paleontology. In other words, playing cards with small stakes, but after the Industrial Revolution, when candles have become cheaper and you can burn even cheaper electricity instead.

In your particular case, where resources are scarce and you don’t want to take too many risks, but you want to harm a specific person who represents the hated state, and in such a way that they have a chance to understand their mistakes, it seems to me that a minor terrorist attack, also known as hooliganism, would be the optimal solution. The simplest thing would be to break a car window. And the stone used to break the window could be wrapped in a piece of paper with a profound saying. You know, something like, “Sudden arrival is the foundation of Russian statehood.” The person is left with nothing, and at the same time suffers an intellectual defeat, which is exactly what you wanted.

Of course, the recipe will have to be modified to fit the context, and obvious precautions will have to be taken: don’t get caught on camera, leave your phone at home, and don’t leave traces of your DNA on evidence.