A Geek with Guns - Philosophy

Complex Systems, Simple Answers

2026-02-06T13:00:00-06:00

The universe we occupy is a very complex system that contains an uncountable number of complex systems within itself. One of the most common illustrations of this fact is weather forecasting. Weather forecasts are notorious for being inaccurate. The reason for this isn't because the weatherman is incompetent, it's because weather is a complex system. Edward Norton Lorenz, a meteorologist who founded chaos theory, noted the complexity of weather systems through the butterfly effect</a>:

He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier. </blockquote>
The terrestrial weather system isn't the only complex system. Space weather is a thing and a great deal of effort is put into predicting it. Like predicting terrestrial weather, predicting space weather is notoriously inaccurate. A few other complex systems are the movement of tectonic plates, propagation of electromagnetic radiation, and human behavior.
The human brain prefers simple answers. Prescientific man often explained complex phenomenon like weather as the action of gods and other supernatural beings. A typhoon wiping out a coastal city might be explained as the god of the sea punishing the inhabitants because they did something he didn't like. Postscientific man isn't that different. Although our scientific understanding has largely done away with accusing the gods for all that happens, we still end up creating simple answers for complex systems.
This comes up most frequently when people try to blame an individual or group for events that are the result of complex systems. Crime rates are a good example. Many factors play into crime rates. Socioeconomic conditions are the most commonly cited factors, but there are many more. The laws themselves play a huge role because an act isn't a crime unless there's a law against it. If the government passes a law against an until then lawful and very common activity (see Prohibition in the United States), the rate of crime increases. Weather plays a factor in crime rates. Cities in the northern hemisphere typically have a higher rate of violent crime during the summer. Individual attitudes are a major factor. If there is a large number of people who are unhappy with their current conditions, they are more likely to perform criminal acts such as vandalism. Many people ignore all of these factors and instead blame crime rates on blacks or immigrants and call it a day.
Political systems are also complex. A political system involves many people acting in the name of a government. These government vary from dictatorships to democracies. Different systems have different numbers of participants. The laws that get passed depend on a number of factors. Consider the legislative process in a common democratic system. A law might be introduced by a politician on behalf of a lobbyist. The lobbyist may want the law passed to prevent new competitors from entering their market. The politician might received benefits from the lobbyist ranging from paid vacations to promises of employment after they exit politics. Another law might be introduced because a politician sees people participating in activities they personally find immoral (again, see Prohibition in the United States). Once a law is introduced, there is a complex system of wheeling and dealing that commonly happens before the law is either rejected or passed into law. Many people ignore all of these factors and instead blame one political party for all the political ills in their country. Or they might blame the Jews or, more recently, British royalty (a new conspiracy theory gaining headway here in the United States).
What is an answer that doesn't correctly answer a question? It's bullshit. This provides some incite into why all of the perceived ills in the world seem to go unaddressed. Too many people have opted for bullshit rather than answers. But don't be too harsh of those people. We humans aren't well adapted to analyzing and addressing complex systems. All of us opt for bullshit. Some of us opt for it more than others, but we all do it. We especially do it when an answer can't be identified. Our brains prefer simple answers and absolutely despise having no answers. When an individual accumulates too many questions without answers they often succumb to some form of nihilism, but that's not the only option.
If you're willing to accept the fact that there are many questions without answers and come to peace with that fact, you can live in a sort of harmony. Many religions and philosophies exist around this idea. Stoicism emphasizes that you cannot control things outside of yourself but you can control how you react to events. Even though I cannot control who rules the nation, I can prevent myself from become emotional because of it. You don't have to be angry because you don't like the ruler of a nation. Daoism is centered on the Dao, the source of all existence. Critically Daoism teaches that the Dao is beyond our comprehension and therefore cannot be completely understood. This is a good frame of mind when living in a universe full of unanswerable questions. Accepting that you cannot fully comprehend events that are happening can help avoid falling under the influence of those who claim to have the answer and therefore from being manipulated by them.
I can't say for certain what will make you happy in life. I will say that my life became happier once I accepted that I don't know the answer to everything. That acceptance has allowed me to achieve peace by not getting worked up over things outside of my control. I know the universe is composed of complex systems that are incomprehensible to me and I enjoy that there is mystery in this universe. I live my life how I want and care not at all about the opinions of others. They don't know the answers either. I strongly urge you to explore the same frame of mind and see if it bring you peace too.

Stoicism As A Guard Against Propaganda

2025-09-09T12:00:00+00:00

Stoicism is often maligned in modern society. It receives many labels. The most common as of lase is that it's a trait of toxic masculinity. Having read a number of works by stoic philosophers, this negative view baffled me. Like any philosophy, stoicism has aspects I find useful and aspects I discard. One aspect that I find most useful is possibly the reason it's so often maligned is its point that you are in control of your actions, thoughts, and reactions. Before anybody feels the need to point out all of the cases where this isn't true, such as people with Tourette Syndrome (having uncontrollable actions) or schizophrenia (having uncontrollable thoughts), let me save you the effort by noting that there are always exceptions to rules. However, for the vast majority of us, this point is true.

Stoicism teaches that all external things such as health, wealth, politics, etc. are neither good nor bad. They simply are. You can choose how you react to those external states. If you're miserable because you're sick, that misery is your own choice. You can choose to be sick and still be happy. There are many people suffering terrible ailments such as cancer who refuse to be miserable because of it. Herein lies the problem. Most of the actors trying to influence your actions, thoughts, and reactions don't want you to be in control of them. They want to be in control of them.

When you watch or read the news, you're more often than not being exposed to terrible situations. Wars. Politics. Economic woes. The talking heads and politicians spin these situations into existential threats via propaganda. Wars are supposed to make you angry or afraid. Different sides will spin the same story to their advantage. The ongoing Israel-Palestine War is a prime example. The American right want you to sympathize with Israel because it was attacked by Palestinian terrorists. The American left want you to sympathize with Palestine because it's being destroyed by Israel. You can see the effects of these propaganda effort everywhere you go. Leftist protesters are marching around chanting "Free Palestine!" Rightists, on the other hand, are calling those protesters terrorist sympathizers and demanding law enforcement act against them. Do you know what almost all of these leftists and rightist have in common? They've never been to Israel or Palestine. Many of them were scarcely aware of either state's existence until the media and politicians used them in their propaganda.

Where does stoicism fit into this? When you recognize that the Israel-Gaza War or any other event in the world is an external thing, you can control how you react to it. You don't need to pick sides. You don't need to be spun up. You don't need to scream at somebody because their view of the events differ from your own. You don't need to be manipulated like a pawn in the politicians' chess game. This doesn't just hold true for this one war. It holds true for every thing external of you. You can be happy even if you're sick or poor. You can go about your life even if bad things are happening in the world.

Being in control of your reaction doesn't mean you can't have an opinion. Stoicism advocates for reason and avoiding passions. It defines four passions: distress, fear, lust, and delight. I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but the most relevant passions for this discussion are distress and fear. Distress is an emotion you feel presently. Fear is an emotion you feel about the future. Distress is a new opinion about something bad existing. Distress causes people to believe that they should be depressed. You may view the ongoing war in Palestine as a bad thing and decide that you should be depressed over it. This is where a stoic would use reason to analyze the situation. You may decide that the ongoing war is bad (I believe war is bad in general). But the war is also far away from you so there is no need to be afraid for your future (fear in stoicism) well being. You also cannot control the course of the war. Not only are you too far away from the front lines, but no single individual can control the course of a war. Wars are too complex. So you can have the opinion that the war is bad but not feel the need to be depressed, angry, or otherwise effected by it. You can choose to go about your life happily.

Propaganda exploits passions to manipulate your actions, thoughts, and reactions. I've focused on political propaganda, but commercial propaganda, often referred to as marketing, is the same. Apple just announced its new line of iPhones. Its marketing would have you believe that buying the new iPhone will lead to great and wonderful things in your future. Apple wants you in a state of passion so you don't reason your way out of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a device that is only a mild improvement over the one currently in your pocket.

I don't want you to walk away from this article thinking you should become an adherent to stoicism. As I said in the opening, stoicism has aspects I find useful and aspects I discard. To quote the terribly underrated philosopher Bruce Lee, "Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own." You don't need to subscribe completely to anything including stoicism. But using one aspect of stoicism; the realization that you are in control of your actions, thoughts, and reactions; can make your life more enjoyable by guarding you against the intended effects of propaganda.

What's The Point

2025-07-29T12:00:00+00:00

Upfront I will warn you that this post will be rambling even more so than my typical rambling. This is because the idea I'm trying to express isn't fully formed in my head yet. I find writing about such ideas helps me form them more fully. If you don't like that, feel free to skip this post. With that warning out of the way, let me begin.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared the death of God. From The Gay Science:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? </blockquote>
Max Stirner, whose writings may or may not have influenced Nietzsche's, declared the same. From Stirner's The Unique and Its Property:

At the entrance of the modern era stands the “God-man.”
Will only the God in the God-man evaporate at its exit, and can the God-man really die if only the God in him dies? They didn’t think of this question, and considered themselves finished, when in our day they brought the work of the Enlightenment, the overcoming of God, to a victorious end. They didn’t notice that the human being has killed God in order to now become—“sole God on high.” The other world outside us is indeed swept away, and the great enterprise of the men of the Enlightenment is accomplished; but the other world inside us has become a new heaven and calls us forth to storm the heavens once again: God has had to make way, but not for us, rather for—humanity. </blockquote>
Internet atheists often take Nietzsche's (most of them haven't heard of Stirner) declaration as celebratory. This is because few of them have actually read Nietzsche's works. If they had, they would know that his declaration was both an observation about the Enlightenment and a warning. The observation about the Enlightenment, which is also highlighted in Stirner's work, is that Enlightenment thinking lead many to question the existence of God (really religion in general, but both were European writers and Europe was predominantly Christian). This ultimately lead to the downfall of Christianity as the foundation for Western morality. Nietzsche and Stirner both explain how morality isn't self-evident. Without something to plant the idea of morality into our minds, a phantasm to possess us in Stirner's work, there is a vacuum. Stirner points out that the vacuum has been filled by the concept of "humanity," which is just another phantasm. Nietzsche warns that without something to fill the vacuum, there will be nihilism.
Nihilism, like all philosophical words, isn't well defined. It means different things to different people. In the context of this post, nihilism means the absence of purpose or meaning. My observations lead me to believe that Nietzsche's warning remains unheeded. The Enlightenment wiped away the Christian foundation upon which Western civilization was based but nothing replaced it. Reason, the ultimate deity in Enlightenment thinking, can't provide purpose so today we live with those consequences, we live in a state of nihilism.
I'm not the only person who has observed this. Christians are quick to blame the current state of society on the lack of widespread Christian belief. They tell us that if people would just believe in God again, these ills would disappear! Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. The genie of Reason (capitalized as I'm using it as the deity of Enlightenment thinking) is out of the bottle and there's no way to put it back in. So long as Reason lives, God cannot. Christians aren't the only ones who have observed this vacuum. Many others have too. Like the Christians, they want to fill that vacuum. Unlike the Christians, they claim Reason to be their foundation. Political parties are a great example. They promise to fix the ills of society if only we bend the knee and accept them as our lords and saviors! While all political parties claim Reason to be their foundation, none make that claim louder than the communists and fascists. Despite the ruin they left wherever they've taken hold, some people still take them seriously. As bad as they might be, at least they're not nihilism.
The ultimate problem with nihilism is that it leaves everybody asking, what's the point? Everywhere you look you can observe people facing this question. It makes them uncomfortable because they can't answer it so they spend their days doomscrolling, recording videos of themselves screeching about the topic of the day, playing video games for 12 hours straight, endlessly consuming pornography, and anything else that distracts them from facing this question. Reason can't answer this question either, which is why those claiming Reason to be their foundation have failed to fill the vacuum left by God's demise.
I wish that I had an answer. I wish that I could wave a magic wand and fix this state of affairs. Unfortunately I don't have an answer and I can't fix it. All I can do is observe it and point it out. I will, however, leave you with these words from Renzo Novatore's The Revolt of the Unique:

Let each human being therefore work—if he thinks this way—at the discovery of his own I, at the realization of his own dream, at the complete integration and full development of his own individuality. Every human being who has discovered and won himself walks on his own path and follows his free course.
But let no one come to me to impose his belief, his will, his faith on me. By denying god, fatherland, authority, and law, I have achieved anarchism. By refusing to sacrifice myself on the altar of the people and of humanity, I have achieved individualism.
Now I am free... </blockquote>
If you can't find meaning outside of yourself, perhaps you need to look within.

The Rebel Rule Follower

2025-05-30T09:00:00+00:00

I'm not sure if it's a recent trend, but I've heard a lot of leftists citing the works of Ted Kaczynski lately. Based on what I knew about Kaczynski's beliefs, I found this trend odd and suspected many of the people citing his works never actually read them. So I decided to read his more famous work, Industrial Society and Its Future</a>. Now I'm certain that the people now citing him haven't read his works. How he describes lefists is quite different from how leftists typically describe themselves.
Most people who describe themselves as socialists, communists, and left-leaning anarchists, at least here in the United States, believe they are opposed to the norms of our society. They view our society as capitalistic and they are against capitalism. They view our society as white and they are against whiteness. They view our society as colonial and they are against colonialism. However, our society is largely against all of those things. Both the majority of people and the government believe the economy must be regulated and controlled. The only difference between the views of right- and left-leaning individuals on this topic is the extent to which it needs to be controlled. Racists are in the minority amongst the general population. Very few would support laws that discriminated based on race. Likewise, very few people would support the idea of the United States conquering a foreign country and claiming it as a colony. If you don't believe me, just look at the push back to Trump's proposal to make Greenland and Canada part of the United States.
What modern leftists actually are according to Ted Kaczynski are extremist rule followers. From Industrial Society and Its Future:

9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential. </blockquote>
First he discussed feelings of inferiority:

12. Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle to upper-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc., clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful. </blockquote>
While this section discusses how leftists are projecting their own feelings of inferiority onto others, I think it's at least adjacent to the next section on oversocialization. Specifically on how leftists rise to the defense of any group they perceive as weak or oppressed. They typically don't do it through violence. Instead they do it through rule following to the extreme.
Leftists often take it upon themselves to be the police of language and thought. In this capacity, they take common societal beliefs, such as insults and kicking somebody when they're down being bad, to an absurd end. They're typically the first to scream at you for using the wrong word to refer to a group that they've identified as oppressed (kicking the group when they're down). This is especially evident when an adjective changes from approve to unapproved in their book. For example, the word retard. Retard was at one point a legitimate medical term to describe a child with an intellectual disability. I think it's obvious how it then morphed into an insult. When I was growing up, people threw around the word retard as an insult like people today throw around mother fucker. But then a group of leftists decided retard wasn't merely an insult. It was derogatory to an oppressed minority, namely people with intellectual disabilities. Once that happened, leftists were quick to descend on anybody who dared use the word retard even if it was in a technical context (with very early automobiles, you often had to "retard the spark" before you crank started the engine). I'm sure Kaczynski's use of the phrase "black ghetto-dweller" would cause many modern leftists to declare him a racist and demand his books be tossed into the trash bin of history (if they actually bothered to read his works).
According to Kaczynski, this tendency derives from leftists having a feeling of inferiority. Next he discussed his concept of oversocialization, which he says only covers a segment of leftists (if you're a leftist reading this, of course you're not in that segment):

28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes[4]) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African-American culture. But in what does this preservation of African-American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible,” they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values. </blockquote>
I've noted this tendency not just amongst leftists, but amongst most schools of thought outside of the mainstream. Very few schools of thought venture outside of their society's morals and norms. Those that do are typically despised by the masses. For example, libertarians are advocates for freedom of speech. Some especially edgy libertarians will demonstrate this by using racist words or phrases typically shunned by mainstream society. While the words they use may be against the morals and norms of society, the principle they're upholding (freedom of speech) is supported to at least some extend by the majority of people. They're violating one norm but in the name of upholding another.
Leftists are similar but their tactics differ. For example, in our society it's typically considered good form to care for the poor (this derives from the Christian morals upon which this country was founded). Libertarians try to uphold this principle but advocating for mutual aid and voluntary giving. Leftists try to uphold this principle by making it illegal to not give to the poor. Specifically they demand tax money, the payment of which is legally enforced, be used to provide food, shelter, and clothing to the poor. Furthermore, if you express and objection with their strategy, they immediately accuse you of hating the poor. Even if you do agree with their strategy, they'll continue to express anger because you're not supportive enough. There's no winning because the rule can never be followed strictly enough.
I largely agree with Kaczynski on these points. His observations, as should be obvious from what I just wrote, mirror my own although he came at it from a different direction. I also disagree with many of his points. I'm not convinced that what he calls surrogate activities are bad. I also don't believe our problems can be fixed by reverting to pre-industrial society. I definitely believe the strategies he described to revert society to a pre-industrial one are impossible to realize. But I, unlike many lefists currently citing him, actually bothered to read his work before commenting on it. If they had bothered to read Industrial Society and Its Future, I'm sure they would've found him guilty of wrongthink in the first four sections (the excerpts cited in this post are from those sections). Not only did he criticize modern lefitism, but he also openly advocated for violating the morals and norms of society (although many leftists would've supported his bombings if he had chosen CEOs, Republicans, etc.).

An Ode to Illegalism

2025-05-19T05:00:00+00:00

The anarcho-communist will advocate that the hungry man steal bread and that the homeless man squat an unused building. The anacho-syndicalist will advocate workers sabotage their employer's equipment if they refuse to meet the workers' demands. Both will have lengthy moral justifications for why the crimes they encourage aren't really crimes at all. Then there's the illegalist. He'll advocate for the same crimes and more. But unlike his anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist brethren, he won't attempt to twist meanings to explain why the crimes he advocates aren't crimes. He won't waste your time explaining why the crimes he advocates are morally just. The only justification he needs to commit a crime is that he desires to do so and society says he can't. This is why illegalism is the most honest branch or anarchism.
Illegalism is a branch of individualist anarchism that developed towards the end of the 19th century. It's largely influenced by Max Stirner's egoism, which means illegalists typically have little or no concern for the laws or morals of society. Adherents blatantly violate them whenever they desire to do so. Where illegalism differs from simple criminality is that there's a philosophical reasoning behind it. The crimes perpetrated by an illegalist serve a purpose. They are a direct attack against the established social systems and thus action taken under the banner of illegalism is a form of propaganda of the deed.
Clément Duval</a> is largely considered the founder of illegalism. As with many of his contemporary French anarchists, Clément fought in the Franco-Prussian War where he suffered significant injuries. Like so many soldiers injured in war, he was discard by his government when he was no longer valuable to it. Left unable to work due to his injuries and discarded by the government he fought for, he turned to theft to support his family. He was then arrest and imprisoned. In prison he became an anarchist. Because he was French and an anarchist, Clément was involved in a few arson attacks. This lead him back to prison a couple more times. Eventually the state tired of his shit and he was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life at hard labor. Sent to a penal colony, he escaped to the United States after 13 years. His life and especially his final trial inspired several who would go on to become illegalists. To give you an idea of the cojones on this man, here was his opening statement in his final trial:

Yes, I believe that parasites should not own jewels while workers, the producers, have no bread. I regret only one thing: not finding the money I intended to use for revolutionary propaganda. Otherwise, I would not be here on the defendants’ bench—I would be making bombs to blow you up. </blockquote>
No. Fucks. Given.
His statement shows the philosophical side of illegalism. While Clément stole to survive, he also did it for ideological reasons. He viewed his actions largely as acts of individual reclamation and he intended to use the spoils of his crimes to continue waging his war against society. This was the founding of illegalism. Those inspired by his actions would continued his work by perpetrating crimes as a war against society. Probably the most notorious of those inspired by him would be the Bonnot Gang</a> (there's a good book by Richard Parry titled The Bonnot Gang that is freely available on The Anarchist Library</a>).
The Bonnot Gang was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, they identified themselves with illegalism. Second, they made use of technologies that were new at the time. They performed the first bank robberies using automobiles. They were also early adopters of repeating firearms. Local law enforcement in Paris often didn't have access to either so the Bonnot Gang enjoyed a technological advantage over law enforcement for a time. The gang consisted of many anarchists and their eventual target of banks was both practical and ideological. Practical since banks are where the money was and ideological because it was largely an attack against the bourgeois, since they were the ones who held most of the money in the banks. Eventually the gang leaders were arrest and put on trial. Several were executed. But their exploits inspired others to follow in their footsteps. This lead the state to come down hard on anybody espousing illegalist sympathies. Simply stating support for the Bonnot Gang was enough to get you arrested. While the Bonnot Gang didn't topple the French state, it scared the hell out of it. Thus is accomplished more than any group of political activists in history.
I see parallels between illegalists and pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy. Both groups had numerous grievances against their societies. Both groups took direct action in the form of committing crimes that caused direct damage to the societies that aggrieved them. Both groups were driven at least in part by ideology. Illegalists were driven by individualist anarchist ideology. Pirates were driven by a concept of fairness amongst seafarers (this is evident in the constitutions various pirate gangs drew up, which largely ensured all crew members were treated with an equality not otherwise known to seafarers at the time). Neither group spent a lot of time justifying their actions on moral grounds. They took the actions they did largely because they wanted to do so and knew it would damage the social structure that oppressed them.
If you're interested in radical ideology, I can't recommend researching illegalism enough. It's perhaps the most radical of ideologies. It's certainly one of the most straight forward. You don't need to spend months reading tomes written by philosophers. The library of illegalist writings is quite small and to the point. Understanding illegalism is best done by looking into the actions take by its adherents, which makes it much more fun to research than most radical ideologies.

Communist Holocaust Denial

2025-05-18T02:00:00+00:00

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in general have a nasty habit of either downplaying or completely denying the Holocaust. Neo-Nazis especially confuse me when they do this because eradicating the Jews was a key platform of Nazism. But I digress. On the other side of the mass murder philosophical spectrum, communists flip their shit whenever somebody downplays or denies the Holocaust. This is notable because after they finish flipping their shit, they go and do the same thing</a>:

Students at a leading London university have been condemned as blind to reality after defending the system of Soviet Gulag labour camps where thousands perished as “compassionate” places of rehabilitation.
Trans rights campaigners at Goldsmiths University described the Gulags as benign places where inmates received education, training and enjoyed the opportunity to take part in clubs, sports and theatre groups. </blockquote>
I linked to this story in particular because it came across my news feed but it's nowhere near an isolated incident. Where Neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust, communists deny the horrors inflicted by communist governments. Tankies, an especially loathsome breed of communist, are the worst offenders and almost always act as apologists for the mass murder perpetrated by the Soviet Union. But communists in general will either downplay or deny acts of democide committed by the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, German Democratic Republic, and other communist regimes. If they don't downplay or deny the acts, they label the regimes "not real communism."
Ultimately every apologist for any flavor of statism will come face to face with democide committed by their preferred governmental system. Assuming they find democide distasteful, they will need to account for it. Pathetically most of them will try to downplay or deny the democide ever happened.

How Communism Succeeds

2025-05-04T11:00:00+00:00

I've been reading a lot about Cold War history as of late. Right now I'm in the midst of reading The Coldest War by James Brady, which covers the Korean War. The book spends a lot of time discussing the politics of the era, which valuable because the era receives little coverage in popular history. Much of the political discussion is focused on Mao's revolution in China. I've read about the Chinese Civil War before so none of the information is new to me, but for some reason reading about it in The Coldest War got me thinking about the strategies employed by communist revolutionaries.
Communism has a solid track record for winning revolutions. Russia was the first major one. After that countries started falling to communism like dominoes. China, North Korea, and Vietnam are probably the most well known to Americans. But East Germany, Poland, Afghanistan, Hungary, Romania, and many other countries experienced notable periods of communist rule. How did these revolutions succeed? During these revolutions, contemporaries often credited the Soviet Union with every communist victory. Even people today will often give the Soviet Union all the credit. But it wasn't as simple as that. In fact many revolutions, including Mao's in China, succeeded with little to no meaningful support from the Soviet Union.
Communism's success can be credited to several factors. It's tough to rank these factors from most to least important. They all play off of each other so I will discuss them in no particular order. The first factor is the sales pitch. Communism blatantly steals a page from anarchism by promising a stateless society. The difference between the two schools of philosophy is that communism claims that there is a need for a state to guide people into statelessness. The second factor to communism's success is the target of the sales pitch. Unlike many philosophies, communism doesn't target the wealthy, elite, or powerful. Communism as describe by Marx targets the workers, which he calls the proletariat. Post-Marx communist revolutionaries followed this theme but with slight variations. Mao targeted the peasants. Since China was still a feudal society at the time, there weren't a lot of proletariat around. Today's communists, especially here in the United States, target minority groups such as non-whites and transgender individuals in addition to works. The theme is targeting the downtrodden.
Targeting the downtrodden is an effective strategy because in almost every society the downtrodden are the majority. Not only are they the majority, they have often have little to lose and much to gain. Remember the state I mentioned previously? It has a specific form. It's supposed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words, after the communist revolution concludes, the revolutionaries will go from being the downtrodden of society to ruling it. The prospect of being in charge is especially enticing to somebody who has spent their life under the boot of a system. This is a page that communism stole (and constantly denies) from Christianity. Early Christian missionaries targeted the downtrodden too. For example, it become especially popular amongst slaves. Whereas many if not most religions at the time offered slaves little or nothing in terms of an afterlife, Christianity promised even the lowly slave an afterlife of paradise. Promising great things to those who have nothing is a great way to create true believers. Another factor of communism's widespread success is that many of those who fight for its cause are true believers in the philosophy.
I don't remember the exact podcast or episode, but Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame and Daniele Bolelli of History on Fire fame discussed the differences between fascism and communism. One major difference was how the two dealt with European colonies. Fascists typically worked with the colonizers. Communists instead favored the colonized. While both philosophies ended in death and destruction for basically everyone living in a colony, communism enjoyed the benefit of offering the majority, the colonized, hope. This rhetoric is alive an well with today's communists who discuss decolonization in an attempt to attract indigenous peoples to their cause.
Creating true believers figures into another factor of communism's success. Communist revolutionaries rely on tactics that reflect their initial lack of resources. These tactics are often viewed as weaknesses to those steeped in modern military theory. But the fact that communist armies reliably defeat large state armies argues otherwise. If you study communist revolutions, you quickly realize that communists don't rely on traditional European (and European descendants like the United States) military tactics. Instead they engage in what European military tacticians refer to as irregular warfare. The opening salvo from a communist army isn't even from weaponry. Instead they first target the societal structure upon which the opposing military depends. Agitprop, a term combining agitation and propaganda, is the practice of using propaganda to create agitation in society to encourage infighting. Infighting creates instability and thus weakens the overall society. It is only after the societal structure has been weakened that communist armies typically engage in actual fighting.
The fighting methods of communist armies are where the true believers are most valuable. The conditions under which communist revolutionaries fight are often deplorable. Hunger, cold, and life on the run are the norm for communist revolutionaries. This is because communist armies typically remain mobile and rely on low technology. Remaining mobile makes it difficult for state armies to engage on their terms. State armies like decisive battles on large battlefields. These are battles where high technology like tanks, artillery, and aircraft are most effective. The weakness of high technology is that it's dependent on supply lines. Tanks, artillery, and aircraft are worthless without a constant supply of fuel and munitions. Furthermore, the soldiers who operate those weapons require food, water, medicine, clothing, etc. The larger the army, the greater the supply requirements become. Small infantry units like those typically employed by communist armies have much more modest supply requirements. In addition to that, true believers are more willing to suffer under conditions like hunger, especially if they were already suffering from those conditions before becoming a communist revolutionary.
One reason the United States and Republic of Korea forces got their teeth kicked in by Chinese forces during the Korean War is because their supply lines were stretched too far. MacArthur wanted to take the entire Korean peninsula quickly and pushed his forces to move as fast as possible. The Chinese forces, which had already entered Korea unbeknownst to MacArthur and those in his staff, were happy to let the United States forces move ahead unopposed until they reached the Yalu River. By then the forward forces were far ahead of their supply lines. Compounding that was the fact it was an especially brutal winter, which hindered the performance of high technology weapons like tanks. At this point the Chinese army hadn't become an established state military and still relies heavily on their civil war tactics. Using low technology weapons like mortars and rifles and relying on terrain to hide from American surveillance planes, the Chinese were able to fight effectively even in the brutal winter conditions and blunt much of the United States' technological advantage. Despite being a much lower tech force, the Chinese were able to push the United States into negotiations to end hostilities.
This post has already become much longer than I intended so I'll stop here. My hope is that anybody reading this is able to walk away with a slightly better understanding of revolutionary tactics in general. The factors described in this post aren't exhaustive nor are they exclusive to communism. They're effective for anybody willing and able to use them. I also hope that anybody reading this is better able to recognize these factors when they're being used. A careful eye may reveal that these factors are in play today and being used to manipulate people both online and off.