Be Strong: Know Right From Wrong
Opinions are like assholes: only the incontinent shit where they shouldn't
Is there anything as annoying as someone who was Right? When someone was RIGHT someone else was WRONG. It hurts. But people who are Right got that way through effort. Those who disdain those who are Right disdain the effort it took to be Right. They want the social credit that comes from being 'right' but don't want to do the work of determining Right from Wrong. Much easier to pick a large in-group that claims insiders are 'right' and outsiders are 'wrong.' It is hard for people to change their opinions these days, because there are many supportive structures that can give you psychological reinforcement for your folly. Believe in flat earth? So do plenty of others. No amount of evidence will change their mind. You already offended them by contradicting how they think. In a 'democracy' they want to claim you are supposed to 'respect' their opinion as valid.
They want to say: “Opinions are like assholes: everybody has one.” Not, “Opinions are like assholes: only the incontinent shit where they shouldn't.” There is a time and a place to defecate. But to an equalist, life is about shitting... NOT about holding your shit in. Most functional people learn this as babies. The Opinionist wants to lower the mental standard of all adults to that of an incontinent baby. That's why this 'opinions are like assholes...' slogan is so telling. It reveals much about that family of crap-thinkers. They want all beliefs reduced to the level of an opinion. An opinion is what you have about apples or the color green. It is a minimal criteria. As we learn in Kripke Semantics (a form of hard logic), a concept that cannot be meaningfully misused is not a rigid enough designator to be useful in dialectic. Opinion is the subject's relationship to the outside 'objective' world. It is so solipsistic, it's worthless. Yet opinion is injected into every serious discussion in order to sabotage it.
This is why one should be careful of opinions that are not grounded in belief. As discussed previously, beliefs are tested acts of will.
Careful thinkers must learn to quickly distinguish between the families of positions in order to discover which method is best to engage with. To fall for intellectually dishonest methods is to be demoralized. When an intellectually dishonest method isn't crushed ruthlessly, one admits that being Right isn't enough for the incumbent. The incumbent must be 'liked.' And this is the downfall of rationalism: the need to be liked by idiots.
Opinion-makers just guess. They are trying to please the audience, which is why their predictions tend to come from contradictory belief systems. They target the consumer, not the thinker. In economics consumers are all equal. There is only price signal, not Right and Wrong. This is why economic entities act like psychopaths—because telling you what you want to hear is what psychopaths do. Makes it easier to manipulate you.
I'm going off on this point, because people I previously respected have turned out to be chumps. The guy behind Moon of Alabama jumps on every alt-media trend and never backtracks when the facts prove him wrong. Same with Simplicius76 who has taken up shitposting about econ. Both of them bought into the Dedollarization hype and could only cite articles. Not the actual financial data. They couldn't even read the financial data, but they kept offering opinions that conformed to the alt-media's herd mind best exemplified by Pepe Escobar (which is why I always bring him up... he's just a perfect tool). When did they suddenly get an interest in economics? It's not like I write about military hardware. I barely know anything about that shit. I know economics and how to translate financial charts into plain English. People who don't stay in their lane are interested in cultivating a cult of personality, not in being as rational as they all purport to brand themselves as.
The test? They all said that China would benefit from dedollarization. Instead, what we see is that the Ruble has stayed stable, even though there is huge Ruble zone monetary expansion. And we see that the Yuan has continued to lose value. Remember this article?
I lost 5% of my subscribers after I wrote it. But why? I was Right. Everybody else was Wrong. In fact, since I wrote that article, the Yuan has lost another 1.24% on the dollar. Will the lost followers come back? No, because they had an in-group identification and they determined I was not in their in-group. They were never interested in Right and Wrong.
How did my other predictions do?
US crisis centered on commercial real estate? The week after I wrote this article, First Republic Bank died and the regional bank crisis took off. Sounds like a yes so far.
Military spending is going up, so that prediction already checked out. Pretty easy to make. Also yes.
Debt crisis shows that can kicking continues.
Financial data shows that despite debt crisis fears, the dollar zone is strengthening against other zones. We would see the opposite if the dedollarized zones had legs.
When we look at my predictions on the Euro, we see I was right there too. It has declined almost 2% since I wrote that article.
So as far as financial predictions are concerned, I did great. Moon of Alabama predicted the opposite. That dedollarization would lock the US out of trade with China and cost the US its financial leadership. Simplicius76 made the argument that the regional banking crisis in the US was far bigger than the general insolvency plaguing the CCP. In fact, when I called him out on this, he specifically claimed that it seemed the US was in bigger trouble than China. Should have stuck to talking about hardware specs and military tactics.
Everything else will take time to sort out, but given how notoriously difficult it is to get market trends right, I think I've basically discredited these alternative models. I might be proved wrong later, but for different reasons than Moon of Alabama or Simplicius76 argued. And my argument had more predictive power, so it is 'more right.' If their predictions turn out to corroborate to some type of reality in the future, they will still have failed to predict the intermediate data that they were wrong about. So they will merely have had lucky guesses. I don't have a grudge, I just want to use writers that many of my readers already know to illustrate my point.
There is Right and Wrong and too many people want to be seen as 'right' or see others they disagree with as 'wrong,' without actually subjecting their own belief system to the scrutiny they want to apply to others. Anyone who wants to make bold predictions must be held to account when Wrong.
Does the Ruble staying stable in the face of lower energy prices and massive Ruble zone inflation prove that Russia is Kingpin of BRICS? So far yes. Moon of Alabama and Simplicius76 argued that China was the senior partner in BRICS. Market data is proving this Wrong.
We've seen an increase of hostilities since May 9 that can only be described as an offensive.
We don't know who attacked the Kremlin yet, but Voice of Ukraine seems to agree with many of the points that I made. (https://english.nv.ua/opinion/why-does-putin-need-bakhmut-and-what-did-the-drone-attack-on-the-kremlin-change-50325574.html) That argument intersects with many of the other arguments that I made here
... but it has the misfortune of being explanatory, rather than predictive. My arguments always come from a place of trying to predict and being falsifiable.
There are too many non-falsifiable beliefs that cater to preconceived notions. They cannot be proved Wrong in debate, because they are not subject to debate. The only way we can defeat menaces like the Woke Mind Virus is if we hold our beliefs accountable and discard them when they are refuted. We have to be strong and accept when we're Wrong. To do otherwise is to side with oppression. Fine if you're the oppressor, but most people fall in the camp of being oppressed. And if not now, then eventually. You cannot release a monster into the world and expect it to harm everyone but you.