Plastic Zerg, Laughing Protoss

Sitting in a sports bar in Banff, sipping on British Columbian Merlot, I irlloledi as the Canadiens-Bruins game blared in the background. I thought the hockey game would command more of my attention,ii which is why I stepped into the bar in the first place, but with my laptop at the ready, I found myself debating essence vs. substance on IRC and catching up on Trilema, that Talmud thing. The table next to me took the odd glance over, wondering what could possibly have been so much more entertaining than their meals, and the house wench kept my glass full. It was a lovely evening. Particularly because of the lmaoing.

So what had me in stitches? That which so many others would blush at: Zerg Idiocy.

tradingloser Anyone losing money on cryptostock and havelock. It’s killing me.
mircea_popescu You gotta read the logs.
fluffypony I don’t use either.
mike_c If it makes you feel better, everyone who trades on those exchanges loses money.

tradingloser Okay.. so O guess I’m in a double whammy.. I suck at trading + on a site where people always lose money..
mircea_popescu They’re called play exchanges for a reason.

tradingloser Yeah. I’m just here for trying to get some sympathy. You’re right though. Well hoping for a new start. I took what looks like the remains of neobee and cryptoshitstocks over to bitcoinbourse. Hoping for the best.
jurov gaps
jurov asps
jurov gasps.
benkay Compounding, but in the wrong direction, tradingloser.
mircea_popescu Aahahah… truely infinite hitpoints.

Hitpoints… oh man. tradingloser is the kind of consumer that always expects the sun to rise again just for him. It always has before, neh? So why not find some more wallet inspectors to trust?

He can, so he does.

Why? Because, like pretty much everyone else in the western world, he has ∞x more time+money than intelligence+imagination. Because, among other things, easements:

Next you wish to argue for easements – maybe children should get free food so no children starve ? Maybe young adults should get free education ? Or a minimum guaranteed wage ? Or free condoms ? Or subsidized health care ? Well… my answer will be no. They shouldn’t get anything, because if they do get easements the result will be a class of the idle poor. We don’t need, want or like a class of idle poor. Let the rich be idle, and let the poor work their hands to the bone under the whip for barely enough food to keep them going through the next day. Let there be culture and art and philosophy and literature and beautiful women and comfortable furniture and palaces and fine wines and good food and everything nice, all built on top of a huge mass of monkeys and roundworms being bled to death.

The alternative of tshirts and plastic widgets is unpalatable.

MP’s use of the worm metaphor is particularly apt given my of-late interest in Nietzsche. To wit, from Thus Spoke Zarathuster:

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?

Lo, I teach you the Superman!iii

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall he the meaning of the earth!

I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Weiv all want a culture where art, philosophy, women, and food can exist in their natural balance. Why? Because this is the type of culture that gives us something to strive for. The current inflationary regime just gives us one short-termin’ idea after another, resulting in holier-than-thou loonies, general confusion, and the environmental affliction of “affordable luxury.”

As MP then notes in the footnotes,v this is a problem of Zerg being “people.”

A problem somewhat related to the problem of too much money : when you construct a welfare state so the scum of society doesn’t starve, because “they’re people too” (which they aren’t, for the record) and “nobody should starve”, the net result is that a large number of subhuman life forms controls a small quantity of money per capita which in aggregate exceeds the money actual people are willing to throw around.

Consequently the entire society gets reshaped, because a young woman with a good voice that also plays the game rationally will be more likely to try and get a quarter each from one million idiots than to try and get a C bill from a thousand sane people. Because 250`000 > 100`000. As a direct result, there will be hundreds of Britney Spears running around, and scantily any Opera singers, and soon enough shitpiles like wikipedia, made by the retards for the retards, will pretend like Britney Spears is a singer or something.

This creates a vicious cycle, where more and more resources are wasted on the nonsense of the scum, and soon enough the entirety of society is ready to collapse under the weight of small bad decisions made by a large number of idiots that managed to overpower the judicious decisions made by actually sane people for much higher per capita weight, but for much less overall impact.

Basically, welfare states empower the unthinking scum to zerg the productive, important and valuable members of society. Bitcoin reverses this trend, forcing the scum back into squalor and actual people back into the drivers’ seat, which is why Bitcoin is so very important for any sort of sustainable societal construct, and for humanity as a whole to have any sort of hope and future.

Not only is this shit hilarious, it points to something serious. MP suggests that the socialist welfare state  destroys the noble Protoss, those “defined by how well its members comprehend one another’s interests and culture, [who] manage to eclipse us merely by existing,”vi by creating an overwhelming webgen of Zerg, each of whom consume more than enough plastic to choke several schools of fishes. No small part of this could be attributed to our decline in mental and physical capacity these last few thousand years.

Thank the panoply of Gods that plastic doesn’t last forever. Thank them also that Protoss do.vii

Who knew that the Protoss had such a sense of humour?

___ ___ ___

  1. irllol = Laughing Out Loud In Real Life.” Cuz chatrooms are still a thing. And long may they be so.
  2. Out of town, on my own, I momentarily shucked off my disinterest for anything other than the Green Sport: F1. Obviously, the kettle was still black.
  3. aka Protossmensch.
  4. “We” is those of us who matter, that is, the #bitcoin-assets Protossmensch.
  5. Despite what mike_c thinks, footnotes are a thing. And we’re better for them.
  6. This description, via Starcraft wiki, should remind you of the #bitcoin-assets cast.
  7. “A protoss’ average life expectancy is lengthy; Raszagal, aged 1045, was considered old. Protoss under 300 years rarely have any significant political positions. Artanis, who was 262 years old during the Brood War, is considered young, despite his powerful military position.” via that wiki again.

8 thoughts on “Plastic Zerg, Laughing Protoss

  1. […] on IRC, we got into a little discussion of the idle, plastic poor in the Western World.i It went a little something like […]

  2. I love the analogies, but first most the Zerg consumed things…for lack of a better word…perfectly.

    The Protoss as honorable and advanced as they are weren’t without their problems. Their “political system” (a caste system if I recall correctly), was very flawed which gave rise to the Dark Templar.

    Ideally I would go as far to say the Zerg are the perfect race, (although I haven’t played through Starcraft 2 and don’t know any of the spoilers so this is coming from a Starcraft 1 standpoint). Each Zerg knows its place because under the Overmind. They all do what they are bred to do, nothing more. When a Zerg is cut off from the Overmind it can no longer function on its own, and wanders aimlessly.

    Now with the whole Kerrigan saga there was definitely a political struggle within the Zerg, but due to how tailored, purposeful, and efficient Zerg units are I find them to be one of the more superior races.

    I find the Terran (humans) to be the most inept…still struggling with human problems even amongst the stars.

    • Bitcoin Pete says:

      I played the campaign of the first SC2 and was underwhelmed. SC1 was a high watermark.

      To the extent that humans are capable of emulating the Protoss, where the individual matters, this is our highest ideal. The Zerg do their jobs well but are therefore little more than simple biology. And then there’s the imperfect, fallible Terran… lost somewhere in between.

    • The idea of the Zerg and the individuality are non-existent in that context. This is exactly why the Zerg are so appealing to me from this viewpoint.

      Yes the Zerg do relentlessly consume a planet until they move to another world and consume that one, assimilating the native lifeforms into their gene pool in the process. This is unsustainable as the Zerg population approaches large numbers.

      However the truly intriguing part to me is that a Zerg unit is essentially an appendage of the Overmind. Thus the Zerg are not as much a species as one large organism. I would say this goes possibly even beyond the traditional eusocial organization of ant or bee colonies. This is what makes the Zerg so formidable. The units are “loyal to the end” because they have to be. The Overmind can trust its appendages because it directly controls them like you or I control our limbs.

      Sans political turmoil the Protoss are superior. Their individuality matters, and of course this is entirely the point of your article.

    • Bitcoin Pete says:

      By creating a Swiss bank account in the clouds, Bitcoin offers individuals the opportunity to float above the teeming and undifferentiated masses. We have our own politics in the clouds, it’s just not the same nonsense enjoyed by those on terra firma.

  3. […] There are, and have been, a number of places where BTC-denominated listings have appeared in the mere 5.5 years of Bitcoin’s history, none of which have managed to survive and thrive quite like Mircea Popescu’s deceptively austere implementation: MPEx.i Compared to MPEx, the murky and fly-by-night operations of GLBSE, BitFunder, BTCT, Havelock, Cryptostocks, Picostocks, and BitcoinBourse are but play exchanges populated by Zerg. […]

  4. […] the firstest bestest largest everest because reasons that don’t involve us being a plasticised two-bit knock-off of The Great Soviet Union, I mean how could you even suggest such a thing at a time like this when […]

  5. […] (ie. Zerg), and in a fake money socialist economy corrupt the signals and intentions between actual civilised humans. […]

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