5 new permaposts this year:

My 2017 year in review talked about all the amazing progress I made in diverse fields, from anime to visual novels to video games.  One thing it left out was the progress I made on this very blog.  I wrote five posts, over the year, that were so good they merited promotion to the sidebar -- permaposts that everyone who visits this website should read and keep in mind for the rest of their lives.

Not only do these permaposts represent my finest prose, but they cover something new and vital that needed to be said and hadn't been said before.  That's pretty impressive given I've been blogging since 2009.

One of these new permaposts is Good Music:  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/08/good-music.html

It's the one I've been working on the most and the hardest all year long.  Just yesterday I cut six more songs from the list for being too weak or remixes.  (Yes, I'm still finding new remixes even after all this time.  The game over song in Final Fantasy 1 was actually a remix of prelude, for example) I also tried to add some more songs by reviewing the soundtrack of Gods and Generals, but none of them merited entry so the project was stillborn.

Good Music is constantly a work in progress.  Until I've listened to all my music 100 times, I can't be sure of its quality.  Songs I thought were good at first but ultimately fail to impress happen all the time.  I only find these songs out gradually, on the 30th, 40th, or 90th play-through.  In fact, I've even cut Tales songs that I've listened to over 100 times without a qualm, but suddenly realized they weren't any good after all.  Though to be fair, half the time these songs play I'm asleep, so it's more like a goal of listening to all my music 50 times than 100.  Either way, it's hard to judge a song by just its first time.  You have to go through it over and over again to find out its true nature and the only way to do that is a lot of chewing over a long, long time.

Which means I'm chewing on these songs, and I might be chewing on them for years, and as I digest some I'm spitting out others.  Once all my songs are guaranteed successes, I'll start to worry about ranking them against each other, so I can find out the best music and composers not just by quantity (as Good Music currently measures) but also by quality; but for now I'm not even at the starting line for such a project.

For my second permapost, from the beginning, I've advocated for a citizen's dividend, alongside seemingly every intelligent person in America.  I've written innumerable posts on the subject.  This year I felt I had made the simplest and best pitch for it yet.  Once you've said your piece on a subject in the best possible way, there's no point writing additional posts about it, instead people should just read the end-all and be-all permapost, which lays it all out perfectly.  This marks my 2nd excellent permapost of the year:  The Citizen's Dividend is Affordable.  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-citizens-dividend-is-affordable.html

I suspect that I'll eventually get my way on this issue.  Scientists support it.  Economists support it.  Silicon Valley supports it.  Paul Krugman from the New York Times supports it.  The Atlantic supports it.  Charles Murray supports it.  Seemingly everyone who is anyone supports it.  Elite consensus generally trumps the popular will -- look at gay marriage, immigration, or segregation.  The public can hold things up a while, but the elites always win in the end.

I won't have to advocate for the citizen's dividend anymore once it passes, but until then it's the single easiest and best step to improve America and the world.  It has bipartisan support and treats everyone equally, so no one has to get hung up on issues of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.  We can do this.  We should all at least be able to agree about this.  There is no reason anyone has to be poor anymore in the industrialized, developed world.  It's just a human rights issue.  A civil rights issue.  Access to a minimum standard of living is now just as natural and obvious as access to clean drinking water.  It should just be unquestionable in a country as rich as the USA.

The third elite permapost of the year was something I wrote up in early January, as a sort of kickoff to this year of blogging, "Once more, into the breach."  There I give a mild-mannered, completely logical, and absolutely irrefutable argument against open borders immigration.  Given that 52% of democrats now support open borders immigration, and they're likely to take back control of the government soon enough (see Moore, Roy), this argument is necessary if we are to save our country.  Some democrats at some point are going to have to be convinced by this post to change their minds.  Hopefully before it's too late.  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/01/once-more-into-breach.html

I can't give any stronger case against immigration than I lay out there, which is why it's a permapost.  Instead of constantly railing against immigration, people should just read this one post about it, and they'll know everything they ever needed to know about the subject.  If they're still confused they should just keep rereading it until they understand.  There's nothing more to say on the subject.

My fourth splendid success of the year is "Which is Worse?"  https://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/10/which-is-worse.html

It is absolutely fascinating how much in agreement liberals and Nazis are as to the facts.  By presenting my argument in this way, I cut through the initial blind hostility and drill down to the kernel of the issue.  The core of the problem in the modern world is the Nazis didn't win World War II.  Strangely enough, liberals grant that every problem in the world today is due to that.  Their bizarre argument for why they're liberals instead of Neo-Nazis, is that the Holocaust was worse than every problem in the world today.  And preventing a future Holocaust is more important than suffering through any and all the problems of the modern world combined.  I take them up on that dare and throw it right in front of their faces how ludicrous this argument really is.

By asking, "which is worse, this problem we all agree exists today due to a lack of Nazism, or another holocaust?" over and over and over again, as I go down the list, I satisfactorily prove the emptiness, the sheer vapidity, of liberal argumentation.

"We can't do that because it will lead to another holocaust."  Well guess what, that's not going to fly anymore, because we're already past that level of destruction.  Because we're forbidden to do anything to fix our problems in the modern world, we're already slated for a worse hell than Jews ever faced.

Of course, liberals can minimize these issues or somehow fob them off as not a problem, but serious thinkers can't be convinced by these hand waving gestures.  People know instinctively that these are real issues and they will have real consequences.  And if they don't realize it yet, they'll figure it out soon enough.  Once they realize that all these tremendous problems are not being allowed to be solved due to a knee-jerk, reflexive, emotive backlash against Nazism, they're going to resent that hysterical approach and call for the 'villains' to come back as 'heroes' next time around.  In fact, the more liberals bolster the reputations of Nazis as the ultimate villains who are the exact opposite of all liberal beliefs and ideals, the more the people will yearn for them as, apparently, the only saviors who can possibly deliver us from the catastrophe of liberalism.  (By the way, Australia just had another Christmas Islamic terror attack.  It's only going to get worse every year until you put the Nazis back in charge, and everyone knows this.)

My fifth permapost of the year focuses on how set upon white men are, and why white nationalism is our only escape from this backbreaking pressure.  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/10/homogeneity-isnt-hate-its-solution-to.html

Strangely enough, people still think white nationalism is motivated by 'hate.'  It's actually motivated by present suffering and the fear of more to come, at the hands of our enemies, those who have been turned against us by the relentless demonization of the media.  Since the hatred of our enemies will never simmer down, because the media always keeps it at a boiling molten level, and because reality will never erase the innate differences between straight white men and everyone else so the reasons they hate us will never be resolved, escape is our last and only option left available to us.  White nationalism is a reaction to the behavior of non-whites, women, and gays.  It wasn't what we initially wanted or dreamed about, but what we had no choice but to do.  It's that or die.

I've written hundreds of articles this year, but it really boils down to these five.  This was my intellectual contribution to the world and the very best I can do with my 140 IQ.  If nothing else, people should at least consult these five works.