Author: VD

The nomad moves on

This is why it was a massive mistake for US states to allow new residents to vote. This rootless nomad is moving on after all of 14 years because he doesn’t like the way the politicians for whom he voted are governing Seattle.

I KNEW Seattle was no longer a place for me when I met with Debora Juarez — the District 5 City Council member I had voted for.

Last September, at what I thought was going to be a friendly one-on-one meeting between an elected official and her constituent, I expressed some concerns that were on my mind. I fretted over the deterioration of a city with which I had fallen in love — a city that, despite my 21 trips to Europe, I still believe to be the most beautiful in the world.

I told my council member that Northgate, my home, had seen a noticeable increase in litter and graffiti. To my dismay, she seemed to suggest these issues were someone else’s job, not hers. So, I moved on to a bigger issue: homelessness.

When I first moved to Seattle 14 years ago, to attend the University of Washington, homelessness essentially didn’t exist at Northgate. Though I have never been a victim of or witness to a crime, some of my neighbors have been, and they believe homeless camps are the reason. Additionally, the conditions in such camps are often atrocious — not only are the homeless more likely to be victims of violent crime, they are susceptible to infectious disease, such as the hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego that sickened nearly 500 people and has killed 20.

I believe strongly that it is not compassionate to leave people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves to suffer and die on the street. Because many (but certainly not all) homeless people struggle with mental illness or drug addiction, I suggested that Seattle find a way to make it easier to provide treatment to these troubled souls — involuntarily, if need be. It could literally save their lives.

Juarez exclaimed, “What is this? Nazi Germany?” Appalled — in part because my grandparents survived Nazi Germany — I got up and walked out….So, my wife and I are heading to the Eastside. We really would prefer to stay in Seattle. But if safe streets, clean sidewalks, an affordable place to live and polite discourse is asking too much, we’ll gladly seek refuge in a city where quality of life and civility still matter.

Guess what sort of politician this guy is going to vote for in the next election in his new city. Almost certainly the exact same sort of politician he helped elect whose policies he is fleeing now.

This is why skin in the game matters. This is why it is a mistake for farmers to permit nomads to dwell among them, much less be permitted any voice in how they order their societies. When things fall apart, the nomad will move on and the farmers will be left to pick up the pieces as best they can. And this is why no immigrants, foreign or domestic, should be permitted any vote in a democracy or a republic for at least five generations.

The fact that one dislikes the consequences of one’s own vote enough to flee them should be sufficient cause to deny one’s future right to vote. Man’s ideologies and political philosophies have not yet caught up with his transportation technology and his ability to travel around the world to escape the consequences of his actions.

Mailvox: speaking of gammas

Some of Jordan Peterson’s fans have been leaving comments on yesterday’s Darkstream. They are informative, to put it mildly.

  • You are clearly not efficient to understand the depth of Jordan. You look more like an autistic 13 year old.. old man that tries to get publicity points. That’s why you are interested on Peterson. Isn’t it? You just heard about Peterson few days ago and you were able to listen to his lectures? Probably not. You are too busy thinking how to get subscribers. Learn to be humble and recognize where you can move with your limited intellectual skill. What a pity. 
  • Jordan Peterson is very intelligent and has a very impressive resume. You are unimpressive and lie about having a high IQ. Let’s see those SAT scores. 
  • [Vox] obviously took a standardized test and did not end up at a high quality university. He is the type of person who would definitely brag about membership in the Triple Nine Society or even Mensa, which accept college entrance scores for admission because those tests correlate to IQ. He is also a bully who is attacking the integrity of an extremely high quality person. So I am simply pointing out to his naive followers that it is extremely easy to prove an IQ score and that being called on this is Vox Day’s worst fear. He will never provide proof and will block anybody who suggests it.
  • I don’t care about JP’s position on Jewish intelligence other than Vox Day’s inability to articulate that position prior to attacking him. I’m not going to repeat the flaws in his reasoning that I’ve already posted on his last few videos. If there is a turd in the punchbowl, I’m not going to even discuss what is least impressive about the other ingredients. 
  • He should either show the data or stop using his IQ as though it were an argument. His lie about being in Mensa was disturbing in multiple ways, since they claim he’s never been a member and also he apparently didn’t know that they’re only top 2{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}. He attended a lower tier liberal arts school, and he has lived a liberal arts life. I have dealt with high IQ people for decades, and other than perhaps the verbal section I see no signs that Vox Day is even in the ballpark.
  • Being a lunatic in his particular environment may be a good thing. If you are Bruce Wayne living among the lunatics of Gotham, putting on the mask may be the best way to deal with them. 
  • Big words for someone who has a habit of spamming anyone who expresses disagreement with his views on his blog. Methinks that Peterson would chew ya up in a real time debate though, unfortunately, we shall never witness such a debate for you are way bellow his level to warrant any attention from him.

To be clear, I was not only a member of Mensa, but was also a National Merit Semifinalist. I simply don’t brag about either. (It’s amusing how no one knows about Mensa since I ended my column; remember when mentioning that membership in my bio was inevitably equated with bragging about it?) I suppose it should come as no surprise that a supporter of the integrity-challenged Jordan Peterson would so readily resort to blatant and easily disproven lies. But not everyone was so angrily defensive, and it is apparent that at least some of Peterson’s fans are beginning to see past the bilious haze of verbose bullshit that the man spews like a squid attempting to hide its retreat.

  • Doesn’t this speak to the apparent truth that millions of people are mentally unhealthy then? Can we at least say then that Peterson’s work is very important in helping unhealthy people step out of their illness and into a more functional existence? I’m not saying you’re wrong about Peterson, in fact sadly I think you’re right. But I’m more saying that if his philosophy is the “methadone” for heroin addicts, then is it alright to see it as such? I’ll be the first to say if I was a “heroin addict” and that I’ll take the “methadone” route in order to gain enough strength to take the next step. 
  • I was a fan before, but watching you take down that self righteous blowhard is worth the price of admission. “The baleful eye of the dark lord is fixed firmly upon Mr Peterson”
  • I’ve listened to a lot of JP and it got boring fast. If you’ve watched a semester of his lectures you’ve pretty much listened to everything he’s said. Even his analysis of the bible mostly says all the same stuff but with slightly different context. Mostly he seems to reference Jung, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky. Read them and you’ve pretty much read JP. Aside from quickly becoming repetitive he also always avoided the tough questions. Seemed like he was too busy going on a speaking tour than to flesh out his thoughts or do research so he could eventually answer those tough questions. I started to see him as being more intellectually lazy as time went on. Honestly he seems to be acting more and more like an SJW as people press him on these tough questions.
  • As an European and someone looking from the outside in… The fact that Sam Harris is considered a “public intellectual” in the US really makes me worry about what bar you guys set for “public intellectuals” and how low that bar is situated.
  • The biggest mistake that right-wingers make is elevate anyone who is not a complete sjw

I’ve read the first chapter of the 12 Rules for Life: The Crazy Man’s Guide for Functioning in Society. I never do partial reviews, so I will not say more than to observe that if the man had written Who Moved My Cheese, it would have been longer than a George R.R. Martin novel.

Who was on it?

I expect Q will be addressing this soon.

DEVELOPING: Military C-130 plane crashes at @fly_SAV  in Savannah, GA

A lot of military aircraft going down recently. I wonder what the odds are of them all being random events.

Mailvox: this is not Alpha Game

But I suppose the subject is relevant to the Jordan Peterson investigation, so I’ll tolerate it for the time being:

Is it possible for Gamma’s to stop being Gammas? Is the only choice for a Gamma to do what Peterson has done and form heuristics to protect themselves? If they become committed Christians can they exceed their Gamma boundaries or will they simply be Gamma Christians? If they adopt existential relativism per Peterson, will that ever graduate them to Betas, or is always going to be social masking?

Also in trying to generalise from your list of qualities, is it a combination of intelligence plus poor social skills plus generalised low self-esteem? So by that I mean, can socially adroit, physically attractive, plain-speaking men who are good with women still be gamma if they have low self-esteem deriving from some source like a traumatic life event or bad brain biology? If Pyjama boy was able to derive a sense of humility and self-esteem that wasn’t at the expense of others could he stop being a Gamma?

I know a lot of men who are very impressive men, resilient, accomplished, educated, self-confident, but in marriages to women who utterly dominate them in the household with abuse and passive aggression. Are they Gammas because of their inability to exercise dominion over their wives despite all their external accomplishments?

I apologise if these are all stupid questions. I know you hate people asking if they’re Gammas. I’ll freely admit I’m trying to apply the model to myself a bit, but I’m also trying to understand it’s general operation.

First and foremost, “Gamma” is a male behavioral pattern. You are a Gamma to the extent that you behave in accordance with that pattern. One’s socio-sexual rank can be reliably ascertained by one’s behavior, and one’s rank is conferred by the behavior of others, but the core element is always the behavior.

So, in answer to the questions:

  1. Yes, it is obviously possible for Gammas to stop being Gammas. They merely have to permanently change their behavioral patterns. But this is considerably harder than it sounds, as anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, stop smoking, or start working out knows.
  2. No, the choice that Peterson has made is a very conventional Gamma action that is totally consistent with Gamma self-protection.
  3. A Gamma becoming a Christian merely produces a Christian Gamma. Christianity can help a Gamma alter his behavior patterns, but it must be admitted that Churchianity tends to encourage some Gamma behaviors, particularly where women and conflict are concerned.
  4. Existential relativism is only going to cement the Gamma’s behavioral pattern. Any Gamma following Peterson’s philosophy is merely going to become a Gamma with a clean room, better posture, and an iron-clad delusion bubble.
  5. No, to say Gamma is a combination of qualities is mistaking the qualities for the behavioral patterns. My current understanding is that Gamma is primarily caused by the need to avoid experiencing emotional pain. Obviously, the lower on the socio-sexual totem pole you are, the more emotional pain you are likely to experience from rejection, bullying, and failure.
  6. No Gammas are good with women. Women are literally repulsed by the behavior pattern. But Gammas are not the only men with low self-esteem. Except for Alpha and Sigma, any behavioral pattern can possess low self-esteem. One might even argue that a Beta is an Alpha with lower self-esteem.
  7. Pajama Boy will never stop being a Gamma. His behavioral pattern is too embedded in his self-identity.
  8. Married men who are dominated by women are usually Deltas. But any man, of any rank, can marry the wrong woman, and find his behavioral patterns modified to some extent as a result.

There are two easy Gamma signals. The first is dishonesty, particularly in the face of conflict. That dishonesty can take many forms, from false bravado to bizarre lies about their accomplishments to inaccurate explanations of their actions. When Jordan Peterson mentioned that 90 percent of his self-talk in his youth was dishonest, that was a dead giveaway, because Gammas are engaged in a constant monologue with themselves. Whether they talk themselves up or they talk themselves down is irrelevant, the point is that they are always talking to themselves instead of anyone else.

The second is heightened sensitivity. The Gamma is constantly on the alert for what others are thinking and saying about him. He is excessively pleased by praise and will often cite it, and is inordinately upset by criticism. He has a very limited capacity for shrugging off either.

Women are very, very good at identifying Gammas. But they tend to think of it as negative sex appeal. So, if you ask a woman if she would ever have sex with someone and her instinctive response is to shiver in horror at the mere suggestion, you can be confident that he reliably exhibits the Gamma behavioral pattern.

If you want to stop being a Gamma, there is a guide to doing so called Graduating Gamma, written by a Delta who succeeded in breaking his former behavioral pattern.

Big Brother’s retarded little brother

If I was not married, Mark Zuckerberg is literally the last person on Earth I would want knowing about my dating habits:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote address at the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, introducing, among other innovations, the company’s new dating features.

“We are announcing a new set of features coming soon around dating,” Zuckerberg told conference attendees, lamenting that his company has been late to the dating game.

“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hookups,” he declared.

Zuckerberg didn’t explain how he plans to prevent “hookups,” but he did say that the dating service will be “opt-in” and “if you want you can make a dating profile. We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning,” he assured conference attendees. “We’re excited to start rolling this out soon.” He assured users that no one will see their information without express permission. Instead, he said, Facebook will suggest possible dating prospects.

I’m too old and too-long married to have any experience with online dating of any kind, but I do know that the more sensitive the data is, the less I am interested in making it available to Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was already selling the information on status updates to divorce lawyers and the IRS.

Meanwhile, Facebook is also implementing a system to better suppress the public’s access to the news it does not want them to see.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

Darkstream: the lunacy of Jordan Peterson

I’m doing a Periscope addressing my earlier post about Peterson today. This is the place for your comments on it, live or otherwise.

UPDATE: Even Peterson’s fans have no faith in his intellectual integrity.

JBP will never debate Vox. It is a “No Win” for him. First he would take heavy criticism for even associating with Vox. Second even if he takes Vox apart no one will care, because outside of hardcore politics/culture war guys… no one knows Vox.

Of course he won’t debate me. I never thought for a moment that he would, because it is far more likely that he would break down and cry than take me apart. Look, the reason the guy is always obsessing about making a mistake that will ruin him forever is because he’s an imposter and he knows it.

Once you know he’s a gamma, you know everything you need to predict his behavior. Success will make him more hubristic and self-righteous, then he’ll self-sabotage.

UPDATE: This email was amusing, but I appreciated the sentiment.

Until today, I never really thought about how much flat-out lunacy and inanity you get hit with every freaking day.

Where do you think MPAI came from. Unlike Jordan Peterson’s philosophy, Marcus Aurelius’s is still useful. Peterson tells you to lie to yourself. Aurelius’s advice is rather more useful.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. 

That’s a bit more gracious than my version – the father of Commodus was obviously too optimistic – but it’s good advice.

EXCERPT: SJWS Always Double Down

This excerpt from SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN seems appropos, considering the recent topics:

What, precisely, is a Gamma male, how do they behave, and what is the connection to the social justice cause? First, let’s consider the attributes of the average Gamma male.

  • Less physically attractive than the norm.
  • More intelligent than the norm.
  • Unathletic, often overweight.
  • Socially awkward and resentful of social hierarchies.
  • Generally unsuccessful with women.
  • Passive-aggressive and conflict-avoidant.
  • Verbally-oriented and prone to snark.
  • Disloyal and socially calculating.
  • Deceitful and disrespectful.

Of all these attributes, it is the latter that is the most important. One can go so far as to say that the chief attribute of the Gamma male is the relentless ability to lie to himself and others.

If you want an ideal example of a Gamma male, it would be hard to do better than Pajama Boy, the literal poster boy for the young liberal Democrats, who was featured in one of the famous Obamacare ads drinking hot chocolate and wearing a red plaid pajamas with a smug look on his extraordinarily punchable face. Pajama Boy’s real name is Ethan Krupp, and he prides himself on being what he calls a “Liberal F—”, which he explains is not a Democrat per se, but rather, “someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves.”

In other words, a Krupp is a textbook social justice warrior. The two concepts are not synonymous, and yet there is a tremendous overlap between the SJW and the Gamma male.

Later in the same interview, Krupp went on to say that he has never lost an argument, except once, and then only because he was drunk. Even if we didn’t know what Krupp looked like or what views he espouses, this ludicrous claim would be sufficient to identify him as a Gamma.

Krupp’s statement about himself is tremendously valuable insight into the Gamma mentality, and even demonstrates why women tend to find them off-putting. Krupp claims he combines ideas, opinions, and a tone to both win an argument and cause feelbad. But the truth is that to the Gamma, the two are one and the same. The Gamma’s victory metric is simple: whoever can cause the other individual to feel worse about himself wins. This explains why the Gamma is constantly pretending to be above it all and unconcerned with the outcome even when everyone can see that he is horribly upset and wounded.

The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings, he will lose. This is why he is always creating the impression that something is off about him, because it is. Even more than with the social hierarchy, the Gamma is at war with himself and with his feelings. This is why they often appear to be living in a delusion bubble of their own creation, and why they so often idolize Spock and human reason. They like to think they are beyond all human emotions, because they find their own emotions to be painful for the reasons that were described above….

If a Gamma is wrong, then he sees himself as being wrong. His very life is wrong. It’s all personal to him. He holds everything against everyone forever, except for that girl on the pedestal, and conversely, expects everyone to hold everything against him forever. It’s a sad and horrible way to live, but if you watch and learn, Gammas are very predictable and keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Gammas don’t believe in failure, repentance, or forgiveness. That is why they never learn from their mistakes, or anyone else’s.

A Gamma is prone to psychological projection and naturally puts himself in other people’s shoes when it comes to conflict and imagines how he would feel in their place. This is true for both reconciliation and conflict. It is why what he thinks is required for reconciliation is usually out of touch with reality, and why he thinks attacks on other’s feelings are much more effective than they really are.

A Gamma constantly relives adolescent shame, bullying and emotional issues. He likes nothing better than to publicly shame and mock those who he is angry with (except the girl on the pedestal) to the point of losing sight of any other goal he had in mind. If you can imagine the awkward boy on the playground being danced around and called names by the others, then how that boy would treat people when he is a man, and you will begin to understand how they treat others with whom they are angry.

He is a coward and will readily abandon almost everything to save his skin, and the fact of his cowardice gnaws on him internally. Being narcissistically inclined, he is unable to imagine other people not being secret cowards, so he will often talk of being brave while simultaneously accusing others of being cowardly. This, again, is pure projection.

All of this negative, self-destructive behavior ends up sabotaging relationships for the Gamma, including his friends, his family, his coworkers, and even his own children. The recognition of the poor quality of these relationships are not lost on the Gamma, and he will often feel a deep sense of personal disgrace about his behavior. However, since he cannot admit to being wrong, he is trapped in a self-made hell.

It was right there all along

I’m deeply – DEEPLY – disappointed in you Jordan Peterson fans. His lunacy was openly on display from the very start. Did you never even read Maps of Meaning? It was all right there right before your eyes, a psychological purloined letter. How did none of you ever spot this nonsense?

From the 1999 Maps of Meaning Precis

1. We think we live in the “objective” world, but we do not. The objective world is something that has been conjured up for us recently – absurdly recently, from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Pure existential relativist gobbledygook. And don’t even think of opting for the obvious evasion that it’s just that he defines “objective” differently than the bloody dictionary. If you haven’t learned that bait-and-switch is the first sign of the charlatan, you’re not tall enough for this ride.

Let’s substitute, then paraphrase, the relevant definition just to show how crazy this is:

We think live in the world “existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality”, but we do not. The world existing independently as part of reality has been conjured up for us recently.

Jordan Peterson’s mind may not live in a world existing independently from him as a part of reality, but those of us who are sane do, and this is particularly true if we are elements of a vast computer simulation. Now do you better trust my sense of discernment? I caught the scent of intellectual wrongness from this lunatic just from that one inexcusable error about intelligence.

Jordan Peterson’s existential relativism

I’m sorry, Peterson fans, but now that I have begun to look more closely at him, it increasingly appears your intellectual hero is a complete joke at best. At worst, he is a insane monster of inhuman ethics. Assuming that others have understood him correctly, his definition of “truth” is absolutely and utterly false – which explains his lack of intellectual integrity – and his Darwinian ethics are not only incoherent, they don’t even rise to the functional level of Sam Harris’s hapless utilitarianism.

Harris, who is far from my idea of a formidable intellect or coherent debater, has absolutely no trouble resoundingly dismissing Peterson’s shoddy logic:

I recently interviewed the psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on the Waking Up podcast. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, I’d received more listener requests for him than for Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edward Snowden—or, indeed, any other person on earth.

The resulting exchange, however, was not what our mutual fans were hoping for. Rather than discuss religion and atheism, or the relationship between science and ethics, we spent two hours debating what it means to say that a proposition is (or seems to be) “true.” This is a not trivial problem in philosophy. But the place at which Peterson and I got stuck was a strange one. He seemed to be claiming that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false. As I tried to show, this view makes no sense, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that Peterson actually held it.

I found this extremely hard to believe too, and I won’t utilize it until I confirm it from Peterson’s own writings, but the basic idea keeps cropping up again and again when I read what others have written about the man’s ideas, as well as in the man’s own words. Right now, I’m still at the “you have GOT to be fucking kidding me” stage; I am starting to suspect that this guy’s genius lies in piling up so much highly compressed bullshit that the bedazzled reader only sees a mirror of what he wants to believe.

  • Events as they occurred are only factual but not necessarily true. True is a judgment call and is therefore open to interpretation. The claim of ‘something’s’ validity can only be made when one can see ‘the bigger picture’ — the wellbeing of humanity or ‘life’ itself. Only then can we know if something is true rather than just factual or ‘materialistically true’. – Peterson
  • If it doesn’t serve life, it’s not true. – Peterson
  • He seems to claim that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false.
  • Why is Peterson dishonest in some ways? I think he explained this in the debate with Sam Harris, where he said things like ” something which not benefits /potential harms humanity cant be true”.

This is worse than moral relativism, this is existential relativism. Harris correctly demolishes this absurd, childish, and narcissistic conception of truth in his post-interview response.

In the year 2017, the question “How should we act in the world?” simply isn’t reducible to Darwinism. In fact, most answers to this question arise in utter defiance of the evolutionary imperatives that produced us. Caring for disabled children would most likely have been maladaptive for our ancestors during any conditions of scarcity—while cannibalism recommended itself from time to time in every corner of the globe. How much inspiration should we draw from the fact that killing and eating children is also an ancient “archetype”? Overcoming tribalism, xenophobia, honor violence, and other forms of apish barbarity has been unthinkable for hundreds of millennia—that is, until now. And our moral progress on these fronts is the basis of our most enlightened answers to Peterson’s question.

We didn’t evolve to do science, or to build institutions that last for generations, but we must do these things to thrive. Thriving requires the survival of the species, of course, but it’s not reducible to that. Getting our genes into the next generation simply isn’t our only (or even our primary) goal—and it surely isn’t the foundation of our ethics. If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility. If we really viewed the world from the perspective of our genes, no other answer to the question “How should we act in the world?” would seem more fitting. I’ll let readers judge how closely this maps onto the human minds with which they’re acquainted.

Peterson believes that there is an inverse symmetry to our views on the relationship between facts and values. According to him, I see “ethics as nested inside scientific realism,” whereas he sees “scientific realism as nested inside Darwinian competition” (which he views in ethical terms).  A clearer way of stating this is that he thinks I locate all values within a system of truth claims, whereas he locates all truth claims in a system that selects for a single value: survival. Hence our stalemate.

Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

But I have always said that the scientific worldview presupposes the validity of certain values—logical consistency (up to a point), explanatory elegance, respect for evidence, and so forth. This is why I think Hume’s famous gap between “is” (facts) and “ought” (values) is misleading on the topic of morality. We can easily reverse direction and discover that we won’t get to “is” without first obeying certain “oughts.” For instance, to understand what the cause of an illness is, one ought to pay attention to regularities in the body and in the environment that coincide with it. (Additionally, we now know that one ought to emphasize material causes, rather than sympathetic magic or the evil eye.) Facts and values are connected.

However, the fact that some values lie at the foundation of our scientific worldview does not suggest that all scientific truth claims can be judged on the basis of the single (Darwinian) criterion of whether the claimants survive long enough to breed.  On the contrary, this assertion is quite obviously false (as I believe I demonstrated throughout our podcast). We can easily imagine our species being outcompeted by one that has no understanding whatsoever of the cosmos. Would a lethal swarm of disease-bearing insects possess a worldview superior to our own by virtue of eradicating us? The question answers itself—because no insect could even pose it. Mere survival doesn’t suggest anything about the intellectual or ethical achievement of the survivors.

Some who listened to my conversation with Peterson thought that in objecting to his conception of truth, I was endorsing materialism or denying that the mind could play any role in determining the character of reality. But that isn’t the case. I was merely arguing that Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

Peterson is so philosophically incompetent that he quite clearly does not fully comprehend that his idiotic ethical system not only fully justifies the Holocaust, it can actually be logically utilized to require future repetitions on a regular basis! I suspect he may harbor a dim awareness of this, which would explain why he is clinging so desperately to the 115 IQ myth that I disproved.

I have not yet confirmed for myself that the way Peterson characterized his definition of truth during the interview is fully representative of his actual thinking on the matter, or that Harris and other commenters are correctly describing it. But if this “evolutionary pragmatism” is genuinely the basis for his conception of the truth, then I have absolutely no problem dismissing the man as an architect of an evil philosophy, an intellectual charlatan, and a false prophet whose works merit complete and comprehensive demolition.

Spare me the “oh, he does so much good for the broken little boys” argument. If this definition of his conception of truth is correct, then Jordan Peterson is not doing anyone any good at all, and unlike more honest atheists like Dawkins and Harris, he is a philosophical wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Pied Piper who is attempting to transform those broken little boys into unethical monstrosities. He appears to have blown up his Gamma delusion bubble into an ethical system and a philosophy of life. I am even beginning to suspect that he isn’t just comprehensively wrong, but that he is mentally ill. Not unlike Google muttering “don’t be evil, don’t be evil” to itself, Peterson is desperately seeking an antidote to the chaos of his mind.

So, if you’re a Peterson fan, you might want to buckle up. I just read the transcript of the Harris interview, then put 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning on my tablet. The baleful eye of the Dark Lord is now focused squarely upon the man. And we’re not just looking at the possibility that the emperor has no clothes here, we’re being forced to consider the very real possibility that the emperor is actually a recently shorn sheep that sincerely believes it’s a cat.

The literal bankruptcy of Never Trump

Mytheos Holt performs a post-mortem on the quixotic Evan McMullin campaign:

For the forces that backed him, McMullin was not the first, the second, or even the third choice for his appointed task—namely, to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency in the name of donor-driven True Conservatism™. Rather, the forces that supported McMullin leaped from one anti-Trump hero to another, starting with the plaintive-sloganed Jeb!, continuing with the vapid dreamboat Marco Rubio, and finally ending up desperately lining up behind Ted Cruz because at least he went on their cruises.

What separates McMullin’s backers from other Jeb!, Rubio, or Cruz supporters, however, was their total unwillingness to accept that sometimes a primary just wouldn’t go their way. In many cases, this was because they belonged to a class of people for whom losing wasn’t supposed to happen because of who they were. This was particularly true of Bill Kristol, arguably the man who built what little meager infrastructure there was for McMullin, hoping to put up someone, anyone, who would stop the GOP from rejecting its self-appointed neoconservative establishment rulers, and their domesticated coterie of social conservatives, who, goshdarnit, were just too Christian and principled to limit immigration, or to attack the interests of major metropolitan donor industries.

And so it was that people who had never had to fight to win a primary decided they were going to try and fight back against someone whose only experience was winning a primary he was never supposed to win by sheer force of will. First, they did it by attempting to force a brokered convention, which presumably would have produced someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan as the nominee. All they accomplished was screaming helplessly from the floor of the RNC like a certain highly distressed member of the #Resistance.

Not to be deterred, they then decided to follow in the august footsteps of George Wallace and John Anderson, and run a third party protest candidate to ensure that no True Conservative™ would have to sully his or herself with a vote for Donald Trump. And for a while, their push looked like it might be something to worry about. Names like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or even future Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis were bandied about with excitement. That is, until Romney, Sasse, and Mattis got wind of it and quickly made it plain that on no account were they involved in this, and would you please stop calling, Bill Kristol?!

But even after this, McMullin still wasn’t the first choice. That honor went to the august National Review columnist David French, who entertained the idea for just long enough to get a segment on Fox News complaining about how rude Trump supporters were. Then he promptly fled.

Only then, and finally, after casting about in the “darkness” of the dawning Age of Trump, the disappointed neoconservative Captain Ahabs realized they had to run someone if they wanted to look serious. Enter Evan McMullin, former House Republican Conference Chief Policy Director, former CIA agent, former investment banker, and man with nothing better to do because he was possibly the only unmarried Mormon over the age of 19 in Washington. And so, NeverTrump looked at McMullin, squinted, thought he looked enough like David French, and said: “OK, fine, you’ll do.”

Of course, quite rapidly it became clear that the chances of McMullin actually becoming president were someplace between zero and hahahahahahahaha . . . wait, what? But becoming president was no longer the point. It was all about sinking Trump, to prove to those awful populists who had dared to think for themselves, and not the way Bill Kristol and Bill Kristol’s donors wanted them to think, that they were servants, and could never live in the Big House as equals.

And so, a simple strategy for denying Trump the presidency was devised: McMullin would try to carve away enough of his voters in states with high Mormon populations so that even if Trump won a couple of swing states, the losses among Mormons would cancel out Trump’s victory. Whether McMullin won those states, or Clinton won them, was beside the point—which was, and only ever was, to hurt Trump. And, for a few moments, the strategy looked like it might work in Utah, right up until the Mormons thought it through, realized how much trouble they’d gone through making themselves part of the Republican coalition in the first place, and decided they’d rather not self-excommunicate for the sake of panicked Beltway grifters. Ultimately, McMullin came in third in Utah, behind even Hillary Clinton.

As has so often been the case, the light of the God-Emperor has revealed the true character of many a cuck and an America Secondist. I find myself wondering if McMullin even has the self-awareness to be ashamed of how he permitted himself to be used by Bill Kristol to screw over so many sanctimonious conservatives.

Then I recall who those sanctimonious conservatives were and how obnoxious they are, and I remember that I don’t care.