Author: VD

Lest you think we exaggerate

As Daniel Hannan points out, all that is missing is the swastika.

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside
the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the
wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

I found to be potentially significant in the semiotic sense that this imperial rump of the former Christendom not only has the hammer-and-sickle at the top, but symbolically places Christianity below Communism and Islam, while also featuring a large Star of David.  The primary question the poster raises, however, is what importance the Dallas Cowboys could possibly have for the EUSSR?

Mailvox: a reason to not vote

I think we can all agree that blame for the present parlous state of the nation clearly lies with JartStar:

I had some fun today with some of the guys at work about voting. They
asked me while we were on break who I was going to vote for and I
explained that I no longer vote. The looks on their faces were priceless
and when they inquired why I offhandedly explained that I had voted my
entire life and things have steadily gotten worse, I feel bad about
that, and my voting has made the country worse. I then apologized to
them all for what I had done and the three out of the four of them went
into near hysterics.

The Israeli Jew proclaimed it would be better for
me to show up and vote randomly than not vote, and one of the two Indian
immigrants tried to pull me aside to explain that I wasn’t really the
problem.

So this is my new reason for not voting when people ask: The state
of the country to a large degree my fault and I’m stopping now before I
make things really bad.

It’s definitely a more entertaining excuse than relying on reason and being forced to endure a monologue on how Mitt Romney will preside in a TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MANNER than Barack Obama, even though the extent of their actual policy differences appears to be that Romney is slightly more enthusiastic about Israel, Wall Street, and gun control while Obama is slightly more enthusiastic about Saudi Arabia, immigration, and feminism.

Of course, as I have conclusively proven, there is absolutely no chance that your one presidential vote makes any difference at all.  None at all.  Either that one vote will not make a difference to the outcome, or in the extremely unlikely event that the outcome of the state vote rests upon your one vote, the courts will render it void by pronouncing their own verdict on who won the “election”.

The argument for random voting being better than not voting is informative, though. Such a position would indicate that to the person who holds it, the preservation of the illusion of democracy is more important than democracy itself.

My question for Richard Dawkins

Slashdot is inviting interview questions.  Here is mine:  Given that a) a statistically significant minority of students cannot read or write at their grade levels, b) only a very small number of graduating high school students will ever go on to study science in college, and, c) there are already more science majors graduating than there are science-related jobs to employ them, why do you insist it is so important to teach evolution in schools?

Seeds of societal destruction

Desiderius, a commenter at HUS, draws an interesting connection between Rome’s destructive foreign policy and the U.S. university system:

The empire/Unis identify the best and brightest of the
tribes/flyover communities. They wow the parents with the grandeur of
Rome/Uni-degree caché. Parents send promising youth off to Rome/Unis.
They are indoctrinated with values hostile to the communities that
raised them.* In the Roman case, the now-mature youth were then returned
back to the tribes to sow discord, which they did in spades due to the
contempt they’d been trained to feel for the communities that raised
them and the values those communities held dear.

In the present case, when the economy is good, they just stay in the
big cities and live the life of Roissy. Bad economy -> the Roman case
becomes a more real possibility. I’ve seen some teachers like this,
although to be fair, also some teachers pushing back. We’ll see if the
result is just impotent discord. The alternatives range from Alaric to
Washington.

The irony is that the values of the tribes more closely approximated
the republican values that allowed Rome to rise in the first place than
the decadent ones that precipitated it’s fall. Likewise today. It is the
liberal values that have been corrupted.

* I’d argue in both cases violently less egalitarian, but I’m a little
original that way – suffice it to say in the present case that Yale Sex
Week wasn’t what the parents signed up for, or if that feels too
judgie/SoCon for you, one can peruse the syllabi for rampant
illiberalism, anti-semitism, radfem, anti-western, you name it. It’s
bad. I call it anti-humanism.

This is a cogent summary of one of the various downsides of the so-called meritocracy.  Another one is the way in which the destruction of the old WASP network on Wall Street and its strong sense of noblesse oblige led to the rapacious, mercenary culture that has devastated the American economy, created vast quantities of debt, and led to major malinvestment throughout the nation.

IQ and the Ivy League

One of the interesting things about the self-identified intelligent individuals of the cognitive elite is how they commonly demonstrate that the failure to think results in much the same consequences as the inability to think correctly.

Now, most graduates of Ivy League universities genuinely believe that most highly intelligent people attend Ivy League schools.  But in much the same way that atheists confuse a higher average intelligence with a larger quantity of intelligent individuals, they are confusing a concentration of intelligent individuals with the overall quantity.

Let’s assume that every single individual at an Ivy League school is
Mensa-qualified. That’s absurdly generous, of course, as anyone who has
ever been to an Ivy or conversed with more than a few Ivy League
graduates will know, but just to be conservative, we’ll assume that every single student enrolled at an Ivy posssses an IQ of 132+ and is therefore in the top 2 percent of intelligence. Now, note that the total Ivy
undergraduate enrollment is 59,561.

That is 0.32 percent of the 18,078,672
total U.S. undergraduate enrollment in 2010. That means, by even the most
generous and conservative estimate, (since not all Ivy undergrads are genuinely
Mensa-qualified and because the college-attending group has an average IQ a little above the 100 norm), there are at
least 5.25x MORE equally smart people, about 302,012, who are attending
state universities, community colleges, and other private colleges instead of Ivy League
universities.

I’d have to do a bit more research to come up with a more accurate number, but I would estimate that there are probably between 10x to 15x more smart people who did not attend an Ivy than did attend one.

So much for “Alpha Mitt”

I told you that Mitt Romney, for all his height, financial success, and executive hair, was a Beta.  One display of dominance in the first debate, the first in what is now six years of running for president, does not an Alpha make.  Recall that before the debate, Scoobious Doobius noted this:


“In terms of “game” theory (as opposed to “game theory”), it’ll be
interesting to see tonight if things turn into the classic “real alpha
versus beta huffing and puffing and trying to look like an alpha” sort
of thing. If Obama takes that bait, then I’ll be a little more
open-eared towards the predictive power of game.”

The case, she is closed.  Obama not only came out huffing and puffing, but he even managed to prevent Romney from dominating him the way Romney had in the first debate.  The real indicator of Romney’s Betatude was not that he failed to AMOG Obama a second time, but rather the way in which he permitted a woman to not only overrule him, but the rules set out for the moderator prior to the debate as well.

There is no excuse for this failure.  A true alpha would have shut her up and forced her to submit to him without even requiring an appeal to the rules.  But, given how the rules were not only clear, but Candy Crowley openly declared her intent to flout them before the debate, Romney’s failure to shut her up and force her to stick to her appointed role is conclusive proof that he is not, and has never been, an alpha male.

All he had to do, the first time she opened her mouth in violation of the rules, was read them to her and ask her what part of them she did not understand.  Later, when she attempted to play fact-checker, he should have immediately asked her what the score was, then informed her that if she isn’t keeping score, she isn’t the judge of the debate and she should stick to her moderator duties as she agreed prior to the debate.  The fact that Romney’s failure to deal with the woman led directly to him fumbling his best opportunity to publicly drive home Obama’s responsibility for the Libyan debacle is merely rubbing salt in the wound.

Romney cracks 50

Thus spake Gallup:  Romney 50%, Obama 46% Among Likely Voters.  Obama down sharply among men, college grads, and Southern voters vs. 2008

If Romney manages a similar rout again tonight, we could end up seeing a landslide in a few weeks.

The missing seven

I sent out 30 review copies on Friday, so by my count, at least seven reviewers have not yet completed either their reading or their review.  Now, I understand more reviews might seem superfluous, especially of such a relatively small book, but believe it or not, the number of reviews has been observed to make a significant amount of difference in the willingness of Amazon customers to give a book a chance. 

Now, if you absolutely hated the novella and are simply being gracious by neglecting to share your opinion with the reading public, it’s perfectly fine with me if you choose not to favor the world with your verdict.  I have been known to be circumspect in similar circumstances myself, so if that’s the case, please feel free to ignore this reminder.  But if you are one of the reviewers who did read it and just haven’t gotten around to writing your review yet, it would be great if you would see about posting it at your earliest convenience.

And for the 23 of you who did read and review the book on such short notice, I really appreciated your time and effort, and I’m very pleased to see that so many of you enjoyed it.  Also, thanks very much to those who purchased A MAGIC BROKEN, and for a brief while, turned it into a top 25 book in the Epic category.  It was rather fun to see my name in between George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson instead of Michael Lewis and FA von Hayek.

Game and the election

I try to keep the two blogs fairly separate these days, since a relatively small number of people are interested in both econ/religion/politics/literature on the one side and intersexual relations on the other.  Also, the intellectually ruthless approach utilized here tends to work better on matters more objective than the socio-sexual hierarchy.  However, there are times when the two perspectives come together as one, which was the case with a question from GK concerning why women have suddenly begun turning towards Mitt Romney in the presidential election.

My thought is based around one of the keys to understanding female behavior, which is that it is often
aversion-based.  Men find this difficult to understand because their
behavior tends to be positive, in the sense of “I want X, therefore I
will do Y.”  The aversion-based female pattern tends to be more oriented
towards “I don’t want X, therefore I will do Y”.  The increased female
support for Romney has little to do with Romney himself, much with less
his policies or Obama’s policies, but rather the collective socio-sexual
fury of a group of women duped.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

The idiot assimilators

Sara Hoyt has a legitimate complaint about Facebook and the mindless Faceborg who successfully attempt to enlist unwitting others in their cherished causes:

People with zero affiliations with — or even knowledge of — particular
groups are publicly made members of them without their consent. All it
takes is a friend putting you in a group, and then you are in it without
your consent….

There is something downright Orwellian about this, and if you don’t
think it can be used for Orwellian political purposes, imagine yourself
working in an office with Facebook friends who include supporters of a
presidential candidate for whom you don’t intend to vote. If that
“friend” puts you in, say, an “I’M VOTING FOR JILL STEIN!” Facebook group, then you are in it, and you have to un-join. Suppose
your supervisor or next door neighbor put you in it? The implications
are as obvious as they are odious; not all of us are political junkies
with the balls to issue public statements about whom we support or don’t
support, and not all of us are so public that we might find something
like this amusing enough to write a blog post about the experience.

Now, I’m not active on Facebook.  While I do use Twitter, I only belong to most social media groups in order to prevent my more creative critics from attempting to pass themselves off as me.  But I am a registered user there, and so every day I am the recipient of spam from groups like Friends of Protection For Men.  Not only is the constant barrage of email annoying, but it has the counterproductive result of making me feel entirely unsympathetic to the Friends of Protection For Men.  Every time I see another stupid piece of mail from them it makes me want to kick the sender in the teeth.  Not that I often see one, of course, since my spam filter is cranked up to 11, which is why I occasionally fail to receive legitimate emails from readers attempting to contact me.  But I just looked in my Junk folder, and sure enough, there are a pair of emails from the wretched Friends that arrived this morning.

So, for the first time in ages, I logged onto Facebook and removed myself from the various groups into which others have conscripted me.  But, as Miss Hoyt points out, I shoudn’t have to do that.  Opt-out is reprehensible and opt-in should always be the standard.

I appreciate that Facebook and other social media can be a useful means of contacting individuals and organizing groups.  But don’t ever sign people up for causes that you believe to be worthy, even if you are 100 percent sure that they agree with the goals of that group.  It’s just obnoxious, and to be honest, Mark Zuckerberg should be repeatedly punched in that flat, stupid, thieving face of his for his refusal to prevent Faceborg from assimilating others.