Category: Uncategorized

Not even close to done

So, I spent my 50th birthday on the soccer field. As it was our last practice before our first game, pretty much everyone was there and our captain was relentless. We played for nearly two hours, in the heat, with only two short water breaks of about 3-4 minutes each.

I’ve found that I hit the first level of fatigue now almost immediately. It creates a challenge because I hit it about 10-15 minutes before everyone else given that my teammates can be as much as 20 years younger. So, I’ve learned to play in energy conservation mode from the start, which helps me get past that initial period of danger without anyone being the wiser. I’m also diligent about taking my guy out of the play by positioning so his teammates don’t pass to him, and demoralizing him by demonstrating that he can’t get past me the first couple of times that he tries to make a run. A little energy expenditure early can save a lot for the rest of the game, because a guy who doesn’t believe he can get past you doesn’t even try. Plus it tends to make him wary of getting caught out of position when you make a run and drop back deeper into his own end.

On the positive side, once everyone is fully fatigued in the second half, I tend to have an advantage because I’m so much more accustomed to dealing with it. My side was down 6-4 when I beat the opposing wing down the side to earn a corner, took the corner kick, and our defensive midfielder scored on the header. Then, about two minutes later, we had another attack and I made a long run to anticipate following the shot. The opposing goalie saved it, but couldn’t hang onto it, and I put the rebound into the net. 6-6. I couldn’t help but laugh after that, because as we jogged back to our side, one of our midfielders pointed at me and shouted, “How old are you again? How old are you?”

Afterwards, Spacebunny showed up with caramel-chocolate brownies, chilled cava, and a single sad, warm beer. Never mind the latter, it’s a family joke. Not the most typical of birthday celebrations, but we all had a good time and it definitely beat the birthday at the fish farm decades ago.

At the game, I was pleased to discover that I’d managed to hold on to my starting spot on the left wing, although we got off to a bad start against the league’s best team, a team that hasn’t lost since we beat them three years ago, when they literally ping-ponged right through the center of our defense for an easy goal. But we didn’t quit; I got back in time to stuff a one-on-one with our keeper, then block a shot on a rebound, before making a long pass that led to a nice first goal from one of the center-mids. We got a second goal on a perfect free kick from our former captain, then I took myself out for one of the new guys.

I didn’t play as well in the second half, as we were under constant pressure, playing in a defensive shell against a much-superior technical team. Several of their guys still play for their club’s first team and they are very, very good. I did manage a few clearances, but also made two dangerous passes to the inside that could have gone badly wrong. We’re still a bit rusty, I think, because our attackers kept failing to pass the ball to the wings when we ran forward to support them, which was a real problem because every time they lost the ball, we found ourselves 30 meters out of position. Drives me crazy when they do that; if the wing comes forward on an open side, the attacker MUST pass him the ball in order to avoid giving a free side to the other team’s counterattack.

Anyhow, I put an awkward rebound shot over the goal after one of our attackers blew a pretty good opportunity, our best guy in the air missed a clean header on a corner, and we failed to put them away when we had the chance. The defending champions never gave up, and they managed to score the equalizer on a corner in the last minute after being awarded what felt like about 50 free kicks in the last 10 minutes. So, it finished 2-2, which was a really good result for us even though it felt disappointing given how we’d dominated the first half. It was certainly a better start to the season than I’d expected when I found out we’d be playing the three-time champions at their place to open it.

Mailvox: you’re doing it wrong

A reader I can only conclude is a midwit appears to entirely miss the point:

I have an above average intellect and have big problems dealing with co-workers. I call them out, pointing out their mistakes and errors. This has caused the loss of more than one job due to ‘upsetting’ those in charge. Now I find myself being accused of all sorts of bullying and ridiculous charges by people who are either plain stupid or ignorant. Just mentioning facts they consider embarrassing is ‘problematic’. I’m sure you have set yourself up where you don’t have to deal with morons anymore on mass, but what did you do when you you weren’t in such a position? 

(facepalm)

The point is to MINIMIZE your interactions with the less intelligent, not intentionally seek out conflict with them!

Why the bright hate the dim

John C. Wright asks a non-rhetorical question:

In the ongoing and ever-losing battle with my own personal dragons of pride, I took to wondering: why is the proud man angry or peeved with the stupidity (real or imagined) of his fellows? I ask because one would think a saint would be very patient with someone who was stupid, if it were honest stupidity, and not merely laziness in thinking. Whereas the devil (or Lex Luthor) is always in a state of haughtiest annoyance, because he is brighter than those around him. Their stupidity proves his superiority – yet it irks him. Why?

I think there are different reasons that irk different people. Speaking only for myself, I truly don’t mind people being stupid or being absorbed in interests that I consider to be stupid, pointless, or uninteresting. Let’s face it, I consider the average individual to be almost unfathomably stupid, if not actually retarded, and that doesn’t anger me any more than the fact that Spacebunny’s Ridgeback can’t work out differential equations. That being said, I do get extremely annoyed when one of the great masses of my intellectual inferiors takes it upon himself to attempt to correct me, almost invariably incorrectly, and in a manner that indicates that he didn’t even begin to understand what I wrote or said.

Take it or leave it, as you like, but don’t discuss it with me, don’t ask me about it unless I’ve indicated I am available for questions, and don’t even think about trying to “correct” me.

I also dislike when people tell me things that are obviously false or illogical and present them as factual, or even as conclusively true. I tend to regard this as a personal insult, since I find it offensive that they would imagine that I would not see through their transparent pretensions. This is probably why I hate midwits and gammas so much, and why the idiotic way in which they smugly posture and strike false poses is something I simply will not tolerate in my presence or on my blog.

It’s also somewhat beside the point that someone else’s stupidity “proves” my intellectual superiority to him. This is the one thing that normal people and midwits cannot ever seem to grasp about the highly intelligent. WE KNOW. We have always known. We can’t help but know. There is no way to avoid noticing it. You might need the proof, but we don’t and we never have. Because being smarter is no different than being taller, being faster, or being stronger; it’s just a readily observable state of relative being. That an outside observer can’t see the intelligence gap as easily, and that it bothers people more than other differences, doesn’t actually change anything.

As a child, all I ever wanted from the dim-witted was to be left alone. And they could not, would not, do that! Now, I don’t hate them, perhaps because over the last three decades I’ve successfully managed to arrange my life to minimize my daily contact with normal people. I can go days without ever speaking so much as a single word to anyone with an IQ below 120. But while I don’t blame the dim for their lack of intelligence, I find that I can’t blame the intelligent individuals who hate and despise them after enduring years of malicious abuse at their hands either. Because dim or not, it’s really not difficult to simply leave people the hell alone.

But before anyone gets too self-congratulatory about their intellectual superiority, here is an observation that will likely offend many of the more intelligent readers. I have noticed that the smart, but third-rate mind (which usually falls in the 130 to 145 range) inevitably feels the compulsion to explain itself because it needs the external confirmation of its self-assessment. First- and second-rate minds never require that confirmation because they are a) more confident in their self-assessment, and b) too accustomed to no one understanding or believing what they are saying from an early age.

Lest you dismiss what I am saying as simple arrogance, I would encourage you to keep in mind that the most reliably destructive behavior I have ever witnessed on the part of the highly intelligent is the equalitarian assumption that if they can grasp an idea or master an activity, so can anyone else with equal ease. Also, since I am literally retarded when it comes to spatial relations as well as protanomalous, I have a much deeper understanding of what it is like to be totally unable to see things than the average 3SD+ individual.

UPDATE: If you want to make life easier for the smart guy on your team and get along better with him, don’t repeatedly ask questions “just to confirm” things. It’s a maddening habit, and you can tell that you’re annoying the smart guy, whether he shows it or not, when he says things like, “the answer is still yes.” In fact, the word “still” serves as a pretty reliable indicator that the smart guy regards you as at least mildly retarded, particularly when it is spoken in patient, pleasant tones. The unspoken implication is that he suspects you will be genuinely surprised when you see the sun rise again tomorrow.

Mailvox: the inutility of self-help

I mentioned in the recent Darkstream how dubious I am of both self-help books and therapy, prompting this perceptive comment.

So true! I used to visit with a young man whom I’d see off and on. He was always scarfing up the self-help books. He was in his late 20’s, but lived with his parents, didn’t even own a car, had to use his brother’s truck. His parents even paid for him to attend a self-help conference somewhere for a week and he would propound on the ideas ad infinitum if you’d let him, but he never became self-sustaining or able to support himself to this day. I saw him a couple of weeks ago at a bus stop and gave him a ride and he is still at it. 

Talk-talk may be better than war-war, but it is no substitute for act-act. The thing is, if you stop and think about it, there is absolutely no reason that therapy or self-help books should make any difference whatsoever to the average individual, given what we know about the inability of information to transform the rhetorical mind.

From the transcript:

I’m not into self-help stuff. I have resolutely ignored all self-help stuff dating back to the days of Tony Robinson. I frankly regard them as being, by and large, scams. I think that if you’re going to help yourself, it’s probably not going to come in the form of a book, it’s probably not going to come in the form of a television show or a series of video lectures. Now I understand that that people feel that they are helped through reading these books, that they feel that they are improving their lives by seeing therapists and all these sort of things, but one thing I’ve noticed about people who go to therapists and people who read self-help books is that they never seem to get better.

By which I mean, once somebody starts going to a therapist they never seem to stop. When they start reading self-help books, if you see the kind of person who buys self-help books, what you tend to notice if you’re at their house, or if you’re at their apartment, is that they have a library full of self-help books. This is why I’ve always been intrinsically dubious of of people who rely upon this kind of stuff, and these kind of people, and you know, when I see people who actually improve their lives, they tend to go to the gym. I’ve seen many, many people start off as skinny little guys with spaghetti noodle arms who have no confidence and get no attention from anyone, and seen them transform themselves over the period of two or three years. It’s always kind of fun to see these guys come in, and they’re not really in shape, they’re very out of shape, they’re very lacking in self-confidence and that sort of thing, and then you see them improve over time.

And then one day you see them walk in, and they’re there with their girlfriend who is moderately attractive. and you know that their life has improved. Somebody just said, “I really think most people use those self-help books to distract themselves from their real problems and to avoid making real changes.” I think that is true.

Democrats hate Americans

A third-generation immigrant demonstrates why no descendant of immigrants should be permitted to hold office for at least five generations.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo claimed on Wednesday evening that it is “offensive” for President Donald Trump to mention that Mollie Tibbetts has been “permanently separated” from her family after an illegal alien murdered her. Referring to Trump’s White House video about Tibbetts, Cuomo wondered whether “these sympathizers would be as full throated about these tragedies if the killers were white citizens, if the victims were not young white women.”

In the White House video, Trump says: “Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family. A person came in from Mexico, illegally, and killed her. We need the wall. We need our immigration laws changed. We need our border laws changed. We need Republicans to do it because Democrats aren’t going to do it. This is one instance of many. We have tremendous crime coming trying to come through the borders. We have the worst laws anywhere in the world. Nobody has laws like the United States. They are strictly pathetic. We need new immigration laws. We need new border laws. The Democrats will never give them… So, to the family of Mollie Tibbetts–all I can say is God bless you, God bless you.”

All I can say is that it won’t surprise me if American families began hunting down immigrants in retribution for the murder of their children. And pro-immigration politicians.

Scientistry in action

You will note that the self-correcting process of scientistry bears almost no resemblance to the ideal concept of science that is romanticized by the Bill Nye Fake Science brigade:

Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer.

The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis,” says Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the Chicxulub crater. “We have it nailed down, the case is closed,” Buck Sharpton, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has said.

But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers.

“I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis.”

Exactly. And if the scientific community is this upset over the gradual demolition of the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Theory, imagine how they’re going to react when the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection eventually meets its inevitable conclusive demise.

Silicon Valley’s success

An aside worth noting. The Masters of the Universe (California edition) have never understood that they are not geniuses, they are not even particularly intelligent, they are merely lucky enough to be in a privileged, parasitical position created by Federal government intervention in the economy.

Musk has indeed prioritized volume production, and his failure is due to his arrogance. This arrogance is typical of Silicon Valley as a class. They assume they know better than any other industry, failing to realize their success is due to monopoly and lack of regulation (welcome to the auto industry boys!).

(nods) On a much smaller scale, it’s fascinating to see how people keep trying to launch new publishing companies on the basis of one or more successful books, then crashing and burning because they don’t understand that assembling the right infrastructure is considerably more important than the product.

This is related to why Castalia House is not even looking to sign new fiction authors anymore. Because, for the most part, the authors don’t realize that they are not self-publishing, they are simply signing up to publish with Amazon. And due to its algorithms, Amazon, not the book-buying public, will select the winners. Even worse, it will arbitrarily change its publishing deals whenever it sees fit to do so.

What we find ourselves in now is a strategic restructuring period. This is going to be challenging for everyone, and it is those who understand the challenges and innovate who will become the dominant parties once this all plays out.

Diversity in Versailles

It’s become so common for the French police to terminate diversity that it’s barely even newsworthy anymore:

Two people have been killed and one seriously injured after a man, reportedly wielding a knife, carried out an attack in a Paris suburb. Security forces have “neutralized” the attacker. Police killed the assailant on Thursday morning after he attacked people in the street in the Trappes commune, not far from Versailles. Local media said the attacker – a man born in 1982 –  was armed with a knife and barricaded inside a pavilion shouting: “Allahu akbar, if you enter I will blast you all.”

The attacker was previously known to security services and was listed on the national security threat list, known as Fiche S, for incitement to terrorism, according to local media reports.

Eventually, it is going to cross someone’s mind that while welcoming and celebrating diversity has led to all of these rapes and murders and other various and sundry unpleasantries, terminating and eliminating it would solve all of those problems efficiently and permanently.

Fake Americans show their true faces

Rather like the rodent-eating aliens of V, the 20th-century invaders are finally beginning to strip off their concealment and show their true identities:

David Brown has never felt a connection to his own name. “To me, Brown means nothing,” said the 49-year-old finance professional, who lives in Manhattan. “There is no heritage, there is no Jewishness. There is nothing.”

So, in June, Brown began legal proceedings to change his last name to Broner — the original surname of his late father, Nechemia — as a way to pay homage to the family’s ancestry. Broner, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, changed his name to Charles Brown after arriving in New York in 1950, seeking acceptance from Americans.

David’s children Jonathan, 12, Sarah, 10, and Isabella, 8, will also have their last names changed to Broner. (His wife, Maria Gonzalez-Manes, 52, uses her maiden name.)

“I always told my children about my father’s story, and how important it is to keep tradition . . . they understand it and they like it,” said Brown. “Being the son of a Holocaust survivor, [this] is an easy way to show the faith and the soul of the Jews have not changed.”

Waves of 19th- and 20th-century immigration brought millions of new Americans through Ellis Island — many of whom, in an effort to assimilate into new communities and professions, changed their names to ones that sounded more American. Now, in an about-face, more and more of those immigrants’ descendants are reverting back to their original surnames to show ancestral pride.

There is nothing wrong with ancestral pride. There is nothing wrong with men and women showing the faith and the soul of their people has not changed. What is wrong is the pretense that they ever were, or ever could be, Americans. What is wrong is the pretense that the interests of their people were ever the same as those of the American people. The observable truth that is no longer even remotely deniable is that these Fake Americans and their children are no more Americans now, or in the future, than they are still Poles, or Russians, or whatever their previous skinsuit happened to be.

The so-called assimilation of the 19th and 20th centuries was, for the most part, a complete charade. For without the total elimination of the foreign identity, faith, and soul, there is no assimilation. If you possess the identity, faith, traditions, and soul of one people, then you obviously do not, and cannot, possess the identity, faith, traditions, and soul of another, no matter where you may reside.

The pernicious nature of free speech

In addition to its intrinsically anti-Christian purpose that is documented in J.B. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought, in The Suicide of the West, James Burnham identifies another, equally serious problem with the progressive principle of the right of free speech: the logical and philosophical connection between free speech and the devolution of science from the rigors of scientody to the ever-mutating positions of democratic scientistry.

 If we know the truth, we might reasonably ask, why waste society’s time, space and money giving an equal forum, under the free speech rule, to error? The only consistent answer is: we cannot be certain that we know the truth—if, indeed, there is any such thing as objective truth. Liberalism is logically committed to the doctrine that philosophers know under the forbidding title of “epistemological relativism.” This comes out clearly both in theoretical discussion by philosophers of liberalism and in liberal practice.

We confront here a principle that would seem strangely paradoxical if it had not become so familiar in the thought and writings of our time. Liberalism is committed to the truth and to the belief that truth is what is discovered by reason and the sciences; and committed against the falsehoods and errors that are handed down by superstition, prejudice, custom and authority. But every man, according to liberalism, is entitled to his own opinion, and has the right to express it (and to advocate its acceptance). In motivating the theory and practice of free speech, liberalism must either abandon its belief in the superior social utility of truth, or maintain that we cannot be sure we know the truth. The first alternative—which would imply that error is sometimes more useful for society than the truth—is by no means self-evidently false, but is ruled out, or rather not even considered seriously, by liberalism. Therefore liberalism must accept the second alternative.

We thus face the following situation. Truth is our goal; but objective truth, if it exists at all, is unattainable; we cannot be sure even whether we are getting closer to it, because that estimate could not be made without an objective standard against which to measure the gap. Thus the goal we have postulated becomes meaningless, evaporates. Our original commitment to truth undergoes a subtle transformation, and becomes a commitment to the rational and scientific process itself: to—in John Dewey’s terminology—the “method of inquiry.”

But this process or method of inquiry is nothing other than the universal dialogue made possible by universal education and universal suffrage under the rules of freedom of opinion, speech, press and assembly. Throughout his long life, the commitment to the method of inquiry that is at once “the scientific method” and “the democratic method” was perhaps the major theme of Dewey’s teaching. Let us add that truth thus becomes in practice relative to the method of inquiry. For all practical purposes, truth in any specific scientific field is simply the present consensus of scientific opinion within that same field; and political and social truth is what is voted by a democratic majority.

It is not clear in advance how wide the field of political and social truth should be understood to be; presumably that question too can be answered only by the democratic method, so that the field is as wide as the democratic majority chooses to make it. The plainest summary of the net conclusion of the liberal doctrine of truth is that given in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ aphorism. He conjoins the two key propositions, though I place them here in a sequence the reverse of the original: 1) “truth is the only ground upon which [men’s] wishes safely can be carried out”; 2) “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

Another of the prominent American philosophers of liberalism, Professor T.V. Smith of the University of Chicago—whose influence has been spread much beyond the academies by virtue of his mellifluous prose style and his popularity as an after-dinner speaker—has made the idea of relativity the core of his essay on “Philosophy and Democracy.” “This inability finally to distinguish [truth from falsity, good from evil, beauty from ugliness] is the propaedeutic for promotion from animal impetuosity to civilized forbearance. It marks the firmest foundation”—again the paradox is near the surface—“for the tolerance which is characteristic of democracy alone.”

Professor Smith very rightly cites Justice Holmes as a major source of the influence of this doctrine of relativism among us. “As Holmes put it, we lack a knowledge of the ‘truth’ of ‘truth.’ ” Professor Smith attacks all of the classical theories of objective truth, and declares: “No one of these theories can adequately test itself, much less anything else.” The idea of objective truth is only the rationalization of private, subjective “feelings of certitude . . . ; and certitude is not enough. It more easily marks the beginning of coercion than the end of demonstration. . . . The only insurance the modern world has against the recurrence of the age-old debacle of persecution for opinion is the presence in it of a sufficient number of men of such character as will mollify assertions of truth with the restraints of tolerance.”

Since final truth cannot be known, we must keep the dialogue eternally going, and, where action is required, be “content”—Mr. Hutchins echoes Justice Holmes—“to abide by the decision of the majority.”