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Mailvox: I don’t hate Jordan Peterson

But I am starting to seriously dislike some of his fans, who apparently are determined to prevent me from returning to happily ignoring their favorite integrity-challenged psychologist. A Peterson fan by the name of Y is the worst culprit so far. His comments are in bold.

I agree in general with what you say (that people set up those unwinnable games), but I believe your problem is that you don’t really know who you are or why you do things you do.

No. Your problem with me is that you really don’t know who I am or why I do the things I do. I have various problems, but those two are not among them.

For example, from the CW perspective, it makes literally no sense to shit on Peterson. for your differences on Jewish question.

My perspective is not whatever the CW perspective is. That is irrelevant. I had previously demonstrated the myth of the 115 mean IQ. Peterson attempted, ineptly, to defend that myth. I tore down his arguments just as easily I will tear down the arguments of everyone else who attempts to perpetuate it, just as I have demolished the arguments of everyone who attempted to perpetuate the myth that religion causes war.

That’s the thing about myths. It is very foolish to attempt to defend them, because they are myths. You will be taken down, along with the myth, by any honest, competent investigator, and no amount of verbal or rhetorical facility will save you.

Don’t get me wrong, he has a lot of flaws, but saying what you said about him because you have some not-so-solid reasons to believe Jewish IQ is 105 instead of 113.

No. My reasons are absolutely solid in terms of logic and relatively solid in terms of statistics. The fact that you do not understand this, or grasp you are implying that the majority of the non-Arab Israeli population is less intelligent than African-Americans on average, is not a sign of your own intelligence.

It doesn’t make sense. You’re both in the same fight.

No, we are not. Jordan Peterson is not a friend of mine, he is not an ally of mine, he is not a co-religionist of mine, and he is not a nationalist of any kind. So, he is either a neutral or an enemy. I don’t know which, nor am I interested in doing the research necessary to determine his true status.

To me it seems the degree of your animosity and vitriol directed at Peterson is unwarranted from a rational perspective. He has his flaws, lack of cynicism being the chief one. Rationalwiki has helpfully collected most of his fuck-ups in one place if anyone is curious.

I haven’t directed any vitriol at him. I don’t have any animosity towards him, but I am certainly developing some towards his idiot fans. And I certainly don’t place any confidence in anything Rationalwiki says about anyone. If I were to direct vitriol at him, I would point out that he is a drug-addled, integrity-challenged depressive little bitch prone to crying in public, who is one of the last people any sane young man should look to as a role model. I would also point out that he has said that most Israelis of Jewish descent are less intelligent than African-Americans. But I haven’t done any of that.

He is justifiably massively more successful than you are. More charismatic, better spoken, probably somewhat more intelligent, infinitely better at public relations.

Maybe, but my wife is hotter and I don’t look like I’m borrowing George Will’s bowtie. But more importantly, NN Taleb is vastly more successful than Peterson by every measure. If I was prone to envying anyone on the grounds Y suggests, it would be Taleb. Do I exhibit any animosity for him? Am I seeking to tear him down? I note that Taleb has apparently reached much the same conclusion about Peterson as I have, which is that he’s a lightweight who is prone to stupid opining in ignorance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb@nntaleb
I think I am completely done with @jordanbpeterson. Gave him the benefit of the doubt with Monsanto and other nonsense. This does it.

Sure, you get to be the Dread lord, he is a Sith whom you can’t really attack without making yourself look quite foolish.

Want to bet? Keep annoying me about the Canadian Crier and I will begin looking into dissecting Peterson as thoroughly as I’ve vivisected Harris, Dawkins, and others. My instincts already suggest that there will be no shortage of holes in his poorly-researched arguments. The fact that Taleb is now of a similar mind tends to confirm my suspicions.

So there is reasons why the part of your soul that has the Devil’s ear may want to make you hate him. You’re a Christian, why hate someone who is in the business of using evolutionary science for the purpose of making a rational case for christian virtues? Worst case, he converts some atheists into supporting socially conservative policies sympathetic to Christians.

Is there reasons? I don’t hate him. I don’t care about him. I merely harbor an amount of contempt for his demonstrated lack of intellectual integrity, as I do for all such creatures. But at this point, I am certainly beginning to dislike him – unfairly – due to the annoying behavior of his fans such as Y.

Those who are accusing me of wanting to tear down Peterson should probably consider what happened the last time I was falsely accused of something, namely, gaming a certain collection of literary awards. Do you really want me to conclusively demonstrate that I was not doing anything of the sort by showing you what the real thing looks like? Because, at this point, I am genuinely starting to feel the desire to see if my initial readings of the man are not merely correct, but can be conclusively proved to even the most die-hard Peterson fan.

Then again, it looks like a job better left to Taleb.

If you want to work together with people and spread your ideas as effectively as possible you don’t lash out to people like Peterson who has in the past congratulated @nntaleb for his book and cited his theories on his lectures.

The imbecile doesn’t get that

1) My judgment of pple has NOTHING to do with whether they like my book

2) Social life, where relationships are nurtured, is for PRIVATE citizens, nothing to do with intellectual life bound to rigor/truth

3) Follow inspirational charlatans not me

4) I do not derive my income from some philantropy or Paltreon where I have to act inspirational & suck up to a crowd of followers cutting me a charity check. I derive my income from financial & business activites in the real world.

I don’t owe nothing to nobody.

I know where I’d place my bets. Taleb is one of the very few people on my “if he disagrees with you, you had better take a close look at your assumptions, facts, syllogisms, and conclusions list.”

Kallmunz has been repeatedly demanding an answer.

This is interesting and it brings to mind your recent attack on Jordan Peterson’s stance on Jewish intelligence. Your tack is on the offense. There is no “Peterson is right, but on this issue” Peterson would of course be on the defensive in answering this charge. Peterson being a nominal ally is now ostracized. I am interested in your reasoning here.

My attack is not on Jordan Peterson’s stance on Jewish intelligence. My attack is a complete and conclusive demolition of the myth of Jewish intelligence. The fact that Jordan Peterson happened to to be foolish enough to again perpetuate the myth afterwards was mere coincidence. I don’t believe Peterson is right about anything, mostly because I do not know his positions about almost anything. He is most certainly not an ally of mine, nominal or otherwise. I have never had any contact with the man, I have never paid any attention to the man or his work, and more than a few of his connections and influences, such as Monsanto, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker, appear to merit deeper investigation.

In summary, I am beginning to suspect many of his fans are making the same mistake that their fathers and grandfathers made with the neoconservatives, and that they themselves made with NeverTrumpers like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro. You may not trust my powers of discernment, but I most definitely don’t trust those of Jordan Peterson’s fans.

UPDATE: This statement confirms that Jordan Peterson is not, and will never be, an ally of the West. Note that he has declared the need to separate from us. We are merely acknowledging that he is correct to do so.

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
The true liberals need to separate themselves from the identity politics types. The doctrines are NOT commensurate…

It’s true. They are not commensurate. They are, in fact, diametrically opposing doctrines. On the one side is the West, with its Christian and European identities.

The fact that a globalist ideologue attacks elements or particular doctrines of the Left every now and then does not make him of the Right. It does not put him on our side, nor does it make him an ally of anything more than momentary convenience. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you will stop falling for the William F. Buckleys of the world.

The suicide of the West

That’s the title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, which I expect will be primarily interesting for how Jonah tries to dance around the obvious, based on this extensive interview about it with Russell Moore. I’ll be posting my review of it after I finish reading it.

It tends to strike me as an attempt to defend the West while simultaneously de-Christianizing it. The core thesis strikes me as being fundamentally wrong, because “the fundamental form of human corruption” is most certainly not “I don’t like your artificial constraints on my human desires and my desire for my group to be victorious.”

—

Russ Roberts: It’s a fascinating book. It’s a disturbing book. It’s a somewhat depressing book, at times; and maybe we’ll look for some bright spots on the horizon and in our conversation. But I want to start with a paragraph from near the beginning of the book. You say the following

My argument begins with some assertions. Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence, terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.

Elaborate on that. And talk about what you mean by the Miracle, which is the unnaturalness that we’re in the middle of.

Jonah Goldberg: Right. So, what I mean–I’ll just start with what I mean by ‘unnatural.’ If you took a jar of ants and you dumped them on a planet very much like ours, with our atmosphere, ants would do what ants do. And they would build little colonies and they would dig their little ant tunnels. If you took a pack of dogs and you put them in the wild, they would very quickly become a natural pack like they would. If you took human beings, absent all of the stuff that they learned from culture and education today and put them in the wild, they would not all of a sudden start building houses and schools and have startups. They would take to the trees, and have spears, and it would take a long time to discover spears. And they would behave the way that we are wired to behave. One of the core beliefs I have about a definition of–at the heart of conservatism–is this idea that human nature has no history.

And so, when I say that ‘capitalism is unnatural’: if it were natural, if it were the way human beings, like ants or dogs or any other creature naturally behaves in its natural environment, we would have developed capitalism a little earlier in the evolutionary history of man. We would have developed democracy a little earlier in the evolutionary history of man. In the 250,000 years, give or take, since we split off from the Neanderthals, the amount of time where we had any conception of natural rights–particularly for strangers, right? People within the tribe, that’s different. But for strangers, the idea that someone we just met has any dignity or any claim on justice–that is an astoundingly new idea in human history. And, this whole world that we live in–so, a big inspiration for this book is this idea you talk a lot about on EconTalk, which is: Hayek’s distinction between the microcosm or the microcosmos, and the macrocosm. And, I take Hayek–I think Hayek is absolutely correct, where he says that we evolved to live in small bands of people–troops, tribes, whatever label you want to call them. And that’s how our brains are structured. And our brains haven’t changed very much in the last 10-, 11,000 years since the agricultural revolution. And so, this entire extended order of liberty and contracts and the monopoly on violence of the state–all of these things are really new. They don’t come to us naturally. We have to be taught them. We have to be civilized–as a verb–into believing in these things.

And this Economic Miracle–and so the Miracle is–and I was heavily influenced by Deirdre McCloskey; and I think she gets a lot right. We can talk about one of the things she might get wrong, later. But, you know, for, what is it, 7500 generations? For 200-, 300,000 years, the average human being everywhere in the world lived on average on about $3 a day. I think it’s Todd Buchholz who says that man lived no better for most of man’s existence he lived no better on two legs than he had on four. And, it is only when you get this radical change in ideas that comes from the bottom up–what I call the Lockean Revolution, but I don’t think Locke gets credit for it. He just simply sort of represents it. For the first in all of human history basically in one place, this little corner of Europe, human prosperity, human wealth starts to explode. And that explosion radiates out around the world and is still doing so today. And that is a miracle. And the reason I call it a Miracle is not because I think God delivered it–the first sentence of the book is, “There is no God in this book.”

Russ Roberts: A promise you don’t quite keep; but, I know what you meant.

Jonah Goldberg: We can talk about it.

Russ Roberts: That’s all right.

Jonah Goldberg: But, what I’m saying is, it’s not providential. Right? God didn’t suddenly decide to give us all of this bounty. It’s a miracle because you people, you, you know, you witches and warlocks of the economics profession have not reached a consensus about why the hell it happened. You know, there is a consensus about the $3 a day stuff. But there is not a consensus about why this miracle or this explosion of rights, liberties, and prosperity happened. And, no one planned it. We stumbled into it by accident. And, my argument is that we should be incredibly grateful for it. And, therefore, protective of it. You only protect those things you are grateful for. And, that’s what I–that’s sort of the opening precis of the book, I guess.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Just a couple of comments. I always think of it as the goose that lays the golden egg. If you have a goose that–all of sudden you get this goose that happens to be laying golden eggs instead of regular ones–you’d kind of want to be interested in what keeps the goose healthy and alive, and how this came to happen, as you keep it going. And we seem to be somewhat oblivious of it. I think it’s a human trait to be–take things for granted, and to think that tomorrow will be like yesterday. And so, the era of progress we presume is just a natural thing. And, as you point out–it’s hard to accept, but it’s not so natural.

Jonah Goldberg: Right.

Russ Roberts: And just to expand on the Hayek point, in The Fatal Conceit, he says: This micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos, we have two –we have to have two ways of thinking about the world. In our small families or our bands or our tribes or our communities, we have a more socialist–what you and I would call a Socialist–enterprise. We don’t sell stuff to our kids: typically, we share. It’s top down, not bottom up. In the family, the parents tend to run things. And, that’s very appropriate in a small group that’s held together by bonds of love, for genetics–whatever keeps it together. And, he says, we have to have a different mindset when we go out to the extended order–when we are traders and commercial actors. And he said, we have a tendency to try to take the beautiful and poetic ethos of the family and extend it into the larger order. And he says that leads to tyranny.

Jonah Goldberg: Right.

Russ Roberts: In a way, that’s–that’s what I want to–you might–it’s one of the things you are worried about in your book. Which is that the tribalism that we are hardwired for seems to be spreading beyond the immediate family.

Jonah Goldberg: That’s right. I think it’s worth pointing out: It is disastrous going both ways.

Russ Roberts: Hayek makes that point, yeah.

Jonah Goldberg: Right. Right. It’s disastrous to treat the larger society like a family or tribe. But it’s also disastrous–getting your g’mindschaft[?] and your Gesellschaft is always a problem. And treating your family like a contractual society destroys the family. And, both are really, really bad. And I agree that it’s not just that we are Socialist. I mean, the way I always put it is: We are literally Communist, in the sense that in my family it is: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. You have a sick kid, you don’t do any kind of calculus about what their contribution to the family is. You just do whatever they need. And, yeah. So, part of my argument is that–you know, the Roman philosopher Horus has this line where he says, ‘You can chase nature without–you can chase nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes running back in.’ And, so, part of my argument is that human nature is always with us. Right? We are born with it. That is the preloaded software of the human condition, and you can’t erase that hard-drive. All you can do is channel and harness human nature towards productive ends as best you can. And when you don’t do that, human nature will assert itself.

And I think of this in terms of corruption: That, just as if you don’t maintain their upkeep–a car, a boat, or a house–the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy or just rust will–you know, rust never sleeps. Eventually, nature reclaims everything. And that’s true of civilizations, too. And if we don’t civilize people to understand this distinction between the micro- and the macro-cosm, what inevitably happens is that the logic of the microcosm, the desire to live tribally which we’re all born with, starts to infect politics. And if you are not on guard for it, it can swamp politics. And this is why I would argue that virtually every form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism–whether you want to call it right-wing or left-wing–doesn’t really matter to me any more. They are all reactionary. Because they are all trying to restore that tribal sense of social solidarity–whether, you know, it’s a monarchy or treating the leader of the country as the father of the country or the Fuehrer or whatever you want to call it. Or whether you are just saying that the entire society is just one family.

Whether it’s nationalism, or socialism, or populism–all of these things are basically the reassertion of human nature, which says: I don’t like your artificial constraints on my human desires and my desire for my group to be victorious. And that is the fundamental form of human corruption.

Of criticism and envy

Here is something you should probably consider before resorting to the same stupid equation of criticism with envy that I have literally witnessed a certain type of individual making here on this blog for 15 years. It tells everyone that envy is a particular weakness of your own. In fact, when you criticize someone, or when you accuse someone of something, you are betraying information about yourself that others can read very clearly.

For some reason, this always seems to escape the gammas and the alphas of the world.

The strange thing, from my perspective, is that if you follow the logic of some of my critics, I should never criticize anyone for anything. If I criticize someone who is less well-known, then I am engaged in bullying and directed social media mobbing. If I criticize someone who is better-known, then I am merely exhibiting envy and am inspired solely by jealousy.

Now, what sort of individual habitually tries to set up this “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario? The delusional secret kings, of course. The telling thing, of course, is that there is never any attempt to even consider if the criticism is correct, let alone justified, it’s always “do not pass go, do not collect $200, go direct to discredit and disqualify”. It is pure gamma rhetoric.

There is literally not a single individual I have criticized, from PZ Myers to John Scalzi to George RR Martin to Ben Shapiro to Sam Harris to Richard Dawkins to Richard Spencer, of whom I have not been immediately accused of being jealous or envious.

As one observer recently noted:

Interesting to see the litany of tactics they used to try to discredit you or trick you into making a mistake. They go to them because against the average person they work very well. They’re trying to bait you into something they can latch onto then discredit you.

But here is the thing. I’ve had different people attempting to use the same tactics for 15 years. They didn’t work then. They won’t work now. What these inept little anklebiters engaged on their never-ending crusade of futility do not grasp is that intellectual integrity is its own reward. To paraphrase Liam Neeson in Rob Roy, it is a man’s gift to himself.

I am not saying that I am innocent of envy. But you do not understand me if you think I envy any e-celebrity, media figure, popular author, or talking head. You do not understand me at all.

Cuck State is dead

NeverTrump killed it:

Salem Media, owner of the influential conservative outlet RedState, froze the site on Friday and dismissed many of its writers. Bloggers were locked out of their accounts — some just temporarily, while the cuts were made, and others permanently.

Erick Erickson, the site’s longtime editor who left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the “mass firing” on Friday morning.

“Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem’s direction,” he wrote. “And, finally, after all these years, they’ve turned off my account.”

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat. “They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

Good riddance. How do you define being sufficiently supportive of President Trump? Easy. If you refer to him regularly as the God-Emperor and mercilessly hunt down his enemies without showing them mercy or quarter, then you are sufficiently supportive.

Voxiversity 006

The sixth Voxiversity video is now live! This is a graphic narration of my foreword to Moira Greyland’s THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon. It features Moira’s music, as well as a number of family pictures she provided, and the video is all the more powerful for it.

Episode Six: The Last Closet

The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon is available in paperback and on Kindle. To support Voxiversity, sign up here.

This is why you should not lie

Especially not to the God-Emperor’s Warmaster:

Secretary of Defense James Mattis explained Thursday why he directed a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria back in February.

Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. has a deconfliction line with Russia to ensure that the two countries can communicate in order to avoid direct conflict with one another in Syria. He said that a group of “irregular forces” were in conflict with U.S. forces, and once it was ascertained that those forces were not Russian regulars, Mattis directed a counterattack.

“The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people, and my direction to the chairman was for the force, then, to be annihilated,” Mattis said. “And it was.”

It never pays to play tricksy word games with a warrior. Be direct. Be honest. And learn to understand when you are defeated and behave accordingly, lest you be destroyed.

Mailvox: why draw lines?

Some Guy doesn’t understand why I hold certain people to high standards:

Some of us, myself included have a hard time dealing with your very cut throat attitude towards other people when they have crossed a line that you draw in the sand. Sometimes, admittedly because I am not the consummate intellectual that you are, I have a hard time understanding why you draw the lines in places that you do and why you defend those lines so incredibly hard. I understand you desire for the truth and in this, I actually agreed with your position. You mathematically proved that Jordan did not know what he was talking about. 

Allow me to make an analogy. If you are involved with a woman, you might overlook any number of minor transgressions. Maybe she’s a little short with you. Maybe she’s a little too flirtatious with some other man when she’s had too much to drink. Maybe she’s a hugger who hugs everyone and you’re not. You overlook these things. After all, she’s generally been a big positive in your life, even if you know there are some things in her background that might be a little shady.

A Nobel for the God-Emperor

There is no question that the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to Donald Trump:

North and South Korea will seek a peace ‘regime’ to end the 68-year Korean War, their leaders announced today, after Kim Jong-un agreed to a ‘complete denuclearisation’ during historic talks. Kim became the first North Korean leader to step into the South for 65 years as he met with President Moon Jae-in for a peace summit.

The two sworn enemies exchanged a warm greeting at the 38th parallel in the truce village of Panmunjom before the pair held talks and planted a commemorative tree together. The dramatic meeting has been seen as a precursor to planned talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump next month.

This afternoon, Kim and Moon embraced warmly after signing a statement in which they declared ‘there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula’. The two countries said they will push for talks with the US, and potentially China, to officially end the 1950-53 conflict, which stopped with an armistice and left the Koreas still technically at war.

They also agreed to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons but did not provide any new specific measures outlining how to achieve the objective.

Kim said: ‘We are going to be one again, as we share the same history, the same language, the same culture, the same blood. We are going to happily look back at the hard times in the past when we achieve a new future. No pain, no gain. Let us go forward, step by step for the bright future together.’

This is a staggering development of the sort we have not seen since 1989. I expect the Nobel committee will give the award to Kim and Moon, of course, but the world knows who really deserves it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is already one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States of America.

And he hasn’t even delivered on either of his signature campaign promises yet. But he will.

Mailvox: it is good for the Jews

Critical G flips the narrative entirely by observing that it is in the best interest of the Jews to be told the unvarnished truth rather than reassured by obvious falsehoods that have been perpetrated for decades.

High-IQ (140) full-blooded Ashkenazi here — long time lurker, occasional commenter —, and I can tell you that @VD is totally right. I’ve been thinking about these matters for a long time, and I can tell you @VD does us all a far greater favour by stating the unvarnished truth than JBP does by perpetuating a falsehood. I share the following thoughts and observations to back up what @VD has been saying.

(1) Jewish average IQ of anything higher than about 106 is a myth. I grew up amongst, and went to school and university with, both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Yes, a lot of us are smart, but we are nowhere near *that* smart. Maybe the neurotic Jewish emphasis on education results in higher than whites’, but that’s not solely a question of natural general intelligence.

(2) I ran the numbers on Israel’s IQ and came to Vox’s conclusion, i.e. the Ashkenazi average can’t be higher than the 102-106 range. I am skeptical of Israel’s national average being as low as 96, but even if it were as high as 105, Vox’s argument would still stand. Given the three variables — Ashkenazi IQ, non-Ashkenazi IQ, and Arab IQ (which can safely take as 83) — the higher the average Ashkenazi IQ, the lower the non-Ashkenazi IQ must be, and an average Ashkenazi IQ of 115 results in non-Ashkenazim having a lower IQ than Arabs.

As the vast majority of Jews outside of Israel are Ashkenazim, the rest of my comment pertains to Ashkenazim only — which actually supports Vox’s argument.

(3) Although our general IQ is only a couple points higher than whites’, I do think our verbal acuity is at least a standard deviation higher. I don’t have numbers to back it up, just my personal experience looking at it from within and without. That is (and this is a double-edged blade), we are extremely talented when it comes to language, debating, polemics… and propaganda, lying, and swindling. A fighter for truth has the same weapons as the most fork-tongued deceiver, the difference being in their respective commitments to Truth or the Message.

(4) The myth of Ashkenazi super-intelligence is as harmful to Jews as the myth of IQ equality between blacks and whites is to blacks. It gives rise to anti-semitic beliefs in the super-human evil cunning of Jews, and it also turns Jews into a philo-semitic fetish. I get very annoyed when a philo-semite tries to place me on a pedestal, and my admonitions to be proud of your own culture often fall on deaf ears.

(5) Owing to the myth of Ashkenazi super-intelligence, we labour under unrealistic expectations to be naturally gifted and clever in every which way, and I am convinced a lot of Jews in prominent positions suffer from imposter anxiety, much like those blacks who are undeservingly admitted to elite universities.

(6) I have a pet hypothesis that blacks in America are ultimately unhappy because they know they will always have low sexual market value no matter how prosperous they be. Telling a black woman that she has it better than her sisters in Africa, when 90{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} of desirable men automatically downgrade her SMV, simply doesn’t speak to what really makes her unhappy. By the same token, I think we Jews, in our heart of hearts, feel the same way. We’re simply not as tall or good looking as the northern Europeans, and we know it. In Israel, the things we’re embarrassed about — big noses, frizzy hair, etc — are the norm, and Israelis, for all their obnoxious tendencies, at least do not suffer from the Diaspora Jew’s neurosis about looking Jewish.

If you know many Israelis, one thing you immediately notice is that they exhibit very little of the neuroses, the false bravado, and the prickly defensiveness so often evident among Diasporans. They tend to have a little swagger to them, a genuine self-assurance that I find quite likable. They love to talk about Israel, and you can barely speak with an Israeli for five minutes without him inviting you to come and visit it.

This often reminds me of Garrison Keillor writing about Lake Woebegon and the signs on the outskirts of town: A TOWN ON THE GROW! Israelis are rather like the Middle Eastern version of 19th century American town boosters, a little gauche for the tastes of the cultured individual, perhaps, and yet their enthusiasm for the country they are building is genuinely infectious.

They are, in a word, self-confident. They know they are not parasites. They know they have sweated, fought, and bled for what they have. They are proud of what they have built in the desert, and rightly so.

And as for the Palestinians, let me assure you that the Israelis I know have shown considerably more concern and compassion for the defeated people they have displaced than I have ever heard any American show for how the American Indians are treated today, never mind in the past.

What is the difference between these two halves of the same nation? The Israeli has skin in the game, he is fully committed, and he knows it. The Diasporan is a nomadic pillager, his commitment is conditional upon his perception of his momentary best interests, and he knows it. It’s the difference between being a bossy backseat driver on the weekly run to the supermarket and taking the pole at the Indy 500; which responsibility do you think is going to build more self-confidence. We often talk about the deleterious effect that parasitism has on the societal host, but the parasite pays a heavy price too, because his state of being shatters his psyche and erodes his soul. Have you ever met an individual who does not economically support himself who is self-confident, psychologically mature, and secure in his abilities? As with a person, so it is with peoples; one has only to visit an Indian reservation to observe as much.

A mere 8{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} of Israeli Jews describe themselves as being on the left while 55{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} describe themselves as centrist and 37{c2bf88dee429485d3b0f61325a10c26cb2e215274027e21905ef5aec05bbd0e7} as being on the right. This is radically different from Jewish opinion in any other nation.
– Pew Research Center

That’s the difference that skin in the game makes. It fundamentally changes one’s perspective, one’s time preferences, and one’s behavior. Critical G’s prediction is in line with this: “I make a prediction, which I hope to be tested one day: if the Western Jews migrated en masse to Israel, most of them would become right-wing nationalists. This is exactly what happened in Israel, and I bet you it would happen again.”

The Alt-Right is inevitable. Especially – not even – especially in Israel.

Critical G’s observation of imposter anxiety is a significant one. He believes that the only cure for this and the other psychological ailments of the Diasporans is for them to move on to Israel, and that such a mass exodus would be materially and spiritually better for everyone on all sides of the equation. Based on my observations and experiences, I think he is almost certainly correct. Diversity is no one’s strength and ultimately operates to the disadvantage, if not the actual destruction, of everyone it touches.

Why the Dread Ilk are so superior

To Jordan Peterson’s milquetoast millennials.

All I can say is that if I ever screwed up as thoroughly, and as publicly, and demonstrated such a flagrant lack of intellectual integrity as Peterson has, I would damn well expect every single member of the Dread Ilk to jump down my throat with sharpened spurs on.

Instead, what do we see here? Oh, poor Jordie, it’s just so difficult for him? It’s so hard! How can a philosopher be expected to simply tell the truth? He’s done so much good that we shouldn’t criticize him when he’s running around calling people cowards and failures because they point out the obvious to him! Don’t be mean to Jordie and make him cry!

Excuses. Complaints. Rationalizations. Whining. Accusing. Anything but holding the man accountable for his deceitful words and his lack of intellectual integrity. I’m unimpressed enough with the man, but it’s his followers that really have me rolling my eyes.

WTF? Is the guy such a delicate depressed flower that he’s going to kill himself over being called on acting like an uncharitable and uninformed jackass? I thought this was supposed to be the fearsome debater, the formidable man of principle who isn’t afraid to go into the belly of the beast to tell it like it is?

Let me make one thing clear. I do not give a fragment of a flying fuck about poor little Jordie or any other public figure with whom I am not personally acquainted. I have not read his books nor watched his videos. I care about the truth and the Truth, and I do not cut any intellectual figure any slack in that regard, including myself. I ask for neither quarter nor mercy from anyone, least of all my supporters.

When I get it wrong and you can conclusively prove it, then show me! If you’re correct, I won’t attack you, much less call you a coward and a failure like Peterson did, to the contrary, I will be grateful to you for helping me get back on the correct path of true understanding.