Germany is “a nation of immigrants” too

The German – or rather, Immigrant – President declares there are “no biological Germans”.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has declared Germany “is a nation of immigrants and will remain so”, asserting: “There are no half or whole Germans, no biological or ‘new’ Germans”.

Speaking at Berlin’s Bellevue Palace, where a small group of people with Turkish heritage had been invited to share their views on immigration, integration, and xenophobia in Europe, the German president strongly denounced “exclusion of and discrimination against people with foreign roots”.

Telling guests of his regret at hearing people with migration backgrounds report incidents which they claimed made them feel they don’t belong in the country, Steinmeier claimed prejudice undermines “all the things we have done together as a country”.

“There are no Germans who are ‘on probation’ and having to earn their rights in society again and again because their [citizenship] could be revoked on the basis of alleged misconduct,” the president said, insisting that there are “no half or whole, no biological or ‘new’ Germans; there are no first- or second-class citizens, no right or wrong neighbours”.

This tends to raise an obvious question. If the USA, Great Britain, Sweden, and now Germany are all “nations of immigrants”, to what nation do all of these immigrants originally belong?

I mean, obviously there cannot be any “German-Americans” or “Swedish-Americans” now that we know there have never been any biological German or Swedish nation.

Mailvox: on the hunt

If there are any small skeletons in Jordan Peterson’s closet, Saint Chan will find them:

Just in case no one let you know already, Jordan Peterson is getting researched in the Qanon board and it includes references to your videos.

I won’t be even a little bit surprised if something deeply sketchy surfaces once the chans dig deep enough. The man’s guilt is literally etched on his face. I don’t know what it is that he feels so guilty about, but this might be an indication.

Pedophile ring theory in Cornwall, Ont., will likely continue to swirl
By: Allison Jones, THE CANADIAN PRESS
16/12/2009 7:08 PM

TORONTO – It’s been more than 10 years since allegations that a pedophile ring operated in eastern Ontario first made national headlines.

And long after the dust has settled from the tome that is the Cornwall inquiry report some will continue to believe in a conspiracy to cover-up the truth, experts and observers say.

Commissioner G. Normand Glaude concluded Tuesday that children were sexually abused by people in positions of authority and that public institutions failed victims by mishandling complaints dating back to the 1960s.

But many were looking to him to lay to rest a more sinister explanation for those events, that it was the work of a pedophile ring and a cover-up that reached all the way to the Attorney General’s office was at play.

He did not, saying in his 1600-page report that he would not make an unequivocal statement about the theory either way.

For some, it may not have mattered.

An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others’ suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

“It’s very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky,” he said.

Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.

They’re psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy “should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses,” Peterson said.

“A good rule of thumb is: Don’t presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation,” he said.

“Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that.”

While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.

But we know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that an array of government officials and agents have been conspiring against Trump. We have the emails and text messages. We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Vatican hierarchy conspired for decades to protect its gay pedophile priests. We have the indictments, confessions, admissions, and apologies. So, how does malevolence somehow cancel out stupidity?

And more importantly, why was this particular psychologist brought in to dismiss the idea of both a pedophile ring and a coverup even when the criminal abuse of children had been confirmed? Dismissing these things appears to be a subject of some interest to him.

Given Jordan Peterson’s massive guilt complex and his observed inability to answer the question about his belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, taking him down might be as easy as simply asking him on camera if he has ever a) had incestuous relations with anyone in his extended family or b) had sexual contact with a minor. Again, I don’t know what it is that Peterson feels so guilty about, why he feels he has to save humanity in order to expiate whatever sin or crime it is that he committed, but there appears to be something that is tearing him apart from the inside.

Remember the heuristic: anyone who claims stupidity is sufficient explanation for malevolence is in league with the malevolent.


UPDATE: Oh, Sweet Saint Solomon Kane! Apparently it’s been sitting right out in the open all along.

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson explains the method small children start to explore the world – quite similar to the voyages of Star Trek. This excerpt is part of his comprehensive lecture “2017 Maps of Meaning 9: Patterns of Symbolic Representation” at the University of Toronto:

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
Sept 1, 2017
I’m a bad guy but I’m trying not to be and that’s fucking something…. 

You don’t say…

UPDATE: Apparently Peterson failed to notice the pedophiles right at his own university. Or a ring of 1750 of them who were in contact with his colleague at the University of Toronto.

No hills worth defending

Words that could be engraved on the Conservative Movement’s tombstone:

Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you.

But we didn’t get a unified message of support from the pinky-out people on the right. We were scolded for defending Jones. They sang so sweetly into the left’s ears: “Alex Jones is icky. And there is no slippery slope. And you should frankly be censored anyway, if you don’t at least have a Master’s degree.”

The same people who ceded control of public education, the federal bureaucracy, the media, movies, and music to the left have once again found another hill not worth dying on. “It’s only social media,” they say. Yeah, fear not. Around 2.5 billion people use Facebook and Twitter. What’s the worst that can happen if we just let the left have them?

In fairness, conservatives have not defended the national economy, the national borders, or even the ladies rooms. So, it’s really not surprising that they aren’t willing to defend Alex Jones.

This is why the Alternative Right is inevitable. It is the only real resistance to the Left. Conservatives have turned out to be as Fake Right as Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler. When Jonah Goldberg talked about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, he was projecting on behalf of conservatives, although I suppose “beer-drinking surrender monkeys” would be a more accurate description.

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.