Better late than never?

Hollywood finally excommunicates Roman Polanski:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expelled Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski from its membership, the organization said Thursday. The Academy’s board of governors, following its new procedure for enforcing Standards of Conduct that it adopted in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, voted to expel the comedian and the director at its most recent meeting on Tuesday.

“The Board continues to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity,” the Academy said in a statement announcing their expulsion.

A five-time Oscar nominee, Polanski will keep the Oscar he was awarded in 2003 for directing The Pianist, an honor he couldn’t accept in person because he fled the U.S. in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. Cosby was found guilty of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand in 2004 by a Pennsylvania jury last Thursday after 14 hours of deliberation.

Of course, they did nominate him three times for an Oscar during those four decades, and even gave him one 15 years ago. As Spacebunny commented, they’re only kicking out Polanski because they are under pressure to expel Cosby, and they can’t do so without being called racist if they don’t give Polanski the boot as well.

Ah, Hollywood values. The fact that they see fit to posture about their “ethical standards” and lecture the rest of the world would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating.

A Red Swan

With apologies to NN Taleb. A Red Swan is a neologism describing an event that literally everyone, except the idiot left-wingers responsible for its occurrence, saw coming:

Regional police statistics show that 56.9 per cent of crime in the German town Sigmaringen was committed by asylum seekers last year. The figures reflect ‘real crimes’ as offences of breaking migration laws were excluded, newspaper Schwäbische reports.

Crime, especially drug-related crimes (+69.6{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}) and shoplifting (+44.8{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}), has risen sharply due to migrant criminality. But other more serious crimes increased significantly, as well, such as street crimes (+33.5{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}), assault (+39.5{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}) and sexual offences (+14.7{c765cef31248bdf9727e0d9ed37c3833bec162074a6cb2d3654476e6b63f536e}).

Therefore the region’s Ministry of the Interior has now developed a security plan for Sigmaringen, a special group of investigators. The group recently arrested 21 multiple offenders among the asylum seekers.

Gratulieren, Sigmaringenen! Your reward for your do-goodery is the more-than-doubling of your crime rate. Please to enjoy the additional shopliftings and rapes.

A bureaucratic approach to literature

One of the central challenges George R. R. Martin always faced as a writer is that he approaches some significant philosophical questions with the mind of a bureaucrat. This Rolling Stone interview with Martin from 2014 is rather enlightening in that regard:

It’s a shockingly brutal story that you tell. The first major jolt comes when the knight Jaime Lannister pushes a child, Bran Stark, through a window because the child witnessed Jaime and Jaime’s sister, Cersei – the wife of Westeros’ King Robert – having sex. That moment grabs you by the throat. 

I’ve had a million people tell me that was the moment that hooked them, where they said, “Well, this is just not the same story I read a million times before.” Bran is the first viewpoint character. In the back of their heads, people are thinking Bran is the hero of the story. He’s young King Arthur. We’re going to follow this young boy – and then, boom: You don’t expect something like that to happen to him. So that was successful [laughs].

Both Jaime and Cersei are clearly despicable in those moments. Later, though, we see a more humane side of Jaime when he rescues a woman, who had been an enemy, from rape. All of a sudden we don’t know what to feel about Jaime. 

One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don’t have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he’s apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen. Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you’re a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don’t know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what’s the answer then? [Martin pauses for a moment.] You’ve read the books?

Yes. 

Who kills Joffrey? In the books – and I make no promises, because I have two more books to write, and I may have more surprises to reveal – the conclusion that the careful reader draws is that Joffrey was killed by the Queen of Thorns, using poison from Sansa’s hairnet, so that if anyone did think it was poison, then Sansa would be blamed for it. Sansa had certainly good reason for it.

The reason I bring this up is because that’s an interesting question of redemption. That’s more like killing Hitler. Does the Queen of Thorns need redemption? Did the Queen of Thorns kill Hitler, or did she murder a 13-year-old boy? Or both? She had good reasons to remove Joffrey. Is it a case where the end justifies the means? I don’t know.

The problem, of course, is how do you seek forgiveness without repentance? And how can you repent without an objective moral standard that clearly states: with this act you have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?

Man cannot find redemption without God, which is why some crazy and godless men make maps of meaning filled with bizarre and imaginary creatures and warnings of nonexistent dragons, while others, less crazy, but still godless, write meandering rapefests addressing the hard questions of tax policy and population demographics.

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.

Some readers have been kind enough to say that my own AODAL falls in between ASOIAF and LOTR in terms of literary quality. But one could, not unreasonably, say that is true of our literary approaches as well.

And yes, I am working on the final edition of A Sea of Skulls. And yes, I expect it will be out, in around 900 pages of print, in time for Christmas. The 40-hour audiobook version of A Throne of Bones should also be available by then. I just finished re-reading it to refresh my memory preparatory to the final push on ASOS.

No safe havens

(((David Brooks))) is alarmed by the fact that the Left is becoming as unlikely to provide safe haven for his particular form of globalism as the Right

Tribalism is in the air, on the left as well as on the right. It is based on a scarcity mentality, the idea that life is a zero-sum war between us and them. It emphasizes division and conflict, not solidarity and cohesion. It draws out the authoritarian tendencies in any movement. On the right, tribalism brings us the ethnic authoritarianism of Donald Trump. On the left, it seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.

You can see authoritarianism entering the left through two avenues. The first is nationalism. Not long ago, most of the American left tended to think transnationally — partly because problems like climate change are global, partly because it’s hard to regulate a global economy nation by nation, partly because progressives used to be psychologically averse to nationalism.

But national sovereignty is not withering away. Left-wing hostility toward European Union-type multilateral organizations is at record highs. Now a lot of progressive economic thinking is nakedly nationalistic. Bernie Sanders in 2015 derided a more open immigration policy as a “Koch brothers proposal.” It’s the old xenophobia — us or them, screw or be screwed. On trade, the left-wing populists sound like Trump.

The second stream fueling economic authoritarianism is identity politics. It used to be that big political divides were defined by economic interests; now, the cultural dog wags the economic tail. Identity politics defines the core political divides. When many progressives talk about economics these days, they take the habits of mind they developed when talking about identity groups and apply them to economic groups.

Translation: David Brooks’s (((identity group))) is fast running out of political wiggle room. When one very small identity group becomes massively overrepresented among the economically dominant, then obviously the economic redistributionism of the Left is going to merge with identity politics. How can it not?

The Left sees the One Percent as the primary problem. The Right sees the demographic change and economic decline of the nation as the primary problem. And if the One Percent are responsible for the the demographic change and economic decline of the nation, well, then both sides have more than a scapegoat, they have successfully identified the responsible parties.

This, of course, is why Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, and Jennifer Rubin are all calling for a third party. But it’s going to be a very, very small one of virtually no appeal to anyone who is of the nationalist Right or the economic Left. There is not much of a market for a party of warmongering globalists whose primary domestic priority is the economic strip-mining of the lower, middle, and upper-middle classes.

The same situation is developing in the UK, as the media-generated “anti-semitism” of the Labour Party is causing the traditional Labour-supporting Jews there to rapidly migrate to the Conservative Party, where their globalist priorities are unlikely to remain popular or influential for long.

A defeated Labour councillor, Adam Langleben, said it was a source of ‘shame’ for the party that Jewish people had felt obliged to vote based on ‘their safety’.

‘Thanks to all those who voted for myself, Humayune and Agnes today. It was the greatest honour of my life to serve West Hendon,’ he tweeted.  ‘We must NEVER have another election like this. No community group should have their vote dictated by their safety. That should shame us @UKLabour.’

Mr Langelben told the Guardian: ‘Every Jewish Labour household we visited, people said, “not this time.” Activists were being told, “this is a racist party, an anti-Semitic party”, doors were slammed in their faces.

It’s not exactly hard to figure out how that’s going to play out over the next decade. And it occurs to me that the so-called White British population now already had their vote dictated by their safety. That’s why they voted for Brexit.

The Last Closet and the reality of evil

If you haven’t watched the latest Voxiversity video yet, you really should. While reading 12 Rules for Life, I noted that Jordan Peterson claims “evil is the desire to cause suffering, where suffering is not necessary.” This demonstrates that he doesn’t know a single goddamn thing about real, material, conscious evil, which has absolutely nothing to do with the desire to cause suffering, but rather, the desire to do as one pleases.

And Jesus Christ is not a myth or a metaphor. He the only way, and the only truth, to systematically combat that very real, material, and conscious evil.

Where is the problem?

Population experts are belatedly beginning to worry about the effects of abortion on various countries:

Scientists have sparked controversy after creating a pin-prick test that can determine the gender of a baby after just eight weeks.

Concerns have been raised the test could trigger a rise in sex-selective abortions, especially in countries such as India and China where families desire boys over girls for cultural reasons.

A recently published government report in India found that the country has 63 million fewer woman then it should because families are choosing to abort their female babies.

The situation is much the same in China, where men outnumber women by 34 million – significantly more than the entire population of Australia.

Experts claim the controversial one-child policy, which lasted from the 1970s until 2015, helped to create the imbalance as families sought to have a son.

It is feared the new pin-prick test could fuel a ‘genocide’ of female babies in India and China as parents are given more time than previously to make a decision on whether to abort their babies.

India’s Government revealed in January that there will be 105 boys for every 100 girls without any human intervention. But previous estimates from 2011 suggest the problem is already worse than that, with 914 girls under the age of six to every 1,000 boys the same age. In China, the UN states there are nearly 116 boys for every 100 girls, however reports claim the ratio is much higher in poor rural areas.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Isn’t worrying about the male-female ratio transphobic, considering that an individual can now be whatever sex it identifies as being? And it’s very identity politicist, to say nothing of culturally appropriative, to interfere with the individual choices of women in other countries to make choices about their own bodies.

The Alt-Right is inevitable because we do not advocate suicide, on either an individual or a group basis.

The nomad moves on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mailvox: speaking of gammas

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

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

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

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

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

Who was on it?

I expect Q will be addressing this soon.

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

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

Mailvox: this is not Alpha Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, in answer to the questions:

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

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

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

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

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