Thomas Sowell lays down his pen

The conservative economist retires his column at 86:

Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.

Most of us did not question what he did. He was president of the United States, and he knew things the rest of us couldn’t know – and that was good enough for us. Fortunately, the Soviets backed down. But could any president today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?

Years of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Goodbye and good luck to all.

Dr. Sowell is a good man and he wrote many a fine opinion column. I enjoyed several of his books and considered him to be among the more thoughtful conservative columnists. His ideas were always worthy of consideration.

25 years of syndicated columns is an amazing achievement and testimony to the man’s intellectual stamina; I didn’t last half that long myself. Congratulations to Dr. Sowell, and I hope he enjoys more than a few years of relaxed retirement.

TIA in audio

On one side of the argument is a collection of godless academics with doctorates from the finest universities in England, France, and the United States. On the other is THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST author Vox Day, armed with nothing more than historical and statistical facts. Day strips away the pseudo-scientific pretentions of New Atheism with his intelligent application of logic, history, military science, political economy, and well-documented research. The arguments of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray are all methodically exposed and discredited as Day provides extensive evidence proving, among other things, that:

  • More than 93 percent of all the wars in human history had no relation to religion
  • The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over professing Jews, Muslims, or atheists, and executed fewer people on an annual basis than the state of Texas
  • Atheists are almost four times more likely to be imprisoned than Christians
  • “Red” state crime is primarily in “blue” counties
  • Sexually abused girls are 55 times more likely to commit suicide than girls raised Catholic

In the twentieth century, atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined. THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST provides the rational thinker with empirical proof that atheism’s claims against religion are unfounded in logic, fact, and science.

Now in audio from Castalia House, TIA clocks in at just under 10 hours and is narrated by Jon Mollison. You can listen to a sample from the audiobook at Audible. You may also wish to note that ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is also available in audiobook format.

Also, in case you might be interested in more Selenoth, THE LAST WITCHKING is free on Amazon today.

Those fine people at Facebook

These are the people who believe they are worthy to define what is real news and what is fake news.

Senior Facebook Employee Arrested For Allegedly Soliciting Unprotected Sex From Underage Girl

Dov Katz, the head of computer vision at Oculus VR, was arrested near Seattle on December 21 for allegedly soliciting sex from an underage girl. According to charging records, Katz allegedly attempted to pay $350 to have unprotected sex with someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl.

Katz, 38, has been charged with attempted commercial sexual abuse of a minor. According to the charging documents, Katz wasn’t actually texting a 15-year-old girl, but an undercover agent from the Tukwila Police Department. Katz, an Israeli citizen living in America, has since been released on $125,000 bail according to the King County jail website.

Apparently we can look forward to a lot more stories about how 15 is the new 21, lollipops are sexy, and pedophiles are people too.

The IQ delta and the Last Man

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man helped me articulate the difference between the smart and the brilliant, or to use the terms that are less easily confused, the VHIQ and the UHIQ.

The Fukuyama text is in blockquotes, my observations are bullet-pointed.

From By Way of an Introduction:

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today’s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

  • Remarkable consensuses are reliably incorrect.
  • Liberal democracy absolutely does not constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution or the final form of human government. 
  • It would not be unreasonable to use “the end of history” to describe a genuine such end point and final form, given the Hegelian-Marxian context. Fukuyama is clearly using History in the progressive intellectual sense, not the prosaic sense. It’s actually a rather clever title in that regard.
  • It’s also a ludicrous and anti-historical idea, albeit one certain to prove seductive to men of influence for precisely the same reason that Keynesian economics and Ricardian trade theory have.

After dealing with the midwit critics who have had trouble dealing with the idea of a History that is not wholly synonymous with history, he plants his flag; an act I suspect he has come to regret.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article’s many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the “struggle for recognition.”

  • Fukuyama clearly declares that he believes in a specific, directional Marxian-style History which will eventually come to a predictable end. 
  • Given the context of the article, Fukuyama is definitely declaring that liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government”.
  • He’s wrong. I don’t know his economic reasoning or his “struggle for recognition” yet, but I know that he is wrong and I know that I will be able to prove it. I can even disprove the first prt to my own satisfaction: given that he is not an economist, his economic argument must be entirely based on 1990s economic orthodoxy, which is already in tatters and was insufficient to support the philosophical case in the first place.

And here is where the tendency towards binary, or at least limited, thinking on the part of the VHIQ betrays itself.

In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefnitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness, and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

  • A prediction about the future obviously revolves around both currently viable alternatives as well as potentially viable alternatives that are not visible today.
  • The deeper and more profound question does not concern the goodness of liberal democracy, but rather the existence of self-destructive internal contradictions in liberal democracy. Systems fail due to their internal contradictions; communism failed because the impossibility of socialist calculation slowed economic growth vis-a-vis capitalism. SJWism always fails due to the impossibility of social justice convergence preventing the converged organization from performing its original function. Liberal democracy – or as it is more properly termed – limited democracy – fails for much the same reason that communism does; it creates perverse incentive systems.
  • No, we cannot assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefnitely.
  • Yes, liberal democracy is not only prey, it is prone to internal contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system. Forget eternity, this is already visible everywhere from California to Switzerland.
  • Yes, these problems these problems are obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles. Not only that, but they are so serious that they will necessarily either lead to the collapse of liberal democracy or the collapse of society as a whole.

Keep in mind that these are my initial thoughts about the book by page xxi of the introduction. The clean room, as I have termed it, is already splattered with mud. Fukuyama is an erudite, thoughtful, intelligent and educated man. And yet, his enthusiasm for his potentially significant idea blinded him to its obvious flaws? This is the distinction between the VHIQ and the UHIQ. Compare this with SJWAL or Cuckservative, both of which are considerably more modest in scope.

How many potential errors can you find in either that even begin to compare with the obvious errors in this bestselling work of vast socio-political influence, which is so riddled with flaws that the author has, apparently, felt the need to blatantly lie about his original thesis?

The Jewish veto is over

The God-Emperor Ascendant team makes it clear that Israel First will not be the Trump administration’s motto:

A senior member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team and a delegation of US Republican and European lawmakers canceled a briefing Thursday with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely over a refusal to allow a Swedish far-right member of the group into the meeting, The Times of Israel has learned.

Becky Norton Dunlop, deputy to the senior adviser on Trump’s transition team for policy and personnel, is in Israel as part of the three-day Jerusalem Leaders Summit, a gathering of conservative parliamentarians from the US and Europe.

As one of the high-level briefings organized for the group, the delegation was due to meet Wednesday morning with Hotovely in the Knesset.

Just hours before the briefing, the group was informed that Kristina Winberg, a member of the European Parliament for the Sweden Democrats, would not be allowed to join.

In protest, the entire group, including Dunlop, decided to boycott the meeting with Hotovely, according to a representative for the group. A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry said the decision to exclude Winberg was made due to her party’s far-right and ultra-nationalist positions.

Boycotting the meeting was the right move. The Trump team should also inform the Israeli foreign ministry that any future attempts to interfere with American foreign policy discussions will meet with future US abstentions from UN Security Council resolutions.

And Israel is certainly not paying sufficient attention to events in Sweden; they should be praying that the Sweden Democrats come to power in the next ten years and do everything possible to ensure that they do. If the Sweden Democrats don’t, the party that will eventually arise in its place will almost certainly make them look cute, cuddly, and tolerant by comparison.

Conservatism is dead

And National Review killed it. Josh Gelernter provides the nail in the coffin with “A Conservative Defense of Transgender Rights“:

Kentucky governor Matt Bevin said last week that he hopes the Kentucky legislature won’t consider a transgender-bathroom bill in the upcoming legislative session; according to Bevin, “the last thing we need is more government rules.” He’s absolutely right, and I think it’s worth offering a conservative defense of transgender rights — which ought to be a conservative issue.

On the American political spectrum, conservatism is the mind-your-own-business ideology. I know smoking is unhealthy, but I enjoy smoking, and my health is none of your business. I know motorcycles can be dangerous, but I like the wind in my hair; whether or not I wear a helmet is none of your business. I realize that fireworks can blow up before they’re supposed to, but they’re fun and my fingers are none of your business. Don’t tell me what sort of car to drive, or what kind of light bulb I can buy, or what kind of milk I can drink, or how to raise my kids.

There’s a reason, when push comes to shove, most libertarians vote Republican. The Republican party is — more often than not, and should invariably be — the party of individual liberty. So conservatives have to ask, is it a good idea to empower the government to start lifting up people’s skirts?

The response, from many conservatives, is that it’s not a question of interfering with personal freedom — the freedom to live one’s own life however he’d like — but of preserving personal freedom — that is, the freedom to go to the bathroom among only people of the same biological sex. Allowing mixed-biological-sex bathrooms risks making adults uncomfortable, and risks opening the door to child predators, or so the argument goes. I’m afraid neither of those positions strikes me as well thought-out. Certainly not from a conservative point of view.

Well, if something doesn’t strike JOSH GELERNTER – THE Josh Gelernter of NATIONAL REVIEW – as “well thought-out”, then obviously it is wrong!

After all, what is conservatism if not doing whatever one wants at any time, without the slightest possible concern for the possible consequences to oneself or anyone else?

Conservatism is dead. Conservatism has conserved nothing, not even itself. If you want to live, if you want America to be reborn, if you want Western Civilization to survive, you have no choice but to support the Alt-Right.

The best response was this comment:

YIH says:    
December 26, 2016 at 7:42 am GMT
“A Conservative Defense of Transgender Rights”

https://infogalactic.com/info/Cuckservative

The IQ delta

It has been observed that the exceptionally intelligent think differently than those with conventional minds, even those which most people would consider to be highly intelligent. The difference is qualitative, not merely quantitative, in nature, and is akin to the difference between the genuinely mathematical mind and the non-mathematical mind. It is, to use one acquaintance’s example, the difference between the minds that can ascend the mountain by the winding path or by climbing straight up, and the mind that takes a helicopter ride directly to the peak.

I have been asked on more than a few occasions to explain what the qualitative differences are and to provide some perspective on how the different thought processes work. Now, obviously I am somewhat handicapped in explaining this because I have never not thought the way that I do now, but I do have the advantage of observing considerably more conventional thinkers than any conventional thinker, no matter how intelligent, has been able to observe non-conventional thinkers. However, upon beginning to read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, I believe I may finally able to articulate a few of these differences.

There are a few observations I have made over the years that are of limited utility in differentiating between what I think of as “very smart” vs “brilliant”. The terms themselves are meaningless and entirely subjective here, to put it in terms the quantitatively minded can accept, let’s call them VHIQ vs UHIQ for the time being, with the understanding that what applies to the VHIQ also applies to midwits and average minds, whereas what applies to UHIQ does not.

And FFS, if you’re reading this and think something might apply to you, please understand that is not a signal to decide that you are an unconventional thinker or exceptionally intelligent and share that fascinating observation with everyone. That very reaction is a pretty reliable indicator that you’re not. If you can’t fathom that, go ask a very tall person how excited he was this morning about discovering that he was tall.

Keep in mind that these are tendencies, not iron-clad laws. If they don’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it. On average, the responses will fall into six categories:

  1. Huh?
  2. Hmm.
  3. Vox just wants to talk about how smart he is again.
  4. Vox is right/wrong because [x].
  5. OT: Something off-topic because IMPORTANT. Link goes to the Drudge Report, which no one reads.
  6. Hey, I can use this as an excuse to talk about ME!

Regardless:

  • VHIQ inclines towards binary either/or thinking and taking sides. UHIQ inclines towards probabilistic thinking and balancing between contradictory possibilities.
  • VHIQ seeks understanding towards application or justification, UHIQ seeks understanding towards holistic understanding.
  • VHIQ refines the original thought of others, UHIQ synthesizes multiple original thoughts.
  • VHIQ rationalizes logical conclusions, UHIQ accepts logical conclusions. This is ironic because VHIQ considers itself to be highly logical, UHIQ considers itself to be investigative.
  • VHIQ recognizes the truths in the works of the great thinkers of the past and applies them. UHIQ recognizes the flaws in the thinking of the great thinkers of the past and explores them.
  • VHIQ usually spots logical flaws in an argument. UHIQ usually senses them.
  • VHIQ enjoys pedantry. UHIQ hates it. Both are capable of utilizing it at will.
  • VHIQ is uncomfortable with chaos and seeks to impose order on it, even if none exists. UHIQ is comfortable with chaos and seeks to recognize patterns in it.
  • VHIQ is spergey and egocentric. UHIQ is holistic and solipsistic.
  • VHIQ will die on a conceptual hill. UHIQ surrenders at the first reasonable show of force.
  • VHIQ attempts to rationalize its errors. UHIQ sees no point in hesitating to admit them.
  • VHIQ seeks to prove the correctness of its case. UHIQ doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the jury.
  • VHIQ believes in the unique power of SCIENCE. UHIQ sees science as a conceptual framework of limited utility.
  • VHIQ seeks to rank and order things. UHIQ seeks to recognize and articulate concepts.
  • VHIQ is competitive. UHIQ doesn’t keep score.
  • VHIQ asks “how can this be used?” UHIQ asks “what does this mean?”

This obviously doesn’t explain how a UHIQ thinker thinks per se, but it might provide some perspective concerning the qualitative differences between conventional high IQ thinkers and unconventional high IQ thinkers previously observed by others. For example, when I read something, even something about which I am inherently dubious, I do so in what is essentially an intellectual clean room. I am not merely open to being persuaded, I am, in the moment, fully believing whatever the author is saying.

However, upon encountering an obvious falsehood, non sequitur, bait-and-switch, or erroneous leap of logic, the clean room is muddied. The more mud that accumulates, and the more rapidly it is accumulated, the more certain that I am of the text containing errors. I don’t know exactly what they are yet, because I’m not reading critically, and I don’t retain more than a general sense of where on the page the mud is, but I know where to go and look for it, and perhaps more importantly, I know with almost 100 percent certainty that I will find something there. Every now and then I pick up a false reading, but that doesn’t happen more than 2-3 times per year.

I’ll demonstrate this in action in a longer post about Fukuyama’s book, specifically, the introduction, in a few hours. In the meantime:

The topics of genius and degeneration are only special cases of the more general problem involved in the evaluation of human capacities, namely the quantitative versus qualitative. There are those who insist that all differences are qualitative, and those who with equal conviction maintain that they are exclusively quantitative. The true answer is that they are both. General intelligence, for example, is undoubtedly quantitative in the sense that it consists of varying amounts of the same basic stuff (e.g., mental energy) which can be expressed by continuous numerical measures like intelligence Quotients or Mental-Age scores, and these are as real as any physical measurements are. But it is equally certain that our description of the difference between a genius and an average person by a statement to the effect that he has an IQ greater by this or that amount, does not describe the difference between them as completely or in the same way as when we say that a mile is much longer than an inch. The genius (as regards intellectual ability) not only has an IQ of say 50 points more than the average person, but in virtue of this difference acquires seemingly new aspects (potentialities) or characteristics. These seemingly new aspects or characteristics, in their totality, are what go to make up the “qualitative” difference between them [9, p. 134].

Wechsler is saying quite plainly that those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human being.

RIP George Michael

It is being reported that George Michael died peacefully at home today. He was 53.


The star, who launched his career with Wham in the 1980s and later continued his success as a solo performer, is said to have “passed away peacefully at home”.


Thames Valley Police said South Central Ambulance Service attended a property in Goring in Oxfordshire at 13:42 GMT.


Police say there were no suspicious circumstances.

An introduction to Selenoth

In case you’re wondering what all the discussion of the various Selenoth-related books is about, or if some of the superlatives being cast about could be even remotely justified, you can now dip your toe into the epic fantasy waters at neither risk nor cost to yourself, as A MAGIC BROKEN is free on Kindle today.

The ebook is a novella in which is related the brief intersection of two perspective characters from A THRONE OF BONES and A SEA OF SKULLS prior to the events of either book. I think those who are fans of the Arts of Dark and Light series would agree that it is a reasonably fair warning of what the reader can expect from immersion into what is now, according to Amazon’s most recent Kindle Normalized Page Count, a cumulative 3,053 pages of epic high fantasy.

Anyhow, if you haven’t read it yet, I’d encourage you to download it and check it out. Even if fantasy isn’t really your thing, it’s more than a bit of a spy thriller as well.