The diminishing appeal of Harry Potter

I never, ever, thought the Harry Potter books were destined to become classics. This commenter at Castalia House gets it:

I started reading Harry Potter in 2004. I devoured the 5 books in less than 6 months, and followed the release of the last two books. Harry Potter was the fever of my teenage years. What I think made me like HP was not exactly the characters themselves, but the universe created by JKR. I liked to imagine myself inside that universe, being a witch like Harry and studying at Hogwarts.

Of course, as a teenager, I knew very little about other fantasy works and literary classics, so back then I really believed that Harry Potter was a genius story and JKR was the best writer in the world. Today I recognize that this is far from being true. JKR’s characters are mostly shallow, static and stereotyped. Voldemort is part of the villain trope I least like, an irremediable psychopath who was born evil and died evil, remaining eternally static, and without any trace of humor. There are villains who are irremediable but at least they have a vein of great humor, like Joker. Voldemort is nothing like that.

In addition, I think JKR made some bad decisions and wasted a lot of interesting characters on the books. I’ve always found it a shame she’d never delved into such treacherous characters as Wormtail / Peter and for example. Traitorous characters can make great stories, but instead of going into a story of redemption, she decides to put him in the shadows of the story with a death so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the film’s adaptation. Game of Thrones does a much better job with Theon Greyjoy for example, giving him more prominence and a arc of his own.

Talking about her bad decisions… I never liked JKR’s decision to make Ginny be Mrs. Potter. In a universe where we have unique and fantastic female characters like Luna and Hermione, why did JKR make Ginny the Mrs. Potter? The romance between Harry and Ginny was poorly written in the books, and extremely cringeworthy to watch in theaters. They make the most insipid and generic pair of literature, IMO. Luna Lovegood would was the best choice for Harry’s romantic pair, imo. Or if Harry finished the story with no one, it would not be bad either. I just think Ginny / Harry was hideous.

I’m not saying that the HP series is horrible and unimportant. Quite the contrary, it was part of my adolescence and in a way, it is nostalgic. The fact is… the Harry Potter books lose more and more appeal to me every time I revisit them, and today, I do not feel like reading them any more.

Rowling’s one skill was creating vivid and compelling characters. But that’s not enough to create a classic capable of withstanding the erosion of time.

A cause that unites

I think most of the human race is solidly behind the idea of Ricky Gervais’s assisted suicide:

Comedian Ricky Gervais, 57, says he in favour of assisted suicide as he launches new Netflix series about death and grief. He has notoriously joked about the most controversial of subjects – but Ricky Gervais is deadly serious about how he sees his own life ending. Speaking exclusively to Event magazine today, the creator of The Office and Extras reveals: ‘I am in favour of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.

‘I know that I’d want it. I hope when I’m ready to go you can just go to Boots and get something. I hope we get more advanced and more liberal, that there’s not all this hate for people who want to do it, all this going, ‘How dare you?’ That’s madness.’

His comments come ahead of After Life, his upcoming Netflix series about death and grief, which is said to be as black as comedy can be. Gervais, 57, reveals his latest TV character, a depressed journalist who dabbles with hard drugs and thoughts of suicide after his wife’s death from cancer, is his darkest by far and made him face up to his own mortality.

There are probably a lot of people who would pay rather well for the privilege of assisting Mr. Gervais. Perhaps he could approach it as a charity auction.

Failure is no hindrance

Not when you’re able to produce the answer “THE US MUST INVADE [Fill-in-the-blank]” on cue whenever called upon by the Fake News. Tucker Carlson shares a compelling selection from his recent book about two neocon mediocrities who keep being called upon for their opinions on military matters despite their collective track record of complete failure:

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in.

Meanwhile, brilliant military historians and strategists like Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind are being ignored, to the cost of many thousands of lives.

Obvious hoax is hoax

To precisely no one’s surprise, the purported attack by MAGA-chanting white men on an attention-seeking black fame whore has been determined to be a hoax by the police:

On Saturday night, Chicago Police confirmed to PJ Media that the testimonies of two black men arrested in the case of Empire star Jussie Smollett have flipped the story. Rather than considering Smollett the victim of an attack, it appears that police may now see him as the perpetrator of a hoax.

“We can confirm that the information received from the individuals questioned by police earlier in the Empire case has in fact shifted the trajectory of the investigation,” Chicago Police chief communications officer Anthony Guglielmi told PJ Media. “We’ve reached out to the Empire cast member’s [sic] attorney to request a follow-up interview.”

Two law enforcement sources confirmed to CNN that police are considering the Jussie Smollett case a hoax. Police now think the two men they arrested last week — Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo and his brother Abimbola “Abel” Osundairo — were paid by Smollett to attack him. Chicago Police believe the Empire star orchestrated the assault.

All of these sorts of attacks are always hoaxes. Because in a society that rewards victimhood, the victims manufacture themselves. And in a society dominated by Fake News, the news is reliably false.

UPDATE: The details are now being reported. And now we know the going rate for crisis actors. The imported ones, anyhow.

Jussie Smollett paid two brothers to stage an attack against him, directed them to buy items used in the alleged assault and actually rehearsed it with them, sources say.

Sources say at least one of the brothers bought the rope used in the incident at Smollett’s request. The sources also say the “Empire” actor paid for the rope, which was purchased at the Crafty Beaver Hardware Store in the Ravenswood neighborhood the weekend of Jan. 25.

The brothers, who were questioned by police this week before being released, were paid $3,500 before leaving for Nigeria and were promised an additional $500 upon their return. They left for Nigeria later in the day on Jan. 29, after the attack.

Cognitive catastrophe

A new book confirms and explains the cognitive collapse of the West:

Today we can confirm that hereditary intelligence has been declining. Dutton and Woodley summarize the evidence, which includes deterioration in simple reaction times, color discrimination, the use of “difficult” words, working memory, special perception, child developmental schedules and—most critically—frequency of macro-innovations. In 2017, an Icelandic study found the first direct genetic evidence that a set of alleles predictive of g has been declining in frequency in that country’s population. More such studies can be expected in the years ahead.

According to a 2015 meta-analysis of studies conducted since 1927, IQ in the USA and the UK appears to be declining at a rate of 0.39 points per decade. Declines are also reported in Russia and a number of non-Western countries.

The authors emphasize five reasons (besides improved public health) why this is happening: 1) naturally gifted people have a tendency to trade mating and parenting opportunities for the opportunity to develop their abilities, e. g., through higher education; 2) being forward-thinking, such people are likelier to use contraception; 3) the modern welfare state taxes the more successful in order to support single mothers, who can often increase their benefits by having more children; 4) the modern movement for sexual “equality” has encouraged the brightest women to pursue careers and postpone marriage, often until it is too late; 5) finally, and most unforgivably, Western elites are now deliberately sponsoring the colonization of our nations by vast numbers of low-IQ persons from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Declining general intelligence has been masked during the Twentieth Century by the so-called Flynn effect, an improvement in specialized mental skills independent of g. This may be one factor which made possible the continued technological progress of the twentieth century. But there is good evidence that the Flynn effect has now done about all it can do, and lower genotypic intelligence will increasingly make itself felt.

I calculated this several years ago in Cuckservative. The affects of our cognitively-challenged societies are already beginning to make themselves felt. The Age of Progress is over.

Mutilating the people

The pro-globalist government is responsible for the worst anti-public violence in France since 1871:

In summary, 20 have lost eyes, five hands have been partially or entirely torn off, one person lost their hearing as a result of a TNT-stuffed GLI F4 stun grenade.

“I have repeatedly seen injuries consistent with those suffered in serious traffic accidents, or after falls from a great height,” neurosurgeon Laurent Thines told L’Express newspaper this week.

These are real wounds of war. And they are happening in France, on the streets.

While the May 1968 student and worker protests that upturned French history claimed four lives directly, Thines believes the overall scope, length and intensity of violence was much more contained than the current chaos. If so, France is likely witnessing the worst non-wartime bloodshed since the Paris Commune massacre of 1871.

The evil Macron government is at war with the people of France. So far, the people have been astonishingly restrained in light of the violence being utilized against them. One wonders how much longer that will last.

In full retreat

The defenders of the Neo-Darwinian hypothesis of evolution through natural selection and a whole host of things that have nothing to do with natural selection are frantically fighting a rhetorical withdrawal as they attempt to deal with the problem of the average rate of mutational fixations over time.

Torin McCabe: Vox first you said you could use math equation using fixation rates to disprove evolution since there is not enough time.  People called BS saying you could not use those rates. Next you say that we should be able to see differences in historic DNA and yes of course scientists are looking into that but again you are jumping gun if you assume that the rate of change is uniform across time.  For example 80{f03b982df00939a0603520e349290ee9e722cb707fe7cb6b379ee8d64c20e193} of the change could have occurred in 20{f03b982df00939a0603520e349290ee9e722cb707fe7cb6b379ee8d64c20e193} of the time leaving long periods of relative stability.  So regretfully your case cannot just be proved by showing how human DNA was relatively static for 100,000 years of a 12 million year period.  It will look very strange if we find DNA that narrows all the change to a very short period of time; and then perhaps external influence could then be an interesting hypothesis.

Vox: We can and it increasingly looks like we will. The defenders of the Neo-Darwinian hypothesis are losing the scientific battle, losing badly, and you know it because you’re attempting to retreat to a position of “well, it could have all happened super fast in the one area that we can’t examine yet.”  And even that retreat fails to account for the fact that we should be seeing more and faster fixated mutations among the human race further separating us from the CHLCA because a) beneficial mutations fixate faster among growing populations and b) the environmental changes have been greater over the last 450 years than at any time previous, including catastrophes and Ice Ages.

The Neo-Darwinian hypothesis has not been conclusively falsified, not yet, but the probability that it will be is rapidly increasing with advancements in genetic science. And with every retreat to “yeah, but I can imagine that this thing we haven’t ever observed is still theoretically possible”, more and more people are rhetorically convinced that the Darwinian emperor has no clothes.

It doesn’t help when you tell ridiculous lies like: “again you are jumping gun if you assume that the rate of change is uniform across time”. I have never, ever assumed any such thing nor can you pretend that I have. You are erroneously conflating an AVERAGE rate over time with a UNIFORM rate over time. And the more you engage in dishonest definitional changes like that, the less credible your criticism is.

But I am glad you finally admit that this is pointing to some very intriguing possibilities. If all the DNA changes occurred in a time too short for the various mechanisms currently proposed, as increasingly appears to be the case, then there must be some other mechanism at work. And isn’t that much more interesting to consider than simply trying to find a way to defend an outmoded and erroneous hypothesis?

Smock Man: It is about observed vs theoretical. Torin, Vox already agreed, as do I, that your theoretical case is possible. What Vox is saying is that if every time we observe the rate of change, and it contradicts the theory, we should begin to be skeptical. The observations we see dont make the theoretical case impossible. But you need to revise your arguments if they disagree with observation. And we are seeing that, which is a good thing.

Torin McCabe: Are you one of the “dread ilk” the fabled smart people who follow Vox?  So far I am less than impressed with most of those I have talked with

Smock Man: No, I am not. I didn’t read vox until 2015.

Thomas Saint:  It does not have to be uniform. But the existence of continuous change itself starts to come into question if it is absent in recorded instances. It’s a matter of probability. The longer the period extant of no observable genetic changes, either addition or subtraction, the higher the average rate of change must be within the unmeasured time-frame. Evolution is starting to look like a theory that ignores probability, when the whole theory is predicated on probability.

Evolution seems a nonsense if it magically doesn’t apply to a 450 year period during which populations have exploded and environments have changed to unprecedented scale. Evolution is based on ‘change’ as well as ‘time’. Remove change, and time actually becomes irrelevant. 450 years is still a large number of human generations. There must be evidence of replacement of genetic base-pairs. Vox has established a feasible number.

Evolutionists basically have to now argue that environmental change basically has to be apocalyptic to get a single replacement of a gene pair, or that humans and in fact all species have our final form. Is that what evolutionists are arguing? This theory is really starting to ridiculous isn’t it.

Torin McCabe: Yes it is a matter of probability.  Can you do some math for me: what percentage is 450 of 12 million years?  The “magic”, “unprecedented”, “apocalyptic”, and “ridiculous” slurs are not arguments.  450 years is a good start but based on a real understanding of probability much more data is needed to explain 12 million years.  There is no need for argument, get some good coverage and the answer is there.  Stop here dude, you are making a fool of yourself

Vox: No, he’s not. But you are not merely making a fool of yourself, you are being obnoxious and are very close to getting banned. First, your appeal to big numbers biologists don’t understand is irrelevant. Second, according to the current understanding of the theory, the 450 years should be seeing a higher-than-average rate of fixated mutations, not a lower-than-average rate. Third, the relevant number is 9 million years, not 12 million. And fourth, the sample years being 0.00005 of the total makes them five times more statistically relevant than the 0.00001 samples that are used to correctly predict U.S. presidential elections.

Isn’t it informative how rhetorical, nasty, and completely unscientific they get the more you press them on the actual facts and figures that are necessarily involved. At this point, we can’t even reasonably call evolution by natural selection a “theory” anymore, as it is more accurately described as a “low-probability hypothesis” that will almost certainly be entirely falsified within our lifetimes.

UPDATE: After Torin McCabe demanded “a retraction and an apology” I banned him from the channel. He apparently believes as long as you say “if”, then it’s fine to say anything you want when you describe someone else’s actions. It is not and that is why he is not welcome to take part in the Darkstream discourse anymore.

“Pretty good read”

Humanity’s Greatest Thinker addresses Jordanetics, or as he calls it, “Dianetics” and describes it as a “pretty good read”.

Interviewer: Well, it’s hilarious you you kind of get, your celebrity gets co-opted from people on all sorts of parts of the political spectrum, and extremes of the political spectrum, doesn’t it.

Jordan Peterson: Well, I think there’s some of that. I don’t know it’s co-opted too much on the radical left, let’s say, although I certainly face the majority of my opposition from the radical left but the radical right types are not very fond of me either. There was a new book written called Dianetics by a rather reprehensible individual named Vox Day and if you want to find out what the ethno nationalists think about me that’s a pretty good read. I wouldn’t call it precisely complementary.

Jordanetics is a pretty good read and/or listen. It’s also a pretty thorough demonstration that Jordan Peterson is considerably worse than reprehensible. He’s downright evil and he is preaching an extremely evil and destructive philosophy.

“Total capitulation”

Ann Coulter is beyond furious with President Trump:

Ann Coulter is taking her criticism of President Trump to the next level following his national emergency declaration, with the conservative commentator declaring Friday, “the country is over.”

Coulter hammered Trump in a Friday interview with KABC after he announced he would sign Congress’ funding deal and declare a national emergency. “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot,” she said, per Mediaite. She also fumed that Trump is just “fooling the rubes” with this national emergency declaration.

The root of Coulter’s criticism isn’t that Trump is bypassing Congress, as she argued that Trump never needed Congress to build the wall at all. Instead, she suggested the president is actually “hoping” the national emergency declaration will just be blocked by the courts “because for some reason, he really doesn’t want to build the wall.”

On Twitter, Coulter said that responsibility for the border wall deal, which the president has said he is unhappy with, is “100{f03b982df00939a0603520e349290ee9e722cb707fe7cb6b379ee8d64c20e193} his,” and she responded to Trump saying in his press conference that he barely knows Coulter by writing, “THANK YOU, Mr. President for admitting that your total capitulation on campaign promises has nothing to do with me.”

Maybe he has finally cucked and capitulated. Maybe not. As always with the God-Emperor, wait two days before reaching any conclusions.

It strikes me as more than a little odd that despite the report on Breitbart, no one in the media or in either party establishment is celebrating the President’s signing of the funding deal. This tends to lead me to conclude that it is at least possible that he is simply leading them on and that he will not sign it in the end.

National emergency

Immigration has been a national emergency since 1965, but better late than never. The God-Emperor declares a national emergency.

President @realDonaldTrump signs the Declaration for a National Emergency to address the national security and humanitarian crisis at the Southern Border.

Now here is hoping that he comes to his senses and flat-out refuses to sign the bait-and-switch law that the Congress has presented him.

NumbersUSA@NumbersUSA
The legislative text sent to Pres. Trump and he agreed to sign did not have the language rewarding child trafficking, granting immunity to large {f03b982df00939a0603520e349290ee9e722cb707fe7cb6b379ee8d64c20e193} of illegal aliens, and increasing H-2Bs. That was added on later and then rammed through the Senate. Bait and Switch!