Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: Surviving Helene

This is an email from a reader. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, so I’m presenting it here unedited except for the removal of a few sections since it was pretty long.

This is an attempt to capture my thoughts and first hand experiences over the last week having gone through hurricane Helene and the subsequent recovery effort. My goal is to get this all down while its fresh so i will not forget all the lessons learned 6 months from now. I will reference “the police” at various points. Unless otherwise stated, you can assume these are Sheriff’s Deputies from my local church community who I personally know and trust. This is categorized into topics and roughly follows the timeline as it developed.

My family and I live in Henderson County, NC. You have probably seen Henderson Co. in the news over the last week, from my home its only about 8 miles to what used to be Bat Cave and Chimney Rock, and little farther down the roads was the village of Lake Lure.

A quick summary of what happened: from Tuesday night (24 Sep) to Thursday night, the greater Asheville area received 20 inches of rainfall. Late Thursday night is when we saw the first of the hurricane weather and it dropped another 12 inches of rain over the next 8 hours. All told, Henderson County saw nearly 3 feet of rain in about a 72 hour period. This obviously contributed to historic levels of flooding, but it also prevented the trees from being able to withstand the hurricane force winds. Trees fell everywhere. every single yard that had trees before the storm had at least some of them blown over by Friday morning. This led to the largest impact of the whole experience: catastrophic damage to the power grid. Between flooding and mud slides, nearly all power substations were damaged or completely destroyed. the first 3 days of recovery was completely devoted to fixing or rebuilding all of these substations. People started voicing frustration because for a while you didnt see power crews working on the roads as they were forced to start with all the damaged substations. Once the substations were back online, the power company and tree crews shifted to clearing the lines. A “good” road would only have a tree rip down the power lines on 1 out of every 5 sections of line between poles. the higher up a mountain you went, the more that ratio would inverse with the narrow roads and thick mountain vegetation. Duke energy would estimate they had thousands of down lines and hundreds of broken poles in Henson County alone. this total failure of the power grid let to an immediate “shortage” of supplies, specifically food, water, and gasoline, because literally no one anywhere had power to run their store or gas station.

Preparedness

I, like most people in my area, did not prepare specifically for this event ahead of time. The volume of rain took everyone by surprise. I remember being at Ingles early Thursday morning and grabbing an extra loaf of bread on a whim because it seemed like a good idea. that’s all. sadly, this was more forethought than a lot of people in our area. What carried us through was our general level of preparedness. We have food for 4-6 months and several weeks worth of drinking water. I cant express the amount of peace i felt knowing we were never in desperate straight and had the means to provide for and defend ourselves. Winning the psychological battle is a real thing and should not be underestimated. The biggest hole we found in our preps was gray water. our only means of flushing the toilet was our 50 gallon rain barrel and that was getting very low by the end of day two. the only other option was a creek about 400 yards down a steep hill behind our house that would have been a tremendous amount of time and energy cost in collection… Another interesting note is the loss of faith in our Berkey filter for this specific event. It was no fault of the Berkey, but every single water supply, be it creek, stream, river, or pond flooded to historic levels and was left cluttered with all manner of God knows what from who knows where. Unless i was able to collect it coming directly out of a spring (i know people who have springs on their property and were just fine drinking from it), i would have used a nature water source only as a last resort. Lifting weights paid off big time. I lift 3 days a week and doing a 5×5 squats and deadlifts had me ready to go when it came to 3 days of moving trees.

First 3 Days

We spend the wee hours of Friday morning in our basement to protects us from the falling trees. I was able to go outside and look around in the steady but windless rain by about noon. It was obvious there would be significant clean up based on all the down trees around us. walking out to the road I could see several snapped and hanging power poles and the road was impassible in both directions from huge oak trees. Cell service was still available to us until Friday evening so i was able to text pictures to family and even spoke to out of area family on the phone to let then know we were ok. By Friday evening cell service started going in and out. we would later find out that some towers have generators damaged or destroyed from mud slides and other worked for a while until they ran out of fuel. The latter would remain down for the next several days until crews could cut their way to them with more fuel. This significantly limited our ability to communicate until people were able to identify places where service was usable, and were able to actually get there. In these first 3 days it was more or less you and your neighbors just trying to cut everyone out. first cars and driveways had to be cleared, then your road, then the main road would get you back into town. If a road was lined with trees would would average a significantly sized down tree about once every couple hundred yards. Its about a mile from our house back to the main road and I would bet more than 20 trees had to be cut and moved to clear a path big enough for a car to get through. Luckily there is lots of farming equipment around here so you could cut it into fairly large pieces and someone would push it with a backhoe into the ditch or at least out of the middle of the road. On Saturday afternoon one of our deputy friends that lives nearby stopped to check on us. That’s when we got the first news that Bat Cave and Chimney Rocks were unknown as all the bridges washed out as well as the scope of the down trees. The police were critical in these first few days with spreading the word on what roads were passible and what areas had to be avoided. One friend is a long time dispatcher and said the previous record was a bad storm years ago and the call tracker got to 87 active reports in the stack. by Saturday afternoon it topped 900. It certainly would have been higher if cell services wasn’t down for most people. It was also Saturday night that all the issues with panicked and desperate people started popping up. there were two gas stations in the whole southern half of the county who had their pumps running on a generator. starting Saturday morning these stations were grid locked by people who were caught transiting through Hendersonville, plus anyone else who didn’t top off their tank before the storm. hundreds of cars were waiting at pumps around the clock. I was finally able to gas up Tuesday morning at 1am. There were multiple fights and at a rest stop on I-26 some lunatic even climbed up on a tanker truck and tried to force the driver at gun point to give him fuel. The police said it was insane how many people were out driving around on Saturday looking for food because they only procure food one day at a time. The looting was limited to closed gas stations and convivence stores but generator theft was a big problem. I didn’t get much sleep those first 3 nights as we had to keep the windows open to try and fight the now growing mold in the basement. Monday was a big mile stone for my family, we were able to make it over to the other side of town to link up with extended family. they lived right outside town and never lost natural gas and just had their municipal water restored earlier on Sunday. I moved my wife and kids in with them for the rest of the week and i would spend the night at our house with the animals and all our long term preps.

Logistics Considerations

Tuesday marked the shift out of immediate survival mode and into coordinated recovery mode. Enough men from our church had cut them self out that we were able to organize chainsaw crews to start helping church members, mainly the elderly. By this point you had a decent idea of how to could get from here to there, but you only knew for sure one route that was clear. As Duke Energy and all the other out of state (and even out of country) power crews started restoring lines, previously passible roads would be found closed so crews could cut trees and fix lines. this would lead to a game of find your way around, and often the first 2 or 3 alternate routes you knew would be blocked and unusable as well. A trip that would normally take 15 minutes might take 30 minutes or 2.5 hours. This lead to EDC on steroids. if you left the house you had a gun with spare mags, flashlight, headlamp, water, food, chainsaw + tools, cash, and extra water to give out.

Community

Even as i write this Monday morning October 7th, its still mostly a community driven recovery effort. neighbors helped each other in the beginning, then we were able to start organizing and effectively getting around to places on Tuesday. I didn’t see a FEMA person until Thursday morning, and all they have done is make sure all the previously homeless drug addicts and illegals have what they need at the large shelters. There is no way i would send a woman or child to any of the temporary shelters run by FEMA or the Red Cross. It was incredible to see how man good people there are around us. everyone was helpful and gracious. a specific thing i noted was how little power multiple homes really need to keep afloat in something like this. our extended family’s neighbor had a natural gas whole-home generator that operated the entire time. they ran extension cords to the 3 houses in the immediate vicinity so everyone in that little nook of homes had a charging station inside their house, could run their deep freezer, and have a box fan. it was a huge morale boost to say the least.

Operational Logistics

The recover effort leverages the network of churches, and specifically the pastors of those churches. out of area pastors would coordinate supply drop offs with our pastor and get it packed and shipped up to our church. (by this point I-26 was open heading south into SC and that allowed trucks and trailers to get stuff in to us). We converted our fellowship hall into a receiving area and small aid station. We worked about 10 hours a day unloading trucks and sorting supplies. lesson learned here, timely supplies are nice but we would have taken them several hours later if it was a little more organized. A lot of small items, like toothpaste or bottles of water, would come in large palatized produce box but would be completely loose inside it. it would take a lot of time to dig them all out while you were trying to empty a truck and get it out of the way for the next truck. The best way to go about it would be to throw everything in boxes that can be carried by a single person. Supplies were then loaded onto pickup trucks (using trailers was a hard no-go as the more remote roads were barely passible and there would be no room to maneuver them) and taken deeper into the worse hit areas where they would be left with a local church as a forward staging area. From there either pickups or ATVs would take out for distribution to work crews or families still in the area. Local men would form into unofficially official chainsaw teams or search and rescue teams and would get a police escort into and out of the worst areas. This leads into the final topic.

Social Media / Cellphone Culture

90% of all the reports of “police kept me out and refused to let me save people!!!” are all nonsense and are actually examples of police exercising good judgment. Right now DoT contractors are trying to reconstruct roads so large recovery teams can get into places like Chimney Rock but have to constantly avoid killing GoPro Bros on 4 wheelers and dirt bikes. One equipment operator at church yesterday said they had to double back to re-repair a stretch of road that was rutted out and left unusable by a group on ATVs, no one knows who they were. There are hundreds of local, able bodied men that know the lay of the land and exactly who they are looking for. Do not bring your lifted jeep to NC to try and save people because TikTok said you should. Its really hard to believe how much disaster rubber necking is happening out there right now.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: A Bad Case Against Free Trade

I was asked to consider Paul Craig Roberts’s case against free trade, which he describes as follows:

In 2004 NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and I opened a New Year with a jointly authored column in the New York Times. We raised the offshoring issue. American manufacturing jobs and the tech jobs of American professionals were being sent to Asia. We posed the question that if jobs offshoring was free trade, as economists claimed, was free trade any longer in America’s interest? My position was that jobs offshoring is a contradiction of free trade–more later–and Schumer was still in his idealistic period when he was concerned about the displacement of American labor by foreign labor in the production of goods and services that Americans consumed.

Our article caused a firestorm. The Brookings Institution in Washington called a conference and asked us to come and defend our position. C-Span broadcast the conference live and rebroadcast it a number of times. Schumer and I carried the day.

Delighted with the publicity, Schumer suggested a follow-up article. The NY Times was eager. We began a draft, and then it went cold. My explanation is that Wall Street, which was committed to jobs offshoring, got to Schumer and explained campaign contributions to him.

I continued on. Conservatives, free market economists, and libertarians, who are indoctrinated with free trade, but who do not comprehend the theory, called me a heretic. Nevertheless, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were intrigued that the “most ardent” of the “Reagan policymakers” had taken a position against the policy that Wall Street was imposing on the country.

The Wall Street Journal assigned Timothy Aeppel to arrange a series of debates to be published in the Wall Street Journal between me and Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. The question was: Is jobs offshoring really free trade?

Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theory of free trade rests on the principle of comparative advantage. What this means is that a country’s capital remains employed at home and is employed in areas in which the capital is best used. If all countries do this, there are gains from trade, and all countries will be better off than if they are self-sufficient. I have wondered if the free trade theory was used as a stratagem to repeal the British Corn Laws and reduce the income and power of the landed aristocracy.

Both Smith and Ricardo made it completely clear that if a country’s capital left the country, it was pursuing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage, and free trade theory is vitiated. This is the point I made. Without comparative advantage, there is no case for free trade.

This is trivial and irrelevant Econ 103-level criticism of free trade. No one has ever denied it, and it permits the discussion to be transformed from “is free trade good for the nation” to “is the current situation one in which absolute advantage or comparative advantage applies”.

Political matters are intrinsically rhetorical, so building a circumstantial case on what most people will see as a minor technical point is never going to be very convincing. It’s no surprise that despite the fact that he and Schumer “carried the day”, they ended up completely losing the political battle.

The point is not that “free trade is sometimes bad”, the point is that free trade is bad even in the case of comparative advantage that supposedly provides for mutual benefit, but destroys both nations in the process.

And yes, the free trade theory was never more than an excuse to repeal the Corn Laws. Ricardo was an an investor and politician, not an economist, and the arguments he presented were dishonest, incomplete, and wrong, which is why Joseph Schumpeter labled the structure of Ricardo’s arguments “the Ricardian vice”.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Evolutionary Rhetoric

An eminent authority on mathematics, namely, Frank J. Tipler, recommends that we keep things a bit more simple and rhetorical for the innumerate enthusiasts of evolution by natural selection:

You are of course quite correct that biologists do not understand the mathematical criticisms of evolution by natural selection. Since they are incapable of being reached by dialectic, perhaps rhetoric would be more effective.

One rhetorical technique is Argument From Authority.

In your July 13, 2024 “Evolutionists are Retarded,” you refer to the mathematical arguments given in the 1966 conference by “a professor of electrical engineering from MIT and a French mathematician.” In one of your earlier posts on this subject, you mentioned the similar criticisms by the mathematician S. Ulam, but you did not say who Stanislaw Ulam was.

Ulam was the co-discoverer of the Teller-Ulam design for the thermonuclear bomb. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller–Ulam_design). Ulam also discovered the Monte Carlo Method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method) which was essential to working out the details of the H-bomb’s mechanism. Now the Monte Carlo Method is an evolution by natural selection technique that actually works!

An example of the Monte Carlo Method is Richard Dawkins’ “Methinks it is a weasel” so-called “example” of Darwinian evolution (it’s not). In the “Methinks” example, the endpoint is chosen ahead of time (this is teleology, which is implied by determinism — recall that Monte Carlo has a “deterministic” piece in the algorithm). Certainly, if there is a future goal chosen, natural selection can find it. The Monte Carlo Method works! But the key point of Darwinism is that evolution is assumed to have no goal.

Which means that Darwinism doesn’t work mathematically, for the reasons you’ve stated. Which was Ulam’s point. And Ulam understood the mathematics — he ought to, he invented it — and the biologists did not, and have not, and cannot.

So, if these people cannot be reached by dialectic, they might be reached by rhetoric: Ulam was a great mathematician who understood the mathematics of evolution.

Argument from Authority does not establish truth, but it does establish presumption of truth: if you cannot understand the mathematics, assume that the mathematicians do.

So there it is. Evolutionary biologists don’t understand the mathematics of evolution. And you don’t have to take the word of a humble truck driver and part-time plumber for it either, that’s on the authority of a very well-respected professor of mathematics as well as a famous mathematician of historical note.

The man can certainly turn a phrase. This one is definitely going in the aphorism book:

If you cannot understand the mathematics, assume that the mathematicians do.
–Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematics, Tulane University

That French mathematician I mentioned in the previous post was no slouch either. One thing that has become very clear is that the educated critics of TENS are vastly smarter, on average, than its best-known and most-educated advocates.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Debt Deflation in Action

A reader notices that the credit card companies are rapidly reducing the amount of credit available to their more conservative cardholders.

My husband and I run a small business and have noticed an unusual practice by credit card companies over the last 4-5 months.

Our business is seasonal, and during our ramp up in from February to April, we usually max out 6 cards on supplies and improvements for the coming season. And then the profits from May and June pay those down, before we start making real profits July-October. We’ve been doing this for over ten years, and typically the result of the max-out and quick pay down has been an increased credit limit. 

This year, as we have started the pay down, each large pay down amount, say $2000 on a $10,000 card for example, has come with a credit limit reduction of 50% – 100% of the amount paid. One card, upon paying it off in whole dropped from $2500 to $350 as the limit. 

We have no personal reasons that our limits in particular would be getting slashed after so many years of increases. So I am wondering if this is a systemic attempt to use debt deflation to slow the rate of inflation without further interest rate increases. 

More generally, if what I’m seeing is systemic, is this a correct understanding of debt deflation? 

This is 100 percent debt deflation. And in some ways, it’s more worrisome than the leadup to the 2008 contraction. Whereas in 2008, there was a dearth of people willing to borrow, now it is apparent that the banks simply can’t afford to offer the credit if there isn’t a sufficient amount of interest to be gained.

Which suggests that the 2024 credit cruch and subsequent financial institution failures will be bigger and more consequential than we witnessed in 2008. It’s even possible that the federal government will not be able to bail out most of the failing institutions.

UPDATE: An SG reader adds another indicator worth noting.

We had a different scenario but still deflationary. Our credit card had a 55-day interest free period which we have never paid interest on in 30+ years. Two months ago, we noticed in the fine print at the back page that it was reducing from 55 days to 44 days. It was hidden away and was only announces on the two previous bills. It had been 55 days for 30+ years.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: The Logic of the Cult of Free

I thought this exchange with a member of the Cult of Free who is upset over Torba’s very sensible decision to stop permitting users who pay nothing for Gab’s services to utilize them at considerable expense to Gab was informative, as it raised a basic philosophical issue that some people obviously fail to understand.

You might want to check and see how many of the “free cult” are among YOUR followers. Most paid users rely on their “free” followers to make people like you more “relevant” and give people like you a reason to pay to be here. The “free cult” also brings other people to Gab and some spend their money on products being sold on Gab. THAT is the REAL WORLD. Andrew Torba, paid users and “attention seekers” like yourself, are NOTHING without the “free cult”!

Totally wrong. I don’t care at all about the “free followers”. We have a community of more than 10,000, all of whom have skin in the game and are not only supportive, but reliable. Free followers are, by and large, useless cowards who abandon ship whenever their feelings get hurt.

I do hope all of the “free followers” read this and realize that they are considered “nothing” to people like you. Have fun in your imagined “important” world!

So, do all of the so-called “free followers” here at VP realize that you are considered nothing to me? Have I failed to make that sufficiently clear to all and sundry? Are you fully cognizant of the fact that this blog existed before you were here, exists without any help or support from you now, and will continue to exist long after you cease visiting here?

Is everyone perfectly clear on that?

While I have nothing against people who read this site, or Sigma Game, or Castalia Library, or Castalia House, or the Arkhaven blog, or Arktoons, and still decide not to participate in or support any of our community’s various projects for what are no doubt very good reasons, I don’t regard them as being important, I don’t rely upon them in any way, and, in fact, I don’t think about them at all. They’re not on my radar.

If you’re not involved, you are irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong, or even negative, about being irrelevant. You’re not a problem, you’re simply not a factor at all. For better or for worse, you don’t matter any more than some random individual in Ghana or Myanmar who has never heard of me.

Everyone is welcome to read this site for free. That’s literally what it’s here for. I would write here and post here even if there were only two or three people visiting the site every day instead of 30,000; it gives me no more and no less pleasure to go through the discipline of articulating my thoughts on a regular basis now than when there were only a few thousand pageviews a month back in 2003. But this site is just something I do for my own reasons, it is not a business, it employs no one, and it does not require any resources to make it work. Die Gedanken, sie sind frei.

The Cult of Free was created by the false application of an outmoded business model to a series of government-funded data-mining platforms. It’s not a surprise that so many people were misled by this; even 30 years after Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver published “The Death of Advertising” in Vol. 23, Issue No. 4 of the Journal of Advertising, the Cult of Free retards still think that sites like Gab can be funded by nonexistent advertising revenue.

They don’t realize that X has never, ever, made a profit. They aren’t aware that Google loses $2 billion or more on YouTube every year. And they have no idea how Meta actually makes its money. Silicon Valley’s One Million Eyeballs and Exit model was always fraudulent, on every single conceptual level, even though it appeared to work well for certain favored ticket-takers.

What is necessary, what is vital, what is absolutely required for an operation that is going to survive and thrive over the long haul is to build a community of 10,000 or more people and provide them with enough value for them to justify their moral and material support. We are very, very fortunate to have been able to do that, and it is my goal, every single day, to provide an excuse, a reason, or a justification for all of our supporters to continue with their support.

I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to think about those who not only don’t have skin in the game, they simply aren’t in the game at all. The value of the free content they create is zero. I know this for a fact, because when I shut down comments at this blog, all the same stupid arguments were mustered against it. I was “killing the blog” by shutting down the discourse here, or so they claimed. “Just as many people come to read the comments as read your posts,” they argued. The result: absolutely no change in traffic at all.

And here is how you know the so-called “support” of freeloaders is worthless: they never even do the free and easy things they could be doing to benefit the community without spending a single dime.

This isn’t a request for anyone to do anything at all. It is merely an philosophical explanation.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never. Question. Me.

At least not by email. If you want to know why I am so actively hostile to being asked questions about pretty much anything, I invite you to consider the sort of thing that I still see in my email on a regular basis. Here’s one from just this morning.

I got into a huge argument with my co-workers who are all atheists. They now all think I am crazy because I seriously question evolution. Their main argument is that human dna and chimp dna are extremely close. I foolishly did not believe them, however when I checked online it said 98.8% similarity. If that is true then I’m gonna have to admit it, however I don’t know what is true. I personally think the entire thing is a scam, but I am not smart enough nor expertise enough to know how to prove it.

First, none of these retards are intelligent enough to be having a meaningful discussion about evolution. That’s obvious, considering the way they’re arguing over something that is a) meaningless, b) irrelevant, and c) scientifically outdated. It wouldn’t matter if human DNA and starfish DNA were 100 percent identical, that still wouldn’t suffice to prove that the theory of evolution by natural selection was correct. Sweet St. George, how I despise democracy!

Second, I have already addressed the theory of evolution repeatedly and in considerable detail. I have even presented a mathematical disproof that has thus far failed to meet with any meaningful critique and has not been refuted or even substantially addressed by any advocate of TE(p)NSSSBMGD&GF, which is to say, the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, which I believe includes most, though probably not all, of the evolutionary epicycles now required to explain away the pre-VD critiques of the theory. So, it’s pretty safe to say that if you have a question, the answer to it is already on the blog.

Dance, little scientist, dance the epicycles for me!

Third, in case it has somehow escaped your attention, there are a lot of people who read this blog. We have an entire social media community filled with very smart, very well-informed individuals who are perfectly capable of answering ignorant questions asked by relative retards. So if you have a question, start by asking it on SG, there are always a few Smart Boys who live for that sort of thing who will be absolutely delighted to show you how smart and well-informed they are. Which, by the way, answers the recent question that appeared on Sigma Game concerning what are the positive benefits of Gamma. They can be positive life-savers in this regard!

Fourth, when you consider that this blog has been around for 21 years and has well over 100 million views, what are the chances that no one has ever asked your Very Important Question before? What are the odds that I haven’t already answered it in a public manner?

Fifth and finally, save it for Stupid Question Day on the Darkstream.

Addendum: No, I won’t do an interview. I don’t care how Very Special and Important your publication or university happens to be. The answer is still no. When I’ve rejected multiple interview requests from The New York Times and Fox News, do you really think I’m eager to take advantage of “your chance to tell your side of the story”?

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Nationalism and Non-Leadership

A recent exchange with a longtime VP reader.

DC: I consider Christian Nationalism a dead issue we are still just mucking around with in the US.

VD: I wouldn’t say it’s a dead issue, I’d say it’s an intellectual issue with very little relevance today.

DC: For the US it became a relevant issue which it still might be? But it was effectively still born as the proponents did such a poor job out the gate.

VD: It had nothing to do with that. Ideology is irrelevant anyhow. The time just isn’t right yet. Most Christians still think it’s 1980, if not 1950. They can’t even conceive of any need for Christian Nationalism so long as the government isn’t performing pagan sacrifices in public every national holiday. Christian Nationalism will be a reaction to pagan imperialism.

DC: Much more believable path forward than anything I’ve read.

VD: Of course. Because most of the writings on it are people attempting to redefine and pervert the concept. Most public intellectuals, such as they are, are simply professional activists for an ethnicity or an ideology. All of their analyses are rooted in politics, not in history, and always just happen to point in the same direction no matter the topic at hand. Which makes them worthless for more objective purposes.

DC: I find the same sort of problem with analysis of the role of men and women in the church. The theologians try to make an ahistorical, timeless, systematic theology of men and women ignoring all of history as a guide and not even putting the answer in today’s context. That’s how we got the ridiculous, new “servant leadership” theology for men which at its root is a compromise with the feminists. “Don’t be mad women and we will carry your bags for you in Target, not have friends, and watch the kids while you go drink with your friends!” SERVANT LEADING! I have probably read in-depth six books in the last 18 months on men and women in the church. Most of them simply degrade into rank Biblicism and try to write a timeless theology out of a scant few verses to exclude women from being Elders, and in the case of Piper, policemen. They are proof-texting themselves into theological stalemates which end in nihilism. Servant Leadership theology made neither servants nor leaders, instead it turned men into butlers who ask their wives for permission.

DISCUSS ON SG

How to Recognize VHIQ

/pol/ considers how the average individual can recognize a highly intelligent individual in public situations:

What are some signs that show someone has a high IQ? The kind of things you can notice within moments of meeting or by spending a few hours with someone?

I have a few anecdotal ones:

  • Friendly, but detached. Like they know they have to play the social game but don’t find it important (they have better things to think about).
  • Can hold a conversation on a wide range of topics.
  • Suddenly light up when esoteric topics come up – they are energised whereas before it was just going through the motions (even their going through the motions is higher level than most people’s high effort)
  • Have a habit of cutting through the crap and saying things very clearly and succinctly. This often shocks people around them with its accuracy.

inb4 IQ score. I don’t give a fuck about that – I’m talking IRL signs which don’t involve asking someone’s IQ like an autist. inb4 is successful businessman/tech guy. Hell no. It’s the midwits that thrive there. I am one.

It’s rather refreshing – and slightly suspicious – to see a midwit who is sufficiently self-aware and modest enough to distinguish between his own superior intelligence and VHIQ. Especially when he is clearly observant enough to recognize some of the genuine signs of high intelligence.

For me, the first sign is always the eyes. Highly intelligent people tend to have a penetrating quality to their eyes, particularly when they aren’t interacting with anyone and aren’t aware they are being observed. It’s often described as “intense” or “lively” by others, and can provoke instinctive reactions such as widening eyes or a physical retreat. It’s also how the highly intelligent can quickly recognize one another. Consider the way that a fictional version of Vladimir Putin is described.

At the time, the tsar was not yet the tsar. His gestures did not then convey the inflexible authority they would later come to acquire, and though his gaze had some trace of the mineral quality we recognize in it today, it was as if veiled by a conscious effort to keep it under control.

Most VHIQ and UHIQ adults know that they will get along better with people if they don’t force them to confront their intelligence. If someone who is not observably shy or lacking in self-confidence, whose posture conveys a high level of self-assurance, tends to habitually avert their eyes or avoid making eye contact, that is a possible indicator.

There are, of course, other indicators. But the eyes are a fairly reliable one, particularly if you see them change from one state of awareness to another in the literal blink of an eye.

One thing to keep in mind is that highly intelligent people always know it. Some will rub your face in it. Others will desperately attempt to conceal it. But the midwit myth of “the smart person who doesn’t know how smart they are” is nothing more than a Gamma coping mechanism. The reality of the VHIQ is the inability to credit how totally fucking retarded the average individual is.

It’s arguably even worse for the UHIQ, since the VHIQ usually has a basic grasp of how the average mind’s logic functions. The UHIQ can’t even understand that.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: The Post-Morten Convergence of CS Lewis

A reminder, as if any could possibly be necessary anymore, of the importance of Castalia Library preserving the original texts that are being actively disappeared by the publishing industry:

We were given tickets to the stage version of The Lion and Witch and the Wardrobe. It was terrible. I was waiting to see what SJW stuff would be included. It started with about eight or so army guys, and only one of them was black, so I thought maybe we will be lucky… then the kids walked out. They were black. It was abysmal. Although it did put a different spin on a few of the lines – like when Mr Beaver is asking if they’re human or not…

The kids got to the house after being evacuated from London, and one of the two housemaids was a big burly man with a beard. He was wearing a maid’s outfit. It was grotesque. They stripped away all Christian references and undertones, which was impressive in an awful way given the subject material.

They even removed Santa. He was now Sinta Klause, and looked like a fat Turkish man who had been caught in an explosion at a fabric factory.

The West has fallen to Clown World. We are the remnant. We will rebuild anew and wiser than before.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”

— JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF

A highly literate reader named JC emails a detailed analysis of George RR Martin’s difficulty in finishing A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and reaches precisely the same conclusion that I have assumed all along, which is that Martin is too devoted to intellectual subversion to accept the true and obvious heroic end to his fantasy saga, which is to say, the triumphant marriage of ice and fire.

To put it rather more concisely: one can no more write an English-style novel and not end it with a wedding than one can write a Japanese-style novel and not end it with a suicide.

I don’t think it’s so much that Martin won’t finish the saga as that he can’t. And principally for one reason (though I imagine there’s a host of ancillary reasons): Jon Snow & Danaerys Targaryan themselves. He didn’t anticipate when he set out to write his story, I suspect, to write one genuinely heroic character, let alone two.

It’s clear that Tyrion, and the Lannister family in general, are his favoured characters, and it’s the Lannisters who set the tone of the series. I think this is so for both internal-structural reasons and for personal reasons. Martin just prefers them and sympathises most with their worldview. Structurally, I believe the Lannisters are the vehicle through which Martin has tried to accomplish his main artistic goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire: to subvert the Fantasy genre, with its roots in the heroic and the mythical, by introducing an element of cynicism and realist historiography, a literary Real Politik.

To do this he had to build a typical Fantasy setting with mythological elements, in order to deconstruct them from within. What he didn’t anticipate, I suspect, is that the ‘machinery’ of his writing would churn out two more or less heroic characters, there among all the cynics, warlords, cowards, bureaucrats, hypocrites, mercenaries, careerists et al. with which his universe abounds: Jon and Dany — who do fit the classical standards of heroism, despite Martin’s critique of their characters, as their motivations ultimately transcend the merely self-interested, and they are brave in the pursuit. Martin is, at bottom, a good storyteller with a keen sense of character, so it’s very likely he trusted his intuitions in writing these characters and plotting out their stories, without fully realising the overall structural implications for his saga.

Now I think he’s reached a bind in his grand narrative. There are two irresolvably conflicting impulses acting within him as a writer — and it’s this irresolvability that has given him an incurable writer’s block, sapping him of all motivation to conclude his epic: the first impulse is the conscious wish to accomplish his artistic aim of deconstructing the heroic and mythical foundations of Fantasy; and the second impulse is the novelist’s natural need not to betray his own characters, to provide a coherent resolution to their ‘character arc’. The problem is that, unwittingly, Jon and Dany have turned out to be genuine heroes in their own right, and Martin can’t figure out how to give their stories a fittingly heroic ending without succumbing to classical Fantasy standards, the very standards he set out to subvert in the first place. Jon and Dany narratologically deserve an heroic ending, but can Martin bring himself to do justice to their heroism, or even to spoil it with one last act of cynicism?

It’s clear that the ‘Ice’ and ‘Fire’ in A Song of Ice and Fire are Jon and Dany respectively, and that it’s ultimately their tale. I can only imagine that Martin did this unconsciously, and that it’s made him nauseous now that he’s discovered it. What we see in the TV Show — Jon and Dany having a romantic affair and it being discovered to be incestuous — I think is Martin’s intention, and I think this development shows his good writer’s instinct. It’s what comes after (the final season of the TV Show) where everything falls apart, and I think Martin knows it. He knows the notes he provided to the show directors are sloppy, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. I can only imagine that when he now sits to write the final chapters in his story, he feels a debilitating anxiety over the problem the existence of Jon and Dany, and the challenge their unforeseen heroism, transcending the pettiness of their surroundings, has caused for him, leaving out all that enthusiasm he once had for the narrative and its setting, when he was writing the opening volumes.

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