Tag: society

Why kids hate nerds

Vanity is seldom popular, but it is considerably less bearable for the average person in those who are more intelligent than the norm than in those who are more beautiful than the norm. At least with the physically vain, one has only to look at them. With the intellectually vain, one is far too often subjected to lectures in which the primary purpose is not to educate, inform, or discuss, but merely to demonstrate the knowledge and intellectual superiority of the lecturer.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.

I would go so far as to say that most smart people are considerably more vain about their intelligence than most beautiful people are vain about their beauty. And because intelligence is less easily perceived than beauty, they tend to go further out of their way to ensure that others know about it. In fact, one could even go so far as to suggest that the primary purpose of “nerd culture” is to foster nerd vanity by publicly staking an implied claim of superior intelligence that otherwise might go unremarked.

The vanity theme is supported by the observation that modestly smart people are far bitchier and hateful to those of genuinely high intelligence than the pretty girls are to the beautiful girls. As we’ve so often seen here, there is no one nastier on the subject of intelligence, or more dubious about the validity of IQ, than the +1 SD midwit whose illusions of intellectual superiority have been shattered.

The highly intelligent don’t want to be smart. It’s merely a simple fact of life, to be utilized or navigated as necessary. We are entirely accustomed to meeting with blank, uncomprehending faces practically every time we open our mouths without consciously dialing down our thoughts. (The befuddled response of the File 770 commenters to my simple reference to Aristotelian rhetoric is a good case in point.) The fact that we might occasionally use our intelligence to torment annoying midwits should be no more surprising than a beautiful girl using her looks to outshine a less attractive, self-appointed rival who has been relentlessly talking about her behind her back.

Should we, as adults, be beyond this things? Perhaps, but it’s readily observable that we are not. I daresay that even inside a Buddhist monastery, the same hierarchical social patterns can be readily observed.

I have to admit, I never got into nerd culture outside of its overlap with games. I didn’t join any of the defensive little nerd posses in school, although it is interesting to look back and observe that my three best friends from first grade were all National Merit scholars or semifinalists who went to RPI, Stanford, and Bucknell. Like tends to attract like. To this day, I still prefer to eat alone so that I can read while I’m eating. But I don’t dislike nerds either, except when they get intellectually insecure and start posturing and pontificating in defense of their easily wounded vanity.

It’s rather amusing, really. Any time I see someone going on and on about my supposed obsession with intelligence, I know exactly where to place him. The highly intelligent are much more inclined to shrug and say “so he’s smart, BFD, who isn’t?”

The benefits of abolishing high school

It wouldn’t just help those on the bottom, but quite a few of those on top as well:

[A]bolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost.

I think we see some of the human flotsam and jetsam that is the result of high school shipwrecks floating through here from time to time. From the overconfident midwit who has never recovered from the experience of being the smartest guy in a room with a 115 IQ to the deluded ex-cheerleader who is now fifty pounds overweight but still thinks she’s as attractive to men as she was when she could fit into her little skirts to the bitter omega who can’t accept a compliment at face value for fear that it is another cruel trick intended to humiliate him, the psychological scars of the high school experience are often visible to complete strangers on the Internet.

I tend to include myself in that mix, although perhaps wrongly since my psychological idiosyncracies tend to trace back deeper, which is to say, back to elementary school. My suspicion is that being constantly pushed around and marginalized by one’s intellectual and athletic inferiors, and thereby simultaneously finding oneself at the bottom of some social hierarchies and at the top of others at a very young age, tends to leave one permanently unable to take any of them very seriously or place much value upon them, for good or for ill. When one is both king and beggar, how can one find one’s identity in either state?

For a while, I thought it was strength of character or innate stoicism that enabled me to so easily walk away from various attachments and obligations without looking back. But eventually, it became clear that it was not a positive attribute, it was simply that I was lacking something normal, in much the same way sociopaths lack empathy, autistics lack social cognizance, and atheists lack an intuition of the supernatural. Specifically what it is, I don’t know, but one might describe it as lack of set bonding.

So, I don’t think the abolition of high school would have made much difference to me, but I do think it would greatly benefit those who are either oppressed by the social hierarchy or crippled by too much success too soon in it. And, of course, ending the intellectual lobotomization of entire generations by maleducated, intellectually sub-standard propagandists of the State would be a desirable outcome too.

You had ONE job!

Far too many women of my generation were let down by their mothers failing to teach them the one basic skill they actually need in life:

My mother hadn’t felt the need to give me a recipe—she knew that I
had watched her, and before her my Nani, make the same pot of sauce
nearly weekly in my previous 17 years. So many times I smelled the meat,
browning in olive oil before the garlic and onions were added,
intensifying the distinctive aroma of Nani’s kitchen, which lingered
even years after her last pot had been simmered. Yet I didn’t know how
to cook.

But what did my mom expect? Both she and my late Nani had always
praised and encouraged my good grades and scholarly instincts, and
neither had encouraged me to do anything in the kitchen other that set
the table. Nani never taught me to forage for burdock or can tomatoes
because “you won’t need to,” she said. Cooking was something else the
modern young woman wouldn’t have cause to do either, it seemed. So, I
focused on my career.

What had stuck with me from those hours in the kitchen watching my
mom and Nani cook weekly Sunday dinners or nightly from-scratch meals
was not the recipes for beef bracciole or manicotti, but the
conversation. “Go to college,” I was always told, “have your own money
and don’t rely on a man.”

Let’s not make the same mistake with our daughters and sentence them to a lifetime of bad food, obesity, and culinary frigidity. There is nothing more important than for a young girl to be taught how to be a good wife and mother. Nothing. Because nothing less than civilization and the continued existence of the human race depends upon it.

Don’t raise your daughters to be dead ends.

#GamerGate and 4GW

Mendicant Bias has clearly read his Lind and correctly applied it to #GamerGate and society alike:

We have seen the most important and fundamental values of our society torn down and destroyed by vandals who used the tactics of cultural Marxism to subvert our society. We have seen abominations like gay “marriage”, no-fault divorce (read: his-fault), government-subsidised abortion and freely available birth control, and universal suffrage become “acceptable”—as if these cultural freak shows could ever possibly be considered “normal”. We have seen our most fundamental rights of conscience, association, freedom of thought, free exercise of religious belief, and freedom of action circumscribed, shrunk, and destroyed before our eyes. And we let it happen.

The self-aware man who looks at how this happened will come away with a certain cold appreciation for the tactics of those who imposed this ashen, burning Hell upon us.

When it comes to gaming, we have repeatedly seen how SJW tactics work. They have used the fundamental decency of the average Western gaming consumer against him, by browbeating him into believing that he is sexist if he wants “believable” (i.e. non-ridiculous) women in games, or that he is “racist” if he doesn’t want games to become some sort of absurd paean to multiculturalism, or that he is a misinformed idiot if he thinks that women can’t be just as strong and effective in an FPS game as men.

They are exquisitely good at shutting down dissent. They’ve had forty years to entrench themselves and become institutionalised. And they have succeeded. They did this by capturing the single most important and powerful level of war. The Moral Level of War

He also explains why #GamerGate has been uniquely successful in resisting the SJW onslaught when everything from the US Army to the churches have been overrun like France in 1940:

The cultural Marxists who brought us to this point have used the moral level of war brilliantly, up until now, by bludgeoning anyone who disagreed with them into submission through the threat of being branded sexist, racist, and other double-plus ungood things. To the SJW set, any deviation from “acceptable” modes of thought was and remains Badthink. Hell, they even have their own programming language! (Note the satire.)

But they grew overconfident, and made a huge mistake—giving us everything we need to destroy them, root and branch.

Until recently, gaming “journalists” had a lock on how the consumer viewed the products that they paid for. Games that promoted “social justice” narratives were given high reviews—but when the rest of us actually tried playing them, we often found them to be unplayable garbage, because they sacrificed absorbing gameplay and great storytelling for smarmy preachiness and painfully stupid messages about “tolerance”.

When #Gamergate first broke, the reason for this appalling state of affairs became perfectly clear: the gaming media were in bed, literally, with the very same game developers whose work they were reviewing.

Overnight, they lost their moral high ground in the eyes of thousands of gamers all over the world. And they have continued to lose that support as gamers have mounted a vicious backlash against their immorality.

This is a very, very important lesson to absorb. You cannot win at the moral level of war when crippled by ambiguous values and a lack of moral confidence. This is why the Christian churches that compromise their principles and turn against their own historic values rapidly collapse. Defeat at the moral level of war destroys an institutions raison d’etre; once robbed of its core reason to exist, an institution ceases to grow and rapidly begins to decline.

Mr. Lind and I had a conversation about #GamerGate. He recognized it as an obvious manifestation of 4GW, so it’s interesting to see that the students of 4GW see it clearly as well.

Guns are not a motive force

It has always been obvious that guns don’t cause suicide; the USA has never had the highest rate of suicide in the world. But now that the UK has effectively banned most gun ownership, it is becoming harder and harder to claim that there is any relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates. Dr. Helen draws attention to the statistical reality:

The article is about the high suicide rate in the UK and states: “Suicides of men aged 45-59 have risen by 40% in a decade, and account for a quarter of all suicides in the UK.” There is a graph pointing out that a majority of men (and a number of women) in the UK die by suffocation or hanging: 58% of male suicides and 36% of female suicides use this method. We always hear that it is the proliferation of guns that causes much of the male suicide in the US but if the guns are the problem, why is there also a high incidence of male suicide in the UK?

Perhaps the UK should consider also banning ropes and plastic bags. After all, if it saves just one life, it will be worth it. The reality is that no automotive society should attempt to restrict any popular means of committing suicide; there are already far more auto suicides than most people realize.

Yeah, THAT’S the problem

This is why the self-styled anti-racists can never be trusted. They would rather permit your daughters to be raped than admit to the fact of genetics-based behavioral differences:

Dozens of men were yesterday charged with a wide range of sex crimes against vulnerable girls after two separate police investigations. Following a ‘milestone’ operation by Northumbria Police, 20 suspects appeared in court to face charges including rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking.

The alleged offences involved 12 victims, including one girl who was aged just 13, with officers vowing to continue their investigation into the abuse of vulnerable children.

In a separate case, 25 men from Halifax, West Yorkshire, were charged with a number of historic and child-related sex offences. Almost all of the men in both cases are from Asian backgrounds, prompting police leading one of the cases to warn that far-Right groups may use the issue to stir up racial tension.

The issue SHOULD stir up racial tension. This is merely the latest in a very long line of evidence that strongly indicates different cultures cannot successfully live together peacefully over time. And contra those who attempt to hide racial differences behind cultural differences, culture is a product of human genetics.

Whether one subscribes to the theory of evolution by natural selection or some form of creationist intervention, both the science and logic of genetic differences is inescapable. And it is not “racist” to be scientifically and logically correct with regards to these matters, as the superiority of one race completely depends upon one’s perspective and favored metrics.

It cannot be denied that if rape, sexual assault, and sex trafficking are the metrics, the Asian population of Great Britain is absolutely superior to the English population. It is only racist if one argues that this factual observation is evidence of Asian racial superiority.

RACISM: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
– Oxford Dictionary

The definition most usefully serves to demonstrate the intrinsic idiocy of the concept; it is limited to binary thinkers and is not even relevant to those who are capable of thinking in probabilistic terms. Indeed, anyone who thinks in probabilistic terms cannot possibly be considered racist, given that no one who does so is going to be inclined to believe that “all members of each race” possesses virtually any characteristic in common.

When speech is not speech

Vox Day ‏@voxday
#SJW logic: “They seem to believe that freedom of speech includes the freedom to say anything.”  … Yes, it does.

Tanya Cohen ‏@xTanyaCohenx
No, it absolutely doesn’t. International human rights law MANDATES legal sanctions on hate speech.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
Hate speech being whatever #SJW’s find objectionable. Brilliant.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Of course it does. International human rights law is anti-free speech. No hate speech = no free speech.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Hate speech is free speech. There is no free speech without hate speech.

Tanya Cohen ‏@xTanyaCohenx
Hate speech is not free speech.

Tanya Cohen ‏@xTanyaCohenx
Hate speech is speech that violates fundamental human rights.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
There is no fundamental human right not to be offended or shocked, dear. Hate speech doesn’t violate any rights.

I wonder if the Left truly understands that they have now opened a door to banning Black speech, or Jew speech, or Female speech, or any other form of speech that the majority wishes to silence. The Muslims have already learned how to utilize the concept to their advantage; they won’t be the only ones. It’s time to bring back the blasphemy laws.

The dissolution of order

The cracks in US society are widening:

Police officers showed their contempt for New York’s mayor on Saturday, turning their backs as he addressed a funeral for a fallen colleague.

Rafael Ramos was shot dead alongside his partner Wenjian Liu last weekend amid nationwide protests accusing police of racism and using excessive force against black people. Mr Liu’s funeral will be held in the coming days.

Officers have accused Bill de Blasio, the city mayor, of having blood on his hands for failing to give his full backing to officers while demonstrators raged at the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died in a police choke hold.

While he received polite applause inside the church, hundreds of officers outside turned their backs to screens showing the service.

Notice the names. Ramos. Liu. De Blasio. Ironically, only Garner, the black man, had an traditional American name. They are names that would cause a progressive’s heart to leap for joy, were it not for the context of the story in which the names appear. And I would be remiss to fail to mention Ismaaiyl Brinsley.

This is what multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic society looks like. Violence, lack of respect for authority, rival power centers, and ongoing societal fragmentation. Expect more of it.

The mainstream discovers MGTOW

A very good article by Milo on the increasing male distrust for and disinterest in the opposite sex:

Never before in history have relations between the sexes been so fraught with anxiety, animosity and misunderstanding. To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that’s a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

Social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old, ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes, chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture, all of which insulate them from a hostile, debilitating social environment created, some argue, by the modern feminist movement.

You can hardly blame them. Cruelly derided as man-children and crybabies for objecting to absurdly unfair conditions in college, bars, clubs and beyond, men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: ridiculed as basement-dwellers for avoiding aggressive, demanding women with unrealistic expectations, or called rapists and misogynists merely for expressing sexual interest. 

The readily observable fact is that the majority of women do not give a damn about men. They are so locked into their vision of intrinsic female inferiority that they assume their actions will have absolutely no effect on how men think and behave. This is profoundly dyscivilizational, which means that men are going to need to install an overt patriarchy, as the Romans eventually saw the need to do, if civilized society is to survive.

There is nothing fair or equal about feminists. Words are, for the most part, meaningless weapons to them; they would just as soon appeal to “purple” or “Kardashian” if they thought it would be useful. Men need to stop buying into those false appeals for the same reason everyone needs to stop giving ground to the SJWs.

A society of Gamma males will not survive for long. We need to get the Deltas to stop white knighting for women or the cruelest, coldest Alphas will soon rule over all. The reality is that a female-dominated society is not one that any self-respecting man is willing to maintain or live in.

No wonder young men are checking out. Consider this ridiculous, anti-male article:

They started in 2007 by forming a girls-only team. The girls started working with a robot that the boys had initially built. Almost immediately, they solved problems that the boys couldn’t. They developed competition strategies without loud-mouthed boys and repaired the robot on the fly without having to defer to the strongly held opinions of the male members of the team.

Lesson: don’t lift a finger to help women in science, tech, or games. They ask, you ignore. If they’re so damned superior, they can certainly figure it out for themselves. There is no need to discourage them, just leave them to their own devices and go your own way.

The pursuit of safety

Is often counterproductive, as was seen in the accidental death of the young EnglishAustralian cricketer, Phil Hughes:

Most of my career I batted on uncovered pitches without a helmet. This taught me how important it was to have a good technique and courage against fast bowling. Why? Because you required judgment of what to leave, when to duck and when to play the ball. But you had to be even more careful about attempting to hook because at the back of your mind you knew that if you made a mistake you could get seriously hurt.

I once asked Len Hutton, a great iconic player, whether he hooked Ray Lindwall or Keith Miller. He said he once tried it at the Oval and he got halfway through the shot then cut it out because out of the corner of his eye he could see the hospital. That tells you everything.

Before the advent of helmets in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s, if a team had a genuine fast bowler, tail-enders did not hang around. You did not see tail-enders propping and copping. They played shots or got out because at the back of their mind they were terrified of being hurt.

Helmets have unfortunately now taken away a lot of that fear and have given every batsman a false sense of security. They feel safe and people will now attempt to either pull or hook almost every short ball that is bowled at them.

Even tail-enders come in and bat like millionaires, flailing away and having a go at short balls with poor technique and a lack of footwork. Helmets have made batsmen feel safe in the belief that they cannot be hurt and made batsmen more carefree and careless. As a consequence more players get hit on the helmet nowadays than ever got hit on the head, before we batted without this protection.

This is true in the broader historical culture as well as the world of sport. We attempt to protect our women and children, to ensconce them in a rubber-and-plastic safety bubble that will keep them from all harm, forgetting that in protecting them from the petty dangers, they tend to forget about the existence of the more serious ones.

It is when we feel invulnerable that we are most susceptible to being taught otherwise.