Tag: society

Mailvox: throwing girls to the wolves

Rollory disapproves of men protecting their daughters. He claims Dalrock does too, although I would not be so sure of that.

This is the sort of thing Dalrock rips to shreds every chance he gets. I don’t always agree with every detail of his argument but it’s definitely worth thinking about.

The message this shirt is sending is “I belong to my daddy, not to the young man who might otherwise be interested.” It’s crazy for the young woman, it’s crazy for the father, and any young man who is sane will receive the message loud and clear and stay far away, choosing instead another girl whose father ISN’T playing the overprotective sexually jealous guardian.

An excess of suitable young grooms needing ever stricter winnowing is not at all the problem facing marriageable young women today. Again, Dalrock has covered this, and continues to do so.

Dalrock is good on many subjects, particularly on the Church and feminism, but if Rollory is correct and the message on this t-shirt is the sort of thing that Dalrock rips to shreds every chance he gets, then he doesn’t understand female psychology very well, nor would he appear to have daughters or sisters. It may help to keep in mind that this is the original context of the phrase.

  1. Take a position on high ground somewhere in the middle with clean sight lines of the entire route.
  2. Load a round into your .50 caliber rifle.
  3. Take the lens covers off the scope.
  4. Watch as your little girl walks off to school by herself.

There is nothing crazy about a father being protective of his daughters. There is nothing even remotely crazy about a young woman wanting to feel protected by her daddy. While people can, and do, go too far – and anything that is more suited for a wedding or a high school prom is going too far – there is nothing overprotective or “sexually jealous” about paternal protectiveness; anyone leaping to that conclusion is raising serious questions about their own psychosexual issues. The ironic thing about citing Dalrock in this regard is that Dalrock regularly complains about “feral” young women; he even has a category called Feral Females.

Now, where do you suppose feral young women come from, families where men protect their daughters or families where men simply throw their daughters to the vagaries of sexual selection, to fend off the predators as best they can on their own? The symbolism of the t-shirt is less about winnowing the suitable young grooms, than it is about giving the daughter the strength and the permission to say “no” to the wrong ones in the full knowledge that her father will have her back.

But as it happens, the real target of the message is not men. The t-shirt is actually status-signaling on the part of the daughter, or the wife, when that version of the t-shirt is ready. It is less a warning to young men than it is bragging to other young women that she is valued, that she is loved, and that she is worthy of protection by a man who is strong enough to provide it for her. Both Dalrock and Rollory appear to have forgotten that support and protection are the two primary male roles in every relationship with women and children, and that stable young women really do treasure those things.

I suspect a telling determinant will be who loves these shirts and who hates them. My prediction is that good girls from strong families will love the message and feminists will furiously hate it. The more interesting question, and one to which I do not have an answer, is: why do men like Dalrock and Rollory dislike it so much?

Regardless, King Edward’s motto is appropriate.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.


UPDATE: since we’re discussing the shirt, I should mention that the long-sleeve crewneck version is now available as well.

Of art and the artist

It is interesting to observe that when SJWs insist that the art MUST be judged in light of the artist, it is merely another example of how they are projecting:

Like Hitler, Jeanneret wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence.

One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.

A book has just been published—Le Corbusier: The Dishonest Architect, by Malcolm Millais—that reads like the indictment of a serial killer who can offer no defense (except, possibly, a psychiatric one). The author shares with me an aesthetic detestation of Jeanneret, and also of his casual but deeply vicious totalitarianism; but, unlike me, the author both has a scholarly knowledge of his subject’s life and writings, of which the perusal of only a few has more than sufficed for me, and is a highly qualified structural engineer. Mr. Millais is able to prove not only that Jeanneret was a liar, cheat, thief, and plagiarist in the most literal sense of the words, a criminal as well as being personally unpleasant on many occasions, but that he was technically grossly ignorant and incompetent, indeed laughably so. His roofs leaked, his materials deteriorated. He never grasped the elementary principles of engineering. All his ideas were gimcrack at best, and often far worse than merely bad.

To commission a building from Jeanneret was to tie a ball and chain around one’s own ankle, committing oneself to endless, Sisyphean bills for alteration and maintenance, as well as to a dishonest estimate of what the building would cost to build in the first place. A house by Jeanneret was not so much a machine for living in (to quote the most famous of his many fatuous dicta) as a machine for generating costs and for moving out of. In the name of functionality, Jeanneret built what did not work; in the name of mass production, everything he used had to be individually fashioned. Having no human qualities himself, and lacking all imagination, he did not even understand that shade in a hot climate was desirable, indeed essential.

The artists, authors, and architects of the modernist era have much to answer for, and they are answering for it in Hell. The best tribute that we can pay to them is to tear down their buildings and destroy their sculptures while pointing relentlessly to their paintings and books as preeminent examples of what no man should ever do.

An ugly man can produce beautiful artwork, but those with ugly souls can neither recognize nor create beauty. They can only destroy.

Average global IQ = 86

The blank slatists and civic nationalists are in for a nightmarish disappointment if these global IQ figures are even remotely correct.

The World’s IQ = 86. Test results of 550,492 individuals in 123 countries.

Every test, either “school near” as those designed for PISA or “school far” as designed for intelligence testing, are subject to the same concerns about sampling, measurement invariance, individual item analysis, and the appropriateness of summary statistics. Why the difference in public response to these two different points on the assessment spectrum? Perhaps it is as simple as noting that in scholastic attainment there is always room to do better (or to blame the quality of schooling) whereas in intelligence testing there is an implication of an immutable restriction, unfairly revealed by tricky questions of doubtful validity.

Perhaps it is a matter of publicity. PISA has the money for brochures, briefing papers, press conferences, meetings with government officials. Richard Lynn put his list together in his study, and came up with results that many were happy to bury.

106.02 CHINA
100.46 GERMANY
 96.99 USA
 92.79 ISRAEL
 88.51 MEXICO
 83.04 JORDAN

I suspect the 8-point decline I calculated in the USA hasn’t fully shown up in these tests yet, although the initial decline is clear in the way it is declining faster than the European norms. Anyhow, as incomplete as the data presently is, it suffices to put the lie to more than one dubious IQ-related narrative.

The kind of girl you want to marry

This young woman pretty much defines it. She’s not only cute and relaxed about the unanticipated, but has genuine love in her heart.

The dog was coaxed back outside by guests, and with order now restored, the ceremony went forward with the actual bride in place. But as the couple read their vows, the furry wedding crasher returned.

“The dog entered and laid down to sleep on my veil,” Marília said. This time, no one had the heart to turn the dog back out into the storm — certainly not Marília. She was more than happy to share the spotlight, and a bit of her gown, with the sweet pup. “It was a very pleasant surprise for me, because I love animals,” she said. “I liked it very much.”

“We decided to adopt him because he is a street dog,” Marília said. “It took us a long time to find him again, but yesterday, we were contacted and told his whereabouts.” Before long, the couple reencountered the dog, whom they’ve named Snoop: “He came home, and I showered him,” Marília said. “He played a lot, ate, drank water. He is very happy and slept super good the first night.”

It’s always a good sign when a woman loves dogs and says things like “super good.” It is a fairly reliable sign that she’s both grounded and positive. One of reasons Spacebunny and I hit it off immediately was because we both had dogs. Most of our initial dates involved taking them for walks through the forests near one of our homes. Looking at her, surrounded by all the colors of the autumn leaves, calling after one dog or the other, I always felt as if I had somehow found myself in an Eddie Bauer ad.

Defending the home

A wise woman chooses the known and defends her home over the dubious promise of the unknown and the unlikely:

I’ve earned those rewards. There is no way I want to jeopardize where I end up and how I live because I didn’t have the courage or willingness to pursue my marriage and family with integrity now. Before the hurricanes and menopausal tornadoes.

See, to be blunt, we don’t fare well in the re-marriage market as only 25{fb3a76c107ed8c3c77e3185bbb6287afee78a52023d85b1deb746f5c7c504d3b} of women who are divorced in their 30’s-40’s actually remarry. Men will generally marry at a rate closer to 50{fb3a76c107ed8c3c77e3185bbb6287afee78a52023d85b1deb746f5c7c504d3b} but, even then, they aren’t looking at our Match.Com profiles. They tend to marry women far younger than themselves the second time and, well, that rather gives a raspberry to both our aging marketability and our chances at second time marital bliss.

Seriously. 25{fb3a76c107ed8c3c77e3185bbb6287afee78a52023d85b1deb746f5c7c504d3b}.  I don’t like those odds.

Have you seen the dating market for women our age? Have you seen the dudes interested in us? How many of those men would want a ready-made family and a whole set of busted up luggage? How many of those men would you want around your 14-year-old daughter or raising your little boys?

Hollywood says women can do anything and have anything no matter what they look like or what mess they’ve made of their lives. But Hollywood also uses CGI to make dead people talk so we know they’re a bunch of liars anyway.

When it all boils down and we are left with the goop in the bottom of the pain, it seems wiser to just hang on to the 41{fb3a76c107ed8c3c77e3185bbb6287afee78a52023d85b1deb746f5c7c504d3b} chance that I get to be one of the women who can hold on to her husband and intact family for the long haul. At least as much as it is in my power to do so.

One seldom sees a statistics-based anti-divorce article from women, so it is good to see that there are some women who are beginning to embrace reality and acknowledge that muddling through the ups and downs of marriage with determination is a much preferable option to either you-go-girl divorce or the eat-pray-love-lesbian cycle.

Building a new culture

Conservatives love to talk about the need to build an alternative culture.

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

The publishing world is not exempt from this state of affairs. When conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left appeared at Number seven on The New York Times bestseller list, despite actually having outsold all fourteen of its competitors on the list, D’Souza called out the Times on Twitter: “In what alternative universe do Jeff Flake’s 7,383 book sales for this week (BookScan data) top mine at 11,651? Thanks @nytimes fake list!”

This was far from the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings on the Times’ all-important bestseller list. Cortney O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er) side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The New York Times did have the book at Number 13 on its “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved Number four slot among bestselling nonfiction titles.

“It’s not only an insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said “but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”

Ludicrous? The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves.

Guess how many times a conservative media organ has reviewed, or even mentioned, a Castalia House book? Zero.

The conservative media talks a lot about “the culture”, and complain about the Left’s behavior in relation to it, but as is so often the case, they do absolutely nothing proactive about it. Conservative billionnaires don’t invest in culture, because they’re frightened of what they consider to be a “hits-driven business”. They’d rather blow millions on politics and television ads, even though, as Instapundit noted, all the money spent on political ads in the last presidential campaign would have been better spent buying up all the women’s magazines.

“Police have disappeared”

From Twitter:
“Police have completely disappeared from #Berkeley. People getting beaten up. Red flags being waved in the air.”

This is a surprise? Again? Really?
What part of “when seconds count, the police are 20 minutes away” failed to register with gun-owning conservatives?
Observations:

  1. The police have ZERO responsibility to protect you. None. This is settled case law. Never, ever, count on police protection from anything.
  2. The police work for the local mayor. The local mayor’s political allegiances dictate how the police will be utilized.
  3. This marks the third time – at least – that police protection has been proffered and then withdrawn.
  4. Street rallies serve no positive purpose, although they can be effectively used to demonstrate a) the politicization of the police as well as b) the violent lawlessness of the Alt-Left.

It’s not that bad

And it’s really not that hard to figure out, either.

The concept of communication range was established by Leta Hollingworth. It is +/- 2 standard deviations (roughly 30 points) up or down on one’s own IQ. It denotes the range where meaningful interaction (communication, discussion, conversation and socializing) is possible. If the IQ difference between two persons is more than 30 points, the communication breaks up. The higher IQ person will look like an incomprehensible nerd and the lower IQ as a moronic dullard – and they will not find anything common.
+/- 30 points does not sound much, but once the IQ is past 135, the downsides are imminent. When someone has a perfectly mediocre IQ (100 for Caucasian average), his communication range is from IQ 70 to IQ 130, which covers some 98% of the whole population. But when it is 135, it is from 105 to 165, which is approximately 36% of population. And it gets worse: if it is 162, your whole meaningful set of human interactions is restricted to Mensa qualifying people only (2% of whole population). Good luck for finding friends, acquaintances, colleagues – or spouse.
And it gets worse.
When the average IQ of a group is lower than the lower end of your communication range, the group will see you as a hostile outsider. They will do anything to bully you out of their presence. They will ostracize, excommunicate and oust you amongst themselves.
Sorry, but this is basic human psychology. Human group dynamics dictates that when the diversity grows too big, the group becomes incooperable – the group interaction becomes impossible. And high IQ means exactly that.
You may say that nobody must left behind and that mobbing and bullying is nasty and unacceptable, but our biology dictates otherwise. Exclusion is the basis for co-operation. A group which does not exclude people differing from the norm off or otherwise eliminate their presence, becomes dysfunctional.
Let me put this bluntly: every single human being with IQ of 135+ has experienced this exclusion, ousting and loneliness. The stereotype of a lonely genius does not come from empty air. It is cruel reality. And each and every human being with IQ of 135+ has experienced such unhappiness and misery the mediocre IQ people can not even imagine in their nightmares. I have cried my cubic metre of tears.
And this issue – that unhappiness is due to loneliness and the loneliness is due to the communication range – is something very few high IQ people ever realize.

I suspect it is significant that this piece is written by a high IQ woman. It’s not only harder for them to find friends, it is MUCH harder for them to find romance. A man is just as happy with a less intelligent woman as a more intelligent woman, whereas a woman is unlikely to want to settle for a less intelligent man, just as she’s less inclined to settle for a shorter man.
I knew I was much more intelligent than the average from the age of four, but I had an even smarter friend from the age of five. So, while I certainly experienced my share of exclusion and ousting, I can’t honestly say I ever experienced much in the way of loneliness. And frankly, very intelligent kids tend to be more than a little obnoxious as well as somewhat dishonest with themselves; it’s fine if you decide to reject the way that people have settled on doing things, but then, you have to recognize that you are making a choice.
In that refusal to admit that they are making a choice, many a gamma male is made.

Too low to parent

Speaking of IQ, apparently an average 69 IQ is insufficiently intelligent to care for children in Oregon.

Controversy as Oregon couple are forced to give up their children to social services after they were deemed ‘not intelligent enough’ to care for the babies. Amy Fabbrini, 31, and Eric Ziegler, 38, had both of their children taken into foster care, the youngest right after he was born in the hospital. After taking a required IQ test, Ziegler scored a meager 66 and Fabbrini a 72. The IQ of the average person ranges anywhere from 90-110. Domestic abuse and neglect were not factors in the custody case, but didn’t need to be, according to a report.

This indicates that 15.9 percent of all Black Americans, and 2.6 percent of all White Americans, are not intelligent enough to be permitted to raise children by Oregonian standards. I tend to doubt they were intending to establish that principle, but that’s what the bell curve dictates.

Enjoying their tolerance

It’s always mildly amusing to see progressives forced to face the consequences of their moral posturing, however disastrous those consequences may be for everyone.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and have seen my fair share of transgender/gender fluid people. They in no way offend me. I’d consider myself pretty progressive and tolerant of most things…except maybe people who identify as a person wearing socks with sandals. We all have our line in the sand and that’s totally mine. But how transgender people feel, how they choose to dress or any surgeries they get, don’t infringe on any parts of my life, so I support their decision to live as they see fit. I’ve also seen my fair share of transgender women in the women’s restroom before. Not ALL the time. But over the past few years, I’d say 4-5 that I noticed. Men…who were in some stage of transition and making every attempt to be a woman from mascara to heels. Transgenders who certainly felt comfortable in the women’s room and probably frightened to go into the men’s. At these times, I smiled…I peed…and life went on. But 2 weeks ago something very different happened.

I was at Disneyland with my son, my friend and her son. We were over in California Adventure in the food court area. We’d just finished eating and decided to pee before we headed out to The Little Mermaid. I went to the bathroom while she watched our boys in their strollers, and then I did the same. (For anyone who’s tried to fit a stroller in a bathroom stall, you get it).

I was off to the side waiting with the two boys, when I noticed a man walk into the restroom. My first thought was “Oh shit, he’s walked in the wrong restroom by mistake. lol” He took a few more steps, at which point he would’ve definitely noticed all the women lined up and still kept walking. My next thought was, “Maybe he’s looking for his wife…or child and they’ve been in here a while.” But he didn’t call out any names or look around. He just stood off to the side and leaned up against the wall. At this point I’m like, “WTF? Ok there is definitely a very large, burly man in a Lakers jersey who just walked in here. Am I the only one seeing this?” I surveyed the room and saw roughly 12 women, children in tow, staring at him with the exact same look on their faces. Everyone was visibly uncomfortable. We were all trading looks and motioning our eyes over to him…like “What is he doing in here?” Yet every single one of us was silent. And this is the reason I wrote this blog.

If this had been 5 years ago, you bet your ass every woman in there would’ve been like, “Ummm what are you doing in here?”, but in 2017? The mood has shifted. We had been culturally bullied into silenced. Women were mid-changing their baby’s diapers on the changing tables and I could see them shifting to block his view. But they remained silent. I stayed silent. We all did. Every woman who exited a stall and immediately zeroed right in on him…said nothing. And why? B/c I and I’m sure all the others were scared of that “what if”. What if I say something and he says he “identifies as a woman” and then I come off as the intolerant asshole at the happiest place on earth? So we all stood there, shifting in our uncomfortableness…trading looks. I saw two women leave the line with their children. Still nothing was said. An older lady said to me out loud, “What is he doing in here?” I’m ashamed to admit I silently shrugged and mouthed, “I don’t know.” She immediately walked out, from a bathroom she had every right to use without fear.

It’s always informative to spot the exact point at which the progressive virtue-signaling stops. It’s invariably somewhere between “violence directed at me” and “potential violence directed at my children.” Adjust your rhetoric accordingly.