The author of the great novel, Watership Down, is dead at 96. As you’ve probably already heard, Carrie Fisher, aka Princess Leia, has also died, at 60.
Tag: society
What War on Christmas?
The Carlos Slim blog can’t find it:
It’s that time of year again, folks. It’s time for the War on Christmas.
What is that, you may ask? The short answer: a sometimes histrionic yuletide debate over whether the United States is a country that respects Christianity.
For the longer answer, keep reading.
The idea of a “War on Christmas” has turned things like holiday greetings and decorations into potentially divisive political statements. People who believe Christmas is under attack point to inclusive phrases like “Happy Holidays” as (liberal) insults to Christianity.
For over a decade, these debates have taken place mainly on conservative talk radio and cable programs. But this year they also burst onto a much grander stage: the presidential election.
At a rally in Wisconsin last week, Donald J. Trump stood in front of a line of Christmas trees and repeated a campaign-trail staple.
“When I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here some day and we are going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” he said. “Merry Christmas. So, Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year, but Merry Christmas.”
Christmas is a federal holiday celebrated widely by the country’s Christian majority. So where did the idea that it is threatened come from?
Where indeed?
Berlin Christmas market attack killer still on the loose, say police
Also, if you say “Merry Christmas” to anyone, you are insensitive, a racist, a bigot, and an anti-Semite.
Happy Kwanzanukkadan, and may the metaphorical spirit of evolution naturally select you, your kin,and those who immigrate to replace them.
A society in decline
Declining life expectancy is the expected result of a society that has peaked and is on the way down:
One of the fundamental ways scientists measure the well-being of a nation is tracking the rate at which its citizens die and how long they can be expected to live.
So the news out of the federal government Thursday is disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, according to an analysis of the latest data. And that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993, particularly among people younger than 65.
“This is a big deal,” says Philip Morgan, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new analysis.
“There’s not a better indicator of well-being than life expectancy,” he says. “The fact that it’s leveling off in the U.S. is a striking finding.”
One can’t say it is surprising. The same thing happened in Russia under Yeltsin, when the country was being strip-mined by the oligarchs in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has found its confidence again in its return to Christianity and nationalism, and both its birth rates and life expectancies are on the rise again.
If Americans are fortunate, the God-Emperor Ascendant will be half as good for his people as Putin has been for the Russians. The more foreigners are driven out, the more the secularists and atheists and pagans are forced to accept their second-rate status, the more America will be made great again.
Equalitarianism is neither just nor healthy, and diversity is no more a strength than war is peace or black is white. If it was, the diversity advocates wouldn’t have to repeat it like a retarded mantra in defiance of all history and science.
The great irony is that allowing minorities equal status in a society is not only bad for the majority, it is almost always bad for the minorities themselves. After all, if they were even remotely capable of constructing a society in which they wanted to live in the first place, they would be the majority.
Mailvox: stuck on cuck
It’s clearly going to take more than the ascendance of the God-Emperor to get some conservatives unstuck from their cuckish clinging to increasingly outdated ideology politics. Consider one self-professed Alt-Right sympathizer on Twitter:
- I think worldview is what’s important and race is a lazy proxy.
- Race is just a proxy. It’s a lazy way to categorize. I think it’s important to do the hard work.
- I know it’s hard but if the alt-right could substitute worldview for race, it would be more powerful.
Translation: if only reality would accede to my fantasies, what a wonderful world this would be! This sort of conservative tends to remind me of the white liberals who californicated Colorado and are now californicating Texas.
Sure, what I believed before completely failed, so I had to leave, and even though you haven’t asked for my opinion, I’m going to help you improve through making this place more comfortable for me by making it more like the place I just left!
The question from the emailer, who is a reader, is, as you would expect, considerably more intelligent.
Is a racial identity the only identity option, or merely the most reliable or probable given historical precedent? Put differently, is there a deterministic nature to it, or just probabilistic?
I ask this in that racial identity seems to be only an initial filter, and ideological identity always follows soon afterwards.
Is there a specific reason you believe the ideological can’t be the first filter?
Off the cuff it seems like it can’t because we don’t really know what people think or believe, and people can lie, so we sort first by the most obvious traits and then afterwards by the more subtle.
It feels like the effort to sort primarily by ideology and secondarily by race is at the root of the “proposition nation” concept, that there would be a nation unified by an identity which superseded racial identity.
If the failure of the “proposition nation” was that it had no identity, let alone one which superseded racial identity, then in spirit the idea could exist if an identity which superseded race actually existed.
I believe that identity could exist within biblical Christianity, but given that it is personal and not political (like Islam or Judaism which have detailed theocratic components built in), perhaps the only unity possible in this life even with a Christian identity is genuinely “in spirit”?
Racial identity is not the only identity option. The two primary identities are race and religion. Again, to quote the founder of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew,
“In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
The recent presidential election demonstrates that race is a more powerful identity than religion, as more Mormons in Utah voted for Trump than for Evan McMullin, although the fact that so many Mormons were willing to vote for a no-hoper like McMuffin demonstrates the power of religious identity.
The irony is that those who desperately want to cling to the idea of a proposition nation fail to grasp that the only possible alternative to a race-based nationalities in the West is Christian theocracy, complete with a Department of Inquisition. I have yet to see a single person who cringes at the thought of nationalism and professes to be concerned about black and brown Christians endorse the concept of expelling every individual who does not share a Christian identity.
If you don’t like either race war or identity politics, then you should not have stupidly embraced immigration from other nations with competing identities. But it’s too late now, so it’s time to get unstuck from the cuck. You’re going to do it sooner or later, so you might as well accept the truth and spare yourself the embarrassment of having to look back on a series of desperate evasions and intellectual dishonesties to go with your previous mistakes.
And for the love of all that is good and holy, beautiful and true, don’t even think about quoting Galatians at me. Just spare yourself the inevitable humiliation.
Shooting at Ohio State
There was a minor attack of some kind at Ohio State University:
At least 8 people have reportedly been injured in a mass shooting at Ohio State University. Columbus Fire Department officials tell CBS affiliate WBNS that 8 people have been transported to area hospitals.
Seven of those patients were reportedly stable, at least one of them critical.
Law enforcement say one suspect has been shot and is dead.
Police tell WBNS that the incident started around 9:30 a.m. this morning when a vehicle ran into the chemical engineering building.
Some reports coming in say that some of the victims have been stabbed, with at least 4 being shot.
No word on if it is Sudden Jihad Syndrome, but the fact that it took place at the chemical engineering building tends to indicate that it wasn’t an omega taking out his frustrations on women.
UPDATE: AAAANNND it’s Muslims. A Minnesota Man, to be precise, which I understand is the proper way to pronounce Somali. So sad. Another Magic Dirt fail.
The price of badthink
Scott Adams said that he used to be scheduled to do at least two speaking engagements per month. Since he’s been talking about Trump, he has not received one request. And one scheduled for next year, was canceled as “they are going in a different direction”.
It’s no wonder the Left has been winning the cultural war. The Left is very good about supporting its cultural leaders. Castalia readers aside – they have been reliably great in this regard – far too much of the Right would rather back a Left-approved winner than support any of its own. Of course, I’m guessing that very little of that speaking engagement money came from anyone who was spending his own money, and most of it came from SJWs who managed to put themselves in position to spend someone else’s.
If you were at the Big Fork meeting last night, please note that this is the right time to get involved and start supporting it. You’ve got the Paypal address already; we’ll get a button on the relevant page by Monday. We will continue to do it on a shoestring; we’re comfortable with that. But the more people who start using it, the more server resources we’ll require.
And for those ready to start making some noise next Monday, there is more than one way to do that. (These are not the OG shirts, they’re being prepared, so hold off on those as you’ll all be emailed about them. And it’s not the only Crypto-Fashion now available.
The idiot intellectuals
Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why the world desperately needs to ignore the idiot intellectuals who presently rule it:
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke, who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
I could not agree more. One thing I have noticed, regularly and reliably, is that the professional class of the so-called cognitive elite are simply not that smart. I mean, they’re not exactly stupid, but most of them are 2SD midwits who are considerably less intelligent than Taleb, me, or most of the genuinely smart people that I know.
Remember the lesson of the Excluded: “The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.”
Or as Taleb puts it: “Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry. The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.”
Churchianity and the feminized church
It’s really rather remarkable, that as Christians lament declining attendance in their churches, and particularly, the growing absence of men of any age in them, they continue to double-down on the Churchian doctrine of the Holy Lady Parts. Rollo Tomassi observes that there is a material price to the structural and spiritual violations of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, to say nothing of 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 1 Timothy 3:11.
After almost six years of following the religious aspects of the Red Pill, I think it’s high time men acknowledge that modern Christian culture simply does not have men’s best interests as part of its doctrine anymore. Christianity, in particular, is by women, for women – if not directly executed by women, though even that is changing.
Church culture is now openly hostile towards any expression of conventional masculinity that doesn’t directly benefit women and actively conditions men to be serviceable, gender-loathing Betas. The feminist narrative of “toxic masculinity” has entirely replaced any semblance of what traditional masculinity or manhood once was to the church. Any hint of a masculinity not entirely beholden to a now feminine-primary purpose is not only feared, but shamed with feminine-interpreted aspersions of faith.
I recently read a study that our current generation is the least religious in history and I think as far as men are concerned much of that disdain for religion is attributable to a church culture that constantly and openly ridicules and debases any male-specific endeavors or anything characteristic of conventional masculinity. It’s no secret in today’s church franchisement that reaching out to, and retaining the interests of, men is at its most difficult.
Again, this is attributable to a generation of feminized men being raised into a church culture, and eventual church leadership, that has been taught to prioritize and identify with the feminine and reinforced with articles of faith now defined by the Feminine Imperative. The modern church has trouble reaching men because the church no longer has a grasp of what it means to be ‘men’.
To be clear, that’s not an indictment of the genuine faith itself, but rather a fairly measured observation of the way a feminine-primary church culture has shaped that faith. In the future, any man with a marginal capacity for critical thought will avoid the contemporary Christian church and religion for the obvious misandry it espouses; the only religious men you will find will be those raised into a life of religiously motivated Beta servitude – or those dragged to the feminine-directed church by wives who hold authoritative ‘headship’ in their relationships.
And even in what some consider to be pro-masculine or “macho” churches, we still find the Paper Alpha leaders preach from a mindset that defers wholesale to the feminine’s “Godly perfection” as they attempt to AMOG other male member to greater devotion to qualifying for, and identifying with, the feminine influence that pervades their church.
In this, as in so many things, observe that the consequence of following the lie is eventual destruction. This is what Paul means by knowing things by their fruits. If a church can throw out such clear Biblical direction in the interest of remaining in harmony with the current social or political consensus, it is only a matter of time before it will throw out any other instruction that makes anyone feel uncomfortable, and eventually, the Cross and the very concept of sin as well.
One need not be a theologian, or even a Christian, to see how this process has played out over the last 50 years.
Mailvox: how can you tell?
JI wants to know how one can accurately pick out the sociopaths among one’s acquaintances and colleagues. A few observations:
- Look for abrupt changes in demeanor as the situation changes, and particularly for a wide-eyed, “caught red-handed” reaction when such a change is observed. Sociopaths go from bright-eyed, charming, and friendly to dead-eyed and icy cold in the blink of an eye. Normal people do not.
- Beware of anyone who is too friendly too soon. It’s one thing to hit it off with someone, it’s another to have someone glom onto you for no apparent reason.
- Perma-victims are usually perpetrators. Female sociopaths, in particular, are adept at revising every story to make themselves the victim, especially when they were the culprit. If nothing is ever someone’s fault, it’s usually all their fault.
- Trust your instincts. If you find someone repellant but you don’t know why, it’s your subconscious picking up on small contradictions that you haven’t recognized. Keep a close eye on that individual and you’ll usually discover what it was that your subconscious was warning you about.
- Sociopaths have a very alert gaze and they are always scanning to see if anyone is watching them. If you intentionally let them know you are onto them by not looking away and smiling at them in a “gotcha” manner, they will confirm their sociopathy by abruptly changing their behavior towards you, usually by becoming avoidant and launching a whisper campaign against you. This can be risky, of course, but it does provide certain confirmation. I would not recommend it for most people, as most people are insufficiently ruthless to deal effectively with sociopaths.
- A shallow “salesman” effect. If someone is always “hail fellow well met”, but doesn’t have any real friends, this is a warning sign.
- An attempt to “take over” a group of friends or a social organization, particularly if they attempt to cut out the person who brought them into the group.
- Persistent cheating and parasitism, especially in small matters that no one normally keeps track of. I’m not talking about someone who is cheap, but someone who is always a taker and never a giver or even a fair-exchanger.
- Constant whisper campaigns. Sociopaths are even more concerned with controlling the narrative than SJWs. If you find that someone has told three different stories to three different people about the same event, be alert.
- Be very skeptical of all sob stories. If you encourage a sociopath telling one by feigning shock and sympathy, he will proceed to go deeper, adding more and more detail, and more and more pathos, taking the story into completely absurd territory in order to see how much of a sucker you are and what he can get away with.
None of these things are definitive, they are merely suggestive. But taken as a whole, they are reliably conclusive.
The importance of illumination
Status 451 contemplates the damage caused to organizations and individuals by “value-extractors”:
There’s a pattern most observers of human interaction have noticed, common enough to have earned its own aphorism: “nice guys finish last.” Or, refactored, “bad actors are unusually good at winning.” The phenomenon shows up in business, in politics, in war, in activism, in religion, in parenting, in nearly every collaborative form of human undertaking. If some cooperative effort generates a valuable resource, tangible or intangible, some people will try to subvert the effort in order to divert more of that resource to themselves. Money, admiration, votes, information, regulatory capacity, credibility, influence, authority: all of these and more are vulnerable to capture.
Social engineering, as a field, thus far has focused primarily on hit-and-run tactics: get in, get information (and/or leave a device behind), get out. Adversaries who adaptively capture value from the organizations with which they involve themselves are subtler and more complex. Noticing them, and responding effectively, requires a different set of skills than realizing that’s not the IT guy on the phone or that a particular email is a phish. Most importantly, it requires learning to identify patterns of behavior over time….
In Chapman’s analysis, a subculture’s growth passes through three phases. First come the geeks, the creators and their True Fans whose interest in a niche topic gets a scene moving. Then come the MOPs, short for “Members Of Public,” looking for entertainment, new experiences, and something cool to be part of. Finally, along come the sociopaths, net extractors of value whose long-term aim is to siphon cultural, social, and liquid capital from the social graph of geeks and MOPs. Sociopaths don’t just take, unless they’re not very good at what they do. Many sociopaths contribute just enough to gain a reputation for being prosocial, and keep their more predatory tendencies hidden until they’ve achieved enough social centrality to be difficult to kick out. It’s a survival strategy with a long pedigree; viruses that burn through their host species reservoir too quickly die off.
Corporations, of course, have their own subcultures, and it’s easy to see this pattern in the origin stories of Silicon Valley success stories like Google — and also those of every failed startup that goes under because somebody embezzled and got away with it. Ditto for nonprofits, activist movements, social networking platforms, and really anything that’s focused on growth. Which is a lot of things, these days.
Organizations have a strong incentive to remove net extractors of value. Would-be net extractors of value, then, have an even stronger incentive to keep themselves connected to the social graph. The plasticity of the human brain being what it is, this sometimes leads to some interesting cognitive innovations…. If you’ve ever seen an apparently-thriving group suddenly implode, its members divided over their opinions about one particular person, chances are you’ve seen the end of a sociopath’s run.
This is why sociopaths and predatory narcissists hate and fear people like Mike Cernovich and me. Both being Sigmas and more than a little inclined to march to our own beat, we are not vulnerable to the social pressure that silences most people when they get suspicious about a sociopath. Remember, sociopaths are always on. They are always scanning, trying to get a read on who might be aware that they are not what they pretend to be.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve caught in the middle of a hyperaware perusal of the group they are in, like a wolf in disguise surveying the sheep around him. They always react physically when caught out, often physically recoiling. Even more damning, they react in one of two ways. They either stay away from me and begin exhibiting signs of extreme personal dislike or they suddenly get very friendly in an attempt to figure out if I’m really onto them or if it was just a coincidence. If I don’t respond in a warm and clueless manner, they soon turn openly hostile.
Most people have some inkling that there is something off about the sociopath, but they simply can’t get their heads around believing what their subconscious is telling them. But if you get that ping from your subconscious radar about someone, don’t ignore it, start watching him closely. Make a habit of it. More often than not, you’ll soon see something that will justify your suspicions that everything is not as it should be.