It appears the Michael Avenatti story arc has reached its final phase, with his arrest by the FBI for trying to shake down the sneaker company Nike. Like everything else about this guy’s story, the events leading up to his arrest were an amusing mix of outlandish claims and ham-handed attention seeking. He was tweeting about how he was about to expose Nike for their crimes moments, before he was arrested by the FBI for his crimes. Even in custody, he is still working the grift that landed him in Federal custody.
What’s remarkable about this Avenatti story is not that he exists or that he has managed to hustle the left-wing media for a couple of years now. He actually had them giving him money to explore running for President. What’s remarkable about his story is that he is not all that uncommon. He’s more garish than most, owing to his heritage, but his type is becoming a common feature in public life. The most prominent politicians today are every bit as dishonest and corrupt. Ours is an age of the universal sociopath.
This proliferation of sociopaths is most certainly a new thing. A few generations ago, the rules of society would have prevented a character like Avenatti from getting to this level, as his demeanor would not have been tolerated. He simply would not have been granted an audience by the media, which is a big part of his story. In fact, it’s probable that his character cannot exist without social media. New social media not only makes it easy for stupid people to get on-line, but it makes it easier for grifters to exploit them.
That’s the truth about services like Facebook and Twitter. They did not invent the concept of social media or the public platform. Usenet was a very popular platform at the dawn of the internet culture. It’s fair to say the BBS was what initially drove amateur interest in the internet. Long before Mark Zuckerberg, message board communities were flourishing on-line, serving tens of millions of people. The thing was, you had to have a little savvy to reach these platforms and you needed some smarts to exploit them.
What the new platforms did was make it so a moron could get on-line. Phones come with Twitter and Facebook apps baked into the platform. In most cases, you can’t remove them even if you don’t use them. If you can operate a phone, you can be on these platforms, interacting with your fellow morons in minutes. What’s unique about this age is that the people who were encouraged to remain silent for most of human history have now been fitted with the tools to stand in the public square, bellowing like lunatics.
The stupid have always been catnip for the dishonest, so it stands to reason that the grifters would also flood in the public square, attracted by the stupid. Social media has become a hunting ground for the modern grifter. In a different age, Mike Cernovich would be a lawyer with an office behind a Vietnamese nail salon at the strip mall. Milo Yiannopoulos would have been working children’s birthday parties as a clown, who made the adults uncomfortable. Michael Avenatti would be selling real estate or used cars.
Now, go even further back and it is hard to imagine these types making it to adulthood, much less becoming public figures. For example, the serial killer is most likely a phenomenon of modernity. To get away with ritual killing, you have to live among people who don’t find it odd to be around strangers. If people started dying or disappearing in a small medieval village, people noticed. For most of human history, being a drifter or even a traveler was a good way to get killed by paranoid locals.
Of course, what we know about sociopaths like Avenatti is that their behavior did not start in late adulthood. He was a ripping people off as a kid. His inability to distinguish right from wrong probably would have gotten him killed by puberty in most times. Society was too near a run thing to tolerate these types of people. In fact, there’s good evidence that Western society deliberately removed these sorts of people from the breeding stock by the miracle of capital punishment. The executioner was essential to human civilization.
There’s pretty good evidence to suggest the prolific use of capital punishment raised western intelligence and provided the spark for what we think of us as the birth of modernity. By reducing the population of stupid people, the smart fraction increased. This led to a larger smart leisure class, who could then work on technological advances to overcome scarcity and the problems of human organization. More smart people made it possible for more smart people, so a cascading effect gave us modernity.
We know we are getting dumber now, and that may be due to the elimination of capital punishment, or possibly the fact we have eliminated the lethal consequences of stupidity, so the stupid are proliferating. Just as social media makes it possible for the proliferation of grifters, it’s possible that the end of capital punishment has allowed for the proliferation of sociopaths. In another age, these people either would have been killed in their youth or killed soon after reaching adulthood. Their reproduction would have been limited.
In short, what we may be experiencing is the result of western society evolving down a cul-de-sac, like the Panda. The proliferation of smart people resulted in a new social morality that permitted the flowering of a class of sociopaths and also a growing stock of stupid people on whom they can feed. It’s as if the Enlightenment unleashed a pathogen that made the left handed into status-seeking sociopaths and the right-handed into high-trust altruistic suckers. In time, the former has come to dominate the latter in the West.
Of course, no process continues into the future unabated. At some point, survival will require dealing with people like Michael Avenatti. If after a quick trial, he is hanged in a public square, the dynamics of society would quickly change. Being the slick talking grifter would plummet in status and even the dumb people in mass media would become afraid of them. The executions would proliferate until the balance of personality types in society was restored. In other words, it’s time to bring back the hangman.
I agree with the overall gist of the article, but I think that declining IQ levels among whites are exacerbated by the dysgenic consequences of putting high IQ women in the work force, so that they are often childless or have one child in their mid-to late-30s or even later. Low IQ women are more likely to achieve at least replacement levels of fertility. A better way to raise white IQ levels is to actively discriminate in favor of men in the workplace and to restore marriage and motherhood as high status female careers.
Far too practical for consideration.
Don’t overlook the effect of wage reduction (inflation) starting in the 60’s. When a typical middle class workingman’s wage could support a stay at home mom, we had stay at home mothers organizing home and hearth.
My wife has three degrees, smart as a whip, and regrets everyday our decision to earn two incomes. There are plenty of women smart and not so smart that would heed their biological imperatives if they could live with a reasonable lifestyle.
Japan, which doesn’t have all of the problems associated with diversity, has the same problem for the same reason.
That’s very interesting. I have in the past defended having smart women contributing to the economy and technological advancement. I knew there were negative offsets, but never considered the lower birthrate angle and it’s impact on collective IQ.
Diversity Heretic, great point, I’ve never thought of that.
Love the bluntness of this article!
Interesting points. Let’s also not forget the effectiveness of corporal punishment. Nothing like a good caning – Singapore-style – to remind the youth that vandalism has real consequences. In the private sphere, there’s nothing like a punch in the teeth to remind people to mind their manners. A certain amount of contained violence is necessary to maintain civility. Perhaps we would prefer it were not so, but that doesn’t make it any less so. Just look at all those people, safe and snug inside their cars, flip the bird or scream profanities at others, when you know damn well they… Read more »
I like a gallows for capital cases. Hangings have great entertainment value without all the mess concomitant to a beheading.
I agree that corporal punishment should be reinstated for violent crime. A publick flogging that leaves the miscreant maimed would be a good
way to deal with the particularly vicious.
And of course, an armed society is a polite society.
And you can, of course, guarantee that the Justice system that just let Jussie the Jew Jig go free will never be under any political pressure to flog the uppity honky, can’t you?
The bad guys are armed too. I don’t think today’s officer safety wants a bullet in the skull pan when he comes to maim someone and note back in the day no one wanted the job as an executioner anyway If I was going to die a horrible death for some offense or be maimed, I’d might as well take you with me and a cheap AR15 and some Molotovs make that doable Things get worse if its a gang and officer safety’s wife and kids get a visit from some homies Now non lethal flogging with no criminal record… Read more »
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Robert E. Howard
Not only no capital punishment, but no punishment at all, at least for certain protected classes. Juicy Smollett is merely the tip of the iceberg. Last weekend in Chicago a Negro killed an off-duty Mexican cop because he was POed at some Mexicans he’d been in altercation with earlier. Perp was on probation for burglary. This is a regular story. Guy is on parole, probation, wearing an ankle monitor when he kills someone. There’s simply no serious punishment for anything less than murder (and not always for that).
That’s because the only real crime left is “racism” or “bigotry”. Killing or maiming people is no big deal any more, as long as there is no “bigotry” involved.
Exactly. Who cares about a routine murder if there’s no “hate” in the mix?
I’ve often thought we should dig up LBJ, shock him back to life, then hang his sorry ass.
Swing him in a circle by his big ears.
Pope Stephen VI put the corpse of Pope Formosus on trial in 897. If only we had that kind of resolve. After he was convicted he was buried in an out of the way piece of land. Then dug up again, and his body thrown in the Tiber. However, apparently things didn’t go well for Stephen VI, who was strangled. Theodore II supposedly recovered the body, and John IX supposedly reburied Formosus in St. Peters’s.
Agreed. We’d have fewer corrupt politicians if a guillotine sat at every public square. In stead of baby proofing the cabinets and outlets and putting fences around every body of water and seat belts and air bags in every car maybe we should just let natural selection take its toll. If an idiot wants to stick his dick in an electrical outlet we should applaud his act as raising the IQ of society in general. It’s called “natural selection” because it is natural so who are we to fool mother nature? Let the idiots kill themselves if they want to… Read more »
When I was younger I fell into the usual trap of thinking ” hey – I should tell that guy to not stick his hand on the hot stove ” The problem was – as I found out – that in more cases than not the idiot you were trying to protect from himself (or herself) – would then go on the attack. “You can’t tell me what to do!” – and things like that. In other words : a well meaning warning to a moron would turn into a long drawn out argument that would devolve into sheer stupidity.… Read more »
Problem is as I’ve said repeatedly, the Welfare State. Remove that, and most all societal ills go away—or at least remediate eventually on their own.
In the above example, you eat Tide Pods, the hospital does not treat you for free or on the tax payer dime. You get no disability from SSI, you get no welfare, ADA accommodations at work, and so forth.
And all those people laid off by machines end up weaponized by some ambitious elite. He can code, he know algorithms ! Necklace him! is a well deserved fate for a callous bastard A pro tip. if you don’t care about them they have not obligation to care about you and as this is not a Christian society (such a society would force reciprocal care) they have a moral right to go Rwanda on you and to preemptively smash your complex and fragile infrastructure I’d rather pay for the welfare state than create a power vacuum where MS13 or the… Read more »
Listen to the Edward Dutton segment Z links. Guy is a riot.
If you don’t hang the sociopath, the sociopath becomes the hangman.
*Current sociopolitical situation
“we have eliminated the lethal consequences of stupidity”….perhaps the greatest line I’ve read here yet. I intend to spread this far and wide. It becomes more true as each day goes by.
I’m somewhat surprised that you have never heard that before. I’ve been hearing that for a few decades now. As somebody who has done a small amount of car racing, rides a motorcycle, shoots guns, and has worked in a number of industrial settings as well as doing a decent amount of home construction – it’s been pretty obvious to me for a long time (since like the 1980’s) – that as a society we have constantly worked towards eliminating the consequences for stupid behavior. It’s why I constantly go back to the “stop making me fund the welfare /… Read more »
Repeal the 19th. Remove the Invaders. Gas the boomers.
I drive a leased basic Toyota RAV4. It’s cheap and reliable. It has decent pickup and a nice tight turn radius . . . BUT the new models are crammed with “safety features” that mothers pushed for and I HATE THEM. It BEEEEEPS if you change lanes at any time for any reason without signalling, it BEEEPS if the temp goes to 37 or lower and warns you about icy roads, and it BEEEEPS if it thinks you’re going to have a collision when you’re obviously not. It’s the nanny state on steroids and it drives me f—king nuts. God,… Read more »
disconnect the beeper. It may just involve removing one fuse
LOL.
I bitched about seat belt requirements, driving with the lights on during the day, and then airbags and ABS.
You’re behind the curve.
…add that thought to the political and social construct of academia that used to cull the herd but now allows morons to find refuge within the sacred walls of education…..
I would take it one step further and argue that we’ve incentivized stupidity.
Survial Of The Fittest, a.k.a. Natural Selection, will return in earnest some day soon. A herd of mindless, sick cattle inevitably gets thinned – one way or another.
I’ve heard it referred to as the K-shift.
Right now we are an r-selecting society. That will not last much longer.
As existential threat declined in the modern era of civilization, fitness culling by the natural environment declined with it. Barbarian warfare provided a meager substitute, as the stupid tended to be killed off first on both sides. However, the stupid cohort is currently too large for any kind of policy solution to be effective. Rather, the environment must change in order for the problem to be remedied systemically. Otherwise, we will continue to evolve toward a hive/herd species.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15330
A lot of the stupid would eliminate themselves. That should be encouraged rather than interfered with. This would cause the Democrats to lose most of their constituents.
Sitting at a So Cal Starbucks this morning. Reversion to mean observed and confirmed. 1/3 of patrons should be institutionalized, 1/3 should be farm equipment. If you’re bringing the hangman back to California, bring a lot of rope.
No shock Avenatti & his partner in crime Geragos are CA esquires. This place is a grifter’s Paradise.
It’s a bit like peanut allergies. Why are we unable to get peanuts on an airplane any more, why are there so many peanut warning signs and school bans? Did we, as humans, suddenly evolve a peanut allergy? No. More and more people who would have died from peanuts never did, and they passed this on to their children.
More likely it was just a slow rolling panic that afflicted mothers of young children. Incidents of peanut allergies have been on a steep decline. Food scares are probably a symptom of the decline is social trust. There’s nothing more frightening than the thought of invisible demons attacking us through food and water.
Food allergy deaths are declining, partly because more precautions are taken to prevent them. If you ever see somebody in anaphylactic shock, food allergies will seem less theoretical.
I think that it’s knowledge and avoidance, mixed in yes with over reaction. But, as a dad who brought a can of salted cashews home and unwittingly nearly killed his own daughter as a result (we didn’t know, until the airway started to close), it is a real thing.
I read ingredients on jars of pesto very carefully now.
There has been a a number of studies on tree nut allergies. Peanut allergies are similar, but peanuts are not actually nuts. They are legumes. The protein involved is the same in people allergic to both tree nuts and peanuts. The prevalence of the allergy has been consistent in clinical studies. About 4% of the population is allergic to tree nuts or peanuts, with some overlap between the two. Self-reported allergies spiked in the 1990’s and then began to decline in the last decade. I expect similar data to turn up with gluten allergies. The biological prevalence of this allergy… Read more »
I think a factor in the gluten surge is that it ain’t your grand-dads gluten any more.
There is no crop that’s been more fucked around with than wheat and current crops would be unrecognizable to a farmer 100 years ago.
Most people who are allergic are mildly allergic. what slice of the 4% are in life threatening danger by breathing peanut dust?
no one on the airplane can eat nuts because someone might smell them!!!!
Peanut allergies can be avoided by feeding very small amounts of peanut flour to children starting at a young age. Their immune systems will not recognize it as an allergen if it is introduced this way.
Similarly, allergies to cats can be reversed (even in adults) by constant low dosage exposure to cat dander.
Or by the eradication of cats.
Cats are wonderful. Cat ladies…not so much.
Maybe, but my daughter doesn’t have a peanut allergy. She has a cashew allergy. There’s no way to predict that without a scratch test or lots of bloodwork.
Yep. Only allergy ever had was to cats as an adult. Wife decided to take in a stray kitten. All it took was two weeks of near anaphylaxis, eyes swollen shut, runny nose and sneezing and the reactions finally stopped.
Be glad it was a cat and not your wife.
So what I get from this is that I am not getting back my campaign donations to Avenatti.
Crap! Can Zuckerberg help out in any way?
I’m not convinced we actually have more sociopaths than we used to. A sociopath acts outside the bounds of what society will tolerate. These days, society has shown itself prepared to tolerate quite a bit. I’m willing to bet that in the circles Avenatti runs in, his ethics are pretty close to the norm.
Nope, a sociopath is an individual without a functioning conscience, or superego.
Half century ago people like Avenati woul have never been admitted to law school or allowed to take the bar exam. A quarter century ago his conduct would have gotten him disbarred. In modern America sociopaths like him are feted and adored by the sociopathic media.
Remember reading a few years back that for ~500 years, England was executing ~1% of its most troublesome males each generation while their the upper classes were dramatically out-breeding the lower classes.
Had to wipe a tear of joy from my cheek. I was overcome by the beauty.
Executions in the medieval period were quite rare actually and executioners all had second or third gigs to make ends meet even though the job paid well on account of people mostly having to be forced to do it What happened as serfdom ended and the healthy three tiered society normal for Caucasian peoples (those who rule, pray,work or some variation ) fell apart , the social controls went with it Most people broadly cannot handle freedom unless its heavily contained by custom .As opportunity and liberalism and such started to creep in , so did bad conduct. So we… Read more »
I watched Idiocracy about a month ago and I could make the same movie from the daily “average” and “suggested” internet clips
One of the funniest scenes ever is that guy in his apartment on the lazyboy watching some dumb show while sucking on a tube of movie popcorn butter. Someone knocks on his door and he yells, “go away, batin’. I wish I still lived in a crappy apartment just so I could yell that whenever someone knocks on the door.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wJpdA-LE3o
There’s a problem in cosmology known as the Fermi Problem. In a nutshell it states, if the goldilocks zone for the probability of life and even intelligent life seems so commonplace in the universe, where is everybody? (Should be detectable through transmissions). The Derb wrote an article on this subject some years ago. The title had Black Planet in it. A Black, black-pill. A possible explanation for this is that the cooperative cultures that are needed to develop a technocratic civilization also over-develop the cooperative instinct to the point of pathological altruism. Altruism, a necessary ingredient to rise, at some… Read more »
People try to figure out the optimum IQ and personality type to make everything work well. Maybe the civilizational secret sauce is to create an environment where different types and intelligences of people are given room to live and contribute. Not to go all multi-culti, but maybe giving the culture a little bit of room for different people, living in different neighborhoods, to do their bit and get rewarded for it is what makes it all go. It also seems to lead to the problems and excesses we see today, but that is another story.
What you describe is how we evolved. Symbiotic castes or estates…not competitive classes.
Getting back to that without browning the civ may be a pathway out of this. Assuming we can get out of this.
“Not to go all multi-culti, but maybe giving the culture a little bit of room for different people, living in different neighborhoods, to do their bit and get rewarded for it is what makes it all go.”
That worked pretty well in quite a few places for a long time.
Diversity is never good and while it can be tolerated in the manner you noted any society is better off without it. If you want ethnic food, get damned cookbook Not directed at you here Lorenzo, but while ethnic neighborhoods provide stimulation and excitement, I don’t care. Save your shekels and travel. Don’t bring it here because life is boring Boring, homogeneous cultures are better cultures Truth is a lot of the social trouble in the US came from European migrants and those same migrants helped usher in gun control, grew the state and lead to many of the problems… Read more »
Dear Lord, why didn’t we pick our own cotton! Lol
Going to space is stupid as the energy cost and material cost doesn’t pencil out under any reasonable circumstance. There are no habitable worlds in our solar system , its cost the GDP of nations to make say Mars livable and the low gravity will still hurt the colonists On top of that FTL may be effectively or completely impossible anyway Also its less altruism that kills space but urbanization. With a global “developed” world fertility average of 1.6 there is sooner than later not going to be population pressure other than from low tech immigrants Assuming we deal with… Read more »
@AB Prosper Energy and material cost to go to outer space isn’t prohibitive, entryist. Instead, the only thing that would make space travel prohibitive is people like you passing laws to make space travel illegal. Starship/Super Heavy development as well as the current Block Five Falcon Nine as shown that projects like the expendable SLS and every spaceplane booster are overpriced crap. The money that was wasted on the Senate Launch System’s propellant tanks (just propellant tanks!) would’ve paid for 1,000 SpaceX Starhopper/Starship prototypes. Technology keeps settlements alive on Moon and Mars. High tech gods would be worshipped in those… Read more »
Settle the solar system, and the stupid shall never flourish.
Praise be to Prophet Elon Musk (PBUH).
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stainless+steel+starship+spacex&t=palemoon&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
The sociopathic and stupid are everywhere. I saw them in my business life. I see them everyday everywhere. I imagine them drawn and quartered.
A very inefficient means of elimination. I think batch processing by packing them into old ocean freighters and sinking the freighter at sea is probably the best way forward. Hygienic, too.
Sorta like the German gas wagons that directed the exhaust gasses into the containment area, but more efficient.
Someone above was talking about how white men are going to take over and it’s gonna take unsentimental types to save the world and that’s who we are. That’s true. The hard right is full of hard men. Hard-hearted men. You can tell immediately who’s Left or Right by just mentioning the words ‘peanut allergy’ and see how the person reacts. I’m not even going to give an opinion on that. I’ve no idea. But restless leg syndrome is real. It sounds ten times gayer and made-up than a peanut allergy. But I’ve suffered from it. It’s real. It feels… Read more »
” In a different age, Mike Cernovich would be a lawyer with an office behind a Vietnamese nail salon at the strip mall. Milo Yiannopoulos would have been working children’s birthday parties as a clown, who made the adults uncomfortable.”
Zman, I love you for this. I admire independent thought and blunt honesty far more than anyone’s high IQ.
and for the oblique Better Call Saul reference
It’s not that we’re getting dumber, we just don’t have to be any smarter. A European teenager today knows all about a smart phone and a PC because he’s been exposed to to one his entire life. But that same teenager has no real clue where his food or clothing comes from. 200-years ago, not only did a teenager know where it came from, he worked for it every single day along with every member of his family. I would guess if you could put both in the same room, you’d discover one is just as smart as the other.… Read more »
Either society is encouraging smart people to reproduce or dumb people to reproduce. Welfare systems do the latter.
You don’t have the moral authority of the church to get people to act against their interests and to mitigate the negative effects of shoving strangers into a city
Thus either pay people to work which means controlling automation and efficiency pay people not have to kids or pay welfare but no matter what you will pay.
Or you could just starve people to death and hope to god some opportunistic rich person doesn’t help them kill you as they have no connection whatever to you and yours
Bring back capital punishment? LOL. We can’t even get the crazy, drug-addled homeless criminals off the street because bleeding hearts won’t allow them to be touched.
You still have to pay the cost Spud Boy and you cannot safely contain mentally ill people and addicts in tents. Even without corruption, its big money and I can promise you that the bulk of heard heartened conservatives and just being cunts as usual. They want to opt out of the costs for peace and order so they can have more money If you truly want it, you need a lot more paths for people to opt into a good life which means nearly hermetically sealed ports and closed borders, repatriation, and very probably heavy regulation to contain efficiency… Read more »
We are experiencing the cascading results of dysgenic policies – subsidizing the least fit to breed and eat, removing capital punishment, discouraging family formation by the more capable, etc. There have been a couple of excellent reviews of a book explaining this, “At Our Wits’ End” (at Vdare and, I think, Occidental Observer). In the unavoidable cataclysm to come, there will be a lot of Whites dying too. Those who survive will be the hardest, most determined, and least sentimental. Only White men can build civilization, and only they can save a bit of it – but first they need… Read more »
Modernity is killing humanity in the industrialized world. Remember the White fertility rate has been below replacement for nearly 50 years. Simply you cannot have your cake an eat it to, move people into cities so you have more consumers and automate too many jobs to lower scale for even more profit they stop having kids. The only way around that requires a lot higher wages than make sense in any market society. There is no moral leverage to use and no social capital to spend and absolutely no policy choices that are available right now under the system we… Read more »
A bit off topic, but I wanted to share this article from Switzerland about unregistered gun ownership. Your readers who think all Europeans are unarmed may be interested in this. It’s in German (of course) but if you have Google Chrome, you can right click on it and select “Translate to English”. Even with the translation not being 100% precise, it’s a very understandable article. When you see the word “she” they are referring to a pistol which is feminine (die) in German. His girlfriend hates the gun. “I always have to make sure she does not dump her –… Read more »
Sehr guter Artikel. Vielen Dank.
Speaking of the lethal side effects of stupidity, can you imagine the terrible injuries when they used to put children working in factories around dangerous, nonidiot proof machines back in the early days of the industrial revolution? I’m sure that culled the foolish rather effectively too.
Climate change sounds like a great idea – a huge rapid ice age, or the catastrophic flooding of the coastal areas, would cull low IQ members of society rather quickly.
It’s like I tell Progs, “Why should I fear the rising tides? That’s where you people live and I hate you.”
Certain I will catch hell for this, but Planned Parenthood is doing their best. Horrible, but there it is.
This is one terrific and useful and necessary essay! And, it is focused and to the point all the way. Funny too while never being anything other than deadly serious. Quite a feat.
We seem to be conflating two things in the comments: IQ and sociopathy. This leads to competing theories of solutions: execution vs consequences for stupidity. In the book, “The Son Also Rises”, by Gregory Clark, Clark makes the case for smarter people being more successful, and therefore wealthy. He tracks wills and estate documents through the centuries in England to show that the wealthy had more children and wealth to bequeath to them, while the poor did not. In other words, absent the welfare state, the higher IQ folk outbreed the lower IQ folk—eugenics. This led after a few centuries… Read more »
”A more feasible approach, again highly doubtful, would be sterilization for criminals and unwed mothers and fathers.”
Without medical welfare. The poor bears the disproportionate infant/child and adult mortality.
So all things being equal alot of the poor are disappearing from the breeding pool by this alone
With only as much food as in harvest boxes and lack of baby bonus. The poor is discouraged from breeding.
Socrates being the first victim of the public square morons of democracy.
From the Rumjacks; your favorite Australian-Irish Band: The Jolly Executioner https://youtu.be/1NOode7Bpww It said his blade weighed half a tonne, O’ Spanish steel, Christ how it shone, With a whistle & thump yer dash were done, And the axe cared not for who you were, He kept a cell below the tower, Where he signed the cross every half an hour, With a calf skin drum & a rattle tat taa, The Jolly Executioner. He had a son, a drunken sailor, Coulda been a Tinker, Tyke, or tailor, Sailed away to far Australia, To be the executioner, His rope were short,… Read more »
In China, treason was punished by executing 3 generations of the traitors family. So even more extreme than the West. However since the emperor is merciful, the traitor was skinned alive, while the furthest relatives were only beheaded.
Three generation punishment is good way to get rid of a damaged elite but collective punishment doesn’t sit well in Western craws. Also we are kind of entering a tribal period and when it comes to tribal warfare, no action you take has legitimacy to my tribe. XYZ person might be a monster but he’s my monster so F/U Also with bio weapons and such being nearly an at home thing , its wise to show some care. It won’t be that long before you got to arrest and execute some traitor and he adds Ebola to the landscape and… Read more »
I had an idea for a sci-fi horror book. A rogue molecular biologist yokes a melanin promoter to a biological toxin and inserts this construct into a communicatible virus. The story ends with a bunch of albinos sitting around bemoaning their lack of mating options. The (((PUBLISHER ))) shut my ass down.
Maybe he had read ‘The White Plague’ by Frank Herbert of ‘Dune’ fame.
Where is Albert Pierrepont when you need him? But does seem like society has managed to turn the “tabula rasa” vs. heritability/innatism debate into a global Lethal Dose-50 (or worse) experiment.
But…but…but blacks have a RIGHT to be stupid, Z…!!! Is this just some hatey scheme to eliminate blacks from the gene pool???
As P J O’Roark has famously said, “ You have the right to do anything you damn well please, and your only responsibility is to accept the consequences”.
As a society, we seem to have adopted the first part and rejected the second.
Hey guys i’m getting cyberbullied over at powerline. If you got a disgus account i could use the help: wright=sidvic
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/pompeo-feeling-it-at-aipac.php
Done
Thanks I noticed. Rolled in there with some pretty strong tea didn’t you bile. I guffawed (refuse to sound like teenage girl and use lol). I enjoy going there and arguing with their large Jewish readership. reminds me of college. To be fair, many are smart, but they all argue the same way. I often suspect that i’m arguing with one jew and his six sock puppets. I was able to get several to evoke nazi stuff so there is that.
Sid, good for you for arguing with the civnats. Even if you don’t sway your opponent, you may affect the audience.
The civnats must wonder why they rarely win converts. I sure did when I was one. Civnats have an internally consistent worldview but sadly their worldview doesn’t fit the world itself. If most people really wanted to be race-blind, then the “Democrats aRe the Real Racists” argument would be persuasive. But it is not at all persuasive and that should suggest to the smarter ones that they must change their worldview to fit reality.
I added a bit of civnattery about what their idols “The Founding Fathers” had to say.
What is being described is the r vs K Reproduction Theory which explains the sudden decline of great civilizations through out history. In human terms ‘r’s can be easily fit into every negative category one can ascribe to sociopathic and phsycopathic behavior.
Avenatti was set up by a Trump administration conspiracy to keep him from winning the 2020 presidential election.
And stop picking on people of left handedness…
Trial by public acclamation sounds like a good idea. Also removing restraints on self defense. (sic.) The vicious are a more direct threat than the stupid. If robbery and assault could be resisted with immediate, lethal, and crushing force there would be a whole lot less of it.
This. Appeals to allow only a “proportionate response” are in every case our enemies’ first step towards anarchotyranny. The sole purpose of such arguments is to stay the hand of Justice.
I puzzled over this sentence for some time. Can anybody explain the meaning here? “Society was too near a run thing to tolerate these types of people.”
His supposition in that statement is that survival (in ye olden days) was tenuous and that civilization was a thin veneer on top. Subject to great damage from seemingly innocuous actions. Further that the leaders of society had some sense of ownership of it and so would not tolerate reckless actions that might permanently marry of destroy it.
An analogy is that of an elderly person who zealously guards their furniture when the grandkids are over.
Just saw a USA Today headline. Women will no longer have kids because of wait…. global warming….
Avenatti flourished because he served a purpose for the elite. Now a grifter doesn’t need to be gifted at conning suckers, he only needs to support the dominate narratives and he can get his moment in the sun. The suckers want to believe and there are stiff social and financial penalties for not believing. The higher skilled grifters like Sharpton and, probably, Cernovich are shrewder and know how to make the con last longer. But, as Z notes, even their job is easier these days due to a dumbed down populace and public discourse. There is a real chicken and… Read more »
“Avenatti flourished because he served a purpose for the elite…” You guys love to think too much. There’s not always some clever ideological angle. Get real. Avenatti was appealing as hell in his moment. I’m glad he fucked his life up because that dude is smart, articulate, and aggressive. And women love sharky looking bald guys. He’d have been Lefty’s jpitbull to devour dullard Trump in debate season. If he’d been halfway in control of himself he’d be the next president.
I swear I have read this thesis before about how modern Europe was formed by the reintroduction of the death penalty after the Church reversed their policy on it, but for the life of me cannot remember where.
Mentioned in the “Jolly Heretic” clip Z-man listed. BTW, don’t judge the series by this first poorly produced video. They get better.
The Plague did a lot of the heavy lifting.
Thought the US average IQ was dropping due to the white birth rate dropping, and the influx of vibrancy from Mexico and Africa…. Doubt the near elimination of capital punishment has had that much of an effect.
No, white IQ is dropping about a point per generation. Ashkenazi IQ is also falling and a bit faster, as it starts from a higher figure. This is most likely due to intermarriage, but not exclusively. Jews no longer have rocket high selection pressure for intelligence.
If I may play the devil’s advocate, we may be wrongfully associating intellect with virtue.
No, measured IQ is dropping.
brawndo, its what sociopaths crave
I read a study, I don’t remember where, claiming that success, both academic and financial, mirrors IQ up until about an IQ of 140. Once you cross over an IQ of 140, success collapses. This would mean that our current society discriminates against a high IQ.
I have worked around a bunch of >150 IQ types. Two problems there. One is that they go off in strange tangents, while they remain oblivious to some of the obvious truths around them. Two is that they are completely overconfident in their capacity to be correct in every judgement they make. Put it all together, and you occasionally get spectacular success, but often offbeat and weird sorts of failures. These traits are also why, IMO, super smart people often have social issues.
I have found that the super high IQ people I’ve been around were the opposite of over confident. They can never seem to nail anything down. Way too many variables pinballing around in their brains. They do tend to get a little strange. One of the old man’s friends basically invented modern avionics and his full basement is half mad scientist laboratory and half enormous model train world. If you wanted to play with his trains you had to put on the locomotive engineer’s hat.
“If you wanted to play with his trains you had to put on the locomotive engineer’s hat.”
Well yeah, obviously. How crass and uncouth to suggest otherwise!
I’ve always suspected that my high IQ is the root of all the problems in my life…
I know what you mean, Mac. I also think that the root of my problems is my high IQ. I think my good looks and vast wealth are also part of the problem.
I recall a fellow I knew back in the 60s. He was a phone phreaker and computer wiz before they were common, MENSA member and proud of it.
He wired his Harley, and the engine died when he turned the lights on.
Book learnin’ smart vs. real world walkin’ around sense.
The main reason for that is the rarity. When you get into the one percent IQ range, you’re talking about a very small number of people. Throw in the fact that comparative advantage tops out at around 120 for 95% of the academy and 100% of finance and law, stratospheric IQ’s will tend to end up in narrow areas of math and science. Having a 150 IQ means a lot for a physicist, but not so much for a patent attorney. There are not many attractive feminists for the same reason.
There might not be much use—other than entertainment—for idiot savants. OK, I’m being facetious, but the point being that society can’t be blamed for discrimination when you are so smart as to be non-communicative with the rest of us peons. However, there seems to be any number of famous individuals that have been deemed “scary smart” having made significant contributions to society, albeit they have been labeled “eccentric” at times.
The opinion of the person that did the study was that society and the education system was failing people with extremely high IQs, and that we needed those people in order to make the jumps from the known to the unknown. If I’m not mistaken, his idea was to remove high IQ people from the education system and place them in an environment that would let them progress at their own pace.
McLeod, absolutely. Had that problem with my children growing up. Schools, especially public schools, have a leveling effect on outstanding (high ability) students. As we’ve said, they have been poz’d. It’s always easier to bring down the top, than raise the bottom. Attention is always spent on the laggers—whether or not such will do better in the long run for those individuals or society in general. Indeed, I removed my son from a public school (top district at that) when he came home on a Weds—proud that he had completed his weekly “math module”—and would be allowed to play video… Read more »
Well, we also read numerous studies suggesting extremely high IQ students thrived among their intellectual peers and, therefore, skipping grades was beneficial. Our older son did fine skipping 1st grade (in private Christian school) but not so well skipping 5th grade. Academically there was no problem, but the age/social gap at that point was not so great. He got through it but if I had to do it over again, I’d choose a different route.
And, merely FYI, here in the DFW suburbs, Montessori schools are predominantly Iranian and dot-Indian, with a few SJW Whites thrown in. Not our thing.
There was a fairly good movie about 20 years ago called “Little Man Tate” about this topic. Jodie Foster played an “ordinary” waitress mom of a “scary smart” little boy. She faced the choice of sending him to a boarding school which was an incubator for others like him or keeping him living with her and going to a “normal” public school. She wanted to keep him living with her, but saw how alive he became among others of “his kind”.
Read Dutch. He explains this.
I honestly think this is a urban myth that extremely high IQ is associated with neuroticism or that society discriminates against the big brains. Vox Day promulgates this idea. I suspect because he feels bitter that his genius is relegated to the intellectual ghetto. My reasoning is that if you have a high IQ- you are smart enuf to turn down the high beams when warranted. Certainly, i have little problem faking mediocrity. I also have little problem instructing my gardener so his assertion of a SD communication gap down strikes me me as bull shit to. Not too many… Read more »
Vox Day is full of crap, as far as one percent IQ correlating with poor interpersonal skills. Now, as far the communications gap, it exists, for sure, but I don’t think it is as much a function of g as culture. I grew up in the underclass, so I have little trouble communicating to poor people, but I have to think about it a bit. Rich people, on the other hand, often leave me baffled and homicidal. I’ve administered a lot of IQ tests in my life. I’ve also worked with large data sets of IQ data. The one thing… Read more »
Yeah, I’ve never quite figured out why people in 115 to 125 IQ range can be so obsessed by IQ and so desirous to claim to be a few points above where they are. Generally speaking, they have the IQ to do most jobs. In addition, success at those jobs becomes more about other personality attributes than IQ so long as your IQ is above the 115 or 120, i.e. whether they have a 118 IQ or 121 just doesn’t matter. I mean, I don’t hear guys who are 6’0 or 6’1 obsessing about height or constantly trying to convince… Read more »
My theory on the high normals thinking they are geniuses is this. If you are clocking in at 115, you are going through school smarter than most of your coevals. In fact, you probably will not get to know anyone significantly smarter. If there is a one percent IQ in your class, he’s probably not spending time with you. Mr. 115 gets to college and goes into something like economics or pre-law, where he is in with people ranging from 95-120, so he is again not running into those one percent people. They are in the computer lab or some… Read more »
Well, anyone who has taken even just a couple of math classes in college (and, thankfully, I only took a few) will quickly find where they stand in the IQ pecking order. When the average score on a test is a 42% but some guys are getting ~70% and one guy gets a 92%, it’s tough to pretend you’re as bright. Anyway, I grew up in an odd situation going to school both with working-class kids and kids on their way to Rice, Berkeley and a smattering of Ivies. We had the full spectrum so you knew where your stood.… Read more »
Citizen, good observation. More can be read in Charles Murray’s book, “Coming Apart”. About 10 years or so old, but I got a lot of my initial concepts there. First reference I heard to “assorted mating”.
We are leaving the bulk of the middle class behind and not one has a clue what to do except put them all on welfare (UBI).
Murray grew up in my part of the country. I know his world well. Murray has a lot of silly libertarian ideas, but he cares about the working and middle class because he grew up around them, as did I. The white poor and working class are falling apart – and have been for awhile. The white middle class is getting seriously squeezed, and it’s a 50-50 bet as to their fate. Upper middle class whites can see this, and they’re scared. (I know because I am one.) It’s no longer a matter of moving a less nice house, having… Read more »
If the super rich techies have their way, the rest of humanity, the bottom 90% will be killed off, sterilized or in camps. Think of it as “Revenge of the Nerds” on a massive scale And this isn’t a fringe thing, its what sits in the heads of people like Marc Andreessen of NetScape as noted in the article on him in Hacker News , its a callous disdain for the life and value of regular people Its not new either, back when the A-Bomb was a new things they were taking bets if the weapon would ignite the atmosphere… Read more »
Your description of the 115 crowd fits Vox Day. He constantly lets his readers know about his self reported high IQ but can fall for things that are transparently nonsense because he is so sure of his genius
just to be clear I was kidding about my gardener. My house looks like the one on Malcolm in the Middle.
Aka the midwits…
I don’t remember where I read the study, it “seemed” pretty comprehensive. It wasn’t that extremely high IQ people were neurotic, it was that they didn’t have the same academic or financial success as those with just a high IQ.
Mcleod, The study I saw on concluded that it was a function of the vast number of people who are “smart” let’s say the 130-140 range preferentially deal with their own ilk all the time, When they meet the 160’s who are obviously an order of plus up they don’t like it, can’t handle it and avoid it. The “smarts” win by sheer weight of numbers. The mid 160’s are about one in thirty thousand, that’s very different than one in a hundred.
It has been written, but I forgot where/who, that IQ tests begin to fail to accurately describe genius over 160. In order to isolate the “scary smart”, one should poll the top performers in their fields as to whom they consider “smart”. Then you find out who those individuals are. Sounds feasible to me.
Billie Jones, you’re talking about midwits; 34% are btwn 100 and 115; 14% fall between 115 and 130; 2% are above 130. It’s a very small tail. In my humble experience, the differences between 130-140 and the 150-160s is small, and not a barrier. Certainly not enough to get you into Dunning-Kreuger territory, like with midwits in the 105-110 range zman discusses above. If you’re in the 98th percentile, you are probably doing something or went to school where you rub shoulders with 150-165, or higher. 80th percentile 112’s, not so much.
The 2% Mensa crowd is interesting.
The truly elite do stand out and often don’t bother to join Mensa.
A few seem borderline stupid – in the sense that they cannot look other people in the eye, cannot interact socially but wowza, when it comes to fresh ideas they put down on paper.
The annoying ones are the ones who think they are smarter than you and use tiny little litmus tests to decide that is so.
I’ll gladly compete with them every day as long as they aren’t by boss.
They may seem neurotic because you don’t understand. Your version of success isn’t in their vision. Sheldon on TBBT is a pretty good example. My older son is like that. He’s a theoretical physicist and his contact with planet Earth is very tenuous. We didn’t allow him to skip ahead in school, but he he didn’t have to attend classes and luckily he was a good athlete, so he played sports had contact and friends outside his head. Takes all kinds of people and we’d do best to get government out of our faces and let us all muddle along… Read more »
SidVic, purely personal observation in people crossed in the financial/IT field. The financial side doesn’t really reward creative thinking much, but the IT side, at least back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, sure seemed to. I watched people build “out there” systems and programs for the time, but they were never able to convert them to big time success. It all did encourage me to try my hand at some fun things to help me at work, proto-CRM stuff. The big thing I saw, socially, was that the high IQ guys would not want to talk over our… Read more »
Something interesting is going to happen in a few generations. White conservatives have about 40% higher fertility than white liberals. And in white conservatives, the lowest IQ quadrant has fewer kids than the highest iq quadrant. Once the shitlibs have aborted and buggered themselves into irrelevance, I am predicting there will be a revival in fertility and a rise in IQ amongst whites.
Not if we’re overrun by the black and brown horde.
We’re definitely being overrun by the black and brown horde. There may be hope if (and it’s a big if) enough whites become red-pilled and start advancing our own interests the way every other group does. If we can do that, we can punch way above our weight versus the blacks and browns. Under those circumstances, whites being more numerous and higher IQ as Dirtnapninja predicts would only help. Also, if whites become more conservative, there may be greater hope for red-pilling. There is hope for red-pilling the guy who is relying on his Constitutional principles to save him. The… Read more »
The middle option being Brazil/Mexico, where a refined elite rule over the hoi polloi. Not a pleasant outcome, but if 20 pct of the US are the whites, who are all smart, rich, right wing, and attractive (what dirtnap is pointing at) and the other 80% is a mystery meat horde that can barely feed itself… Western Civilization might not die out. Better than going 5th century Rome, I guess. I’d rather my grandkids live in Elysium with bulletproof hovercars to go past the favellas than be post-apocalypse subsitance farmers.
I wouldn’t count on Whites ruling over the masses in the US, at least for a long time. Jews have created a culture where whites are seen as the cause of everyone’s problems and other groups have the right to take what is now whites’. White males are seen as only having achieved due to white male privilege. BioLeninism will rule
The problem is that the US has a long “tradition” whereby any attempt by the smart, White, and wealthy to create their own little worlds is met by a rush on the part of POCs and cucked Whites as well to force the diversity back in to whatever people are trying to protect from it. You see this in everything from forcing section 8 housing down the throats of affluent neighborhoods to diversity quotas in STEM fields. Latin America, by contrast, has centuries of allowing the wealthy and ethnically European to live and reproduce amongst themselves. Even “gun control” in… Read more »
Your comment really got me thinking. Given that this society is doomed and that the one last hope that anyone at all had at voting our way out of this has been shattered – what with MAGA turning into MIGA and all – what do we do now? This comment would probably have gelled better with yesterday’s post, but hear me out. Several methods were discussed, most of them (namely anything remotely involving engaging with the current system or any of it’s elements, such as the Fake News Media) correctly dismissed, one thread did remain – namely, finding somewhere to… Read more »
An end to immigration, secure border and sending back people who doesn’t use English as a 1st language , live on welfare or have serious criminal convictions is needed I’m White and prefer my own people in my own land however Brown threat is a bit overrated , most of the Mexicans I’ve met are OK people , they work and very few other than La Raza idiots and drug cultists are out to get Whites any more than anyone else Many also favor an illegal and often near complete immigration freeze. Typically the one’s who don’t need to go… Read more »
Smart people choosing to have one kid then playing helicopter parent is a confounding factor. Even smart people can have a dumb kid. Only having one isn’t helping our cause. We are far below replacement rate without mass importation Sad but true.
I understand replacement rate concerns. But is that the real concern in light of our advance technological society? Or is it a concern for industrialists and governement worried about consumers and taxpayers?
Is it more important to have two college educated, high functioning children, or three kids, one of whom is best suited as a cab driver—cab drivers soon to be an antiquated occupation?
Compsci, I think It’s primarily the industrialists and government both dependent on population growth for their Ponzi schemes.
Japan seems to be avoiding replacement by ensuring robots will be able to care for an aging population rather than relying on pig-ignorant hostile imports.
People should spend more time looking at and discussing the effect and implications of the nuptiality (who knew that that was a word?) of the Hajnal line and its Westward extension.
There’s a reason why 95% of the modern world was invented by those originating to its west and north.
Bilejones….yep, get the biology right and it’s all downstream from there.
Japan illustrates something people don’t talk much about and that’s the sheer amount of potential technological progress that has NOT happened because our elite takes the easy way out and imports cheap wetbacks. Invent a fruit picking robot and, barring asteroid impact or nuclear war, you never need to invent it again and can build as many as you need forever. Hire Juan and Miguel to pick the fruit and you just need to hire Julio and Maria tomorrow. The fruit picking robot also might have spinoffs in other areas and make for some nice synergies. Immigrants just spin off… Read more »
Ted Kaczynski was right, maybe not in his actions but his manifesto was spot on 90% of humanity has an IQ of 120 or less. What do you plan for them to do about them. If the answer is I don’t care , you’ve forfeited your moral standing as they are now no longer obligated to care for you . Maybe we ought to pay a bit more for fruit so we can have family farms or encourage more people to plant trees so that humanity can prosper and we aren’t ruled by our machines Progress is not what we… Read more »
I’ve thought a lot about this actually. I actually think that a lot of the problems of modern society have arisen because, over the last few centuries, machines have steadily eaten away at the tasks done by people from the left side of the bell curve and moving towards the center and right. At first it was just things like carrying water in mines. The first steam engine was literally tasked with pumping water out of mines. As time went on more and more skilled tasks fell to the Robot Horde. With AI they have crossed the center line and… Read more »
I’m with you on the 3-D printers. But there are bio-tech versions of the 3-D printer on the cusp of widespread availability. Machines that can produce whatever sequence of DNA you program into it. The ability to custom make a destructive virus looks like too dangerous a power to be widely available. But how do we prevent the technology with anything less than the totalitarian methods it would take to effectively suppress “ordinary” 3-D printing?
It’s the concern of our leaders “owners”. Which is another way of stating your reply. Members of congress don’t work for us. They work for their owners.
I view this simple reality as the biggest flaw of democracy as we live it right now.
I.8 to 1.6 forever means you hand society over to the Amish. In any case, people are the point of of society not innovation or technology which if anything just creates a heterogeneous smear of ideas and destroys culture and if it requires that we control tech to get people to breed, so be it. You can ban self driving cars, require guilded licensed cabbies to operate them and do a host of other things to make sure regular folks have work. A world made up of of amoral tech nerds and Hi IQ assholes is a world of monsters… Read more »
History seems to indicate that only a couple children actually survived to adulthood in large families. So smaller families is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is other groups are having larger families still, even with modern medicine. Hence the population disaster that is Africa.
The helicopter parent is a product of female emancipation.
What would be so terrible about a smaller population? Less stress on the environment and on people. But we have to make sure this doesn’t apply only to whites or those with higher IQs.
Stop the influx of Third World peasants, stop subsidizing irresponsible breeding, and let everyone else have as many or as few children as they want. Or don’t you believe reproduction should be voluntary and produce wanted kids?
One factor you’re neglecting is that higher IQ white females are taking themselves out of the genetic pool by focusing on their career to the point of giving up having children.
The other thing is since they are now higher status females, the available pool of white males they are attracted to shrinks dramatically. In a earlier era this wasn’t a issue since they would have been nurses or teachers. Now they are executives, management, etc. And they end up as cat ladies since they can’t find men of a higher social status than them.
I blame the lawyers. if they weren’t constantly suing companies on behalf of the survivors of stupid people, we wouldn’t have labels like “don’t drink the drain opener” and our collective iq issue would take care of itself. Darwin has been temporarily held up; but i’m sure it can’t last forever just like you said
[…] skate. Standards and rules are unfair and hamper minority advancement. We used to be judicious and wise enough to hang or shoot detestable […]
[…] The ZMan has an intriguing post calling for more capital punishment and expounding its numerous benefits. As a Californian, I can confirm the need for it. Here, the violent and reckless are on a circular conveyor belt through our “justice” system which is resulting in the deaths of Americans like Kate Steinle and even police officers. El Chapo is making a mockery of our “justice” system by asking for a new trial rather than hanging by the neck until dead. He will likely continue to run his criminal organization from prison for the next 10 years until his appeals… Read more »
The rise of stupidity is fairly evident anytime one ventures out their front door. I believe it’s one of the reasons why these ” Purge movies” are so popular. Same with zombie movies or TV series like The Walking Dead. Being able to eliminate the brain dead that walk among us is very appealing 🙂 There’s one “society” that doesn’t tolerate overt stupidity or disrespect and that’s prison. it’s one of the reasons why inmates have a hard time readjusting to so-called normal society. In prison you held accountable for your actions. If someone on the street cut you off… Read more »
The executioner made western society smarter (and unfortunately more docile), but a much more important factor was starvation of the poor and ignorant, with the younger sons of higher classes moving down to take their places…Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms documents the effects…