The End Times

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

–Some Old White Guy

Spend any time around our nation’s ghettos and you quickly become a believer in Smart Fraction Theory. You often hear people say that the problem in the ghetto is a lack of good role models and most people take that literally, but it’s really just a polite way of saying that there are few smart people. Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others. Often, they take up positions of authority so they can prevent the dumb people from doing dumb things. Someone has to affix those stupid warning labels on products.

Another way to think of it is anti-personnel weapons. Ambush weapons are often designed to wound, not kill, enemy soldiers. A wounded soldier requires medical care. He may also require transport out of the area. Even if it does not halt the advance of the unit, care for the wounded will slow the advance and render the unit less effective. Stupid people have the same effect as wounded soldiers. It’s that they are a non-contributor to society. It’s that they are often a net negative, dragging down society, which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.

America, like every Western country, has loads of smart, altruistic people, in addition to lots of middling people. Our Smart Fraction is large relative to places like Africa. This means we can carry a large number of low-IQ violent losers. America is the richest country on earth, despite having a population that is 13% African, because we have recruited the best and brightest from Europe over the last two centuries. Now we are skimming off the best Asians for settlement here.

That’s the theory. People in the cognitive sciences, when drunk or outside the wire, will tell you that you need an average IQ of about 94 to run anything resembling a modern economy. Pakistan with an average IQ of 84 is never going to leave the Iron Age because they lack the human capital. They have some very bright people, but not enough of them. Those smart people are overwhelmed by the teeming hordes of low-IQ hyper-violent mouth breathers from the hills, which is why those bright people flee to Europe.

Even if you reject biology as an explanation, travel a little bit and you soon figure out that there is a limit to the number of dysfunctional people a society can carry before it sinks. The debate, if there is one, is whether this can be arrested or whether technology can mitigate it. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid. Either way, there is some limit to the number of unproductive a society can carry and everyone gets it. People have always known this.

This long wind up is not in support of sterilizing Hillary Clinton voters, even though that would be a good idea. This is a post about the Zika Virus and similar plagues. What if something like Zika gets lose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads? What if the smart, fearing they may birth a pinhead, further reduce their fertility? It would not take but a generation or two to significantly alter the cognitive profile of society. Further, this weakening of the West would reduce the global carry capacity.

When we think of the collapse of civilization, it is always nuclear war, economic collapse or the zombie apocalypse. What if it happens slower? Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole. The elites will withdraw behind their walls, but that does not change the facts on the ground. The West would eventually reach the point where it could no longer hold back the barbarian tide. This cascading effect would further reduce global carrying capacity.

It is easy to forget that those billion or so sub-Saharan Africans depend on food and medicine from the West. If that flow stops, they are instantly past their Malthusian limit and you get some combination of mass starvation, Hobbesian violence and mass migration out of Africa. The same is true of the Middle East. Even South America, which has made great strides in food production, still depends on a strong West to remain stable. Just look at Brazil if you want to see how fragile these countries are under the skin.

Here’s another thought. When scarcity was real, people, even the poorest, especially the poorest, had little sentimentality toward the weak. They could not afford to have sentimentality. Newborns with defects were euthanized. The old we left to die. The sick were put out of their misery. It’s a ghastly thing for modern, post-scarcity, humans to contemplate, but it was a necessary reality for most of human history. What if some disease like Zika spreads, resulting in a swelling population of pinheads?

I’m not making any predictions on this. Maybe humanity would quickly respond. Maybe we have lost the capacity to survive when facing real scarcity. There is no way to know. It’s hard to imagine a society that celebrates grief and victim-hood quickly shifting to cold-blooded realism, but maybe nature finds a way. Reality is, after all, that thing that never goes away when you stop believing in it. The reality of life is survival trumps everything, even familial love. Still, one has to wonder if the post-scarcity world is a trap of our own design.

65 thoughts on “The End Times

  1. Problem 2: there is a tendency to overestimate the ability of advanced societies to adapt to scarcity. Even a minor disruption in food or power supply would wring the US to its knees, and transfer power from the ” elites” to those stupid proles. You know, the ones who know how to shoot, and are willing and able to fight for what they need.

  2. One problem: the so called elites with their high IQs are to blame for much of the degradation of western civilization.

  3. “Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others.”

    Smart people commit suicide in America at significantly statistically higher rates than people not considered smart.

    And any smart person would admit they are not smart about lots of things, including very important things that forever affect a life or many potential lives.

    Smart folks declaimed and had to have had smart folks hear “hindsight is 20/20” and appreciate it in order for the wisdom to have spread around, which contains some humility within the sentiment properly understood. Humility about just how smart folks are. Nazi’s. Rio Lindoians. Maoists. Mr. Jerry “The King” Lawler from Memphis, TN as per Andrew Kaufman, and of coursely Tom Reagan, the Coen’s smart guy (“do you want a pillow for your head”) in Miller’s Crossing.

    The thing Milt Friedman spoke of, creating conditions where the wrong people will do the right thing out of, if nothing else, self-interest (survival) is the perfect pro-Trump meme/talking point.

    Even if equally bad, a stupid proposition given even a smidgeon of honest comparison, the known fact Trump will be fought to the mats every day, every decision or non-decision or even correct decision that could have been way mega more correct if a Dem did it, is all the proof a patriot and principled ideologue needs to Vote Trump, or any candidate the media destroyers attempt their voodoo on.

    And always remember as Buckley taught: Despair is a mortal sin.

    It’s tough, Buckley knew, to fight long odds while Lies rule. Buckley knowing “my Redeemer liveth” helped him advocate American notions of decency in ideological battle so as to not host Lenny the conductor, but to let conservatives know Lenny Berstein is himself how “liberal” had become an epithet; He Didn’t Even Know.

    No smiling winking Marilyn panty-shot here!

    ‘It’s not Buckley’s special knowledge that makes the quote, but the willingness to give Lenny his credit where due.

    Oh, and “Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others.”

    So are y’all eatin’ waffles? Where’s utopiaEarth? Or, smart persons, what’s a decent guesstimate when the mitigation by the smart of the not (smart, that is) results in what could accurately, without comparison to mere Earth offers save what Buckley phrases “epistemological optimism” and defined as “the radical notion some things are better than others, and we as humans are fully equipped to recognize the difference.”? I hope that was the quote anyway. It is what I recall. Can’t verify. Scared of error.

    Things are moving too fast.

    I appreciate this blog and host for not treating me as a big/little jerk troll, even when I was attempting a trolling.

    Fact is most people reading this live Buckleyesque to what I imagine is a large extent, and I can’t say I do. Makes me idolizing him stupid and neatonous (I intend by that term carrying adolescent traits past the natural range defined) in addition to anti-Catholic and much-pussified.

    This is my hope at reaching the Never Trump folks. Good, good people. Very influential, and not, NOT EVER, vain, shallow, or needing to adjust any well-reasoned by the well-connected position, opinion, vote, or amount of salt porn on a steak.

  4. the z-dog likes to take some liberty with the facts! that’s what morally and intellectually superior people do, right Mr z? z seems to have zero faith in America or Americans, unless they’re non-Hillary voters! haha…what a laugh the zblog is! Just a tip for you though zee…you might want to check the iq’s of the trump voters before you anoint any of them as being “non-stupid”…check their pulses while you’re at it….in the meantime…try this advice zman!
    “when I search the faceless crowd…a swirling mass of grays and black and white…they dont look real to me..in fact they look so straaaaaange…raise your glass to the hard working people…let’s drink to the uncounted heads….let’s think of the wavering millions…who need leaders but get gamblers instead….spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter….his empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows….and a parade of grey-suited grafters….a choice of cancer or polio”

    • Thank you for your input.

      After watching “Hillary’s America” I wonder what will become of the poor souls who failed to bring Victory to Crooked Hillary? She has never failed and never will, but when she has been failed she cleaned, squeaky clean, her biography of people entrusted to gain her power without success.

      May God hold you, in the palm of His hand.

      I give you more credit than the Senator Geary from The Godfather actor who was in Apocalypse Now and said to Harry Ford “if you eat that shrimp you’ll never have to prove your courage again.”

  5. I work for a medical testing company. Spoke with a friend in International sales last week who had just returned from Brazil. Asked if Zika testing was selling crazy fast there. He said – “no, middle class women have just stopped having kids.”

    Sounds like the opening scene of Idiocracy but worse.

  6. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid.

    If by better training you mean genetic engineering, then I think you’re on to something. Everyone thinks that the next age will be the age of the intelligent machine, and it might be, but if it is then the one immediately following will be the age of flesh and our mastery of it.

    • I’m a bit skeptical of the robot future, but I’m much more bullish on the genetic future. We’re much more likely to see gene therapies to eliminate a vast range of diseases and defects than we are to see Terminator. Extending life and the quality of life is something with great demand. Super intelligent robots that become aware has no demand. Inevitably, resources will flow into the former and not the latter.

  7. I’ve read some of her novels and some of her speeches but I have never come across anything like the statement “which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.”

    Seems doubtful to me especially her coming from that communist hell hole she escaped from and the ideas she espoused. Can you provide a link to said sentiment? That would be appreciated.

    • It’s there, though not explicitly recommended as a program. In ‘Atlas Shrugged’ her ideal woman, Dagny Taggart, cold-bloodedly executes a man who refuses to make a choice, even when he’s told it’s the only way to save his life. And the author tells us she is right to kill such a man. The famous case of the train in the tunnel is another example: all the people on board, *even the children*, deserve to die because of their moral corruption. Rand doesn’t prescribe firing squads or gas chambers, but she approves of the removal of unfit humans. In the end, there’s mass death and destruction caused by a sort of intellectual siege strategy. When the unfit have died off, the elect can return to do what they want.

      • If everything is relative and subjective, who gets to determined who is unfit? And why? That’s what makes me sweat.

      • Thanks for the references. I’ll have to revisit those but my recollection, albeit from awhile ago, where of many consequences of the State having taken over and the unrelenting demands of the “administrators” were a part of the story line of what was to be a part of socialism in America. That was my take-away.

        • Nuance wasn’t really Rand’s thing. She went for black-and-white polar opposites, and didn’t bother much with what didn’t fit into her picture. Yes, the state apparatus is the engine of destruction in AS – it passes regulations. nationalizes industry, binds productive people and uses the law to persecute anyone who won’t cooperate. But the real villains are “the looters”, and that term applies to everyone who wants to benefit from someone else’s ability. In Rand’s dystopian future world, that covers pretty much everyone. In the novel, it really is “the 1%” who are the good and the rest are either outright villains or their accomplices. So when the world is collapsing, Rand doesn’t really have anything to say about the innocent but powerless people who are crushed along with the guilty. They’re sort of out there – I think at the end she says something about how there’s a remnant of humanity, hiding out and enduring the catastrophe – but she doesn’t really care about them.

          • Thanks Dr. for that summary. I guess when I read her writings, I project myself into them as one of the “producers” and assume that because society is made up of both producers and takers that not everyone is in cahoots with the state, that the “fight” was a common fight.

            You are right to point out that her stories do talk from the 1% vantage point but from people who are not in agreement with the state and therefore have more in common from a value perspective as the rest of society who hold similar values. While I personally despise people like George Soros and others who use their wealth for malevolent ends, I also recognize that to paint all 1%-ers with the same broad brush is a mistake. Thanks again. I appreciate your comments.

  8. And further, what is the effect of evolution on the pinheads? For example, were the first Jews, Germans and Gaels to interact with the Romans also low IQ, impulsive and violent? I think so.

    What happened? I suspect it was the Roman policy to kill stupids as fast as possible, a policy we do not share, but which Mr. Heinlein, correctly I think, says that the universe approves of.

  9. The real questions we need to deal with, and which Mr. Heinlein dealt more than a little bit include the following.

    What evidence is there that intelligence is a more useful survival trait for the species than low IQ, impulsive, violence?

    Is there an upper limit to the usefulness of intelligence, beyond which we become useless, effete, fearful, wankers? I look at your average leftist, your average GOP politician and I think so, but God, aka mother nature, has not yet released that information.

  10. Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole.

    The combination of PC, statism and the new diseases brought by globalization serves the same purpose. We cannot even discuss the pathologies that are dragging down the West. The lower 1/2 are going to drown us. And the ones who think they are smart are proving to just have nice pants creases.

  11. The Big Sort.
    “This leads directly to the problem of the Big Sort. Recall that in the 1950s and 196s there was a decent paying job for most everyone, from low to to high IQ. But now, more than ever, we have a “knowledge-based” economy with a cratered middle and mostly low wage service jobs at the bottom. This means that the economy is efficiently — ruthlessly — sorting people by intelligence, with predictable results.”

    Again, the unpaid thinkers are my favorites!

    • I still marvel at how “service” was redefined in the gas pump business. Used to be someone would clean your windshield, check your engine oil (to sell you oil of course), check tire air pressure for safety, etc. while filling your tank. However, in the drive to “maximize profits” the consumer was told they were better off and would realize lower prices with “self-service” pumps. Now that may not be a high skilled job but it does provide value, would employ many, and could develop customer loyalty for a few pennies a gallon (to my thinking). But I guess those days are gone for good unless someone can break the mindset that self-service is best and that sacrificing quality, safety, comfort, etc. is worth someone else’s bottom line. Where does a little competition come in here to change the dynamic? Extend that idea to all arenas that use the self-service model such as supermarkets, banks, etc. and you have the makings of a resurgence of jobs for the low skilled.

      • I think the problem is our evolved definition of what is considered ‘acceptable’ employment. Our abundance and prosperity has not only changed our work ethic it has redefined how we determine what kind of labor is beneath our intelligence. I have quite a few stories but one stands out.

        We have had our windows cleaned once or twice a year by the same man for at least a decade. He started his window cleaning business when he couldn’t get a job in his credentialed field. He needed to feed his family. Quietly and efficiently he does the job and gets paid. No stress.

        Last time we hired him someone else came. A pleasant well-spoken young man. Apparently this man earned his degree in education from a well respected University back east. He spent two years teaching middle school and said he was so disillusioned he had to quit. He needed a job so he started working for the window cleaner who had acquired too many customers to service alone. The young man quickly figured out how to expand the business and he is now a partner.

        In a relatively free economy there are a plethora of jobs considered low-skill that are nonetheless diamonds in the rough. It’s not the work, it’s the attitude that defines what is respectable.

  12. Here’s my scary thought for the day: we have people incapable of feeding themselves. My grandparents had gardens. My mom knew how to preserve and can. I know how to butcher animals and keep food without refrigeration. We have folks in this country that don’t even know how to take dry beans and cook them, or make bread from flour. They have no idea how much food they would need to make it through a year. Those all seem like very basic skills to me.

    • It has probably changed since the industrial revolution but I wouldn’t doubt that the 80/20 rule has always applied. That is, 20% have been responsible for taking care of the 80% throughout history, as a general rule. Count out the elderly for the most part, and young children, the hunter does the gathering while the women folk did the tending. Lives were shorter, fighting more frequent, life more violent on a daily basis, sickness a constant companion, food scarcity a constant.

      So good for you. Teach your family and friends what you know and benefit someone else instead of gloating. You are king of your world. The 1%, well, they only take care of the 1%.

  13. I’m very skeptical of a test that would measure intelligence; yes IQ does select for math and physics geniuses; beyond that you are just making stuff up. To start grading human life by IQ tests misses the point of life entirely. Does and IQ test measure cunning, ingenuity, deception, humor? No. Who would argue human survival could do without those important elixirs?

    • IQ measures more than math and science. And yes, IQ does measure things like cunning and ingenuity in a way. Those are the results of underlying things like verbal skills and problem solving. IQ correlates well with outcomes. That said, human beings are not moist robots. Mohamed Ali was dumb as a goldfish, but blessed with glibness and the ability to take a punch. He had a great life.

      • I have said on several occasions that I don’t put those with so-called high IQ’s on any kind of pedestal because there are many other character traits that go into making a decent human being. That being said, I find it terribly repulsive that some commentators here seem to lump ALL people in the lower half of the Bell Curve as “dumb as rock” idiots. Consider what you are saying with those who are considered Saints in some faiths. I would say if you were to measure their heart, commitment to their fellow man, and unselfish love, they would put many of those with high intellectual IQ’s to shame. Of course we would be measuring a different vector of humanity.

        And what about all those genius criminals and murderer’s throughout history? I am only commenting to counter the fallacy I see here that the right side of the Bell Curve is the good side and the hope for humanity while the left side is the bad side and the reason for it’s complete decline. Your arguments are way too simplistic and egotistical to let slide my friends.

          • I would put the emphasis on “[measuring intelligence from testing] misses the point of life”. It is a too convenient device wherewithal to address complex human situations. You live in the ghetto? O you must be dumb.OK. If you told 3rd century A.D. Roman senators that England would rule the high seas and much of the earth some centuries hence they would have laughed at you. Even if you told Roman patricians of the 14th century that in a couple centuries the sun would never set on the British Empire they would still have laughed at you. explain to me the DNA mechanism that helped supercharge British brains. You can’t. Explain to me how melanin and intelligence are linked at the DNA level. I don’t think you can because even you know that at that point you are entering the Crazy Science door. The world turns people change; the reasons why are not easy to understand. IQ is probably the least of it. The one smart thing the left did was to abandon IQ studies; they have always been linked to eugenics and a way-out racism. Strangely and unfortunately, the right has snapped the IQ bit up with a vengeance. Adherence to belief in IQ studies indicates a low IQ.

    • Dex Quire being skeptical of IQ tests.

      Educate yourself. First read Daniel Seligman’s A Question of Intelligence: the IQ Debate in America @ $0.01 + shipping at Amazon. Next, if you are up to it, read Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability. (An academic, not popular, level book so beware.)

      Now for a story. While in college one student in 1963 had on the GREs Verbal 800, Math 800, and 960 out of 970 in his subject exam. He also had on the Navy Pilot IQ exam a perfect score: something, if I recall, like 116 out of 116 correct answers to a NON VERBAL test. He was rather smart. Well, another student also a senior recruited over 100 senior classmates to administer an IQ test for his Psychology degree Senior Project. The high score in the test was also the same fellow mentioned above.The kicker in the story was that the test was a rather old one developed well before the 2nd World War. It was based on JOKES, old, old jokes! One read the joke and then answered a multiple choice question as to which answer presented the best reason the joke was funny. As crazy as that sounds, it identified that super gifted individual as did the GREs and Navy test. The guy who came in 2nd was the editor of the Yearbook that year. I knew him from Freshman composition as we were in the same section. He also was a sharp fellow who could really write well and one just knew he was smart. He ended up going to a top Law School. The super bright student did well in STEM and upon graduation ended up in the Ivy League earning a Doctorate and Post Doc there.

      Intelligence tests certainly identify individuals of high IQ and predict a trajectory they are likely to follow in life. The same tests probably also predict the future of the less well endowed with brains as well.

      Dan Kurt

  14. The disease of democratic equality progressively numbs the hind mind which it has created for itself. That is death by ice. But fire would melt that construction and free the beast. “The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white-skinned hordes of the next civilization. Who knows what will come out of the soul of man?”

  15. Z-man says: “What if something like Zika gets loose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads?”

    Ha, ha! They say we joke about that which pains us and I am sorry, but that is some funny sh*t right there.

    To The Powers That Be, I believe we are all considered as “useless eaters” ready for the slaughter. In the end, the ultimate goal of the “ruling class” is global domination via Agenda 21, the demise of constitutional law and nationalism, depopulation and, ultimately the administration of their satanic 10 commandments as outlined in the Georgia Guidestones.

    For the technocratic elite, their hope is eternal life via the Singularity and uploading their minds into the cloud forever.

    The only way a nationalist politico like Trump could stop it is via massive systemic changes. Unfortunately, the demographics aren’t there.

    Reality sucks. Yet hope springs eternal. Therein lay the irony of we the sheeple.

  16. Men who have been paying attention have started removing themselves from the re population game. By the time I was in my late 20’s after having one kid and going through the man hating “family” courts, I got a vasectomy to make goddamned sure that I NEVER would get that kind of treatment again. Had I had a son, I would have offered to pay for him to get a vasectomy for his 18th birthday if he’d wanted one. Sure, I’m all for what is left of western civilization, but not if it means risk of exposure to that sheep-shearing assembly line of dehumanization again.

  17. I was writing in 2001-02 that if Al Qaeda could establish its caliphate, then you were looking at deaths in the range of 100’s of millions for the reasons you outline in your post, Zman.

    I have children and fighting to maintain a functional United States is not an abstract concept for me. Globalist policies will destroy the centers of functionality (US, Europe, East Asia) and send us back to the late Iron Age if we’re lucky. The damage sustained during the collapse will reduce the carrying capacity to well below what Earth could handle around 1600.

  18. Keep in mind that the so called compassionate people keeping all the savages fed *today* are not actually compassionate, and will quite happily — and efficiently — stick them in the ground when food and so forth gets tight.

    • My husband and I were talking about how brutal old punishments used to be. Grand larceny, which was a theft of something $50 or more in value, was punished by death or deportation in England back in the time of the American colonies. But then it was an environment of extraordinary scarcity, and you’re not wasting limited food on rapists and such. I remember the swine flu panic when people were FURIOUS that prisoners were getting priority for vaccines. The public health logic was that illness spreads quickly in an institution. The public’s logic was that criminal lives were less valuable than those of the law abiding.

      • Not just crime – the punishments for “vicious” behaviour, or indulging in vice, were brutal too. Nobody today can even imagine that there was ever a reason for such a thing. They assume our ancestors were just stupid and hated pleasure. But in a world of scarcity, having a slutty daughter could be a death sentence for an entire family. If she’s known to be loose, no decent man will want her, and she’ll be on her parents’ hands for life. And if she gets knocked up she’s producing another mouth to feed, with no man to help with the additional work required to produce more. The whole family could go hungry as she adds more bastards to their burden. That’s why disgraced daughters were kicked out; it might be the only way to save the rest.

    • Karl – I have always maintained the real ‘Zombies’ shall be the low IQ, low skilled lower 1/2 of the Bell Curve population fleeing the inner cities if things go pear shaped. Say “One Second After” for reference.

      They will be useful for one of two things – labor or fertilizer. No, I am not a nice person.

      Solve food first.

  19. It isn’t just that the stupid (or the low-IQ) will drag us down but that humankind will separate into factions. The bright will occupy one place, the less-bright another and while the less-bright will breed without thinking they will eliminate their own in all sorts of fun ways.

    The problem though is that today we have the semi-bright (aka the Elite) making political hay not with the brights but with the dum-dums lower down the ladder. Vote for me and you will have everything you ever wanted, and as the votes keep rolling in — despite no one ‘down below’ ever getting what was promised — the semi-bright have a chance to hold on to power and money. Once the vote is lost from the deadwood end of the spectrum, the elites will have no power.

    The elites have no stomach for a fight to save the west, but they have one to save their own kind by propping up the low-IQs long enough to keep the money flowing up to the elites.

    • The top and bottom versus the middle has worked for a long while now, but I’m reminded off the Mongol invasion of Mesopotamia. The Arabs had buffer states between them and the Mongols. Instead of strengthening these states, they raided them. Eventually, these buffer states collapsed leaving the path open for the Mongols.

      The Western elites seem to be convinced they can stand without a middle class buffer. Maybe they just don’t think much about it. I read elite media and I come away with the impression that these are people oblivious to what’s happening outside their bubble. History is full of examples where the ruling class is so insulated they no longer know anything about those over whom they rule. Tucker Carlson suggest that the modern media is made up of stupid rich people.

      It’s been a good long time since the West has experienced anything resembling a revolt. Maybe this is how it looks during the buildup to one.

      • Mayor Bloomberg got that keeping functional public school options and a reasonable crime rate in NYC preserved a middle class that could act as a physical buffer between bad neighborhoods and the rich ones, in addition to providing a functional population and some marginal tax dollars. He was, in essence, a liberal who got the joke. Talk a good line about equality and progressivism, and then govern on behalf of the rich and their middle class vassals. De Blasio, in contrast, is a liberal who doesn’t get the joke. My working to middle class neighborhood is already starting to turn downhill, slowly and almost imperceptibly. We’re preparing to sell in 2017.

        • I’m not sure whether any politicians “get” the degree to which NYC has become a barbell economy. At my prior firm, we worked for years to methodically shift middle class jobs out of the city and NY in general and relocate elsewhere, mostly VA, TX, and AZ. The tax, CoL and regulatory burden was just too expensive. When I left, NYC employment was 10% of what it was in the mid-90s. Only highly compensated “rainmaker” jobs were left. New firm is the same. Probably more so. And it’s a small enough crew that it could be evacuated elsewhere in a heartbeat. Operations are all in the Midwest, Asia and TX. I spend a fair amount of time in Silicon Valley and see the same. There are two kinds of people, wealthy tech entrepreneurs and the people that make them coffee and sandwiches. That is not healthy. A few hiccups in the economy and the latter are eating their pets for dinner.

          • We’ve lived here four years and I’m just…done. We’re stuck in the greater metro area unless I can convince my husband to change careers, but if it were up to me, we’d bolt the region entirely. My whole life here feels like a case of “it shouldn’t be this hard, should it?” We have a good income and are frugal, and despite saving a lot, I don’t feel financial security. It’s hard for me to find a safe place for my baby to play outside. Navigating the city via mass transit is a constant headache. Nothing functions efficiently. The subway smells like pee. New Yorkers are nasty people. It’s an unpleasant place to live unless you are so wealthy you can spend your way out of every inconvenience.

          • Seems to me its not New York you’re tired of, but living in a third world city that you’re tired of.

      • From Gagdad Bob: “Over the years I have had the opportunity to conduct psychological evaluations of people from third-world and non-western cultures, and it is often so ridiculous as to be comical. Here I am, deploying concepts and techniques designed for modern, self-aware, neurotically conflicted westerners, on people who don’t even know they have a mind.

        I remember evaluating a recent immigrant from the deepest interior of China. He grew up a peasant in conditions hardly different from 500 or a 1000 years ago. No offense, but his worldspace was so narrow that he simply had no words for concepts we take for granted. Offering such a person “psychotherapy” was as bizarre and beside the point as giving acupuncture to your car. Rather, he needed a shaman or witch doctor or spirit visitation or something. Short of a blow to the head, I couldn’t imagine his world, and he certainly knew nothing of mine.”

        • Gagdad Bob is pretty awesome. A mind-sink for me. I get stuck reading his stuff because there is so much to absorb. Same happens to me here. Thanks Z-man.

    • Leftists can have a high IQ (I know lots) but they are killing the golden goose. Low IQ types are the willing army of the leftists. Medium IQ types make the world work (the yeoman farmer and small entrepreneur).

    • If that’s true (and from what I recall of her novels, I think it is), *she* should apologize.

      • “I think it is” == I think you’re right, I don’t recall her wanting to zap anybody.

      • When I was in college back in the Jurassic, “Libertarian” meant “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” (to the more thoughtful Libertarians, anyway; to the others, it meant “I’ve built my whole identity around smoking weed”). At the time, I thought that was profound. Now I realize there’s no such thing as “socially” liberal — there’s just liberal, full stop, which is synonymous with “I want to destroy ambient civilization, because I’ve confused Society with my Daddy.” (I’m not the quickest study sometime). But then I actually read some of Ayn Rand’s other stuff. She wrote a whole book about “Libertarian” aesthetics. It’s hilarious.

      • Whittaker Chambers? Would that be the *Communist* and *Soviet Spy* Whittaker Chambers? So you’re going to publish the opinion of this person as your own on what Ayn Rand thought? I openly defy you to find *anything* that Ayn Rand ever said or wrote that in any way suggests that she wanted to “exterminate” lower IQ people. This is unsettling because I had expected better of you.

        • Chambers left communism and became a giant in conservative circles. His testimony against Alger Hiss nearly ruined him and put his life in jeopardy. Arguably, his autobiography is one of the must read texts for anyone on the Right.

          Chambers understood better than just about anyone the logical end of materialism. You would do yourself a world of good by reading Witness and reading his critique of Rand.

          • No, I would do myself a world of good by never visiting your blog again. If you’re quoting communists rather than doing your own research, then I don’t need you. Bookmark deleted. Buh-bye..

          • People who refuse to read others with whom they violently disagree are possibly those described by Z – low IQ, impulsive and violent.

            One must read those with whom one so disagrees, especially if they write well and are persuasive. Know your enemy.

            So please, come back and comment some more.

      • Buh-bye to Codsnoot.

        I read the Whitaker Chambers essay, (and also The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, years ago.) It seems to me, according to Chambers, that nowhere did Ayn Rand suppose that her hero or she herself would like to personally eliminate the rabble, but it is passively implied in the ruin she imagines will occur when smart, resourceful men retreat to their self-interests, leaving dullard tribes to their own fate. If she’s not wishing it, then she’s certainly needing it for her narrative, for her hero’s ultimate free hand to rebuild the world “as it should be.” Did I get that right? Because I think that’s exactly the subtle sort of “objectivity” exercise that devils love to play between the ears of lackbeards.

        • Exactly. Chamber saw first hand that materialism strips people of their humanity. Once you stop seeing people as your fellow humans, slamming the oven door on them is easy.

          • Some of us don’t need Chambers to tell us that. It is why even having gone to business school, I never bought “hook, line and sinker” the mentality that “maximizing profit” was the end-all, be-all of business leaders. Look at where the globalization push and the drive for “perpetual profit engines” has gotten the world. And who is it that is pushing for two things: 1. reducing the world’s population by very unacceptable means, and 2. seeking to leave earth only to transport their problems outward to other worlds (wherever you go, there you are!). It is the elites. They want their walled in fortresses and because they know that is only good for only so long, they dream of their very own Elysium (movie reference).

          • Agreed. Chambers isn’t saying Rand explicitly advocated genocide, but that she simply left unsaid what her Technocratic New World Order would inevitably require.
            I find it strange that so many people refuse to see the road map when it’s laid before them. For instance, the BLM/Occupy/This is What Democracy Looks Like/LGBTQWERTY demographic fails to see the obvious outcome of their success. If their Global Overlords become all powerful, as they advocate, the Movement becomes redundant, possible dangerous to have around, and a Night of the Long Knives becomes inevitable. When Black votes do not matter in the Post- Democracy the Overlords would like to usher in how likely is it that a Black Holocaust/Holodomor/Great Leap Forward will become convenient; after all a Utilitarian (aka Socialist) looking at American Blacks as a “Community” sees nothing being produced except political leverage. What happens when that leverage is no longer needed by the Overlord class which explicitly rejects White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Middle-Class morality that gave rise to the concept of Natural Rights?

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