An analogy I am fond of using to describe my efforts is of a ferryman, taking people over a river. One side is the political, social and moral arguments based on the blank slate and egalitariansim. On the other side are the arguments based in biological realism. When people finally grow dissatisfied with the failure of the old arguments, the ferryman takes them over the river to the other side. What they do once across the river is their business. I just take them over the river.
Now, this way of stating things wildly overstates my role and influence, but it is useful in describing the whole body of writers, bloggers, podcasters and so forth, making the sorts of arguments I make here. The analogy serves another purpose. It helps frame the intellectual conflict in our current age. The people on our side know all the arguments on the other side. We were there once. The people on the other side, however, are wholly ignorant of what is happening over here.
This came to mind when perusing National Review the other day. I was sure they would have some posts slobbering over the Black Panther movie. No group is as enthusiastic for anti-racism as the modern conservative. They turn into a puddle of emotional goo whenever they see an even a mildly successful black person. It is why CPAC was just a long line of white people taking selfies with the four black people at the event. Instead, I found this review from Jim Geraghty with a very promising headline.
It was the subhead that got my attention, because the last thing I would expect to see at National Review is the mention of human nature. The place is stuffed to the brim with foaming at the mouth blank slaters. Normally, I would skip a Jim Geraghty post, because he is not interesting. Of course, his movie review was his normal banal nothingness. Even by the standards of movie reviews it is bland. What was striking though is there is no mention of human nature.
I re-read the thing a few times thinking I may have skipped over a line about race realism or even the reality of Africa. Nope. The closest he gets is a throw away line at the end about governance being about trade-offs. Unless you were in a coma for the month leading up to the release of Black Panther, you had to know the movie was explicitly about race. Somehow, Geraghty missed that and never mentions race once in his review of a film about race.
Thinking about this, it occurred to me that the so-called conservatives have turned a strange corner. Back in the olden thymes, the paleocons were sure that their wussy compatriots knew the score but were just too frightened of Lefty to be honest about human nature, especially with regards to race. Maybe it was wishful thinking but listen to some of the old guys, many of whom worked for outfits like National Review, and they used to talk about these things with the wuss-right types.
Maybe it is isolation, maybe it is a platonic form of assortative mating, but the remaining husk of Buckley Conservatism is stocked with people lacking the cognitive toolkit to understand the human condition. It is no longer about avoiding taboo subjects with these guys. They are now true believers in the blank slate, so whole swaths of knowledge are no longer available to them. They are forced to conjure solutions from a limited inventory of information about the human condition.
I mentioned this in one of the podcasts, but it is worth repeating. Sometime ago, I was chatting with a woman and the topic of Somalia came up. I mentioned that Somalis have some of the lowest IQ’s measured. Her question was “Is it the lack of schools or is it how they are taught in their schools?” In other words, nature was no longer in her set of possible answers. Like so many, she had fallen so far down the rabbit hole of nurture, it is all she knew. It is all there is.
This also helps explain why so-called conservatives are baffled by the sudden collapse of their movement. They moan and groan about Trump, using the language of the Left, which sounds rather silly to the rest of us. They cannot see that. They do not know what is on the other side of the river, the side we are on, because they do not know there is another side to the river. For them, biology is the edge of a vast ocean, because they believe there is nothing on the other side, not even monsters.
Geraghty has a kind of throw away comment about how **of course** there is nothing inherently wrong with Africans but he never takes the next step and asks why it is that Africans are seemingly incapable of forming functional societies or maintaining the functional societies left to them by Whites (Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.). The refusal to engage in the dangerous conversations that might get them some bad press has driven a lot of once regular readers, like me, away for good. Many of us were forced by National Review some years ago to choose between NRO and their blacklisted former contributor John Derbyshire and we chose Derb. NRO remains only relevant to a shrinking geriatric few.
“…he is the sort of dullard who brings shame upon the dullard community.”
I’ve recently seen a Shakespearean Insults poster, and this belongs on it. Glorious!
I’d not think overmuch about that low-IQ for Somalis until they’ve had some stability of food and family for at least a generation. Amazingly, many ethnic groups SEEM to be dullards, until a consistent food supply and stable family structure allow their inherent genetics to come to the surface. Until then, we’re looking at the effects of war and famine, and family separation. They might still score low, but, I’m willing to withhold judgement.
Even if they get over the malnourished bubble , we don’t need African Muslims in the West for any purpose
Truth is if we sent home nearly every immigrant and their offspring since 1968, we still wouldn’t need anyone from anywhere including Europe
250 million is plenty enough
I remember as a pre-teen in ’67 when the USA hit 200 million!
That would be an AWE-inspiring number to regain, minus all of the post-’65 DIVERSIONS!
Those “testings” have already been done, my friend, and the “magic dirt” and “magic Big Macs,” only get you a few more IQ pts. At best, you’re looking at 5-7, which puts you around 75, if you’re lucky. What country in their right mind imports people whose IQs are below the level of what we legally deem fundamentally retarded, AFTER we’ve spent our valuable resources educating, housing, and feeding them, AND will have to more than likely continue paying for their existence, plus any family they have? Oh, and don’t forget, they belong to the most backward and violent religious ideology there is today. What kind of judgment are you withholding exactly and ffs, WHY? If it was within my power I’d kick out everyone whose family wasn’t here pre-1924 immigration. No exceptions.
“…the science-fiction concepts at the heart of the story eventually become sand in the gears of WHATEVER social message the filmmakers intended.”
Like you said, he is STILL asleep if he can claim to have missed the “social message.” (That’s where I stopped reading it.)
Just read an article by Sam Francis, that I believe was recommended by a commenter here. I was stunned at how prescient it was. Written in 1993, it succinctly lays out the problem of left cultural hegemony, and proposes a solution. Well worth reading.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/winning-the-culture-war/
I like your analogy, Zman. I’ve used a similar one re religious faith, based on a minor “magical” ability as described in Patricia McKillip’s “The Riddlemaster of Hed” trilogy. It involves taking a small puddle of water and making it appear to be an enormous lake, or a twisted thread seem a maze-like path, or a small pile of twigs an impenetrable hedge of brambles. Once the individual is on the other side and finally looks back and sees the tiny reality, they are amazed and exhausted, but far wiser to future tricks.
The same affect is apparent here – to those on the initial side of the river, the crossing looks perilous and the currents treacherous, and the far shore (if even glimpsed) appears foreboding and hostile (literally “here be monsters”). For those of us who’ve crossed over all such arguments are seen as hollow, because we’ve safely made what really wasn’t such a dreadful passage and we know that where we are is far more conducive to mental health and honest relationships, not to mention survival.
Progressive conservatives aren’t willing to hit back hard enough to make everything they complain about stop.
One way to remain safely ensconced in an ignorance bubble is to shun all opportunities for discussion or debate with those of differing beliefs. The best indicator of a true believer is someone with fingers in their ears shouting . . . nah nah nah I can’t hear you! And these prima donna preachers who will not engage are really just selling a scam rather than pursuing a truth. That they still have a following is a surrogate measure of the extent to which our society is diseased.
“These prima donna preachers who will not engage are really just selling a scam rather than pursuing a truth. That they still have a following is a surrogate measure of the extent to which our society is diseased.”
How true; nor am I thinking about the pure grifters such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Tim Wise, the SPLC, and all the rest of the “left-wing” scammers who have piled up millions. Just now I’m looking at the celebrities affiliated with “our team” – Rush Limbaugh and so on; you know the crowd.
Bring up “race realism” with Limbaugh, or Hannity, or Levin – especially Levin – and you’re gone. Free speech? Not on their programs! There was more free speech on the old Randi Rhodes show on ‘Air America’ than on any of these dull and entrenched programs, which recapitulate, day after day and year after year, the same talking-points that haven’t seemed fresh since the Reagan years.
It’s developed into a problem for me, since I work in an environment where my colleagues listen to all of this stuff, all day, relax after dinner by watching Fox News, scan Breitbart and Drudge at lunchtime on their phones. It’s stifling – and I am to the right of these guys. I’ve suggested the alternatives familiar here – Vdare, Radio Derb, the Z man, AmRen, plus other venues I won’t mention here, as ‘unorthodox’ by the standards of this site and its following.
For relief I’ve been reading Marx and Bakunin, just as a palate cleanser to offset the tedium of yet another paean to free markets or constitutional government by one or another of these guys.
In the 80s, pre-Limbaugh, we had no choice but to listen to liberals, on radio and TV. It made us stronger; we developed filters for the gratuitous liberalism, but in those days even liberals weren’t Laputans: Their take on reality hadn’t yet metastisized into an alternative reality.
Listening to NPR in (say) 1985 gave you a far better view of the world and national situation – provided you came equipped with the aforementioned filter – then an endless diet of our multimillionaire “conservatives” with their “profit-breaks” and the like.
Even Levin, lately, has become “woke”, at least as to the critical state of the country, the irrelevance of his beloved Constitution, and the disastrous consequences of open borders. Well, no shit Sherlock; callers you were cutting off in 2016 were onto that, and not making 10% of the cash money you’re making with your gig.
One of the favored “tough guy” routines is to challenge liberals to call. You don’t ever hear them challenge “dissident rightists” to call; their business models require the “non-existence” of such people.
I was listening to NPR in 1980, after Reagan was elected, but before he took office. They were already calling his economic policies a failure. They usually interviewed the head of the USA socialists party on economic issues. I was also listening to their alligator tears when Newt was pulling their funding in 1994.
I’ve had the nature vs nurture debate on black intelligence with lefty progressives. After teachers/schools, the next argument you hear is nutrition. The reason Mohammed Somali can’t read is he didn’t get enough good food as an infant. Or his pregnant mother had nothing good to eat.
Back in the old days, it was leaded gasoline and paint chips.
A Millennial Brit used the paint chip argument just this week, in a YouTube debate. He tried to argue that blacks in Chicago, Detroit, Alabama, Somalia, Eritrea, and Chad all were currently, or had previously at some point, lived in homes w/lead painted walls and ALL black children are inexplicably drawn to eating these chips and cannot be stopped from doing so.
Despite the fact that lead paint hasn’t been used for decades, and certainly not in homes built in the last couple of decades and certainly not in mud huts or houses made from sheets of tin, the type we use here in the US for chicken houses.
These kids are clueless.
As for my “trip across the river,” I was 7, and we were on vacation. I grew up in the whitest of white boonies of Alabama & had no experience w/POC.
We were at the pool and there were 4-5 black kids around my age acting like complete heathens. Their mother(?) Scolded them several times and I kept trying to talk to them and play games w/them but they just couldn’t follow what I was saying and concentrate long enough to play w/o acting up. I finally told my mother I was ready to go. When we got back to our room, I asked her why they weren’t able to play and behave, and she told me that black people couldn’t help it, that most of them aren’t as smart as whites and don’t have the ability to control themselves as well, because of it. She said a small number of blacks are smarter than the rest, just like there are some really dumb white people. She told me that I couldn’t always judge people as a group, but sometimes it’s ok to do so, especially when it comes to my safety.
So, I was red-pilled by a woman with just a high school diploma in Alabama, whose family were poor dirt farmers. To this day, she has never heard of Boas, or Pinker, Mead, Gould, Lynn, Hernstein, Murray, Diamond, etc.
She just knew what she knew. I think there used to be a lot of people like her back in the day, just common sense smart folks.
So long as the individual is removed from responsibility the FemiProgs bucket will carry all the water needed.
Sounds like a significant portion of ‘conservatives’ found a boat back to the other side of the river. More likely they swam back.
My journey to the “dissident right” or “alt right” started when I watched John Derbyshire destroy Jay Nordlinger in The Corner on the subject of Mexican immigration. The Kevin Williamson article telling all working class whites to die, put that journey into warp drive.
There’s a story called “Flatland” which is about mathematics, but it has a character who lives in 2D land, and when a sphere crosses through his plane, it starts as a dot becomes a growing circle then a shrinking circle then a dot then disappears.
He cannot comprehend a sphere.
Flatland also includes an examination of the 1-d world, where your position on the line dooms you to only have two neighbors. Flatlanders quite understandably despise this primitive world and its occupants.
The whole thing has been summed up in 4 words by the great realist philosopher Ron White: “You can’t fix Stupid”.
To Liberals, of course, you can, because Stupid, like Race is merely a social construct.
“Let me tell you what I’m looking for in a tree….”
It’s a distinction that doesn’t matter, but they know . Guess who ferried me across the River? Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker, two impeccably credentialed leftists who haven’t been chased out of the public sphere. At least not completely.
I’m sure you’re aware of Pinker’s book “The Blank Slate.” It tears up modern leftism by the roots. Sure he throws in some gratuitous slurs against those Christian rubes and cover it with opening and closing ideological boilerplate, but it’s all there.
They, know but they 1) don’t have the energy to fight the “studies” mob and 2) they fall back to a Rudyard Kipling style “white man’s burden”
“They are now true believers in the blank slate, so whole swaths of knowledge are no longer available to them.”
It’s like watching someone sleepwalk through a room. Where they see a treasure chest, I see a table. Where they see a unicorn, I see a trashcan. Where they see Hitler, I see a coatrack.
What’s the old truism?
” A conservative believes what he sees, a liberal sees what he believes”
the average joe schmo knows. your grandmother knew the score. her mother knew too. but we have been so indoctrinated to think that it’s impolite, that we are afraid to say what everyone already knows to be true.
As you said that fact a few times on Somali IQ being 69, do you think that might be in error? I have heard differently that it might be 70.
Dalrymple’s emasculated liars observation comes to mind. Someone of my wife’s acquaintance witnessed some theft at a local chain store. When the police came they kept questioning this manager about physical details. He was constantly hemming and hawing without being forthcoming when finally his black female employee yelled out in frustration “he was black for Gods sake”.
Sounds like the same training that most whites internalize.
https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country
This list puts Somalia at an average of 68.
http://aaidd.org/intellectual-disability/definition
”Intellectual functioning—also called intelligence—refers to general mental capacity, such as learning, reasoning, problem solving, and so on.
One way to measure intellectual functioning is an IQ test. Generally, an IQ test score of around 70 or as high as 75 indicates a limitation in intellectual functioning.”
75? OK, that’ll work, on the list from the first link where does that dip below 75? Mali and Namibia tied for 32th at 74.
Scroll down, what do nearly all those countries have in common?
Note that the quote refers to ”mental capacity”, that’s why any and all ”school reform” schemes are doomed to failure.
You can’t fit 100 IQ worth of knowledge into a 68, or 70 or 80 IQ container.
The pigs simply can’t be taught to sing.
I was being sarcastic with the 70 iq statement. Obviously one point is nothing. Splitting hairs and all.
YIH is a strict numbers man. When I was a kid I had an argument with a math teacher; he said that Babe Ruth’s lifetime average was .340. I was ten and I corrected him; no, that was Lou Gehrig, said I; the Babe hit .342. This upset the teacher very much and he pulled rank on me and said I was wrong.
I lugged my Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia to school the following day and showed him the numbers. I was right.
He still pulled rank: What difference does it make? Scorekeepers got things wrong occasionally, and “who knows?” if the numbers are actually true.
I’ve learned over the years that he was right – extensive research shows that quite a bit of the old record has to be adjusted a point here or there.
But it was rank-pulling which bugged me, the shifting of argument… I’ve never forgotten.
Let’s call the Somali IQ 70, just to show we are generous; it changes nothing – Somalis are “in general” unsuited to modern society.
Up until the late 80s-early 90s, an IQ of 85 was considered fundamentally retarded in regards to the justice system and how punishment was doled out. When it became apparent that most black criminals had IQs of 85 & under, this presented the libs with a quandary. This is when they lowered the threshold to 80, and added in even more muddled voodoo of learning disabilities and lack of parental interaction, no books in the home, blah, blah, blah.
It is generally accepted that a country’s mean IQ must be at least 90 to successfully sustain a democracy. I am skeptical of this, personally.
A person living on a two-dimensional plane literally cannot conceive of “depth,” there’s not even a way to explain it to them (“it’s like length or width, except it’s up and down, and it helps things to not bump into each other …?”)
Likewise, the dubious 4th-dimension of “time,” or those pesky string theories notwithstanding, we can’t conceive of anything beyond 3-D. We don’t even understand where it would “fit” in our spatial awareness.
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There are so many vast worlds beyond our understanding, it’s no great leap to think the same biological coding that makes one soul a great running back and another a quantum physicist, would also allow some of us to see the realities of the world around us while others remain blind to anthropological realities.
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Sometimes it’s because we see what we wanna see. Other times, regretfully, we’re Born This Way.
Imperfection is the engine of evolution.
Evolution is also the engine of imperfection; it starts with mutations, often disastrous.
But even progs when making personal choices run away from diversity. They couch it in “good schools” or “crime ridden neighborhood”.
But then they’ll say they’d love to live next door to Oprah or Denzel Washington (“see, I’m not racist”) and Conservative Inc-types will do the same, preferring to live next door to Allan West or Thomas Sowell. (“It’s not about race, bigot!”) Yeah, it would be nice to be able to handpick your neighbors.
Andy Warhol explained the phenomenon: Nothing is more bourgeois than trying to not seem bourgeois.
This to me explains the Left, at any rate the comfy white professional left, ensconced in safe places but planting all the right signs in their yards, wearing broad-brimmed hats or reversed French berets while walking their trendy pure-bred dogs around town.
I can smell libs the way Harry Reid could smell tourists. Middle class people who are determined to “not seem middle class”. Warhol was onto it…
If these people were Aztec bureaucrats, they’d believe in human sacrifice.
I was one of those guys. And – I wasn’t ferried across the river by an intellectual gentleman.
Nope – I was on the riverbank, with a pile of spent brass at my feet, the bolts of my machineguns locked back, with the monsters moving in – and I had just about had the bun. Think “Dunkirk” and that was my tactical situation. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay. I wanted to change my world. As I made my way across the river, I felt like that guy on the chopper that was lifting off as his fellows left behind on the ground were mercilessly over run.
My family’s back there.
But I’m here, and ya know what? It ain’t so bad. I see other guys that can see and think and do things rather than just prattle about them in the way they’ve been taught. They aren’t haters, or thugs, or wicked. Hey – I wish Wakanda was a real place too. I wish Somalis and moslems weren’t savages and animals. But I met them and worked with them – or tried to – and you can’t BS me anymore. And I can’t go back even if I wanted too.
Distance roads are calling us all, Z. Where do we go from here…?
You can’t unsee the oliphant.
GF – Aptly expressed. I mourn for many of my kin.
The four based black guys at CPAC and great guys like Sheriff David Clark are, in a way, an impediment to getting conservatives to the biological realist side of the river. To the NR crowd, they represent what all blacks can be if only they took responsibility and studied harder and worked harder.
Yes. The proper response on seeing a woman who can deadlift 250# is to be amazed at the uncommon thing. It’s not to conclude every woman could do the same if only…
if they would read, instead of just disparaging ‘The Bell Curve,” they would completely understand Ben Carson, Alan West, and David Clark instead of being confused by them.
Or, as Mike Enoch says, I’m sorry, but Thomas Sowell can’t be a neighbor to every single one of you leftists.
Wow the responses are fantastic! Two issues that are off limits in high schools, meritocracy and responsibility. This has caused the before mentioned problems by the previous posters. We may on the surface say we support the two, but in reality it’s just lip-service. When we do in some instances try to have some sort of standard, parents to the rescue! By the way, been coaching track for 30 years, did you know that sprinting, jumping was just a social construct?
Matrix – A high school football coach said his program was the only thing in the school teaching goal setting and working towards them. Sad.
Yup, good point. Sports is the last place to make kids understand that not everyone is equal.
My favorite exercise to help others understand race realism is to use the example of Ashkenazi Jews. Despite being 1/600th of the world’s population and experiencing high levels of discrimination and even extermination, they make up 1/3 of the billionaires and have won about 1/4 of all Nobel Prizes. At the same time, the other sects of Judaism are not able to achieve similar levels of achievement. These Ash jews basically experienced every single thing, and more, that is used to excuse black/hispanic disfunction but still managed to succeed.
It’s a great red pill and an excellent introduction to the biological reality of human biodiversity.
Agreed. Once someone accepts that some subset of the population is above the mean in terms of cognitive ability, it becomes impossible to deny that others are below the mean.
Yak 15 – The problem with this (using Ash Jews as an example of HBD) is the same as using Negro athleticism. These arguments are permitted even in respectable society because they are not necessarily seen as pejorative and, more importantly, the groups in question are already seen as distinct, different, victims, and not White Christians. Just read Sailer’s comment section (or Breitbart of old) and you’ll find many who accept these exceptions to equality but refuse to budge one step further. Jews in particular seem more than content to recognize Negro dysfunction but object vociferously to the belief that their ethnicity might have anything to do with their behavior or opinions.
I agree with teapartydoc, they know.
I’ve spent my life marinating in left-world. I’m convinced that the multicultural faith is precisely because they see the obvious truth but cannot bear the implications. What if it’s really true that the Somalians in Minnesota are not as smart or productive as the Norsemen? What if no amount of education will make a difference? Then what?
I’m also convinced that length of growing season is the key to understanding and appreciating biological and cultural differences. And if so, how could we overcome such a vast and fundamental difference? If the American idea of equality is that we are all created equal, literally, then our strife will increase. If the idea is equal protection under the law, because we’re not inherently equal, then I think there is hope.
PS: Thorsted – please edit your spelling before posting. You ruin what may be a good argument by making it so hard to read.
Each subdivision of our species adapted optimally to the environment in which those ancestors lived. High intelligence was an environmental adaptation driven largely by extreme seasonality (what you called length of growing season). In contrast , black people’s primary adaption was via physical traits that worked well in sub Saharan Africa. There is no morality in this distinction, it’s just about what works best in any particular environment. Fish are adapted to live in water. Put them on land and they don’t do so well.
“What if it’s really true that the Somalians in Minnesota are not as smart or productive as the Norsemen? What if no amount of education will make a difference?”
I have taught math at all levels from 6th grade to senior Calculus. I have tutored senior engineering students at a major southern university in applied linear Algebra.
Over the years, it became obvious that IQ was directly proportional to the student’s ability to do math successfully, and equally clear that educators must never mention this fact. You see, IQ is at least 75% genetic and some races will lag behind no matter what we do. We may never mention this in public! (oh the horror if that were to be known!)
On the other hand, I presently have one “slow class” of pre-Algebra kids where a 105IQ black kid is beating the socks off a white boy with about 80IQ. I am told that if I were to use “best practices” and have good lesson plans they would both be equal. Never going to happen. Notice we can’t even talk IQ differences when the case is reversed from the normal situation.
I mention all this to say that we are harming the slow kids by asking them to do things they can not do. It is like asking the blind kid to read the book you hand him. For God’s sake, demand your educators recognize reality.
This is the new sorting.
Churchill said if you were not a liberal when you were 20 you had not heart, but if you were not a conservative when you were 40 you had no head.
The sorting is different. There are the civic nationalists, libertarians, and others who are Utopian in that they think they just need better or different kinds of arguments.
You come to the river bank or shore when you realize the other person understood the argument, and accepted the air-tight logic, but rejected it anyway.
That’s why Ron Paul brough people into the libertarian movement, but they are now leaving in droves (letting it be converged, good riddance to the LP) for the alt-Right.
The Alt-Right is not ideological, but it simply knows we were able to have a much better life in the 1950’s – “Happy Days”, and are looking for the elements, even the uncomfortable ones, necessary to get to something like that, though forwards, not backwards.
Feminism and Socialism has ended like Candide, who ended up marrying the no longer fair Cunegunda in a tepid not quite misery. The Housewife Mommies are still happy as they ever were.
The anti-assimilation reverse racism has destroyed the black family. Is there such a thing as toxic masculinity? Yes, when there is no FATHER around to give the antidote to a son.
The Churchians have spirituality instead of Christianity. Some vapid, abstract, amorphous “good” ideal for a God that all you know is it is an SJW. Real Christianity is hard, and requires grace and sacrifice.
We see the hell on earth that is the alternative as the gates surround the “sanctuary cities”, and San Francisco is literally a shithole. They have a homeless problem? They can’t credibly remove (deport!) them, they don’t have enough charity to build actual housing with plumbing (or pay for porta-potties which would be better), as that might mean getting them off drugs or on drugs if they are mentally ill. But they won’t allow private people to help and the laws generally encourage more homelessness.
Even though it was a tough environment and it often used severe mercies, it was better back then and could be now.
But the first problem is the infection is so deep the start must be ethno nationalism since there are still large fires of the spirit in the white non-diverse areas. It is more effort than we have time, treasure, or ability to try to restore the fallen when we ourselves are threatened and under siege. Minorities aren’t unwelcome, only that they have to understand that they will be living under Christendom restored, and must act accordingly whether they think otherwise and not be a nuisance, which they can do somewhere else (usually some hellhole).
A long but rewarding comment. Thanks.
I had a similar discussion with a Lefty friend some time ago. I mentioned that the rate of rape in Sweden had gone up 600% or something like that in recent years due to the refugee crisis and his response was to ask if the Swedes were raping the refugees. I’m not sure if he accepted the truth was otherwise, but for a long time I didn’t understand why anyone couldn’t see the causality in the situation. What’s even more interesting is that this same guy understands the correlation between race and IQ, at least in regards to Jews and Asians being higher than others. I expect if asked, he’d fall back on blank slate idealism to explain the black-white IQ gap though.
Because that’s how he’s conditioned. It has nothing to do with him not being smart.
Some of the smartest people in history have been crazy or conditioned, and many of the smartest people around us now are, too.
We need to stop fetishising intelligence.
It’s worth recalling that smart is not a virtue. Courage is. Moderation, fairness, prudence; faith, hope, and charity (if you are Christian). But not smart.
The guys who first started thinking about our culture said the men who run it should be virtuous, not that they should be smart.
One step too far I think. Or perhaps I’m a bit too jewy here. I believe smarts is necessary, but insufficient, for virtue. A true moron could have a heart of gold, but otherwise accomplish little for his people. He might even harm them before realizing his honest error. Granted, this is not nearly as bad as a brilliant and malevolent ruler, but I would never assign a null value to cultivating the intellect without expensing one’s moral character.
if you don’t like smart, BTP, what about wise? wisdom, as aristotle said, is the greatest virtue. courage. when to stand and fight, when to flee? wisdom. moderation. when is enough enough? wisdom. what is virtue? wisdom. what is the good life? wisdom.
When I was a kid we learned about Cincinnatus, the legendary farmer called upon to steer Rome through emergencies by assuming temporary dictatorial power. We also learned of Washington’s reputation as the Cincinnatus of the West.
No one knows what IQ Cincinnatus had, but it’s fairly certain that GW wasn’t terrifically smart, hardly in the same league as Franklin, or Jefferson, or Hamilton, or Adams. Nor was he all that able a general, by Sandhurst or West Point standards of a later age.
The Father of Our Country wasn’t reading Laplace’s ‘Celestial Mechanics’ for pleasure.
Yet it was widely accepted by his intellectual superiors that he was the Man of the Hour, as Cincinnatus was for the ancient Romans.
Whether you are smart or not, you can be right or wrong. Being smart just increases the odds. Being smart also means your execution plan is more likely to succeed.
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Unfortunately, the terms “intelligence” and “smart” can have completely different meanings, depending on who uses it. That’s why IQ is such a handy tool. Regardless of what it really measures, it is quantifiable and provides a baseline that supports the biological basis of human identity. This is also why Psychology is such a dismal science. With the exception of Behavioral Psychology, Neuropsychology, and Psychopharmacology, there is no science involved and no replicable results. And all three of these fields in Psychology lend themselves to misuse by the powers that be.
TPD – Do you think ignorance is a better deal?
Genius level intelligence begins at 145 more and less. It is essential for a limited, if impressive, number of things. Judgement is not one of them. Or courage, or general character. The sweet spot for chess grand masters is 135. Very high IQ is as likely to lead one into the weeds as it is the way out. Perhaps more? The acknowledged smartest people on earth are drawn to perfecting the most odious political arrangements in history.
That late and quirky lefty, Alexander Cockburn, wrote an entertaining book on chess masters in 1974 called ‘Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death’.
No sane Vulcan – much less human – would want any of these people anywhere near the reins of power, or even the reins of the local power plant.
We’re talking ‘issues’.
teapartydoc: “We need to stop fetishising intelligence.”
My extremely high IQ son tells folks he merely has an extremely capacious RAM and processing speed. That has nothing to do with wisdom, judgment, conscientiousness, diligence, etc.
Is it fair to say that IQ is a real measure of real capability, but that it isn’t a “value rating” as such for the individual?
Hubie Blake was blind and did not receive formal musical training, yet he emerged as one of the seminal jazz pianists of the 20th century. Could he solve differential equations in his head? I don’t know; I suspect he couldn’t. Did he know what a differential equation was? Possibly not.
But you have to admit there was something special in his wiring. But none dare call it genius.
When I was a lefty I was a pretty good blank slater, too. Maybe not 100%. I didn’t literally think of it in terms of the blank slate, but I know this: I used to mentally boo and hiss whenever EO Wilson or other “sociobiologists” or evolutionary psychologists were mentioned. Why did I do this? I “knew” that they were both wrong and evil. They were just looking for pseudo-scientific rationales for bigotry and greed. I “knew” this because most of my schooling had imparted this to me. Further as a smart, college-educated lefty I read all sorts of intellectual articles in The Nation and In These Times written by professors who just pooh-poohed EP approaches to IQ and behavior. Could all those credentialed people be wrong or be lying? But I never really investigated the counter-arguments, I just took it on faith that “all the smart people” had weighed in. This is the problem we are still up against when it comes to the mental inertia of normies.
I remember when E.O. Wilson got published. He was a hot thing in biology for less than a year when all the progressives had their “oh, shit” moment and ostracized him almost as badly as Murray.
E.O Wilson was attacked but the evolutionary anthropologist; Robin Fox came out with a similar book slightly before Wilson and was attacked and still is for “racism”. Fox work was a reaction against the behaviourist BF.Skinner claim that all human behaviour was conditional and could be de-conditioned,- there was no “ghost in the box”-humans has no nature. But, “black slate” idea was attached prior to that. The german-jewish political realist, Hans Morgenthau came to the US and worked a the university of Chicago. There he found behaviourist that he regarded as utopian as the communist-as special american creed that claimed that humans had no nature only nurture. His book “Scientific Man Vs.power politics” from 1950 is his attack on the claim that humans have no nature. The “Scientific man” is this utopian behaviourist.
Where did ”the blank slate” come from? http://www.vdare.com/articles/franz-boas-liberal-icon-scientific-fraud
And who was he? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas#Early_life_and_education
You guessed it, his name echoes.
We see these differences within “counties” in Europe. I am half italian and on the surface Italy is a nation where all people are christians. But if one looks at family types in italy there is at least 3.types. The north and center of italy have a european family type that is exogamous with a civil society. The south has a middel eastern family type the historically has been endogamous and it gives a clannish mentality and a absent of a civil society reflected into the institutions -the culture of a “failed state”. In PISA tests south italy is also 15-20% below the north. There might be biological reason for both the family types and intellectual performance. Ann Coulter should have said that the US should convent the middle east to christianity as it would change anything. The first to believe in “black slate” was the Christian missionaries that though that christianity had western civilisation. This rottens utopian universalism has deep roots and has been with us longer than the communist utopia.
Ironically, Christianity may end up both creating and destroying our civilization.
Agree. Paul Gottfried sees multiculturalism as a by product of from of a post modern christianity. I have not read his book but the english prof. Steven Hopgoods book “The Endtimes of Human Rights” that is identical in this analysis. He traces the roots of this thinking to modernity in the late 18-century were the “old God” died and a “new God” was needed. The calvinists in Europe came up with a “new God” in the victim and the “Red Cross” was the first child for post-modernity Christianity . Around the “Red Cross” american and european calvinists came up with the idea of the UN, human rights, a monolithic world and humanity as a family value. Other christian movement transformed from missionary movements to “secular” social missionary movements (NGOs today)-the self-righteous got a new framework. Hopgood says that they perceives their narrative as “universal” but it is in reality only western -and particular protestant.Amnesty International has tried to get members in Japan with expensive campaigns but they have never got more than 500.members. They guilt culture itn´t there . Japan almost don’t take any asylum-seekers for the same reason and the basis for shaming campaigns is not there. Hopgood predicts that this variant of Christianity will come to an end due to the anarchy from the brake down of states in the 3.rd world and the west will withdraw from the “international” system that they in reality unilateral has kept alive. A secularisation from this post-modernist christianity will come.
I used to be on the other side of the river, and it wasn’t quite the way the paleocons imagined. I had a constant subterranean current of Badthink as far as other races and cultures, but I was able, even willing, to suppress it. I first became aware of this after 9/11, when Bush was slowly heaving himself into the Iraq war. I listened to all the arguments in favor: “Fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them over here”, “Flypaper strategy”, and finally planting Democracy in the Middle East, so it will spread and neutralize Islamic terrorism in its cradle. Even Mark Steyn made these arguments. I said they made sense, but deep down, I was thinking, “Nothing good can ever come of trying to reform these animals. Democracy is *ours*, and it took us hundreds of years to achieve it. They can’t do it.”
I noticed that “conservatism” moved quickly to shame anyone who expressed this view, but along with the blank slate dogma they threw in a moral argument: it wasn’t just that it was wrong to say that Muslims were incapable of living in a modern western democracy – that implied that we were BETTER than they were, and that’s tantamount to racism. There was also “Don’t you think they DESERVE a decent society (like ours)?” As if we got to the world’s goody box before everyone else, and picked out the best treat for ourselves, and now we won’t share.
Regarding the Black Panther movie, I know that 25 years ago I’d have been lining up to see it too, and full of tremulous admiration for an imagined world of noble, heroic blacks doing great deeds. An all-black cast! Wow! Isn’t that great! Ten years later, I was a bit tired of waiting for the great Black Awakening, but I was willing, even eager to hail any portent that it was right round the corner. By the time Obama slouched into office, I was done expecting anything worthwhile to come from non-whites, and now I go out of my way to avoid contact with them. Trump didn’t cause this, but he finally made me stop caring about it.
It is amazing how far people like Steyn, Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson have come. I think all of them supported Bush’s nation-building nonsense. Now they spend their time longing for the country as it was when they were children.
I think back to 9/11, and the idea that we would march in to the Middle East and sort things out for them over there had a lot of appeal to me. I think part of it is that we saw that the 9/11 perpetrators were no dummies, exercised some creative thinking, but were obviously very misguided. We were going to sort out that misguidedness.
In hindsight, I was foolishly naive. Bush and Obama helped me find my way across the river. Both of them weaponized false thinking.
Victor Davis Hanson belongs on this list too. Call them “mid-streamers”; they are no longer neocons, and long for a “familiar-looking” America, yet remain in mid-stream, unwilling to plant their flags on the ‘race realist’ bank. They’d all confront massive pay-cuts by doing so; Vdare and AmRen don’t pay the kind of dough they’ve grown used to.
The arguments against fighting endless wars in the Middle East (and elsewhere) are valid and rational in most respects, but there is one side effect that is somewhat redeeming. You can only be good at war if you practice it. Seasoned troops are an order of magnitude more valuable than green recruits. Military vets with combat experience are a valuable national asset and these hard men make us stronger as a nation.
Maybe.
But seasoned troops are only useful if there is a war to be fought and you REALLY need them. The cost of having “seasoned troops” is a huge amount of waste and destruction. If you read the back history of the after effects of pretty much any war the US has fought since the Civil War (I’ve never really seen too much in print about the effects of the Revolution on the people who actually fought it) …… what you will find is a huge amount of broken men who are basically just forgotten about by society and quietly asked to just STFU and go away.
Amputations, broken minds, broken bodies, crime, all of these are the direct result of taking men and beating the shit out of them by sending them off to war. War also doesn’t take the 4F types and dump their bodies into holes in the ground – it takes the mos virile hardest working men – and kills them off – leaving behind the betas.
There’s plenty of WW2 literature and anecdotes about the troops stuck in combat zones being pissed off about the fact that while they were stuck “over there” – their wives and girlfriends were back here screwing around with whomever was left (the guys who couldn’t even get in).
Look at WW1. In Britain, France, and Germany – pretty much an entire generation of young men was killed off. Again – the most virile, healthy – hardest workers. Exactly the men would have been building families, building society and running things – if they weren’t freaking DEAD.
There was a book that came out maybe ten years or so again (the name escapes me at the moment) that was a study of British society after WW1 – and how devastated it was after losing all the men. Women were forced to support themselves, women would “go lesbian” because there was nobody else around to have a relationship with – etc.
Pat Buchanan has made the point multiple times that WW1 was the death blow for the West. I tend to agree with him.
You don’t “conserve” a culture – or a society – by blowing the shit out of it and killing off all it’s men. Even some of the progressives recognize that war only adds to government power (War is the health of the state – Randolph Bourne) . The reason why we have a huge out of control government – which is now infesting our society by importing immigrants from incompatible cultures and races – is because it’s been able to “sell” being on a war footing since WW2. Once one enemy is used up – another one is found.
“The state” for all practical purposes in this day and age – directly equals progressivism and direct attacks on the society.
Men have proven themselves more than capable of becoming warriors on relatively short notice thruout human history. David Hackworth thought that the Army should be retained as a small force of the most belligerent warriors that could be found. All the bureaucracy should be gone – no make work jobs – just warriors. Set them up in a huge base somewhere out in the western US – and let them war game and develop weaponry on a continuous basis. When REAL war actually comes – this core of warriors would be the nucleus of a huge citizen army – which would go on to win any war that gets thrown at us (as it has done multiple times in the past). Some basics of military knowledge could be seeded thruout the citizenry thru some sort of militia service – maybe similar to the Swiss.
The military we have now is a drain on the country – and is a plaything of the cloud people as they go around the world screwing with people the same way they screw with us over here. If they’re allowed to continue doing this – we’ll be lucky if they don’t get us all killed – or bankrupt us ( I think they actually already accomplished that one)
Because if you open up that particular can of worms, it negates everything they look to as their historical “achievements” null. It means that Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, not Abraham Lincoln and William Garrison, were right. The Negro is not the equal of the white man, and the last 150 years have done nothing. The same messianic fervor that has pushed the “making the world safe for democracy” of the Wilson/FDR era to LBJ’s domestic disasters are not noble progress, but miserable failures. That realization is akin to taking away the entire pseudo religion of the last 200 years. We are literally killing their God by destroying their idols and putting a gauche plebeian into their temple.
Minor correction: Lincoln did not believe the Negro to be the equal of the white man.
Lincoln wanted the negro back in Africa.
Equal on what terms? Brain power or atheleticism?
On another forum I was involved in such a debate. The OP featured photos of latter-day Detroit. And here come the ‘dittohead’ posters carping about ”the result of not having a Republican mayor since the 50’s”.
I pointed out that Seattle, San Fransisco and Minneapolis are just as ”liberal democrat” as Detroit, Philly and Baltimore. Yet Seattle doesn’t look like Philly, San Fran even after the Loma Prieta (AKA World Series) quake was not as bad off as Detroit and Minneapolis is much safer and healthier than Baltimore. Having a radio diet of Rush (who gets much of his material from NR) have made them blind to what actually makes Haiti, Sub-Saharan Africa as well as Philly, Detroit and Baltimore what they are.
They know. Their denial mechanisms are so dialed up (possibly to eleven) that their conditioning makes it seem like they are completely unaware. They have become like Winston. They love Big Brother (the blank slate) now. So they see, but they don’t.
The memes from They Live are so accurate it is ridiculous.
I no longer think most of them “Know but choose to not say” because I don’t see the evidence. Maybe at some secret lair they get together and let fly their race realism, but I doubt it. John Derbyshire used to write about his experiences at NR when he brought up immigration. He would have gotten a better reception if he let lose with a loud fart after saying “pull my finger.”
I think the same process that distills left-wing Progressivism into an especially nutty creed has worked the same magic on the right-wing Progressives. Those prone to impure thoughts are exposed and run off, leaving only those incapable of impure thoughts. You’ll also note that what passes for conservative thought is increasingly dull. Jim Geraghty is just a dumb guy who shows up every day. The only thing Lowry worries about with him is that he’ll put his tongue in a light socket.
I don’t buy it. They are just a smart as we are. I live around university professors. They know the score. They are simply extremely well-practiced at reciting the mantras to the point that a kind of conditioned response takes place in reaction to any unorthodox thinking. This may look like stupidity, but what it really is is evidence of very successful imprinting and training.
I believe part of their denial lies in the fact that if they have to admit that they have been “wrong”, not only does it mean they are not as intelligent as they want you to believe, but that they have assisted in letting the genie out of the bottle. The genie that is destroying the White race as we speak. The genie that is placing animals on pedestals and declaring them not only our equals but our future successors. There are many former liberals that admit to their stupidity. There are many more that just segue over the fact that they were “wrong” and are now the protectors of the faith. “it was YOU that let the camel in the tent! Not me!”
A hundred years ago, doctors thought miasmas caused the Spanish Flu, despite germ theory. Lots of smart people believe insane things. More important, I think it is better if we stop believing that the other team is amenable to reason.
Yep. Whether they genuinely don’t believe in biology or they just pretend really hard to ignore it, it’s ultimately a distinction without a difference.
That’s the reason I got sick of NR. They continually complained about the unfairness and hypocrisy of the leftish media. I found myself saying, “Of course they lie. It’s what they do. Man the f up.” Their expedition into never Trumpism was simply the last straw for me. VDH and Andrew McCarthy essays are the only reason to go there now.
Progressive-ism and blank slate are belief systems, whether Left or Right. People who hold such beliefs are not open to argument.
Flu may well be spread via miasma:
https://sph.umd.edu/news-item/flu-may-be-spread-just-breathing-new-study-shows-coughing-and-sneezing-not-required
I think you’re both right. My geriatric parents and in laws watch daytime TV and read the mass media and they think they’re informed. They would think our host and us guys here are bonkers because they live in a comfy retirement bubble where they don’t have to see the consequences of black “culture” and the trappings of affirmative action. Any evidence of such is seen with the usual excuses and cries of racism. They mean well, but they’re just stupid, clueless seniors that don’t know any better.
My brother in law is a public educator and he is as smart as a whip, he’s very well spoken and he’s pozzed all the way through. He knows the score, he sees it in his classroom everyday – but couldn’t care less about the human shrapnel left behind in proggie families. His ex-wife is a feminist feral bitch, their kids are monsters – so he threw them under the bus and started another relationship with a younger model. He’s an evil, filthy son of a bitch and only one person in the family had the guts to say so. (That guy got chased across the river for his troubles with the wolves baying at his heels).
Great descriptions. I can picture these folks;-)
What makes up for it some is that many is the same or close-to age group see even clearer than, say Gen X or younger, how bad it is BECAUSE they were there when things were well-run and by the right people and they can compare it to now.
yeah, some are comfortable in their wrong beliefs. But others can see and feel that things are wrong and because of that, they are internet freaks, constantly searching out more, trying to find out the whats and whys and whos of all this.
So I know the urge is to generalize, but a lot that were strongly to the left in another era are just as strongly “dissident right” or trad/nationalist” today because they want what we once had back so bad. Others, younger and not intellectually curious, accept msnbc and don’t question/consider that there’s a problem. (except for “the Republicans”…they still don’t know most conservative hate both parties and think they’re really getting to us when they do the “But …REPUBLICANS…”hhx92”
I have experienced your point about blank state thinking in people both of the left and right side of politics. The blank state left,unlike the right, has a certain class of people who are fully invested in blank slate but have no doubt it is false. They are committed to the Potemkin village because they believe the truth is so cruel it must not be spoken–at any cost. People on the right who finally accept HBD are open to crossing that river. Funny side note–my code to enter is dnaZm.
I am not so sure. Jon Cole at Taki wrote an article awhile back stating that MANY mainstream Republicans read and agree with the dissident right but know it would be suicide to publicly agree with them.
Of course, it wouldn’t be suicide if they all came out simultaneously and spoke the truth, and backed up everyone else who did so as well.
Unfortunately, each individual is frightened of being the first one out of the gate, and so we all stand by and watch America circle the drain.
On the bright side, the longer this goes on, the more obvious it becomes that the policies of the left just don’t work.
There are a few at NR that I KNOW have to know about HBD-Cooke, Goldberg, Sloppy, they are just not that stupid. I’m not saying they’re deeply versed on the subject or anything, but they’ve got a basic understanding, especially Mischling Jonah.
As for Jim Geraghty, I’ve known affable doof Jim about 10 yrs or so now.
Jim is clueless about pretty much everything regarding life, including basic elements of how biology functions and intelligence is measured.
Jim typifies the average conservative pundit or think tanker today.
Bland, non-offensive, non-curious, and follows party line w/o any pushback. If the party consensus is a support for gay marriage, and someone like Jim didn’t actually support it last week, no problem, he will enthusiastically support it this week, and act like that’s been the case forever.