The Russian evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin coined the term “elite overproduction” to describe the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members. These potential elites jostle for positions that are declining in number relative to the increase in elite members. This game of musical chairs creates conflict as these elites engage in a struggle for power within society.
His choice of terms is a bit misleading, as his description of elite overproduction in America is better understood as an overproduction of people who see themselves as potential elites, despite being mediocrities. He points to the glut of lawyers as an example of the excess of people who wildly overestimate their ability. The number of people toting around an MBA is another example of this phenomenon.
The primary appeal of Turchin’s theory is flattery. It is human nature to resent the people who rule over you. A theory of history that says the problem with the world is there are too many people like that know-it-all rumpswab at the office is going to strike most people as plausible. All of us imagine ourselves as the most rational person in the room, so elite overproduction turns a conceit into scientific theory.,,,
As Francis Yockey writes in The Enemy of Europe: “feebleminded liberals…make up the American generalcy”. He had them pegged 70 years ago!
Remember that the same people who fought the Civil War were of a civilizational caliber that they would erect monuments, plaques, and statues memorializing those on the other side … because we were a society of the same blood. Those people are being replaced with IQ 87 replacements with no interest in or aptitude for that culture.
Today, 1619 gives blacks their comic book history and a rationale for believing it’s always1842. PoCs are encouraged to be maximally resentful about their place, fully unaware of the fact that American blacks are the most well-off of all blacks on Earth, ever, Their credentialed education is a reward for simply contemplating their own group’s bellybutton lint: Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies, Black Studies, Afro American Studies, Chicano Studies, Mexican American Studies, Latin Studies, Gay Studies, GLBT Studies, Queer Studies, Trans Studies, on and on it goes.
The credentials give them a guaranteed slot in the DIE pyramid tucked into every C suite of every corporation, NGO, foundation, HR department, government agency, school, museum, and important institution in the land. Meaningless “status” titles, makework, and eternal employment are guaranteed in exchange for immersing themselves in what Derbyshire calls, their “blackety black black blackness” because anything more wideranging or rigorous is impossible on a mass-production basis. The ruling elite has both imported their potential enemies into the fold and have put them on the payroll for producing nothing but overhead. And just like that, the globalist’s “black problem” is largely tamed. The rest are free to run riot.
Imagine introducing 15% drag on every single institution in the country …
Not to mention the added friction of these 15% disagreeing over spoils among the various victim identity groups … In the politicization of the bug and we can already see serious cracks in medical care, travel and supply disruption. Urban areas will further empty out as businesses close late September when rent deferments expire. The only glue holding crime at bay in cities is the lowest common denominator of any shared cultural norms.
Dr Jill truly believes she is on the same level as Dr Suess, Dr Spock, Herr Doktor Freud and especially that fresh Dr Watson (the DNA Watson, that is). Ditto for Michelle, whose thesis was a handful of diary entries complaining about her being offended. Michelle’s thesis eventually got her a law degree and a $300,000/yr DIE sinecure, First Ladydom, and that gold ring of “charity/ foundation” circuit. Yet poor Michelle still had to whine about being mistaken for an employee in Target by some random white lady, a most unbecoming incident.
The importance of CRT isn’t the effect it has on black self-perception so much as it is a weapon for dividing whites against themselves.
Yeah but Whites were and are divided by our own choices. Its us that give blacks their power over us
All Z says is true.
Left unsaid- they are in POWER and we are Powerless. If they are mediocre yet we their slaves, what are we?
“Beautiful losers” is a long-lived cliché.
Almost all the democratic movements that have troubled the world have been led by the nobility. An elite body can never satisfy the ambitions of all its members; there are always more talents and passions than tasks to deploy and there are bound to be a great number of men who, being unable to rise quickly enough by exploiting the privileges of the group, seek fast promotion by attacking these very privileges–Tocqueville
Journalism is the repository of access mediocrity that sees themselves as elites (and have dangerously powerful platforms through which to express their narcissism) but who instead wind up living in one bedroom apartments with cats fuming that capitalism has oppressed them and subverted their destiny.
I go back and reread my comment and see that I did the grammatical faux pas of dropping “access” where “excess” belongs.
My self editing skills have been subpar lately
I miss the edit comment function. Especially when in my cups.
You had me at “a mass culling of the ruling class”.
Hah. Its also called a rotation of the elite but it only works if you guys are ready to fill in.
Otherwise you get a vacuum someone else will fill either holdouts from the previous group or some warlord.
This is at least in part why the Bolsheviks killed all the Romanov line. That way they can’t try to get back in power.
Warlord sounds fine.
In fact Hitler, Sulla, Marius, Pol Pot (a white Pol Pot) , Mao, Stalin, Tito would all be marked improvements.
Shove Monck, why would we want to restore THAT?
The problem of cognitive decline relative to the demands of the job is also a problem in academia and professions such as medicine and engineering. We are living in a Dunning-Kruger epidemic and it is probably caused by affluence having removed the nasty consequences of being wrong about important things.
Then there’s a side of me that thinks ‘well, given the premise of a society that can no longer tell a lad from a lassie, what would you expect in the general competence department?’ We haven’t seen nothing yet….
What can we expect? Idiocracy, and it won’t take 200 years…
Seems most of the breakthroughs in the modern world came from generalists. Now we live in a world of hyperspecialization with ever narrower “expertise”. And outside of that narrow area they are surprisingly incurious and dumb. Try to do an acquisition or similar transaction. On the legal side you have the SPA guy, the tax guy, the regulatory guy, the intellectual property guy…..unless a partner is in charge that can see the whole scope of transaction things can devolve into a clusterfuck of these guys arguing with each other at $1000 an hour on your dime. Apply the same to the idiotic “interagency concensus” in the government and a decision is held up by the Asst. Deputy Undersecretary whose primary concern is that the agreement with the Taliban doesn’t include free women’s sanitary products. Which is she is concerned about. Hyperbole perhaps, but not far off the mark
I know I’m something of a René Girard bore, but the concept of a society where everyone can be elite has to lead to a dangerous situation where everyone wants the same thing. The democratic process of un-differentiation is exactly this concept of a war of all against all, ultimately.
But a society like ours, that despises the concept of knowing your place and getting satisfaction and fulfillment from executing your duties in that place, is headed for serious trouble of the stabby and shooty kind.
My older son, who eschewed college, was as smart at age 11 when he took the SAT (unprepped/zero studying) for the Duke TIP test (grade 8/9), as the average high school SAT-taker today. But he’s not credentialed, so there are entire industries closed to him. Muh democracy. Rah rah.
Above comment intended as a reply to Ben who was replying to Tars. Sorry for the mixup.
He’s better off. It took 5-7 years for my shit-lib programming to wear-off, and most don’t make it at all. In hindsight if you can go through life without ever needing a key-card programmed to a building, you’re way ahead of the game. Besides, the golden age of these type of jobs was passed by the mid 90’s. Some would even say the early 80’s. By the time I got there the Starbucks sipping HR c unts were firmly established. Que sera sera though. I feel I have more understanding having gone through it.
I’m gonna flex a little here, apologies. I took the tip test but had not had geometry/trig. Was slaughtered. When my son took it I got him a college prep book. Turd taught himself the maths. Got 27 on the act in the 7th grade. Went on to get national merit award. Saved my ass because that led to full and generous academic scholarship. I totally get the trade school push. However tbh i would disappointed if he achieved anything lower than technical research PhD, even professional school.
On a side note I went to the national tip award ceremony. Anticipated the demographics of USAs top .5%. About what you’d expect. However was surprised to see a single black girl in the sea of faces. Poor little thing looked miserable.
A nearly Ideal path would be Trade School and then if indeed you have found the right Trade – you are good at it – then Engineering school.
And I’d pay extra taxes to help fund my fellow citizens advancement- providing he will for me.
This under a new regime of course.
Point is there’s no ideal path. Case by case basis. Temperament and aptitude largely determinant. 4 year bachelor largely a waste for many kids especially if it accompanied with debt. credentials have their place. Shows follow thru if nothing else.
Yes, one of our kids took the SAT in 7th grade to qualify for some stuff, and scored higher than most college bound seniors in HS…He has the degrees, but still had to go into programming to make real money, because no connections in business or government..
pyrrhus: Who you know still matters a lot. Always has, always will.
The mass culling of lame elites is the only solution is natures solution to their overproduction. The elite has one job, to make it rain for the peasants. I disagreed with Rush Limbaugh on several things, including his great Reaganite lie that if you “sit average people down, and explain to them all they facts, they’l come to the right conclusion.” But one thing he did say that was perfectly accurate, and repeatedly, was that 10% of the country drives the rest. It’s around us every day. Of course he believed that if you just give them enough tax cuts everything would work out. But he never mentioned who they are, and yes (((they))) are a big subset of they, but not all of them. The political world isn’t the only one corrupted by democracy. The business world has been just as affected (see ESG investing) and will be the first to deal with the culling. It was corrupted by democracy’s penchant for unbacked currencies, which have allowed us to paper over each and every recession after 1982 with new debt. This means that bad businesses with bad management and bad actors stay in business (See AIG, Citibank etc.). the no talent hacks are never wrung out of the system. About 20% of companies on the S&P are now zombies surviving on finance. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. These zombies have lobbyists. But market forces will eventually overpower all of this in the currency market, overthrowing the business regime first. The political side of the regime will be dragged along by these forces.
Just think of all the bad debt that has been re-financed rather than liquidated. Austrian economics will not be mocked.
Our system at the managerial elite level selects for the best ass kissers and the most connected rather than the most capable.
Z’s great piece reminded of this hilarious Monty Python sketch, the Upper Class Twit of the Year.
https://youtu.be/VVYA3oTG8fg
All real wars (not these brush wars we can’t win against 80 IQ barbarians) tend to eliminate the peacetime rumpswabs and replace them with real men of war. I think the only way the cream of our society rises again is if we’re faced with an existential crisis, which I think might be in the offing.
Our system at the managerial elite level selects for the best ass kissers and the most connected rather than the most capable.
Everything you’re describing can be framed in PSYCHOLOGICAL terms.
In particular, think long and hard about Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder, which is the end stage meta-sociological cancer of dying civilizations.
Given enough time, every human organization [consisting of three* or more persons] will eventually be infiltrated and destroyed from within by Passive Aggressives.
Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder is a such a deviously perfect psychological blueprint for destroying human civilizations that only Massa Lucifer Himself could have inserted the genes for it into our species.
*If you look at classical binary marriages – i.e. only just two persons, rather than three or more – you could argue that yuge numbers of those marriages are destroyed by Passive Aggression.
Furthermore, I’d bet that the numbers regarding dissolutions of two-partner “partnership” businesses are very similar to the numbers regarding divorces of marriages.
“It is easy to forget, but the army advertised as the greatest fighting force in human history has not won a war in generations. Within this decade there will be no one alive who remembers the last time America won a war.”
What, no one recognizes the falsity of this comment? There was, after all, the first Gulf War. I’ll agree that our military is vastly overrated and extraordinarily inefficient for the money spent on it, and it obviously is loaded with incompetence at all levels, particularly the highest. But please, let’s not get carried away with exaggeration.
I would guess that the US Military deployed for the First Gulf War was arguably the finest military in History. That force, alas, now only exists in books. It has gone the way of the Roman Legions, Alexander’s phalanx, the Conquistadors, and the Spartan hoplites.
I’d like to think so since Gen X my generation did a lot of the heavy lifting but the reality is we fought an Arab army with poor morale and substandard gear.
The only way we could prove that was “great” would have been to have faced a true peer enemy who could have hit CONUS and we’d have seen land, air and sea battles here and there.
Such conditions are irrelevant. One fights with the army he has. What matters is victory, not “fairness”.
History is replete with wars and battles against seriously unequal foes. The outcome is never pre-ordained.
Winning is good but winning against a vastly weaker opponent does not prove your greatness.
Mike –
“ the US Military deployed for the First Gulf War was arguably the finest military in History’
I’d argue that was the German Army of 1940. If Operation Overlord was attempted then, think the outcome might have been different. ;<)
This is correct. The Wehrmacht was outnumbered 3 to 1 by French, British, Russian, and assorted other nations at the start of hostilities in 1939 and was never really challenged until Stalingrad. As a modern military force, it was the perfect blend of man, machine, and bold leadership. The closest the US military has ever experienced was the WWII island hopping Pacific Campaign. Those battles were largely won with blood, guts, and NCOs.
Tough call. Both those militaries were superb. I still wish that the German Army of 1940 had defeated Stalin and had ground the USSR into dust.
Mike –
Have you ever read RHS Stolfi’s incomparable “Hitler’s Panzers East”? His thesis is that the Wehrmacht had a God-given opportunity to end in the war in August 1941 by taking Moscow in a classic “Sichelschnitt” (“Scissors Cut”). Hitler certainly had the German Army’s “A-Team” on the job; General Ritter von Leeb (@Army Group North), Field Marshal Fedor von Bock (@ Army Group Center) & “Schneller” (“Fast”) ” Heinz Guderian in charge of the armor under von Bock. If ever a group of military men were primed for greatness, it was then. Unfortunately Uncle Adolf fumbled the ball on the 5yrd line when he halted Army Group North’s advance to allow von Runstedt (in command of Army Group South) to play catch up.
Guderian went apoplectic. The falling out between him & Hitler was permanent.
As General Patton said, “We beat the wrong enemy.”
I will check out “Hitler’s Panzers East”. I have though for a long time that Hitler’s “March to the East” was doomed for two reasons: 1) Hitler’s interference, and 2) FDR’s decision to send Stalin thousands upon thousands of armored vehicles and other such aid.
We know it as the “first” Gulf War because it was lost so badly it had to be re-fought ten years later.
Shrub I didn’t finish the job; like every military conflict we’ve had post-1945, we never achieve a clear cut victory.
By design? Allows the MIC a reason for a permanent state of war.
Lost? Did Saddam think he had won? H. Bush and his affirmative action general Colin Powell stopped the war after 100 hours. Good God.
The Bush clan knew how to start wars, not how to win them.
I wouldn’t even call it a war. A depleted Iraqi army after years of battle with Iran, using antiquated Soviet weaponry was nothing like a real fight. Add in overall air superiority and it was not much.
Beating up 3d worlders who can’t wait to surrender doesn’t count as winning anything…Especially since the US spent a lot of money and got nothing for it…
Just prior to Iraq 1 we handled Grenada and Panama fairly smartly. And the covert ops against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, the FARC in Columbia and the commies in El Salvador went well. So, I guess it depends on how you define “war.”
Nevertheless, most of us in the DR want an isolationist, America First, foreign policy; and that is antithetical to the globohomo raison d’etre. So what won’t be given must be taken (eventually) or eschewed.
Well, von Clausewitz defines war as “politics by other means”, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. Not every war has to be a total war of annihilation to qualify as war.
Unfortunately the DR has been losing the corollary to that dictum, namely that politics is war by other means, and losing it as badly as the Pentagon lost in Durka Durka.
“What is not debatable is that we are plagued by mediocre men with delusions of grandeur and access to power”.
That there are men (and lest we forget – even more so women) with delusions of grandeur and access to power is not debatable.
What is debatable is that they are mediocre. If only they were simply mediocre. It would be a vast improvement over the plague of absolute morons (the current resident at 1600 PA Avenue as exhibit A).
Great point, SISL. And they are cheered on and propelled forward by the absolute morons with just plain old delusions and no access to power. We are greatly outnumbered.
“Elite” white men are a threat to the system and the people at the top. White men in general have a lower BS tolerance and are more willing to call out bad behaviour, stupid ideas, or incompetent people.
So, the ignorant white/Jewish people, especially women, on top prevent normal white men from moving up, and prefer to hire indians, gays, women, or other foreigners. These indians always make the people higher up feel smart, while ignoring everything they say. But feels are more important than realz, as they say.
What strong wimmin really want is respect. No matter how many degrees they have, or how many “deliverables” they make, they are still never as respected as a white man. It’s just a natural response. Even the white auto mechanic in his shop commands more respect than a top level corporate woman. Not including druggies and wigger men, (which seem to be making up an increasingly large share of the white male population).
Obviously, this model doesn’t scale up and leads to gross incompetence. Nonetheless, we can also learn. Be cunning, say stupid things to a strong wahmen to pump her up. Defer to her authority. Until we get our women back in control we need to play the game as well.
Obviously, this model doesn’t scale up and leads to gross incompetence. Nonetheless, we can also learn. Be cunning, say stupid things to a strong wahmen to pump her up. Defer to her authority. Until we get our women back in control we need to play the game as well.
Dude.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but you’re outlining a recipe for meta-sociological disaster.
If you’ve got “strong” women above you in an organization, then the only way to deal with them is to phuck their brains right out of their ears.
And then ignore every single word that cums out of their mouths.
Women “think” with their birth canals & their clitorises.
Meanwhile, in pro-covidPanic Countercurrent…
-still articles about the mad and useless FP Yockey
-article about a french attention whore, as stupid as she looks like, estelle redpill (in short : a democrat + anti-islam)
-article about and by Alain de benoist, a sinister guy very coward, which admitted having vote for french’s B.Sanders, JL Melenchon
-and tons of articles based on this stupid “paganist” POW (i.e. atheist)
this site should be cancelled from “bad thoughts” list.
We take equality and “education” way too seriously. People think “education” is like magic and turns dumb people into smart people. Many people seem to believe the definition of smart is to be “educated.” The primary school system is designed with the goal that 100% of people finish that primary education and be given a high school diploma. While it is generally not said explicitly, there is also the underlying idea that anyone who wants to go to college should be allowed and encouraged to do so.
A big part of why we have this excess of people who imagine themselves to be in the elite is that we send far too many of our children to college. Too many kids “graduate” high school and too many “graduate” from college. Of course, being clownworld, we’ve turned “education” into a racket besides.
Spot on. “Equality” is merely one of Civilization’s (not just Liberal Democracy) fantasies. Humans are not equal. Never were, never will be. This is what Hernnstein and Murray’s “Bell Curve” was about, in the IQ department. Equality of opportunity is hard enough (it overrides freedom of association all too often) but at last it kept the taste of meritocracy. Equality of outcome, also called “equity” now, is even more subversive.
Education watered down for pretend proof of achievement: I often harp on this (indeed, yesterday I think). At least in the USA, all education standards were cheapened by roughly four school years worth, since a base year of (say) 1945, before all the Civil Rights idiocy began in earnest. Thus today’s high school diploma is roughly equal to an 8th grade education of 80 years ago; a BA equates to a diploma, etc. In so many words, a combination of losing the right to racially discriminate led to alternative ways to screen workers. At first, requiring a degree (or even a HS diploma — see 1971’s Duke vs. Griggs case) was an IQ and indirectly, a racial screen. The market (and liberals) responded by inflating grades, in effect, counterfeiting professional and academic certifications. We now approach the end game, where proof of competence in a field is deprecated. Your sex, your skin color, or who you slept with now count for more in getting that job that whether you even have the intelligence to even pick your own nose, much less do useful work. Of course I exaggerate, but not by much.
Of course there are and always will be fields that only retain the talented, or at least capable, but you’re right — there is a lot of useless dead wood, pretend jobs and this has been going on for decades. Thirty years ago, the deputy administrative assistant to the Assistant Administrator of Administration may have at least had some real duties. But today, we can be pretty sure the VP of Inclusion or the Department of Social Equalization or whatever, is a clown world slot.
Tars – Education and credentialism are plagues. Combine them and you get the US State Department. Add obeying orders and being a rumpswab and you get US army generals. Add not being able to swim or navigate and you get the US navy.
The tales I could tell of the people from my A100 class (State dept. orientation). Many of the names would be instantly recognized. These people were well-educated and credentialed fools back then, and now they are fellows here, professors there, advisors everywhere. Same and worse with people my husband worked with/for. Running a country when most of them couldn’t capably run a chainsaw.
“People think “education” is like magic and turns dumb people into smart people.”
We have reached the point where education often makes people dumber. Young ppl enter college with common sense relatively intact. They leave it believing in voodoo like transgenderism, that two ‘dads’ are as good as a dad and a mom and the nefarious ghost of institutional racism.
Education can be like Stephen Daedalus on a beach closing his eyes while doing a silly walk, thinking he’s having a profound artistic experience
But of course what Tars describes makes sense. When you refuse to consider that intelligence is 80% heritable, and religiously believe it is 100% nuture, then “moar edumacashun” makes perfect sense: they literally believe simply being in the right environment, in the right system, actually makes the participants more intelligent. That’s what the “nature” part of nature vs nuture means, beyond early childhood.
As some one who is currently in school for a Bachelors in Accounting, how do I avoid being a mediocrity. Now you all have me worried I chose the wrong degree.
If you’re reading this, you are doing better than 90% of our elites.
Good for you, you are going into a field where there are jobs and paychecks. It’s not really about being mediocre or not, it’s about not being dumb and “chasing your passion” by doing film studies or something.
Just show up every day, do your work, save money, work your way up. Saving & investing money is key and the compound interest does most of the heavy lifting over the decades.
You’ll see that just by being a white guy who isn’t totally insane, you’re already performing well above the non white vibrants and crazy cat ladies in the workplace. Make sure you don’t let yourself get taken advantage of by those people, as well.
Solid advice B125. Compound interest – one of the more formidable powers in the universe.
I don’t want to burst your bubble, but computerization is fast making that occupation obsolete. It used to be that a good accountant could expertly game the system (legally via tax avoidance) and earned his keep as a result. But the tax code is now so ridiculously complex and ever-changing that it will soon take an AI to navigate the morass. Seriously, you would be better off becoming a plumber or electrician. Better hours, better pay, and you will leave work everyday with a positive self image. At the root, accountants just make things less worse. Just my 2 cents.
There’s a reason tradesmen work hard to make money, to send their kids to college.
No doubt there’s money in trades, but if you have a higher IQ, and can make money sitting behind a desk, you’re better off in the long term. More career growth, less physical toll on the body. You need to hit the gym regularly if you’re at an office job.
I’m personally skeptical of impending automation anyways. Do the office job first, if it does get automated and you need a new career you can always switch to trades.
While there is absolutely nothing wrong or shameful about a hard day’s work, the people who romanticize trades are largely people who are not tradesmen.
My father was a skilled tradesman who also had a degree (electrical engineering) and he had to work hard usually without air conditioning. My mother died before he retired and so he just never retired. He was out there at 75 doing work usually reserved for guys in their 20s and 30s.
Mechanical contractors treat their pets better than their employees.
Damn right. People who complain about people not wanting to go onto the trades , haven’t done trades.
They don’t pay well about the same as office work in fact the work conditions are grueling, you can and will be replaced by someone cheaper unless you are very good. The list of why nots goes on for quite a while.
We taught people to be rational economic actors and now have the termanacity to complain when they do when it doesn’t suit us
People having less kids when they have less money, people avoiding dirty jobs, people getting an educations is exactly the smart outcome
Life is so crazy. WHo know what’s in store for us….
I “followed my bliss” (thank you, Joseph Cambel!) and ended in a low paying, but very personally satisfying career. I’m really good at it, but it’s not valued by society so, its I struggle financially.
Reading your post was interesting to me, because my Father was an accountant. He told me in college to take. few accounting classes. I was not suited for that type of discipline, so I didn’t take even one. I don’t think I could have done accounting even if I felt I had too.
Most of the accountants I know work 60+ hrs/wk routinely and more in the months preceding tax time. And that’s under a fixed salary, no overtime. And almost all are severely nearsighted from staring at small numbers all day. In the old days (before spreadsheets), they all had carpal tunnel syndrome from punching calculators too. And many may have a high IQ, but the work is very boring and no hot babe ever chased an accountant down the street.
The world of electricians is changing rapidly with new wiring methods, circuitry & power distribution components, modern lighting & controls. There’s a lot to learn and also some artistry in installing systems efficiently. Most of the guys I know get off work at 4:00pm on the dot and then head off to the gym. Did I mention the 1.5x for overtime? And service techs making house calls run into more MILFs than you will find on Pornhub. Yeah, you can keep your office cubicle.
Heh. The son worked for a rock landscaper, placing boulders and such, and got really big shoulders.
He was a handsome lad as well. Not shy, no siree.
Then he went to work delivering appliances while hubby was at work.
My gods. The stories. He was a pistol, he was.
He even checked out in the saddle.
He knew it would finish him, so he chose.
Now there was a man!
Being a hobbyist tradesman while having a white collar real job is the way to go. Construction and auto repair are hard, dirty, and painful. Doing them as a real job will beat your body to a pulp and leave you dirty and bleeding. They are also filthy on a level you dont appreciate unless you do it. Went to a summer auto tech class in the long-long ago, my hands were umcleanably dirty for 2.5 months. Its why retirement used to be 55 – daily manual labor destroys your body by that point. I’ve met lawyers in their 80s still practising, and making high 6 or low 7 figures a year for decades. I have come across a lot of broken and dead construction workers in their 30s and 40s. Ive come across a lot of rich guys in construction – they all wear biz-caz and pilot a desk and have a 4 year degree and maybe one of those worthless mbas. Still havent come across an accountant who died on the job or a management consultant who became a paraplegic from an otj injury. If you have a 115+ iq, blue collar vs white collar is a no-brainer.
Yeah I’ve done the trades thing. I can take virgin forest and build a house with a big yard.
But now I want an office job I can wear nice clothes to.
Wow! Interesting comments on this post!
Don’t you think we are engaging in some human wisdom here? Life just doesn’t lend itself to prescriptions.
I know a Biblical scholar, who is the most brilliant man I know. Because of his views, he is cancelled from every possible job at a university. He does zoom lesson and his 12 children probably kick in the rest of his expense.
I know I’m going to get a lot of tomatoes thrown at me for this reference, but Dave Mathews had a line in one of his songs (I’m from C’ville, so went and saw Dave at Tracks back in the day!) “will I be a magnet for money”.
Isn’t that the way it is? Some people ARE good at making money and its not due to even their efforts sometime.
Dave Matthews did end up being a magnet for money btw….
I call bullshit on this. No one cuts down there own trees and builds a house from it (not even log cabins are built that way anymore). Next you’re going to tell that you mine you own gypsum and make wallboard from scratch.
I CAN do it, but most property you buy you’re just going to sell the lumber if not just burn it. Most trees are just too small now. On that you are correct.
What I was getting at was the breadth of my experience in the trades.
When I came home off active duty thirty years ago, I had an electrical job waiting for me. With the huge influx of cheap labor over that time, I couldn’t get that job now.
How does one avoid being a “mediocrity”. Don’t know. Sort of depends what you mean by the term. I have an expansive definition of mediocrity, so most fall under that heading. Including me to an extent I’d rather not think about.
I’d say, don’t worry about it. Your choice of majors is already in your favor—as math skills/numeracy is that great dividing line between majority and minorities. Strive to excel in your classes. Read—and understand—important works in the field, even if not directly required for a class.
Remember that all important knowledge has a half life of but a few years. High level fields of study expand, accumulate, and progress. If you leave formal schooling without the ability to master subject content without formal guidance, you are one of the mediocre.
Before leaving school, have a plan—with timeline for your future—especially employment. In your early years, changing jobs is normal and not always looked down upon. In later years, you need to be situated and rising through the ranks or looking to run your own firm. I’ve yet to do business with an accountant or brokerage that was not started and run by enterprising individuals.
Perhaps what I am getting at is mediocrity is often just letting life happen rather than making life happen.
Accounting is an excellent choice in that it’s relatively easy to work for yourself. That’s huge, seriously huge: the option to never have a incompetent boss who takes credit for your work while screaming threats at you for not taking your Fauci Pills.
Specialize in fraud/auditing and you’ll never be out of work.
As some one who is currently in school for a Bachelors in Accounting, how do I avoid being a mediocrity.
Two avenues to pursue:
1) Take a bunch of courses in the mathematics department, courses which teach you about linear algebra & probability theory & statistics & combinatorics [i.e. how to count things, where the “things” being counted are rather abstract]. Then take any “actuarial” coursework the math department has to offer.
The idea there is to become both a CPA and an Actuarial.
2) Go to law school and concentrate on tax law and estate [“inheritance”] law.
If, by your mid-20s, you were a CPA, and an Actuarial, and a JD [with tax & estate expertise], then you could write your own ticket into almost any career.
I’d also urge you to consider topping it off with a PhD in Law [assuming you could do that on the cheap, without having to take on any student loan debt].
Here are two authors to read, who might be able to spur your interest in the legal side of things:
1) Commentaries on the Laws of England, by Sir William Blackstone
2) Anything by Patrick Atiyah:
* Atiyah’s Accidents, Compensation and the Law (1970)
* The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (1979)
* Essays on Contract (1986), Oxford University Press
* Promises, Morals, and Law (1983)
* Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law (1987)
* An Introduction to the Law of Contract (1995 5th Ed.)
* The Damages Lottery (1997)
That’s absurd from Not My Usual, but a couple points. If you have the shot to get in at a big 3, prepared to do the 60 HR per week grind for 10 years, that usually ends well. If you’re going to be mid-level and confined to regional audit firms, it will be a lot harder and much less rewarding. Have a goal, as compsci said. Getting your own firm as a cpa is usually the goal, that is comfortable, resilient, respectable, and you can set up almost anywhere. Being a p&c actuary (not an “actuarial,” assuming that is a typo, and college courses on actuarying are complete hogwash, 1 or 2 exam passes is an order of magnitude more valuable to getting hired) is also a great option. Health and pension are sunsetting harder than Biden after the Country Buffet supper time. But like a cpa, a credentialed actuary can hang a shingle, or stay corporate and make big money. Law is a bunch of additional school and cost, but contra Zman’s throwaway “glut” line, anyone with the intellgience and hard work to get a meal ticket can get a real job paying in the 6 figures. Hard work and a more limited geographical market. You will have to be near a sizeable, probably blue city and unlike a cpa or actuary an attorney has to be local.
And furthermore, estate planning law is a dead end. Don’t walk away from a career in estate planning law, RUN away. With the politics, it is a nonstarter in the literal sense. Trump’s 12.5 exemption with portability killed all hiring in estate planning law for the last few years and the foreseeable future. The political disruptions in that field are so huge and uncertain as to be far, far too risky to pursue these days, especially with someone with zero diversity points. You’ll end up doing plaintiff mill MVAs for eat-what-you-kill deals or bankruptcy or something similarly horrible.
Rumpswab:
a person who is so intense and sloppy while ass kissing that he or she might as well be a bidet. .
What a great word I found that on Urban dictionary
Howard Lawrence Carr
Don’t forget the “Who You Know” factor, the key determinant of success in this culture. Mediocre as the examples you site may be, how did Sullivan and Milley or, for that matter, Biden and AOC rise to the top? It takes great talent of a certain kind to promote oneself to the high level elite. You can’t just be a yes (wo)man. You need to be able to read people instantly and know, on the spot, how to turn interactions to your advantage. We live in the age of the hustler, not the intellectual. It’s not just any mediocrity who can polish up the handle on the big front door and become the ruler of the Queen’s nay-vee.
Good point. The Dilbert guy points out the brilliants of AOC’s messaging. We may not like it, and she may not even know how she does it, but it works.
“Short of a mass culling of the ruling class, America will just have to wait for nature to solve the overproduction of elites.”
Nature takes too long. Recall the “culling of the ruling class” in the Roman Republic. It took one hundred years, from the murder of the Gracchi (133 – 121 BC) until the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra (30 BC). Entire families of elites were wiped out in a series of wars civil and foreign. When Octavian took the stage, hardly anyone else was upon it.
Does anyone think that the US can wait for one hundred years to clear things up?
I prefer a much quicker culling.
Separation would work just as well without the bloodshed. The regions that insist on drinking their kool-aid would be allowed commit suicide without anyone’s interference.
They will never leave us alone. We could be on Mars and they would be moving Heaven and Earth to get there and enjoy the fruits of our labors.
WhereAreTheVikings is correct.
These people range from parasites to these tyrants.
Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies.
Yes, A.B. Give me the old-fashioined robber barons, who would give not one whit about whether I wear a mask or get a vaccine.
Yes, we should concede victory, allow our enemies time to consolidate their gains, write off all potential allies caught behind enemy lines and assume despite all history that they will find the Danegeld sufficient.
That will discourage them for sure. Especially since they’re openly plotting a world government.
Inclusion of a Diversity tier at the “management” level of all institutions ensure that the collapse will be sooner than later. It’s a gigantic Jobs program that places the worst people trained in only one skill – troublemaking – in every boardroom / management structure. Although a brilliant strategy intended to hasten “progress” along (using Federal civil rights laws), it ensures that no organization will be able to function without maximum friction. We are already seeing results.
Yup, I’m for a separation. The country must break up. The sooner the better. War will follow it, but the separation must happen. 2020 taught us this
How will separation come about? Will it be flyover country and Southern governors getting together and drafting Articles of Secession? (Right now, I’m not seeing anyone about to take that on – no, not even DeSantis. Abbott is only dogpaddling until he can go back to being a true blue cuck.) And then the National Guard of each state be mobilized to – to what?
Seriously, I find secession an attractive option, and I’m very interested in knowing how you all think secession is going to be accomplished. But as I said elsewhere in this thread, They will never leave Us alone, secession or no secession.
Just a guess, but perhaps a new set of states. For instance. Virginia is blue, but thats only because of the cities. Out west, its deep red. Combine WVA and western VA and you get a new state. Perhpas what separation will mean will be new states, and a far looser Fed.
Thank you, HY. Maybe city-states, and then elsewhere normal people. But how do we get there? Will it be voluntary, through paperwork? Or a War of City-State/Federal Government Aggression when we break away by our own proclamation?
I think there is a good chance we get a “you cant fire me I quit” scenario. What if CA, OR, and WA tried to secede first? Their friends in the Imperial Regime would play the Sgt Schultz routine, “oh geez lieutenant, we tried to stop ’em but just couldn’t!”
Once the first break happens and the pack smells blood, the remainder will crumble, and chaos ensues.
The question is, why are so many elites so manifestly incompetent. Elites in Ike’s day, or Reagan’s, could manage. I think it is because the pipeline incorporating the young White male flyover state men of ability was shut down after the victory over the USSR in 1991. This meant that elites increasingly became hysterical, shrill woke-tard females, various Mulatto Ascendancy types (Obama, Jussie Smollet, Kamala), and superannuated aging White pols notable only for their corruption: Pelosi, Schumer, Biden.
That’s possibly even worse in the Military, where the leadership is basically a bunch of woke-tards who cannot even manage a retreat against illiterate goatherds.
I believe that the upper echelons of the system have seen White men of ability principally a threat, and have embraced woke politics and wokism to make sure we don’t usurp their position or their planning to pass on their power to their idiot offspring. Thus in the absence of any outside threat the system invariably degenerates into the worst to stave off replacement by those more able.
Very well put, Mr. Wiskey. There is a precipitous drop off in quality from the post Gen X generation with a corresponding increase in that generations opinion of themselves. I always knew that the next ice age/ hole in the ozone layer/ destruction of the rainforest/ littering/ nuclear war going to destroy mankind. But I was also smart enough to appreciate that the solution wasn’t to ban aircraft, shut down nuclear power plants and tear up pipelines.
My 20-30 year old nieces and nephews make the Eloi look self aware.
I can recall several conversations with millenials and Gen Z types about the drawbacks with crash adoption of electric vehicles… mining for battery components, lack of charging infrastructure, strain on the power grid etc. Total lack of comprehension. They can only understand what they’ve been told. Anything else doesn’t compute.
Gen Xers aren’t immune to this either. Sincere white women literally don’t understand anything.
Liberal Democracy, with it’s first principle, Woke Egalitarianism: from which sprang “affirmative action”, “the equality of women”, “anti-racism”, and the various attacks on meritocracy: the abolishing of advanced placement and honors classes, competitive-admission high schools, and standardized (meritocratic) admissions tests for college.
In an “egalitarian” society, there’s no such thing as “mediocracy”: we’re all just “different”: no one is “mediocre”, or any “better” or “worse” than anyone else!
Such invidious comparisons are nothing more or less than “hate speech”!
“Excellence” consists of the degree to which one can conform to the ruling elite’s narrative. As we see in the upper reaches of our military: only Woke Yes-Men need apply.
“The question is, why are so many elites so manifestly incompetent. Elites in Ike’s day, or Reagan’s, could manage. I think it is because the pipeline incorporating the young White male flyover state men of ability was shut down after the victory over the USSR in 1991. ”
I have a client who serves on the city council of Louisville and was previously a state senator. These roles are basically part-time and compensated accordingly, so this person also works as a realtor (and is quite good at it). As a politician, he’s great: conservative, competent, thoughtful and very concerned about taking care of his constituents. He’ll never run for office at the political level, though, because he’d have to make that a full time pursuit, which entails sacrificing his realty business for a shot at the next level, which may not come through. Since he’s a competent realtor, that’s not very appealing.
My point is that the pipeline, by it’s nature, tends to select people whose main (or only) life skill is winning election. If you could do other things well, a do-or-die election that requires full time work for a year or two just seems too risky, so the type of people who jump at that chance are the type who’d rather not do real work. The only solution to this problem would be to limit federal election campaigns to four weeks before an election, and I don’t think that’s feasible.
Thus the problem with democracy/republicanism! yes, democracy is a type of alchemy
Flyover whites are basically locked out of the coasts now due to affirmative action.
Lots of smart white kids in ohio, wherever, can’t get into coastal schools. So they go to a school in the Midwest and stay in the area.
In a sense it’s good, they probably have much higher fertility staying in Indiana than moving to NYC, for instance. It also helps stem brain drain.
On the other hand, it basically means that the country is run by Jews, mulattoes and various sexual freaks and degenerates because the coastal cities are the power centers.
B125: Yes, don’t underestimate the danger of infection. Just as any politician with even a hint of competence or common sense is quickly corrupted and assimilated into the swamp, so too most normal Whites from ‘flyover country’ are equally corrupted by attending a highly reputable college (actually any college today, but worse at the ‘greats’). A good college friend, devout Christian, home schooled her kids and raised them in the midwest. They then went on to Harvard (their dad’s alma mater), where they assimilated into the borg. Actually, she and hubby joined the evangelical borg themselves prior, helping rapefugees infest their flyover state.
Moral – avoid college, and avoid today’s mutant form of Christianity.
You can only avoid college if you avoid certain disciplines and career options—like most of the white collar stuff we speak of. That’s probably not a good option for reasons we’ve discussed, plus how does one take back the high ground of the academic institutions if they are avoided?
Better to investigate and choose those few institutions of higher learning not yet poz’d.
Compsci: A reasoned response, but we don’t live in reasonable times. I don’t believe any institutions of higher learning are ‘not yet poz’d.” There will be no ‘taking back the high ground.’ And various career disciplines are for those who believe the present will continue into the near future. I’m looking to create an alternative future, and we’re trying to live in an alternative to clownworld. Secede from society – not in Rod Dreher’s weak, unthinking way, but in an active and creative means of defiance.
Disagree, many institutions are not yet poz’d as we think/describe here—but all have their bent. For one example, Hillsdale College. I was there a decade or so ago and got to meet their students and faculty.
They don’t subscribe to most of the Leftist nonsense we here decry, but of course, they are hopelessly CivNat and believe in the Constitution as a standard to uphold, rather than a tattered memory of a bygone era. However, their Western Civilization (White history) emphasis can’t be beat. Their weakness was in the hard sciences (IMO), but that was never their claim to fame.
A good college friend, devout Christian, home schooled her kids and raised them in the midwest. They then went on to Harvard (their dad’s alma mater), where they assimilated into the borg. Actually, she and hubby joined the evangelical borg themselves prior, helping rapefugees infest their flyover state.
Which is to say: After all these years [decades even?] you finally learned that they were never your “friends” in the first place – that all along they were actually your mortal enemies.
Learning how to distinguish your true friends from your true enemies is arguably the single moast important psycho-sociological tool in any human being’s darwinian-survivalist tool chest.
“…the pipeline incorporating the young White male flyover state men of ability was shut down after the victory over the USSR in 1991.”
==
Sadly, for both the US and white men, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused the interest in next-gen material technology to drop off the table.
‘Technology’ has since become merely something that enables flat-glowing-screen viewership, alas.
I often wonder if the feeling of invincibility America had in the 50s and 60s, when we allowed blks and whammin’ to be “equal” is still the basic mind set of these White men who embrace antiwhitenss today. They still think we can afford it.
Lordy, Hi-ya, what a good point.
“They still think we can afford it.”
” . . . and superannuated aging White pols notable only for their corruption: Pelosi, Schumer, Biden.” You left out Romney, Graham, McConnell . . .
An average working or middle class White guy is at least as capable as any of our elite., often more so. They could easily replace them, do a better job too.
That is why our elite want them destroyed.
The salience of the Taki article is as one more anecdote validating the prediction that a collapse is not only very likely, but a necessary catalyst for the changes needed in order to right the ship. Hence the reference to mass culling, either via our ancestral evolutionary fitness selection process (resurrected in collapse) or an artificial variant (think new miracle drug that activates our body’s own natural antibodies). The former will take a long time and leave a lot of painful harm in its wake. The latter, in theory, could work much quicker, result in a higher bottom, and save countless innocent lives. I suspect there may be a moral imperative buried in this choice.
As a side note, if there were actual honor & integrity in the upper ranks of the US military, there should have been numerous resignations over the Afghan debacle and abandonment of US citizens. Many people will now begin to openly and rationally hate the military for this betrayal. And that is no trivial thing.
> As a side note, if there were actual honor & integrity in the upper ranks of the US military, there should have been numerous resignations over the Afghan debacle and abandonment of US citizens. Many people will now begin to openly and rationally hate the military for this betrayal. And that is no trivial thing.
It’s amazing they didn’t even throw out a few sacrificial lambs for PR. When the next financial collapse comes, rest assured no bankers or fed reserve people will resign either. The incompetence isn’t what’s going to make people want to tear down the system, but the complete lack of accountability brought about by the bureaucracy.
The tradition of a failed general falling on his sword existed for a reason among an honorable society.
The lack of accountability is “flexing”. It’s a feature, not a bug.
TomA: Agree, except for the part about US citizens. Most of those were Afghanis with magic papers. Better off (for us) that they remain in their ancestral homeland. I’m not terribly concerned that a few pseudo-Californian ‘college students’ got stuck with the inbred-relatives they chose to visit after claiming ‘refuge’ in ‘murrica.
If citizenship truly meant US nationality (i.e. born and bred from parents/grandparents born and bred), then yes leaving genuine citizens behind in favor of various military-age goat herders would be shameful.
As a side note, if there were actual honor & integrity in the upper ranks of the US military, there should have been numerous resignations over the Afghan debacle and abandonment of US citizens.
TomA, search for a website called “D@ily St0rmer”, with a top level domain of “.su”, and read the following essay:
“Soldier Fired for Questioning the Sacrifices of Antony Blinken”
August 28, 2021
But you’ve gotta read it all the way through to the end.
PS: Then top it off by reading Andrew White’s new piece at National File, titled “Antony Blinken Tied To Jeffrey Epstein: Went To School Where He Taught, Family Connected To Epstein’s Mistress”.
PPS: And if you really want to know how the world works, then read the Wikipedia entry for “Donald Barr”.
A serious thoughtful critical reflective reading, on your part, of those three articles, will remove the veil from your eyes.
The US did win a war back in 1991, against a Iraq weakened by 8 years of war against Iran (1980-1988) that ended where the Iraqis had already been bled to the tune of 300,000+ dead, which already fatally compromised the Iraqi Army before a shot was fired in Iraq War I three years later. So the US took on an already exhausted opponent on the ropes.
The key difference is they didn’t turn a textbook blitzkreig into Operation Endless Occupation, like Bush’s idiot son did. It was, essentially, a punitive expedition.
But the hubris engendered in that easy, almost casualty free “victory“ infected both the civilian and military leadership that led the Durka Durka Disaster and Iraq War II. It was a poisoned chalice the bitch made Pentagon bureaucrats in stupid uniforms like Milley and “Lap Dog” Mattis drank deeply from.
What was the end game for both Iraq and Ganistan? I still can’t understand what the motives were. Did anyone in the game win? Contractors? military brass? Did we take natural resources?
I was a “defense contractor” while Operation Desert Bomb-Iraq-for-what-the-Saudis-did was going on. Our employer had contracts that basically gave them about 100k for each 50k cubicle drone they hired. Basically, they could have shaved a bunch of chimps, given them business casual khakis and polo shirts and put them in from of computers and it still would have been 50k in free money per chimp. As you might think most of us had little actual work to do and our superiors didn’t seem to care. One particular clock punching ex-military guy who was obviously trying to put in his last 18 months so he could retire actually told us literally “don’t work too hard now you guys”.
This is the way everything works in the Imperial Regime. The flow of initiative isn’t what even the most here usually think. Basically, what happens is that some executives at Consolidated Thievings Inc. realize that they need a market for this thing they make, maybe call it an “impetuous motion machine”. They’ve long ago absorbed the cynicism about the free-market that so many of us on the DR have so they don’t even bother trying to pitch it to Joe Sixpack. Instead they call up Senator Boyd Buggerer. Senator BB makes a measly $300,000 year. He’s BMW 7 Series comfortable but he longs to be private jet comfortable. Fortunately there’s a lobbyist from CT.com downstairs with a suitcase full of “campaign contributions”. All BB needs to do is make sure the government in his district “needs” some of those IM machines for um… Green Energy. Yeah! that’s the thing. CT.com’s webpage has a lot of math and stuff that proves that if you run a watt of power through one of those you get 5 watts back. What could be greener? Senator BB then hands a billion dollars taken from those dim witted rubes that voted for him, hands it to CT’s lobbyist and gets a fat suitcase full of maybe a million in return. So you see everybody wins! CT.com gets a 1000 fold return on their “investment” in BB’s campaign, BB makes the downpayment on that jet, the rubes think their taxes and votes are “helping the planet”…
Well, there is this one thing… I can’t quite spot it… Oh yeah, there it is. The IM machines don’t actually work. Pesky law of conservation of matter and synergy or some damn thing… There was this old professor who kept saying that during the campaign but we shouted him down, said he hated Green Energy and was a tool of the fossil fuel industry and called him a “science denier”. We even hinted that he was a racist too. He eventually committed suicide. BB’s press people started circulating rumors that it was because he fancied little boys.
Your analysis does not give credit, where credit is due. Primarily to Reagan and his rebuild of the US forces. Iraq was not exhausted, they were simply beat hands down by the best equipped and trained military the world had ever developed to that time.
Russia followed the first Iraq war with great interest as it was their equipment that was in the Iraq army and to a great extent their tactics used as the Iraqi army was advised by USSR. The result of the first sand war was not only an Iraqi defeat, but a wholesale revamp of the USSR military, and arguably, the collapse of the USSR.
I would counter that a country half the size of Texas getting 300,000+ killed in action, plus at least twice as many wounded and captured, so estimate something close to a million casualties in a population estimated at around 13 million in 1977. That’s WWI-WWII level bloodletting.
So yes, I maintain that Iraq was exhausted by the time fat Norman Schwartzkopf pretended he was George Patton for the reporters in Riyadh.
I think we’re all quite well aware that the military is very well versed in propaganda for CivNat normie- and selling the tale of a big bad Iraqi Army defeated by our new and improved Army was one of them.
Iraq was obviously a small player in the “big leagues”, but they fielded an army that was better equipped and larger than most countries in the world. Oil revenues will do that for you. It also allowed them to rebuild/regroup in the three year interim between wars. It’s too bad they had a personnel problem, i.e., they were third world browns.
However, their first line Republican Guard was well equipped and trained and was touted as their elite force, but ran after first engagement with US forces. They did not collapse as recently illustrated in Afghanistan, so I guess that’s in their favor.
Wherever they dug in and encountered US forces, they were run over. When they attempted to move, they were destroyed by complete air superiority. Nothing the USSR supplied them militarily was effective in the slightest against our military. In fact, the military effort was so effective that Bush and Power got nervous of the spectacle (see: Highway of Death) it was producing on the nightly news and they told Schwarzkopf to cease and desist.
Schwarzkopf was a bit of show off, but that’s a product of the news media as much as he and our political establishment. If Schwarzkopf had had his way, he’d actually have marched into Baghdad and solved the Saddam “Insane” problem, the first go around. So in that he was like Patton—who knew who he real enemy was.
You seem to have experienced a different war than I, but in any event the military did it’s job in spades, while the pol’s under cut the effort and eventually the result.
I just don’t see how occupying Iraq in 1991 would have turned out any differently than occupying it in 2003.
The one smart thing Dead Bush did was refuse to enmesh the United States in another futile exercise in “nation building” like we’ve seen spectacularly fail in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. If Fat Norman and his Pentagon buddies really wanted to march into Baghdad and get sucked into that idiocy, then George was right in putting a collar on them. Because you well know there’s no “solving” or “finishing” anything in that godforsaken patch of dirt and sand. For that, I will give Dead Bush a small bit of credit for wisdom, posthumously.
I’m calling bullshit on Z (again). His output rivals the entirety of NRO. I looked the other day and 2-3 of the trending articles at takis were his. The podcasts and daily posts here? Plus subscribe star stuff. Plus a day job. What the hell is up with this guy? Notwithstanding the glowie vibes if you haven’t subscribed, do so.
We are Winterhill and so is Z.
We all need to pray that Z never gets a woman.
I’ve seen the guy. Chances of that are slim.
I remember he was giving health advice once that made me think he was obese.
However I’ve also heard people say he looks like Rasputin.
The man is an enigma. I don’t really see him being a fed though. He drops too many redpills, a fed would drop a couple weak ones to rope people in, but not attack the entire system every day (and spread these ideas far and wide).
LOL! I don’t care if he is Fabio or Quasimoto in actuality, that is hilarious either way. Nothing like taking the piss outta your host, thankfully he is a pretty good natured fellow. 😉
I work with engineers. When we all had to wear masks my first joke was, “You guys sure are easier to look at with masks on.”
Doubtful. He has been described as a surfer god.
Like Tarzan amongst the dark savages, if anybody’s read the original books.
Tarzan took great joy in, errr, ‘oppressing the sh*t out of them.
Perhaps the Z is the secret terror of Lagos after dark. One’s love life must suffer if every Chalkie’s dreams are to be haunted by the unseen menace.
Those of us who know the waterfall is near tend to paddle more quickly.
But when you realize that too few people are paddling and you’re doing all the work in vain, your best bet is to put the paddle down and enjoy the view while it lasts.
There’s nothing I’d like more than for America to experience a Nineveh-esque mass repentance, but I have my doubts.
Don’t we need a Jonah to show up and preach the message of repentance first? He’s not out there yet as far as I can tell.
Some people are just talented. For instance I have an aptitude in math. People would say “wow, this guy is crazy, he can solve so many equations in X time”. But for me it’s within my capabilities and I don’t even sweat.
Same goes for writing. Some people are prolific writers, and it seems like alot of material for somebody who doesn’t write, but for the writer it’s not alot.
The Z-Man in reality is an army of typewriter pounding chimpanzees.
Don’t tell the Taki bint.
“As American society increases in complexity, the relative number of people who possess the minimum cognitive ability to manage the institutions declines.”
It would probably be more accurate to say that as society increasingly rewards specialists, generalists become less common. Complexity is the result of more minute specialization, so as people master increasingly narrow specialties to an even greater degree, their cognitive capacity becomes more rigidly narrow. Breadth of thought is necessarily shallower than depth of thought, but training for depth makes people more blinkered to broader vision.
But are people mastering increasingly narrow specialties or are they littering up their resume with credentials in increasingly superfluous specialties? I increasingly run into people with the title “business analysts” who would have been office clerks when I started work. In addition to the weird title, they have an MBA.
It’s definitely a mix of both. For example, you generally don’t find guys who can, say, build a com network for an office and also write the code for the machines that run it. In recent times, it’s easy to see how Trump’s experience in real estate development didn’t translate to competence in political leadership (though in contrast, Reagan’s experience in union negotiation and film helped him in his political role). Really, the comparison between Trump and Reagan proves that both specialization and credential inflation are running parallel. Honestly, it’s telling how the relatively better presidents of the past forty years were governors at some point, while the last 13 years have seen awful leadership by three men with no prior political executive leadership.
This pattern plays out in vehicles, too. Guys working at assembly plants generally just focus on several small, specific processes, and there are departments with no overlap (i.e. drivetrain guys don’t switch out to electrical systems, paint guys don’t do full panel assembly). On the repair side, mechanics specialize as well (body guys, maintenance guys, drivetrain guys, aftermarket sound systems, etc.) and also have to get certs to prove their competence. Ironically, the type of guy who could build a kit car by himself frame to paint probably doesn’t assemble or repair cars for a living. In fact, it seems that people who have a broad view of a system are usually insiders, not outsiders.
Bushlet was governor, and he was the worst president ever.
That was cruelly accurate.
But he was not incompetent. His badness was the result of competence used to the detriment of the country, not incompetence failing to propel the country to a better standing.
Unfortunately quite true. But fwiw, he didn’t really do any great damage as governor, and he was actually an improvement over Ann Richards.
It’s the Presedent’s men who are going to run the executive (in addition of course to permenent government) so the question becomes what people are going to attach themselves to the President. They are generally different people than those who make themsleves attractive to the governor. No truly excellent man is going to submit himself to electoral politics so you get what you get out of that flattery contest.
You got it right in the piece. The institutions whose traditional purpose was for training ( and nowadays more importantly credentialing ) the elite have been deliberately corrupted.
The scions of the nobility were initially sent to University to ensure that the embarrassments of the transition from youth to adult were away from where he would be operating as a mature man. Messrs Watt and Bell made it impossible for that to be achievable. The Great War was the end of that era and celebrated by destroying the cream of the then elite.
“New Accounts Analyst”
Aka call center job focusing on opening accounts.
Have to watch out for the bullshit job titles both when applying for jobs, and when hiring.
Two things I’ve noticed as I’m wading back into the corporate pool after a ‘forced’ extended break. MBAs and Six Sigmas are a dime a dozen now. They are becoming the ‘Bachelor’s degree’ of highly skilled labor and carry almost no weight unless the MBA is attached to a shitlib infused institution like Harvard, Yale, etc. In which case the actual credential has little value and could be in any discipline.
The other unfortunate thing is that in spite of these being worth slightly more than the paper they are written on every employer seems to still be swamped in credentialism. This is most acute when people put an alphabet soup of letters behind their name indicating with almost 100% certainty that they actually know fuck-all about anything so have to compensate with the 3-5 degrees/certs they attach to their name.
We should probably be glad that the congenitally insecure and neurotic choose to identify themselves up front this way. Saves the sane a lot of time in sizing them up, now that being in the same room and having an actual conversation is considered a waste of time.
And wouldn’t you know, this trend has taken off with the ascendancy of womyn in the workplace.
Apex: Every barrista has a BA. And nationally we have beloved “Doctor Jill.”
A number of hubby’s friends’ sons have BAs. One is working for his dad, two others are personal trainers – nothing wrong with that, but hardly the basis for family formation or worth thousands of dollars of debt.
Wow, thats sad! Glad I didn’t get an MBA
Ask for a vets OER or NCOER duringng an employment interview or when searching through their LinkedIn account. I assure you it will read exactly like that episode from the Simpsons when they go to add the new character to Itchy and Scratchy. The female network exec and Krusty the Clown have a self flagellating dialogue in which they demand the writers build a new and profitable character. When at the end of the bluster one of the writers stops to say: “I’m sorry but ‘proactive and paradigm,’ aren’t these just buzzwords dumb people use to sound smart?”
It doesn’t just start and stop with the military either. People with MPAs, MBAs and as Z alluded to, those with law degrees are far too prolific to be servicing anything other than a call center in Belfast Maine for MBNA. The problem is that these people are not only strictly process oriented (not results oriented) but they believe that merely on the basis or their credentials their cred speaks for itself.
I have several clients with law degrees, all of whom practice law. Or, more accurately, a specialty of law. They’re all pretty competent at their core focus, but are generally useless outside of it, which is why they hire me to work my trade. That said, I would not ask them for their opinion about anything outside of their area of legal expertise. They’re buffoonish in the same way a guy whose only exercise is biceps but never leg day is buffoonish: their specialization makes them narrow minded and unbalanced. I guess my point is just that maintaining a society as complex as ours requires that we no longer have any well-rounded people.
I tend to agree, but really how does one attain “well roundedness” in as vast a technical knowledge pool as we are surrounded by? The last Renaissance man died 500 years ago.
But that does bring to mind a general discussion that pops up every so often about the “general studies” (Liberal Arts) degree as vs the specialty degrees we see many undergraduates major in. I tend to respect the Liberal Arts program (when done properly—not that poz’d crap we hear of).
Technology changes, expands, increases…but human beings remain the same. Perhaps a good rounding in such understanding of who we are, how we got here is worth more in the long run.
“going forward”? is another one I hate….
Some ppl like to think. They enjoy solving problems, reading, and have curious minds.
Some ppl like to do. They enjoy fixing things, being outside, and building things.
We have been trained to believe that everyone should go to college. Thus the problem of the mismatch, ppl in college who don’t belong there, a curriculum dumbed down so that they can all graduate, colleges can accumulate more wealth, and the indoctrination of young minds can continues.
JohnWayne: Very well said. And both types of people (the thinkers and the doers) are highly necessary for the building and maintenance of civilization. Too many thinkers look down on the doers, and too many doers view all thinkers as credentialed idiots (many are, but a few are highly useful). That used to be the purview of the Bachelor of Arts Degree – learning how to think, and studying what previous good thinkers had thought and learned.
All this specialization is overdone. Even in our ‘specialized’ economy, a good thinker or doer need also be a good generalist, in order to see not just the trees but the forest. But today, admitting that one is weak in any arena is considered ‘shaming’ or ‘judgemental.’ (And that’s the proper English spelling, not the illiterate ‘murrican one).
Thanks 3g4me.
I’ll give you “shaming” & “judgemetal” but blimey, i’ll take color & behavior.
Read the classics. Be a dilettante. Gain a superficial understanding of many subjects. Always be onto something. Follow your own natural interests. Know what the major issues are in many fields so that when you meet someone in that field you will be able to carry on a intelligent, profitable conversation.
In evolution, the trend is for a generalized species to evolve into a more specialized one, or more likely perhaps, into a range of slightly differing specializations, to best fit the ecological niche it finds itself in. While I’ve never read his books, one of Darwin’s studied and drew the finches with their beak variations. The downside of this is that if an environment changes catastrophically, the more specialized the organism, the lower are its survival odds. It’s for good reason that fungi, bacteria, cockroaches and other “lower forms” have been around a lot longer than man, and they’ll likely be here long after we’re gone.
I speculate much the same dynamics are at play in the growth of a complex society or economy. The climb up is fun, but what goes up comes down, and the breakdown ain’t much fun.
Ben: It’s going to be a blast.
Is it just me, or did 3g4me just become a Bond villain?
Yep. When I was a grad student, some specialty engineering fields moved so fast that a new graduate was being offered more starting wages than his predecessor five years prior. And if he lost his position (due to knowledge obsolescence), he had a tough time getting another.
Drew – there’s complexity as a result of the need for specialization (domain expertise) and also complexity as a result of overly-ambitious scale (problems stemming from span of control, agency effects, information flow etc) . The government now suffers from both I think. I would urge you to contemplate the massive growth of government scale in recent decades.
Dumbest guy I ever met in the business world had a degree in accounting and an MBA from a name university. Legacy admission, grandpa endowed a chair.
Dumbest graduate student I knew was from Ivy League Cornell. I was shocked when I first started administering tests to students. It’s often hard to gauge the quality of someones thinking from every day interactions. First time I noticed this when teaching a friend how to site a rifle. He couldn’t understand that raising the back site causes you to shoot higher for the life of him. I once had an argument with an engineer(which I ain’t) about gearing and rpm. Took him for a drive to win that one. WTF.
Sight a rifle…not a problem. Technology comes to the rescue, just in time for our new “Diverse” military. Just this week, I was using a new scope. Night vision is now obsolete. Thermo all the way. See through most vegetation. All electronic. Use day or night, rain or shine.
Sight it in electronically too. Attach, shoot at target bullseye. If it hits the paper—anywhere—then aim at that new spot and press one button and the scope electronically “adjusts”. Done!
You don’t need to know shit.
A few years ago there was Linux powered smart scope for sale.
It isn’t on the market AFAICT but I don’t know if that was cost (it was twelve grand) lack of effectiveness or fear that anyone could become a crack shot.
However all those devices require smart people to keep working and to design them. Dumb people can use them but they can only keep them up and running for a while.
And there A.B. lies the rub as they say.
When do we cross that threshold of the “critical fraction”? Surely we are headed there with the decline of the White population and the importation of Browns. And of course, we are all getting a bit dumber generation by generation after peaking of the Flynn Effect.
Some say it’s happened, and cite recent occurrences of disasters in the news. I tend to think so as well, but the effect will not become apparent for another generation or two—albeit, we can see some artificially accelerated examples in countries like South Africa should we care to look with the correct scientific (HBD) perspective.
Just like global warming, when we have that definitive answer, it will be too late.
Dumbest guy I know was a Fed Agent with multiple degrees. Honest, the guy couldn’t screw in a lightbulb, he had to ask his girlfriend to do it once, and it wasn’t on the Sabbath.
If I was overlord , that would end.
The tests for any college entrance would be brutally difficult and highly objective and no amount of money can buy admission.
It could buy tutoring which I am fine with with but if rich people throw dumb offspring they aren’t going to college.
Of course I’d also treat teaching any form of Communism or Cultural Marxism as a viable system to under 21’s as child molestation and all schools would be grind schools.
Oh and there would be almost no educational visas or government subsidy either.
College would not be much fun , worst time of my life but valuable would be the default.
Sharp take.
Three of the last four Democratic nominees for president were utter medocrities. The one who wasn’t, Hillary Clinton, is a deranged sociopath. While Biden probably in more stupid, the sine qua non of the mediocre syndrome you described is John Kerry. It is hard to imagine another time and place in human history where this dullard would have been anything other than the gigolo gasbag he is preying on widowed heiresses and holding forth in front of bemused charity ball attendees. He, too, is a product of contemporary New England and embodies the vapidity that courses through the veins of the idiot sons of the region’s once great people. It is no surprise Kerry and Joe Biden were close friends. Neither could make the other seem worse.
On a related note, mediocrity almost has become a requirement to be an elite in modern America because anyone with merit would make the others in the class look bad. It is no coincidence Austin and Milley came to prominence in the military at this particular time, by way of example, one through affirmative action, the other through serpentine felattio. The shock that their resignations were not tendered is wildly misplaced. Their performance was exactly as expected.
This only will get worse until the United States implodes.
The system has selected for courtiers and play actors, rather than men. Arguably, no man of talent would want to be part of such a system. So where do they go instead? And what happens when the system implodes? Do better men rise to the occasion, or will they be prevented from having any hand in the restoration of the country? The complex systems and conditions of our modern world require the exceptional for their management and adaptation. If yes men stand in the way, who will take the helm?
Do we have organizations where talented men can learn and excellent, and become leader for the country. Politics, military, bureaucracy or business? It does look good. Closest thing I can think of is the KGB.
The United States Army.
I do like well done satire.
Well, credit where due. They said you can be all that you can be; they didnt say “be better,” just everything that is possible. Now a woman can become a man in the aaaarmeee. No word yet on navy enlisted transitioning to dolphins…
Since I’m dancing on the edge of a terminal illness all my f****s are long gone.
BUt they were probably prominent 15 years ago too, no?