212 thoughts on “Stupid People”

1. I just stumbled upon a Neil Oliver video posted 19 hours ago. I confess, it was unusually white pilling. His Wiki page is basic. Anyone have any info/thoughts on the guy?

   • He was a normie civnat doing his history shows til he got redpilled by the plandemic

2. Who is the singer at the end of this podcast?

3. I perused most of the comments, but I apologize if this was already mentioned. The recurring theme in the comments seems to be the puzzling relation between IQ and stupidity. I would put my hat in the ring.

   The defining characteristic of stupidity is not lack of knowledge (as evinced by degrees and academia) but an inability to 1) Properly sort information, and 2) Understand information’s relationship to reality.
   Both the STEM field and the common sense field are used to sifting through information and creating hierarchies of importance. IQ just means that you can apply abstractions to another abstract problem. Wisdom comes from the ability to sift through the overwhelming amount of information and say, “What is important?”
   The STEM researchers who refused the jab are probably aware of observer bias and the sketchy methodologies used. In this instance, they recognize the data is less important than the people who gathered the data. For the commoner, they have a suspicion of the government, regardless of statistical data, because they highlight the fact that, big words aside and data, companies are greedy, and companies made the vaccine. In both instances, the approach to data was not solely grounded in the abstract, but, instead, contextualized in the real world.

   Insane libs can retain abstract ideas. But they cannot create a hierarchy of importance (that has to be given to them by TPTB), and they cannot apply these abstractions to the real world.

   To wit: Stupidity is not a dearth of ideas. It is the inability to prioritize and contextualize information into reality.

   • “The defining characteristic of stupidity is not lack of knowledge (as evinced by degrees and academia) but an inability to 1) Properly sort information, and 2) Understand information’s relationship to reality.”

     Spot on.

     “they cannot create a hierarchy of importance (that has to be given to them by TPTB), and they cannot apply these abstractions to the real world.”

     These types have a dire need to be controlled. They not only actually believe ridiculous things, they want to believe them and to remain in good standing with TPTB. That’s the essence of every prior totalitarian system as well as this one. You do have to give TPTB credit for the tranny insanity. To manipulate folks to embrace that farcical bullshit is an epic achievement.

     Great comment.

     Great comment.

     • Pennsylvania universities warn of costly ‘demographic cliff’

       https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4142557/posts

       “Pennsylvania is going to be feeling the demographic cliff,” said Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher. “It really hits the universities in 2026.”

   • Outstanding. Cogent, and well presented. Respect, Eloi.

   • There is a great difference between inablility and unwillingness. No intelligent person is unable to understand that the global warming-climate chage narrative is a grift, the Trump-Russia collusion was a Hillary-FBI-CIA-media election hoax, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop was in fact his laptop.

     The key to not being that person is, when discovering that you’ve been had, is to be more curious about that process than you are in maintaining the fiction of your intellect. Or as Sam Clemens believed, a lie is easier sold than corrected.

4. Stupid people: Ukraine War edition. Orban is reporting that the EU is considering “peacekeepers” being sent to Ukraine, read an expeditionary force to fight Russia in Ukraine as Ukraine’s army collapses. The US has sent B-52 bombers over the Baltic Sea right up against Russian airspace “practicing” launching cruise missiles at Russia including Moscow and St. Peterburg. Russia has withdrawn its Ambassadors and staff from Latvia and Estonia under fears of a 1979 Iran Embassy take over. [Weakness invites attack and Russia is weak.] Belarus President Lukashenko has charged that Poland is considering invading Belarus in support of color revolutions and that the Russian nukes stationed there are to respond to a Polish invasion. The EU head, Ursala Van Der Crazy, has told China it dare not support Russia and must break ties with Russia or face EU retaliation. Biden has cut the Navy’s budget while baiting China over Taiwan. The rapid incitement of Trannies against Christians by the regime. The total destruction of White male heroes in media/entertainment guaranteeing that straight White males loathe/detest the regime in every way. The rapid escalation of “reparations for slavery” due every black person, as the Census now asks for descendants of slaves and the likely imposition of a Whitey tax on Whites to fund the reparations. With transparently, those unable to pay the enormous burden (basically those not multi, multi-millionaires net worth in excess of $100 million) forced into “national service” i.e. the Russian Front or labor pools like Ukraine now.

   And the indictment, arrest, perp walk, mug shot, of Trump as he calls for an end to the War with Russia. [Note the timing.]

   Its a five front war: 1. Russia. 2. China. 3. The industrial economy and energy and food. 4. Outsider Oligarchs like Musk, Trump, probably Bezos at this point. 5. The most HATED enemy: Dirt People. Ordinary White people.

5. Speaking of stupid, or possibly helpless: I just watched a Tucker clip mentioning the Ricky Vaughn conviction among other politically-motivated legal anomalies involving The Regime, and the comment section is just a long scroll of “This is why we need Trump back, he’ll save us!”

   These amoebas lack the brain capacity to remember all that pardoning Trump did of literally everyone except his supporters. Even the stupidest dog will start growling at you if you kick it enough times, how many times do these civnats need to be kicked?

   • To be fair to those people, they at least intuit that something is fundamentally wrong (evil, in fact) about the contemporary United States. That they choose a futile response is secondary to that understanding. How many people do you know with very high IQ’s who even grasp they live in a garbage tier police state? Most I know are clueless. Some will wake up as time elapses, but most will not. The Regime depends on this type of stupidity. To be fair, it also leans on false remedies such as Trump to placate the masses, but that creates problems for them.

     The bottom line is those commenters are nowhere near as cretinous as the people who think everything is fine.

6. My favorite example of stupidity I see in my daily life is the MSN News page that is set as the home page in the Microsoft Edge browser.

   A typical headline that gets 75% normie upvotes is something like,

   “The US Could Totally Have a Mach 30+ Steathplane that Could Blow Up All 11 Russian Time Zones in Less Than a Minute!!!!”

   Although I was heartened that today’s headline about when the V8 engine might disappear got 95% downvotes.

   • Toyota has made an extemely vital executive decision. They will discontinue electric vehicle manufactuing. Niether the vapors of Kali rules going out or England banning the infernal combustion engine in 2030 impress them, they see clearly that EVs are a disaster on four levels each of which alone would be enough to sink EVs. It’s all posturing now, plus tax farming for the ruling class, for a while longer.

7. Another good example of how stupidity has gained power are all the “warnings” that accompany virtually anything you buy. For anyone with a modicum of intelligence, these things are ludicrously obvious. That said, just watching America’s Funniest Videos will dispel any notion that stupidity doesn’t reign supreme at the moment – and that’s just the “intelligent stupid” making fun of the “sub-intelligent stupid”. As others have mentioned, the real danger is too many of the stupid have power and further promote their fellow morons…

   • One of my favorite warnings for the blatantly stupid is the admonishment “Warning: Do Not Iron Clothes While Wearing Them.”

   • Package warnings are for the most part virtue signaling and liability dodges. Not really an acceptance/belief in/proof of general stupidity of the populace—although I do not deny such. I simply maintain that for the most part those in charge of such labeling don’t for a moment believe they prevent any misuse by the public.

8. The main lesson I took away from this podcast:

   Stupidity is complicated.

   • It actually is. Most of the stupid idiots who took the death shots and became Covid nazis were people of high IQ. Most of the supposedly stupid, lower IQ people I know like barbers, mechanics, cleaners, etc. knew right away that it was a ll BS. So maybe someone can research why intellectuals are so stupid.

     • In America today, being an intellectual means you have to have the same opinions as all the other intellectuals.

     • It’s a mistake to assume the jabbed did so because of his high IQ. Except for the early days of a society, when results matter, credentials are always more highly valued than IQ, precisely because excelling due to IQ is an individual thing, while excelling because you are “properly” networked is something any low-IQ grifter can pull off. Biden is the poster boy.

       In my experience, almost everyone who willingly took the jab did so because of the credentials of the pushers. They had to resort to threats to get the relatively small number of smarter, but uncredentialled to get with the program.

     • If the current Dark Age ever ends (and I mean not with a civilization ending WWIII) there are many scientific questions that will need to be taken up again that haven’t been researched in good faith in 50 years. To put it crudely “why are gays often quite crazy?” is one such. The *real* nature of intelligence is another. Even most of us here, perhaps more here than elsewhere even, think of intelligence as a scalar. Vlad is smarter than Joe, end of story. It’s probably more like a tensor with lots of components that interact in surprising ways. Think of how the commutative property does not hold in general for tensors. A * B ≠ B * A.

       The reality is probably that intelligence includes a “leakiness” quantity. This would be the ability of the person to allow knowledge in one field to “leak” over and influence others. Schizophrenics, for instance, seem unable to avoid this. Everything leaks everywhere and they form a chaotic picture of reality. Very smart people can control and use leakiness to extend their knowledge. It’s like they have a set of valves to precisely control and shape the leaks. This kind of analogical genius in fact has given us most of the major scientific breakthroughs of the last 500 years.

       The people who populate the elite may often have high IQ scores but if they prosper in the elite (which is a political skill) they probably have quite a low “leakiness quotient”. In fact, even if they know they *should* extend their knowledge of one thing to another, they’ve been trained not to or to at least keep silent if they do.

       Barbers, mechanics, cleaners, and such are probably sometimes people with high LQ no matter how well they do in school. They also tend to inhabit social and occupational spheres that are less well “sanitized” of serious physical dangers. The ones who can’t generalize well might get weeded out the old fashioned Darwinian way.

     • Actually, it’s a “U-shaped” curve. The very high IQ also were knowledgeable and skeptical enough to avoid the jab. The average Joe and “mid-wit” bought the lie.

9. Stupid is not just a scalar it has associated with it a direction and velocity which makes it especially hard to control. A stupid man does not just do one stupid thing he does many stupid things in many places all at once. Thus, it requires a number of intelligent people to account for the one stupid one. At some point the intelligent are overwhelmed and simply can’t keep up.

   Our ruling class is a great example. They push different stupid ideas on to the stage at many different places so as soon as we get a handle on one of item they’ve already got three more in motion (the green thing, critical theory, energy mandates, et al.). Eventually they will win out, but the results are usually ugly and tend to be Darwinian.

   • This is why no one can agree on what caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Political corruption, disease, Famine, military failure, lead poisoning, collapsing birth rates, inflation, economic disparity, feminism, rioting, and brain drain to the east all happened simultaneously. A drop in IQ might be the linchpin that explains why a society just fails at everything

     • The problem is that we have a tendency to simplify and desire to hang our explanation on a single, describable cause for a (most-likely) multi-variate and nuanced process. So the more likely answer is—“all of the above”.

10. The Stupid/Intelligent dichotomy was brought into stark relief by who took and who refused to take the Covid vaccine. The two educational groups who were less likely to take the vaccine were the tiny sliver who hold STEM doctoral degrees and those with no college. So, you can hold an advanced degree in law and presumably have a high IQ, for example, and simultaneously be quite stupid. We do not know all the downsides yet of the vaccine, nor, to be fair, even have an accurate assessment of the upsides, but the reasons to be cautious were glaringly obvious from the outset. And, yes, there was insanity involved as well but it generally accompanied the stupidity.

    The “common sense” cliche is tiresome but accurate. Common sense and contemporary educational attainment almost are inverse, in no small part because the academy now encourages fantastical thought and discourages critical thinking. Transgenderism is a great illustration. At least initially, the higher one’s educational attainment the more likely they were to buy into this abject idiocy. Yes, it is a control mechanism but that’s beside the point. This would not work but/for stupidity.

    There always have been stupid people among elites, but it is likely at this point they constitute the vast majority. That more than anything has proved to be the kiss of death for the West, and Ed Dutton is correct despite Rationalwiki’s stupidity here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spiteful_mutant_hypothesis#SnippetTab (the mental contortions make it a fun read). Even if every non-White were removed from the population and an ethnostate were carved out with the contemporary White populace, it would fail for this reason. This subset population itself would require quite a bit of ruthless weeding.

    • Most of the lawyers I’ve dealt with over the years have ranged from how the hell did you graduate high school to fairly bright normal. I don’t think that IQ is needed to be an attorney. The worst business letter I’ve seen came from an attorney. This guy was an illiterate yet had a degree from a crappy law school. Big firm lawyers are better but still aren’t what I consider well-rounded intelligent.

      • Yeah, that’s also been my experience as well, so I should have made that “tax attorney” or “intellectual property attorney.” Those do have high IQ’s, in my experience.

    • the last line says it all

      (all these individuals and groups are white supremacists[citation NOT needed])

      • Missed that, classic!

    • The geniuses and the proles agree on occasion for different reasons. I’m personally immune to emotion. So the logic behind taking an experimental shot to save the elderly was absurd. However my boomer dad, who’s not very gifted cognitively these days, naturally distrusts the government and also refused it, even though all his buddies acquiesced . That was interesting to watch. I respect him a lot. He’s a lot more ethical and superstitious than I am. He believes the shot was purposely evil. I don’t know where my brain came from but we end up arriving at the same conclusions from laughably different angles.

      • Check out my response to Dinodoxy below. I agree there is some sort of cross-over immunity to propaganda. What you cited is a good example of it.

    • The Stupid/Intelligent dichotomy was brought into stark relief by who took and who refused to take the Covid vaccine. The two educational groups who were less likely to take the vaccine were the tiny sliver who hold STEM doctoral degrees and those with no college.

      My explanation for this is that secondary and higher education has come to be little more than operant conditioning in deference to authority.

      So the more education one has the more trusting they are of general authority. It’s only at the very top that they realize the authorities aren’t all that smart and are in fact largely faking it.

      • “secondary and higher education has come to be little more than operant conditioning in deference to authority”

        I think that’s close. For whatever reason, and that very well may be it, these subsets understand the Regime routinely lies. It brings to mind the line from Trotsky that the upper classes were receptive to propaganda if authority was attached to it, but the lower classes were not suckers in that way and harder to propagandize. Apparently, a sliver of the upper classes is exempted, too.

        The only reason I hesitate to fully embrace that as the sole explanation is there seems to be a factor outside education and class that causes a minority to reject propaganda out of hand. It also does not seem to be correlated one way or another to intellect. Trumpton, who used to comment here, suggested there was a biological explanation in that propaganda had been perfected so that it acted as a “mind worm,” and some people more or less had a natural immunity but most do not. It is at least an interesting proposition.

        A few weeks before Covid Forever (the virus at the time had been identified but was incorrectly reported not to have spread outside of China), public service announcements were played on loop that referred to the Spanish Flu outbreak. I imagine much has been scrubbed, but there were similar things softening up the target in mass media during the period. For whatever reason, it failed to effect a rather significant cross-section of the population.

        Covid permanently changed how I and many others view those we live among. That perception is for the worse, and stupidity has taken a second seat to suscpetibility to propaganda.

11. The guys over at the Doran are interviewed by a Polish girl on The Mess of The West and how did we get there. The pattern they describe is familiar to those paying attention in the US, they add some interesting details which really rivets the message home.

    https://theduran.locals.com/post/3770619/how-did-we-get-here-poland-under-the-usa-influence-live-w-theduran

    After you’ve listened to Mr. Z, listen to this.

    • Thanks, that is very good.

    • Ania K has her own channel called, “Through the eyes of…”

      She does some useful knowledge drops about whst is going on in Poland and does some good interviews with Scott Ritter.

12. Bill Kristol was a great example to bring into this. Highly educated, or at least indoctrinated, I’m going to assume does reasonably well on IQ tests, someone your average midwit would assume must be pretty intelligent, but in fact is as dumb as bag of hammers, questionable if he has ever been right about one single thing in his entire life, yet clearly believes himself to be highly intelligent. Thus, the very definition of stupid.

    But being handsomely compensated for being stupid, is he really? I might try to act as stupid as Bill Kristol if you paid me enough to, although I’m sure after a time I would tire of it and move on. Where Ol’ Bill just keeps on truckin. The shamelessness is what is really so galling.

    • I’m willing to consider that Kristol is very smart, but his mission requires that he conceal his real goals from most of his listeners most of the time. This can make him appear stupid sometimes.

      I have similar thoughts about John Podhortetz, Jonah Goldberg, and David Frum. I know that Z Man disagrees, but I am not willing to take it as obvious that Goldberg, for example, is dumb.

      • Z mentioned this in passing but Sailer had done some dives on it in the past where he theorized that, well, someone has to be a little bit dumb to have a lot verbal dexterity. The short version is that the smarter someone gets the more their brain locks up in analyzing what they’re going to say. As a very mild proof it was pointed out that black people, generally, have pretty good verbal dexterity.

        • I can barely talk sometimes

        • Educated black people are where I see the most frequent use of world salad.

          “This is an egregious miscarriagement of taxitude!”

      • Goldberg is dumb, nepotism put him well above his level. Anyone that relies on popular culture to make a point should keep their mouth shut. His use of The Simpsons for years past their see-by date proves that he is supremely shallow intellectually.

    • There was a wonderful debate where Scott Horton debated Bill Kristol on “US Interventionism” a couple of years ago.

      It’s a hoot. Horton is probably the best informed man on the planet on this topic. It doesn’t go well for the the Red Sea Pedestrian.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxdXqAkgOVs

13. This book was preceded by several years by The Peter Principle. Another pseudo-academic treatise that was humorous but made some serious points.

    I’m not sure but I vaguely recall there was a flurry of such books at that time. It was a small fad.

    • The Peter Principal is optimistic, in that it assumes good faith people are promoted too much, with excessive gaps in promotion, and this results in good managers turning into terrible executives.

      In reality, elite level positions are mostly secured by cheaters, because they’re simply too high up for honest hard work alone to reach. All competitions begin separating talent from mediocrity, and end by separating cheaters from talent, and in the wrong direction.

      Now throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix and you have a real party.

      • I think of the brilliant warriors who topped out at colonel and the incompetents who put on stars

        • Bingo. On both side of the issues of national defense and such, it seems it’s the Col’ s that are doing the talking—at least from whom I run across. They also seem to have experience on the ground that makes them seem credible to me. If one does hear a retired Gen, you simply hear pure propaganda points—divorced from ground event analysis. Again, it seems to be on either side of the divide. Gen’s just don’t seem credible to me.

        • Yep. Douglas McGregor v Mark Milley. Guess who got the stars.

      • Fair. I think you might be giving too little emphasis on how critical it was to get business models changed from proprietorships and partnerships to multi-national corporations. MNCs can operate with an astounding amount of deadwood at the top, similar to the general-colonel point made earlier. But in a smaller firm, you can only advance through competence. Incompetent leadership causes above average error, which results in bankruptcy.

        But once you establish Too-Big-To-Fail as your guiding principle, game over. Way too much job security for the grifters and cheaters, way too much regulatory hassle for small business, who cannot afford to have third-rate paper pushers dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s to keep the bureaucrats happy.

14. I sometimes go on long mountain biking rides with my brother-in-law (retired physician) and we can ride & talk for hours on all manner of esoteric topics. One day, I started things off with the query “Do stupid people people know they’re stupid?” He laughed and thereafter followed one of the longest and most entertaining conversations we’ve ever had. A lot of it centered on how to treat stupid sick people and the various conundrums that can arise in medicine. And, of course, ethics gets into the mix and this creates another layer of decision-making difficulty. In the end, we concluded that stupidity is not something that can be cured.

    • I’ve know dumb people that know they’re dumb, and dumb people that don’t know they’re dumb. The latter category I define as stupid. I define dumb and stupid differently.

      Thus, it is impossible for a stupid person to be self aware, at least on that point.

      • Perhaps analogous to crazy and insane: the crazy person realizes he’s crazy; the insane person does not.

    • “Do stupid people people know they’re stupid?”

      This is exactly the conundrum Aristotle faced in his discussion of “slaves by nature.” Aristotle understood society to be a natural hierarchy based on the ability of various groups to use reason: free males, women, children, slaves, and animals.

      The naturally slavish person is unable to use reason to sufficiently govern himself (i.e., stupid), thus his labors must be directed by those who are more intelligent.

      But Aristotle also said that people are “bad judges in their own case.” A person who knows he is stupid would ostensibly submit to his master voluntarily; but few people acknowledge their own stupidity and must be governed by force. This is “slavery by convention.”

      Of course, if people knew they were stupid enough that they should be ruled by others, they wouldn’t be stupid. Thus politics is often rule by convention, which is frequently at odds with nature.

    • As frustrating and demoralizing as it can be, I am grateful for the times that I have worked with people much smarter than me. I worked at a company founded by a group of mathematical logicians and I remember trying to follow their theories. At some point, my brain would reach out to grasp their point, and it would return empty handed. Or maybe it was like trying to hear a pitch outside of my range of hearing. Or describe an object beyond my ability to see.

      Related topic: How do you fight an enemy who is smarter than you? Overwhelming numbers is one strategy.

      Since you think about strategy a lot TomA, I was wondering if you had any thoughts. We may face an enemy who is smarter than us.

      • “ I am grateful for the times that I have worked with people much smarter than me. ”

        Absolutely. If you can’t be that great person, then it’s best to have served him. I’ve known a few of these and it makes coming in “second place” much more bearable. But then again, I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer and conduct myself accordingly.

      • No question you face more intelligent, and vastly older, adversaries. Been that way since the beginning.

        In war if you can’t out-think them and can’t out-thump them, the resort is to endurance. A low and fierce flame, always always burning.

        Combine a sufficiently terrible will-to-endure with grateful obedience to the God of Scripture, and you cannot lose. In Revelation 3:10 Christ the King asks His Church of the Brotherhood for only one thing, to ‘keep the word of my patience’. That’s it . . . just grind it out.

        The King knows our times and our troubles, and tailored His message to suit. If He counsels endurance in His word as sufficient, it’ll be the winning ticket.

15. “The thing is, stupid people are a constant, in terms of their percentages, so the controlling factor is always the smart fraction. This is not just a matter of general intelligence, as there are high IQ stupid people. The intelligent have to be aware of their responsibility and have the means to control the stupid.”

    Well, herein lies the problem. Stupid people are governed by, and take their cues from “intelligent-but-stupid” people.

    The 300-lb déclassé proletarian chicks in the trailer park who work the night shift at Walmart didn’t decide to become androgynous or wear purple hair on their own. Those behaviors were mainstreamed by intelligent hipsters back in the Punk Era. Literally all of the behaviors that completely destroy the lives of the stupid proles were advocated by the intelligent elites — drug use, promiscuity, feminism, open marriage, bastardy, garish dress, debt, hedonism, divorce, miscegenation, gambling, lack of self-restraint, lack of public manners.

    There is no doubt that African Negroes are, overall, stupid, but African nations do not have gay marriage and they outlaw homosexuality. No doubt white American elites are more intelligent on an IQ test, but they are obsessed with promoting homosexuality. The Africans at least know which hole to stick it into. So does every “stupid” farmer, who knows damn well that his cows and bulls in his barnyard are indeed quite “binary.”

    Just today Biden sad that transgenders “shape our nation’s soul” and decried an “epidemic of violence against transgenders” — two days after a transgender murdered six people at a Christian grade school.

    Meanwhile, the “intelligent” people who voted for Biden sneer at all the “stupid” rubes who voted for Trump…

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/biden-proclaims-friday-transgender-day-visibility

    • Transgenders do indeed shape our nation’s soul. They cut a slit down the length of it, turn it inside out, and shove it up into hole where the testicles used to be.

    • I found it interesting that what was formerly the Tranny Day of Vengeance suddenly became the Tranny Day of Visibility.

      I don’t want any fucking trannies shaping our nation’s soul. They said they were looking for vengeance, and after we got a chance to see what a depraved and souless form it took, the slicksters tried to use another word starting with the letter V, that was intended to erase from the minds of the stupid and credulous what the trannies had actually made all too visible about the true nature of their “beautiful” souls through both this atrocity, and the mindset that governed its expression. My contempt for this cynical ploy knows no bounds. May they find themselves rotting in a hell of their own contrivance.

16. It’s clear that Z is riffing on this old essay http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/. I’d recommend reading it. It’s obvious that the author is quite “based” before the word was coined and doesn’t buy into equalitarian ideology. It basically divided people into 4 quadrants along these lines (quoting from the essay):

    “If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O”

    • Now that I’ve listened to the podcast I see that Z immediately gave full credit to Cipolla for the inspiration so apologies to Z if I made it sound otherwise. In looking for the essay, I did find that ironically enough, Cipolla’s heirs are acting stupidly and issuing legal threats to people posting the essay even though the author clearly put it in the public domain. Haven’t listened to the whole podcast yet (I save them for my weekend driving duties) so maybe Z comments on that as well.

17. Really great show today. I’m someone that has a unique perspective on the topic because of my experience. The short of it is this, I was the result of a sperm donor. The family I grew up in is helpless/stupid. However, back in the day (and maybe still) sperm donors (mine included) were heavily recruited from Ivy League schools because everyone inherently knows genetics matter. Just ask any of these extremist egalitarians to use a homeless sperm donor, and you’ll see the cognitive dissonance.

    Thus, I grew up as someone that was quick at learning and in honors classes, but was surrounded by people that had trouble with simple tasks. Intelligent people cannot grasp that stupid/helpless people do what they do because they’re stupid. They think, “if we just teach or train them, they can turn it around.” But they can’t. When you actually have long term hands-on experience with them, you see it easily. To draw an analogy from computers, they simply don’t have the hardware to run the required software. People that grew up in an intelligent family, and in a wealthy suburb surrounded by mostly intelligent people can’t grasp this because they just haven’t experienced these stupid and helpless people in anything more than a theoretical way or on a very short term basis.

    • Bravo. I agree with you. As I often say, there’s no remedy for stupidity. One has to bear it stoically.

      • But hitherto, the vast majority of societies marginalized the stupid and the insane. AINO has given them the reins of power.

    • The Greek: Well put. As someone with two sons at both ends of the IQ spectrum, I’ve seen this ‘up close and personal.’ One picked things up almost by osmosis, rapidly mastered large quantities of information and retained it. Hated busywork and breezed through tests. Very motivated auto-didact.

      The other, although the more diligent student, learned slowly and spent hours completing worksheets. Required constant repetition and could not intuit much at all. Had difficulty completely tests on time. Did not read unless required to.

      Both from the same parents and raised in the same environment.

      • I had twins to compare. The boy is a national merit scholar with complete lack of hand eye coordination. The girl was a semi-elite gymnast of medium intelligence. The son called yesterday and said he wanted a gun for his birthday. Hasn’t shown much interest prior. I probed, apparently AI got him worried? I’m happy. I’ve been worried that he lacks the mean streak that I think may soon come in handy. He got in his first fist fight only last year. I’m fading fast, I need the shithead to take care of his sisters.

    • A white physician who lived his adult life in three African countries wrote that it took him twenty years to understand, and actually believe, what low IQ actually meant in the most practical ways and the absolute inability of natives to understand things and concepts that even IQ 90 would find simple enough. For example, tomorrow is not even a word, but an alien concept.

      • Who was this? I think its also complicated by the cherry picked top 1% who emigrate to the US and those who are part white

        • Yeah, many don’t understand what a SD or 15 IQ points means. I teach physiology and metabolism at a post graduate level. In daily interactions one doesn’t really notice how dumb or smart someone is. Teach a conceptually difficult subject. Then test your students on it. It was a revelation to me how dumb many are. In medical school, most have decent memories. I falter in explaining…. but ask them use a concept, or worse a synthesis of two concepts to come to a novel answer. Few can even take a stab at it. I have see highly regarded scientists from elite schools propose shit in top peer-reviewed journals that violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Madness. The Covid bullshit flabbergasted me. In my estimation this ship is going down. I’m amazed at how sanguine many, not all, are. I’ve set myself up in a white rural area and have begun to organize the locals that have my paranoid disposition. Took some doing, as it turns out Appalachia doesn’t have many research-intensive institutions. Fair warning lest I make you worry, when South Africa turned itself over to the black communists I confidently predicted it would go the way of Rhodesia within five years. Like investing, being early is the same as being wrong and my investments haven’t been stellar either.

          • I taught an intro to Computer Science class for students who intended to major in it. An older black lady decided that she was going to retrain as a programmer.

            I was delighted to help her. I felt like I could further the liberal causes that I believed in.

            Very early in the class, she visited me during my office hours, and she simply couldn’t master basic arithmetic. Specifically, she couldn’t consistently apply the order of arithmetic operations, like how to evaluate 3 * 2 – 1.

            I had to keep correcting her. She got frustrated, stormed out of my office, and dropped the class. To be fair, she wasn’t angry with me. She was frustrated by her limitations and the end of her career plans.

          • @SomeGuy, “Specifically, she couldn’t consistently apply the order of arithmetic operations, like how to evaluate 3 * 2 – 1.”

            Order of operations is arbitrary. There is no particular reason the one settled on is any more “right”, but because the whole idea of having social customs and conventions is to avoid/prevent misunderstanding, to clearly convey concepts, it is critical to understanding to accept that convention.

            If one is culturally predisposed to rejecting what someone says just because it’s whitey saying it, sorry, not sorry, he’s not success material.

          • This is actually a response to Some Guy below: I made the mistake of breaking from my computer career to study molecular biology at the graduate level a number of years back. One of the students was a somewhat older black woman who supposedly already had a degree from UC Berkeley.

            One day I overheard the following conversation between her and the professor.

            her: I notice the Nitrogen atoms in the models are always blue. Are they really blue?

            Professor: (clearly deciding whether to feign a heart attack to avoid this interaction) Um, well, um, a Nitrogen atom is far smaller than the wavelength of what we call blue light. Individual atoms don’t really have colors. Now if you mean the color of N2 in bulk…

            her: but like, that’s the color you would see if you could look at the molecules really close up right?

            It went on like this and I could tell there was just no grasp of anything on her part. Color as a subjective quality imposed by the human visual system, the huge scale difference of atoms vs. visible light waves (a few Angstroms vs. 400-700 nm). She just wanted “the answer”. The problem was that the question didn’t make sense so there was none. This wasn’t the only hint that something was “off” about her but was the one that most bordered on humorous and absurd. It was obvious from this and many other things that she was a product of California’s wonderful Affirmative Action machine and had only survived Berkeley because her professors were terrified to fail her.

            It was obvious that she left the room simply more confused but I’ve often thought about what that professor learned from the interaction. I don’t actually know what his politics were but I’ll assume he was a far Left race cuck because they all were. Yet here he was confronted with a real life example of the system he believed in failing spectacularly. Here was a student who clearly could not really participate in continuing the scientific work of that institution. Do these White Lefty professors think about that? If not, how do they ignore that fact? How do they avoid extending this experience to other things they believe such as the ability of South Africa to manage its affairs without White rule?

            Seeing this happen firsthand certainly doesn’t leave me feeling hopeful that people will overthrow a failing system simply because it becomes obvious that it can’t work. I’m with our notorious Fed Poaster TomA here. Something needs to hit these people hard and in a really personal way to motivate them to really want change. Just observing that 2 Blacks + 2 Mestizos obviously does NOT equal 4 Whites won’t do it.

18. My day-to-day existence has me feeling as if I am living in a Kurt Vonnegut story as one of the characters. It is a cruel story because at the beginning this ridiculous state of being could not have been anticipated and now nearing its end the reader has arrived at a state where he knows it will be far, far worse in conclusion.

    • We are living in a James Bond novel where there really is a cabal of evil men trying to take over the world.

      But try explaining that to somebody.

      • The leftists I know think Donald Trump is the Bond villain

        • And that is why the only solutions are separation or slaughter. We cannot live together with them for much longer. We share absolutely no common ground.

          • “ We cannot live together with them for much longer.”

            We can not live together in “stasis ” much longer. But who says we are in stasis? Seems we grow poorer and stupider as time flows. Could there be a middle point where we are all equally poor and stupid?

          • “Seperation or slaughter”. I suspect we will get both, but some kind of breakup is going to happen anyway.

      • We’ve gone from Lenin to bin Laden to Biden in less than a century.

      • and james bond is using his liescense to kill to prevent any opposition to the evil plan.

      • It’s complicated by the apparent fact that there appears to be a factional power struggle at the top. I’ll admit confusion but I tentatively think high-caste anglos and secular American Jews (Biden’s handlers) are at odds with Zionist and Israeli Jews. Why is Bannon and Kyle Bass pushing so hard for a war with china? This follows decades of the feverish transfer of tech and manufacturing to china. I’ll let you guys know when I figure it out. Don’t hold your breath waiting.

19. Commercials or ads have never convinced/swayed me make a purchase. But now, I will remember their name and go out of my way NOT to purchase any item from a DEI company.

    • The problem is that virtually *all* the major companies embrace this garbage. The best you can usually do is look for ones that are obviously doing the bare minimum to comply. I’m looking for work right now and when I see a job ad that ends with “Blah Inc is an equal opportunity employer and doesn’t discriminate based on race, sex, or handicap” or something like that I know it’s a place I’ll be OK. The reason is what they *didn’t* put in there. There’s nothing about how they don’t discriminate against people who think they’re transgender Pandas or Hobbits. These companies typically also tend to have a simple self identification form with choices for “M,F, decline to state”. You know you’re in trouble when there are as many “gender” choices as US states.

      Sadly businesses can’t yet just state “we don’t buy into any of this cultural rot, we hire the right people for the job, period!”. Yet that was the expectation even 25 years ago. Just getting back to 1998 norms would be a huge achievement now.

      The closest thing to what we need is a list like Z has at the end of his posts. The problem is that it’s a small list right now. What’s needed is a “Based Business Directory” that’s broad enough that I can buy virtually anything I need there.

      • These guys have done a decent job on rating the Wokeness of over 1,000 companies.
        One minor surprise, Lowes is better than Home Depot,

        https://1792exchange.com/spotlightreports/

        • Thanks, I’m adding that to my list of job search references.

        • Oh N00es! My bank is on there as “high risk”. Time to find a new one.

20. Isn’t that the basic problem with affirmative action?
    That stupid people are being promoted to positions of authority?

    • That is a problem, especially when hiring. I was taught in management school back in the 80’s that you surround yourself with people smarter than you, then get out of their way. That philosophy has worked pretty well for me climbing the small ladder I have. When you put the vibrants in charge, they deliberately hire morons to make themselves look better by comparison. When females are in charge, it’s all about the “diversity” of their departments, not the results. In both cases, no one will hold them responsible when their numbers inevitably bottom out. Usually the result is the “Dilbert Principle” in action.

      • That’s the problem Josef Stalin ran into the 1930s and early 1940s…. a problem he himself created By 1940, The Boss and his minions had killed or imprisoned vast swathes of the party, the bureaucracy, academia, the security police, you name it. As a result, Stalin got a lot of slavish yes men who obeyed the party line without question and/or were personally loyal to him. Most of them had no real talent, initiative, or creativity.

21. Commercials or ads have never convinced/swayed me make a purchase. But now, I will go out of my way NOT to purchase an item from a DEI company.

22. Very nice homage to Gordon Moore here: https://americanmind.org/salvo/requiem-for-an-era-in-silicon-valley/

    Intelligence is more than raw IQ. This article did a good job of showing the classic self-made American. It is the values lost that are the real loss here.

23. The overall argument is good, but I can’t help gritting my teeth at the repeated assertion that the smart fraction changes in size but the stupid fraction doesn’t. That simply doesn’t make any sense statistically or biologically. It’s plainly true that the stupid fraction in, say, Somalia is much larger than the stupid fraction in Finland. The smart fraction in Somalia is also correspondingly smaller — if you have a lower percentage of people in one category of a distribution, you necessarily have to have more people in another category of a distribution

    There’s also the issue of whether we’re speaking in absolute terms or relative terms. The IQ scale with 100 as the mean is a relative scale. It’s periodically re-normed, so a person with an IQ of 100 in 1920 is not the same intelligence as a person with an IQ of 100 in 2020.*

    Sometimes it’s not clear what normalization of 100 is being used. The global mean “IQ 100” would be different than the Western mean “IQ 100”. Back in 1920 they probably weren’t including the scores for Africans and most Latin Americans in the global means. I think even using a real global mean, the the people of Somalia fall overwhelmingly into the left side of a normal distribution. If you simply distribute the IQs within Somalia, you might get a normal distribution of IQ centered around something like 70. (You could also normalize IQ for Somalia, so the mean IQ for Somalia would be 100. That would provide a misleading picture when characterizing them against the rest of the world). So, strictly by Somalian terms, the smartest and dumbest 20% of the population would both be fixed sizes regardless of their actual intelligence, but that’s just a mathematical tautology.

    What’s more important is absolute measure of IQ. On some absolute scale, the “dumb fraction” of Somalia is probably 80% of the population (just making that up, but if the mean is 70 and 1 SD up is 85, then that’s not far off). The smart fraction — people of 115 or higher — is *tiny*, comparable to the fraction in our own population that is IQ 145 or higher, which is about 1 percent of the population. A population with only 1 percent of reasonably intelligence people simply can’t overcome the mass of stupidity.

    * And not to the advantage of the IQ 100 person in 2023, in my opinion. We’re getting dumber. Yes, this contradicts the common wisdom: intelligence scores have been rising over the decades, but even Flynn himself believes the Flynn Effect is an artifact of modern people living in a more test-taking-oriented society. Ed Dutton believes the Flynn Effect has reached its theoretical maximum and has started to reverse, and current results reflect that. Dutton is extremely pessimistic and thinks real IQ has dropped back to at least what it was before the industrial revolution and will continue to crater.

    • “The global mean “IQ 100” ”

      I think the global mean IQ is around 88. One does have to be careful with the IQ scores. Plenty of sub-Saharan Africans with an IQ of 70 — but they’re usually capable of more than white people with an IQ of 70. The IQ of 70 merely measures how good someone is at tasks that western society prizes. It’s not some universal measure of “intelligence” (whatever that is).

      • “I think the global mean IQ is around 88”

        See, that’ what I mean. It just depends on what population you’re normalizing the numbers against.

        • The IQ 100 is normalized using Northern Europeans. I think the average for the US is 98. For the Middle East somewhere around the mid -80s, for Northeast Asia around 106, for Ashkenazi Jews around 112 (or 114?). But the same caveat of taking these numbers with a grain of salt applies. To give an extreme and absurd example, if I’m in a jungle I would want my companion to be a big brute. If he had a high IQ it might not be worth much in that environment. As a Darwinian race realist (are there any other kind?), I always maintain that the environment selects for those qualities that enhance survival *in that environment.*

          • Arshad Ali: That elevated IQ for jevvs has been widely debunked. It was a tiny and self-selected sample and those results have not been replicated. Then there is the separate issue of prizing verbal ingenuity over technical/mechanical ability and competence.

          • Broadly speaking, one environment selects for poking a bone through one’s nose as the highest cultural achievement, while the other selects for building the Hagia Sophia.

      • I think what Somalians are capable of speaks for itself.

        • mostly just making more somalians.

        • I think what he’s implying is that if you Vizzini were dropped in modern day somaliland, you are probably SOL and your odds of long term viability are close too nil, and vice versa the somaliland man dropped in say 1950 US flyover country. I’m not sold on IQ being the determining factor in overall intelligence, and it pains me to say, but intelligence in many ways is relative to ones environment.

          • But, being higher IQ, Northern Europeans didn’t just drop unequipped into Sub-Saharan Africa, at least not after they realized what they were dealing with.

            There’s a reason that Africa was colonized by Europe and not the other way around. That the reverse is happening now is entirely a failure of Western rulers, as stopping it would be trivial if the will existed to do so. That’s more a testament to loss of IQ and general softening than the inferiority of IQ.

            High IQ lets you overcome environmental challenges in a way that whatever beneficial adaptations the Somalis have does not. If the West falls, it will be suicide, not traditional conquest.

          • “but intelligence in many ways is relative to ones environment.”

            I agree. Any quality that enhances survival in *a particular environment* gets selected for. I think this is what Rushton and other race scientists have been saying. And this continues until that quality no longer enhances survival. I’m sure that 60m years back, brontosauruses were clapping one another on the back and saying that their size enhanced their survival (and it probably did). Until it didn’t.

            At the current time it seems to be that a particular type of abstract intelligence enhances suvival — verbal, visuo-spatial, mathematical, along with the ability to plan, to foresee, to safeguard, to cooperate. That’s what was needed in northern Europe and east Asia. But one day maybe it won’t.

      • IQ measures cognitive abliity. A Caucasian with an IQ of 70 is severly retarded and his speech and appearance will show this. A Somalian with an IQ of 70 is not retarded because he is that way by design. He is socially normal. The Caucasion is the product of some defect. But their cognitive ablitities are in fact the same.

        This is why it is very hard for normie to understand average black IQ. They couldn’t possbly be that stupid. Now try below average, since half of all people are below average, and all is explained.

    • Of course it makes sense biologically.
      The smart people are having fewer children, breeding iss one way for dumb people to get more money.

      A couple of generations of that as government policy has consequences.

      • Fractions. How do they work?

        If you have 100 people, and they all reproduce exactly at replacement rate, then you have a stable population of 100. Say the smart fraction is 20% and the stupid fraction is 20% — exactly 20 people each.

        Then you make one change. The smart fraction starts breeding at half replacement rate. (We’re going to make an the false assumption here that intelligence inherits perfectly linearly, just for example’s sake. We’re also going to ignore birth and death overlaps — multiple living generations, etc.).

        In the subsequent generation, your population is now 90 people
        20 dumb, 60 in the middle and 10 at the top. Your smart fraction now 11.1% instead of 20 percent. What’s your dumb fraction? Has it remained the same? No. You have 20 dumb people, but they are now up to 22.2% of the population. The middle is up to 66.6% of the population. If you go through several generations, the smart fraction of the population will get smaller and smaller, and the dumb fraction will get larger and larger, up to a maximum of 25% in our simplistic example, because the smart fraction has bred itself out of existence.

        In reality, the dumb fraction will probably continue to grow because under current incentive conditions, dumb people are among the most likely to breed beyond replacement rate.

        Now, same example, but in addition to the smart fraction breeding at half replacement rate, the dumb fraction is breeding at double replacement rate.

        In the next generation you have 40 dumb people, 60 in the middle and 10 smart people. Smart people are now only 9% of the population. Dumb people are 36.4% of the population.

        So, no, it doesn’t make sense that biologically the dumb portion of the population remains the same when the smart population shrinks.

        • It’s funny how people argue against natural selection or that it doesn’t apply to humans when it’s the one of the simplest, most obvious fucking laws of nature that could be.

          • Due to technological advancement of humans coupled with the altruistic spirit of the whites, natural selection has been superceded.

            Today, more people unfit to even live naturally, are still live a full life (think Stephen Hawking as extreme case) thanks to all the medical miracles.

            In a small hunter gatherer society in Africa, kids with Down’s syndrome soon become hyena/lion/some wild beast lunch.

            In the west, they are considered intellectual equals of Einstein, since their vote is as good as his.

    • It’s as if I were being attacked by the sumo wrestlers of stupidity..thumped into repeatedly until I have crawled out of the ring..

    • A part of the problem is that IQ is not normally-distributed. It’s not true the bell is symmetrical, particularly on the higher end, but rather that we force-fit the statistics to make it look that way. If reality matched the model, the difference between 135 and 136 would be the same cognitively speaking as between 64 and 65. But it is not.

      There is effectively no difference at the lower end, but as Mensa testing reveals, not only a small change at the higher end vastly different, but the ways they differ, spatial manipulation, pattern recognition, etc., are also more marked.

    • Vizzini. I’ve thought about your conundrum for a while and how to respond.

      The proportion of “smart” to “not smart enough” may not change (I’m not conceding, only ignoring the issue for the moment), but that’s not the point. The “smart fraction” is that fraction at a level of intellect (let’s use IQ as a proxy) needed to keep this shitshow going.

      For example, a rigorous STEM degree completion would take an IQ of say 120+. (This number you can quibble over and even change a bit, but it won’t alter my argument.). You draw from these “smart” people, your future engineers, doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, etc.—those people that maintain and promote advancement of a 1st world technological society.

      As the number of “smart people” changes—as in decreases—you run out of those folk above. So the question is, what causes that decrease if the proportion always remains the same? Simple, we become stupider (or alternatively you need more such people for a more complex society).

      If you buy into the theory of decreasing intelligence through mutational load increase, and note that IQ is re-normed every so often to that magic number, “100”—the median, is maintained. Then you can envision that those included in the theoretical “smart fraction” of tomorrow are not as “smart” as those in it today, hence less able to enter and compete in a rigorous field of study such as STEM.

      There may even be as many—or more—folks enrolled (proportion-wise) in STEM in the future, but they will not be of the same quality, nor can we expect discipline standards to remain the same (or graduated numbers would decrease).

      Of course, we are seeing that accelerated today through AA admissions and hiring and perhaps even in the field given some of the more egregious examples of technological failures of late.

      • Thanks. Thoughtful response.

24. This is something other than stupidity. People from all walks and all IQ ranges do stupid things. This is why the stupid fraction seems so large. People commit felonies to coverup misdemeanors all the time.

    I’ve seen this in my own work. I’ve seen people much smarter than myself do stupid things, which through my own eyes were obviously stupid. Plus, people are irrational and do irrational things. If people were rational, the world would be a much different place.

    People are also forced to act with very incomplete or incorrect knowledge. If you have faulty beliefs, you are going to do things which will have an unforeseen, to you, outcome. Lack of knowledge or bad knowledge creates outcomes which look like they were produced by stupidity. Though this would not explain Michael Avenatti whose knowledge of law should have protected him from his idiotic actions.

    • I suspect Avenatti believed his status as a leftist celebrity would protect him. And it is indeed rational for him to have believed that. There are just certain people you don’t try to swindle. Phil Knight, in his case. Elizabeth Holmes found out the same thing when she tried to swindle some other people it is unwise to swindle. People who have the power and pull to bring the world down on you. Had either Avenatti or Holmes targeted a “lower” class of marks I expect they’d still be in business. Their sins weren’t so much stupidity as overconfidence. Hubris.

    • The most irrational act of all is valorizing and empowering the irrational. Hence, the West is now an irrational civilization. We live in the Age of Derangement.

      • Dark Age > Deranged Age

    • IQ is just processing power. If you fill a bright young mind with garbage, you’re going to get garbage decisions.

      Every single one of us believes what we’ve been told about a whole host of every day issues. Walking every generation through the process of inventing the wheel and all other acquisitions of knowledge is just impractical.

      So, there’s a lot of opportunity to fill young (and not so young) heads with garbage.

      Isn’t that part of what “the red pill” is about?

    • What Avenatti (and all leftists) lacked wasn’t brainpower; it was basic human morality and a conscience.

25. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Stupid People

26. Listening to today’s podcast, for some reason I thought of this:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_I5x_xq0WQ

27. > The thing is, stupid people are a constant, in terms of their percentages,

    This was only true before immigration.

28. Here’s an example of some stupidity. I work in advertising across different mediums, like tv, web, mail, radio, etc. It’s a known fact that people buy products from those of a similar appearance. Find out who’s buying your product, and show people who look like them in your marketing. I’ve also noticed that light eyes catch more attention than dark eyes. A closeup on light eyes in a tv commercial or on a web page will keep the viewer’s attention for just a bit longer. A closeup on dead, black eyes is jarring and off-putting to the average viewer. It’s just the way color and psychology work.

    Anyway, I’ve been in a number of meetings with agencies that understand this, yet the white women in the room always seem to demand ‘diversity’ actors. I’ll spend 30 minutes explaining how to catch the attention of a prospect and persuade them, then the women drop their two cents and it’s ‘we need more bwack peepo in our marketing.’ I try to politely remind them that our customers don’t fit that demographic and will be more likely to purchase if they feel ‘visual rapport’ with the stock imagery, but this is the hill they choose to die on. So that’s the kind of contribution white women are having behind the scenes when you see all bwack peepo on tv and in stock imagery. I dont know if it’s self hatred or they really think this will reduce bwack on bwack crime. Either way, it’s all stupidity.

    • Yep. Now how does one explain Hispanic numbers in commercials? Hispanics are at least 22% of the populace, officially. Yet, watch any series of commercials and their representation is as low, or lower than Asians.

      Could it be that the “stupid” consider Hispanics, White? Or at least persuadable by White actors in promotion? Not so bizarre a theory as there used to be non category of the US Census for “Hispanic-White” until a few decades ago when they found a great percentage of Hispanics checked the “White” category on the Census form.

      • My guess based on davidcito’s comment is that it is attributable to jungle fever. The only color under consideration is black.

        You see the next layer of not quite as stupid in what happened in early 2021. The corporate execs went all ad exec in the need for “diversity” – more black people. In tech, they realized there were a bunch of Asians so if they had a “diversity” problem they didn’t have one because they already have fewer whites. So, the geniuses realized they had left Asians out and began to bring them into the POC caste system and victim lounge. The humiliation rituals I saw (((execs))) put Asians through to do this were astonishing.

        There is a huge market for companies that don’t want to antagonize and rub their customers noses in their replacement. I hope davidcito can find a way to capitalize.

        Speaking of stupid, really stupid, I know an actor. He always struggled, but he was starting to get a tiny taste of success. A tiny scene in a movie with a huge celebrity. Screen time on a major TV series. Commercial shoots. He is a massive social justice warrior. Yes, an idiot. In ’20, and even now his social media is littered with pro BLM account handles and posts. All of his roles were either a dumbass white guy or a criminal, racist. I think he relished portraying the reality he saw in his delusions, and he was getting a check!

        I was talking to a mutual acquaintance the other day and he can’t get work. He left the major metro where he was working and had built up his career and is living in a small town not having any success. He isn’t even in proximity to any place where he can have success in his industry. The sacrifices that guy made to commit to that crazy industry were insane and severe – for decades. He finally was getting a taste and upward momentum.

        Nope. Black Lives Mattered more to him than his own success. I can tell you it was total stupidity. He never wavered on his loony beliefs and never once saw the implications of them. It must suck to be middle aged, have no skill and then to have thrown away your years of sacrifice to pledge fealty to a race hostile to you by honoring a stranger who took many last breaths to cry out, “I can’t breathe”, as his overdose led to heart failure as documented by the forensic evidence.

        There is no accounting for stupidity. I can’t wait to see the look on those women’s faces when they are told, “We have to let you go. We need more blacks on the team.”

        Stupid!

      • Non-white hispanics tune-in to their own Mexican “spanish language” (barely) channels. All the actors shown there are some form of genetic latino. The blacks have their own channels too. The small hats who own the purported white majority channels have a negro fetish and so you are seeing mostly black actors because this is what the small hats want you to view. If theses channel owners had a Mexican fetish, you would tune-in to latinos.

        • Hah. Never thought of that and indeed, I have many Hispanic channels in my area, and a couple of Black channels on the cable as well.

      • The presence of Hispanics is not a knife in the guts of normal white people they way the ubiquity of Hutus is. And that’s the objective–sticking the shiv in whitey any way possible.

        • I think there’s a lot to this. I’m pretty racist but I admit to a certain fondness for Hispanics. They vote the wrong way but they don’t go in for gender bending, don’t dye their hair fluorescent purple, and are generally free of hipster affectations. Their pronouns are the ones in the Spanish dictionary. They remind me a lot of what Italians used to be and it’s not surprising that they do a lot of the same blue collar jobs the Italians used to. A commercial with a bunch of beaners doesn’t have me reaching to click “skip ads” quite as fast as one with Felony Fontavius and his obese concubine Fawniquity. In fact I’m actually *more* likely to listen to what Juan and Juanita are trying to sell me than whatever Nancy Nosering and her genderfluid manboy are hawking. So I’d say I detest White hipsters at least as much as Blacks and Hispanics are the *least* loathsome type I see in advertising nowadays.

    • What’s also funny is not realizing that black people are influenced by seeing the products white people have/use. Including black people in your commercials actually decreases the appeal to black consumers. Of course to your point, none of that matters if your customers are females more interested in appeasing their feelings rather than increasing sales.

    • davidcito: I will go out of my way not to purchase an item or service marketed via diversity. It’s not an innate response to advertising but a conscious choice to say – in my own small way – f**k you to the advertisers. I’ve noticed, by the by, that it’s getting quite hard to find diaper packs or baby/toddler products featuring White children – they’re always blaqs or increasingly subcons/mestizos and other indeterminate brown mixes. USAA ads always feature blaqs now. Even the new bank in which we opened an account – located in/serves only Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas – had a web page featuring nothing but blaqs.

      It’s a plague and yet another way to deliberately rub our noses in our dispossession. As much as I work to avoid and subvert it, it is relentless and it is everywhere.

    • We sent our girls to school, because we like smart girls who aspire to a Mrs. degree. Once the yentas got control of the credentials bottleneck, our smart girls veered into their ancient, instinctive traditions: Nagging and hectoring the guys.

      Colleges used to be where guys learned how to do cool stuff.

      Now, it’s all “leadership” and administrative training, that is, nagging and hectoring, telling the guys they’re doing it wrong.

    • For those idiots, it’s not about selling product, it’s about pushing an ideology. And, judging by the black/white miscegenation and the preposterous overrepresentation of Hutus in television advertising, the idiots’ voices are the only ones that count.

    • “Find out who’s buying your product, and show people who look like them in your marketing.”

      I’ve been seeing more ads featuring middle-class black families— the sorts of ads that used to feature whites, I’m sure you take my point. I figured two possibilities: either blacks are entering the middle class and embracing bourgeois values (becoming ‘white’), or middle-class white women want more diversity for consumption. Recently a third possibility occurred to me: whites actually starting to identify as black.

      Sounds crazy to me, but I don’t discount much anymore.

      • I have a client owned and operated by blacks. It trades off an edgy brand that celebrates purported “victories” by africans over Europeans. The client is making money hand-over-fist.

        The majority of the client’s customers are white people.

        • Yeah the cuckold thing is pretty gross and shockingly common.

        • You’ve piqued my interest as to just what company is that. Don’t try to even hint but that it exists and has that customer base is indicative of just how far we’ve gone downhill as a society.

    • I disagree. It’s something else. In this case, I believe it’s the fact that the outcome they desire is not increased sales or even a good marketing campaign. Their goal is different from your goal. You want to increase sales, they want to virtue signal and show the world the company is a virtuous one.

      To paraphrase Vox Day, any organization that is SJW “converged” is incapable of performing its primary purpose.

      • Some of it too I’ve noted is patronization as a form of crude altruism. In the past this was called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, but now we know the expectations are properly tuned so that doesn’t play as well. It’s basically a way for High Whites to pat their black pets on the head and say “good doggy”. It’s demeaning, but blacks don’t care, especially if it pays.

    • I don’t want to pry, but do you ever worry, that if you keep being on the wrong side of the discussion about diversity in your company’s product, that you will endanger your job?

      I have wrestled with this issue in my own career. Mostly, I just shut up now because the job market in my field is very competitive and crowded.

      • Im almost phsyically incapable of lying unless i say something while im really nervous or in a hurry. It has cost me relationships. In this case, i use the most robust and professional language as possible, and only make my point once per group.

    • It’s not stupidity that compels the women to want vibrants in the commercials. It’s mind virus. They’ve been programmed. They never would have come up with that idea on their own. Stupidity by its nature springs from within, not from without. The longing for vibrants in commercials did not spring from within, it was implanted. Their brains are colonized. It would be nice if susceptibility to the mind virus was easily explainable by who is smart and who isn’t but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

      In fact, they will be promoted and compensated for increasing diversity, so it’s not a stupid thing to do. One could even argue that we are the stupid ones for taking a view of this that is materially detrimental to us. For someone who has no greater god than immediate material reward, that’s an easy argument to make.

    • Show me a 30 something HR chick, and I’ll show you a hidden “jungle fever” fantasy machine. By the time the old biological clock starts ticking like the opening of “60 Minutes” they are full of visons of “beautiful” mullato kids, since no respectable White males will give them the time of day.

    • It’s an attack on white men, consciously or otherwise.

      Raising all the other groups EXCEPT white males — and inventing new categories like transgender and xir — is a way to lower that status and effective power (vs. collective female power) of white men and boys. Who benefits most from that in the short-term? White females. The wealth and power transfers the past four decades have been vast and unprecedented.

29. The reason our “rulers” are stupid people is because they’re not really our rulers, they’reactors.

    The globalists can’t be bothered to send in a heavy to do menial stuff like sit in Congress or the White House because if you’re smart, the globalists have more important jobs for your. So we the people get to have their retard off-spring “rule” over us – those no good for anything else.

    • Agreed. Western politicians are paid performers in the media-entertainment complex. Nothing more. They’re marionettes whose strings are pulled by …. well, I don’t quite know who but can only conjecture. Being paid performers they’re selected for qualities that make them endearing to the boobs they “lead.”

      • The good looking actors go to Hollywood and the ugly ones to DC

    • True. The Help simply have to do as told. There is a potential danger of a modicum of independence if The Help is marginally intelligent, so the handlers deliberately select for stupidity. The modern lament that The Help do not read the legislation to which their names are attached is based on the false premise they could understand it, and in some cases, literally read it.

      Joe Biden and John Fetterman are features and not bugs.

30. Yes, stupidity is at an epidemic & systemic level and getting worse. This is because stupidity is now actively inculcated within public schools and universities in a comprehensive and repetitious pattern of intentional abuse. It has become a feature rather than a bug, and this statement is not an exaggeration. See Xerl science for confirmation.

    Now I’m going to argue that the only remedy for mass stupidity is a change in the environment that eliminates the fitness selection criteria favoring stupidity as a trait. IOW, we must return to the ancient and natural evolutionary model that imposes a non-reproductive outcome for stupid acts. If you attempt to pet the lion on the savanna and it eats you, then your genes will not propagate forward. Civilization has destroyed all of these natural feedback mechanisms and the specie’s death spiral is now well advanced.

    The collapse is the cure because only an environment of extreme hardship and existential threat can reverse this pathology.

    • “ The collapse is the cure because only an environment of extreme hardship and existential threat can reverse this pathology.”

      “Collapse” is the culling. Then must come the (permanent) “environment” change, otherwise the pattern repeats as the mutants survive and out reproduce along with others.

31. Your proposed solution sounds a lot like what is currently going on in El Salvador. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens in that otherwise insignificant little country.

32. The Italian Carlo Cipolla covers this topic concisely. See the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

33. In America the Intelligent are bred for shirking and cowardice from WW1 until 1973 when conscription ended. Intelligence was a way to dodge military service or at least Infantry.

    Our thinking was done by cowards and our fighting done by fools, meaning less educated. The last Intelligent War was WW2, in most ways the only one. The Victors were Home getting rich.

    That conscription ended in 1973 doesn’t matter as our fate was set.

    I see Z’s nod to IQ isn’t intelligent, true.

    Its all Boomer Bandits and AOC, Gaetz as successors, until our luck changes for good or much worse (to get better).

    Our leadership is diseased.

    • I know an engineer/inventor who is a genuine genius. He needs others to manage his time and put him on projects, otherwise he’s obsessed with alien conspiracy theories all day. Putting this guy in charge of anything would be a disaster, but putting his brain on a particular problem has yielded useful and lucrative breakthroughs for his bosses.

34. It’s springtime and stupid must be in the air: my junior high schooler just asked me about “equality” this morning. He is reading “Harrison Bergeron” in his English class.
    The “Handicapper General” and her shot-gun always come to mind whenever I see a minority, paperwork American or strong independent woman getting an award.

    • “Diana Moon Glampers, U.S. Handicapper-General”

    • Mow Noname: If your kid is reading that in a public middle school I am actually shocked. I wonder how it’s being presented – whereas the stupid can and do avoid the irony and historicity in “Animal Farm,” the message in “Harrison Bergeron” is explicitly anti-equality and pro-genetic inheritance. That it also almost perfectly accords with today’s insanity (trannies, stupid and corrupt blaqs in charge of aviation and the military, females ruining everything, etc.) is also an avoidable comparison.

      • Give me some credit: I don’t send my children to public schools.

        It may be my own personal biases showing, but I don’t think this is a comment board for people who send their children to government indoctrination centers.

    • since you are not homeschooling , I can only assume you do not care about your daughter . sad .

35. In an updated, inclusive, diverse, and equality based 21st century New(er) Testament saying: Blessed are the stupid, for they shall inherit the earth…

    • Right on, USnThem. Universal suffrage might be the worst invention in human history… certainly in WCiv. It will be the downfall of WC. That and the birth control pill.

      • Exactly. The stupid should not have a say over the intelligent—but how to differentiate? One way is to have “earned” suffrage. Change the criteria for voting from fogging a mirror, to contributing toward a prosperous and healthy society. The devil is both in the details and in the will to change.

        • Compsci: I’ve also read suggestions for what sounds like a workable system of multiple votes per person (basic one if an adult citizen, extras for property ownership, military service, etc.) but that can all be worked out later. Suffrage qualifications presume some similar sort of electoral system, which I am not willing to back.

          Anyhow, it’s all mere mental masturbation in the waning days of the GAE. First White people have to secure the will to exist, then fight for and build an ethnostate. The technical and systemic aspects are utterly irrelevant at this point.

          • Yes, the “weighted” vote you describe has any number of advantages. Two of which are—it’s not seen as all or nothing which disenfranchises some, and also it differentiates between lessor and greater societal contributors, thereby encouraging improvement.

            But as usual, you cut to the chase and note the most salient point, *will*! We must as a race have the will to survive and prosper.

          • I’m not sure that military service ought to be a qualifier to vote. Look what we have now.

            My father believed that working for any government, receiving any government check or anything like that should be a disqualifier. You’re voting in your financial interest and will always vote for whoever promises you the most money and job security.

          • Military service is a no no.
            Any government job is a ten year ban.

    • The Neuter Testament got it wrong, as does your New(er) Testament. It will be the same old Elite inheriting the earth by using the stupid while the meek slavishly watch the NFL and order from Door Dash without a care in the world.

      • That’s precisely the point, albeit not readily made in Z-man’s current posting, but stated roundabout in the this group previously.

        The plight of most of mankind until the last couple of hundred years was to live in misery and to die in agony. The only ones to somewhat avoid this were the “same old elites” you rail about. In essence the “meek” you cite are living better than the elites of our Founder’s time. NFL and Door Dash are the epitome of their class/station. Why should they strive for more?

        • I do not believe people prior to 200 years ago lived in misery. They found their pleasures where they could and were so tough that they could endure stoically things that would make us bellow like babies. They were also not afflicted by the myriad horrors and abominations that beset we postmoderns on a daily basis.

          • That the ancients or more modern people’s survived, is not in dispute. That those surviving were a hearty lot comes without saying. Any reading of what soldiers were capable of during ancient times is revealing.

            But for the most, life was short and harsh. Childhood death rates at 50%, women dying giving birth, and epidemic diseases taking people who lived in squalor. Not to mention chronic disease we have learned to cure or avoid through knowledge of sanitation.

            Idyllic peasant life is a movie fantasy. Folks worked hard to survive and put up with whatever, but that doesn’t mean it was pleasant—by our standards at least.

          • Eric Hoffer agrees.

        • Was I railing? At the time, it seemed more like a calm, world-weary, rational observation during a sunny spring afternoon in Oklahoma.

36. While listening to the podcast it occurred to me; these asshats (stupid people), get to vote. Ergo, the phrase “we’re not voting our way out of this” is so much more understandable.

37. The ‘elite’ post-WW2 certainly have been a bandit-culture. Their ethos and spiritual essence derives from the Templar grifters that scoured Jerusalem, above ‘n below, for the buried treasure of ancient Hebrew kings. Found plenty, too.

    When Templarism (banditry) got too fat financially and thus hot politically, they morphed into the nautical East India Company, putting to work the wealth stolen from the Holy City via vast trading networks. That is how the modern banking system began — with pillage, murder, deception, and banditry by the New Templars. Pirates gonna Pirate.

    The East Coast cryptocracy was born of pirating and plunder. The CIA always has been a tool of Skull and Bones and related occult orgs. Like their predecessors from the East India Co., the rites of the Skullies are a mix of the maritime and the lucy-ferian, even to the wink-winks of their chosen entertainments, which ran to ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ and suchlike in the prior generations. These were the folks who ran intel, thus financing, government, law, media, the culture generally. Hollywood/teevee was their megaphone and tool of mass manipulation.

    As the OP notes, presently the bandits are being replaced by the merely stoopid — largely women — because stoopid plus female is the easiest demographic to control, and because the bandits are at root goddess-worshipping sects, with heavy homo-infiltration. As their sad rites at Bohemian Grove demonstrate. Ever in and out of their precious groves, the little scamps.

    • I think in your reductionism and caricaturing you confused the rabble of pirates from Africa with the great builders and civilization builders of Britannia.

      The problem is this generation are the degenerates. Fine. That happens. However, they were subverted by an alien force that got them hooked on debt, and convinced them to turn to temporary pleasures and dilute and forfeit their power to the alien, to women and now to a new wave of aliens.

      What is right before their eyes they cannot see. They believed that people are blobs of flesh and productive capacity that can be substituted. They thought they were immune to that. Many still do.

      They are stupid and about to find out just how stupid.

      “Minister X; WHITE! Minister Y: WHITE! Secretary Z: WHITE! Deputy B: WHITE! … …”

      Right there before their eyes coming for them yet they bend the knee and toast themselves and their virtue.

      Stupid!

      • “you confused the rabble of pirates from Africa with the great builders and civilization builders of Britannia.”

        So well said.
        Kudos to Rules and to Ray, an excellent riposte to a fine history, both true.

        This is a great example to illustrate Zman’s point, “after a war, the intelligent people are often faced with a bandit problem, as this class has grown rich as war profiteers.”

        Ray, a man of his time, has Biblically trained sensibilities that elevate the Hebrew above the Israelite.

        When read as a political history, that is, ruling class propaganda, the same distinction becomes apparent, born of the same need: the ruled tribes were majority of Aryan descent, the rulers were of mulatto descent.

        The military class followed the mores relayed by the priestly class. Today, Southron Baptists call themselves “the New Covenant” and America “the New Israel.”

        Confusing the two was necessary and natural in those migratory, multicultural times. Both were heirs of the survivors of the era of meteoric catastrophe that had obliterated Aryan-built Sumer and shattered Canaan; the oldest book, Book of Job, recounts several generations after the cannibal period, so terrible was the destruction.

        “Habiru”, or as we say, “Hebrew”, was a general epithet meaning “refugee”; later on, the distinction between “darkies” and “trailer trash” habiru became more distinct, as “Hebrew” and “Israelite”.

        The Israelite tribes were a separate border culture buffering the mulatto-ruled urban cores, as seen today with white suburbs ringing a black-ruled urban city (that whites built.) The same dynamics were at play, then as now.

        Eventually, the majority-Aryan “minority” tribes were pushed into long migrations, becoming such as the Cimri (Cimmerians) who resettled in Scotland / Brittainie, Germani (“authentic”) who resettled amongst the northern Sarmatians, and Scythians (“Isaacs”) who resettled towards the steppes.* All had found kinvolk with whom they more readily merged, that is, freeman whites like themselves.

        This is the basis of “the Saxons are Ten Tribes J**s” mythos, played out over many migrations, markedly repeated by the Judean betrayal and rebranding in New Babylon.

        In the oldest telling, Isaac was indeed sacrificed, with the changeling ram adopted in his place; the story changed as the needs of the increasingly lighter octoroon mulatto ruling class changed, from their polytheistic roots to supremacist.

        As Ray’s generation was taught, whites are subservient to Hebrews, the “adam” or “first true humans”. No discredit to him or his, as many of the later Bronze Age Collapse raiders were indeed Aryan descent tribes in uprising and bandit opportunity.

        Per Nature’s dictate, whites resiliently split and migrate, at times warlike, at times philosophical; no dainty flowers are we.

        Our formidable combination is what the Conniver hijackers both envy and fear- thus their powerful attempts to hide who we really are, the rightful masters and rebuilders of an ever fallen world. May the Templar learn to hate.

        ‐———-
        *(This history I saw in an old evangelical video, forgive me for not having the link; the preacher was near beside himself in trying to steer the discourse into confirmation that Whites are really secret J**s. These were very good men.)

        • PS- re-reading Ray’s version of history, I find it even better, condensed with salient detail, than I thought. Well done.

          I find the error we both commit is that he leans toward absolving the Hebraic owners and investors of the East India Companies; my fault is that I tend to absolve their Templar traditions.

          No, we have plenty of white scabs in our history, and I ignore them too easily, eager to assign all blame. The fault is mine. Let us look to cleaning our own house as well.

        • ‘Ray, a man of his time, has Biblically trained sensibilities that elevate the Hebrew above the Israelite.’

          The what? Hebrew, Israelite, the LORD barely has bothered with the old tribes in the past two thousand years. They turned on His choice so He rolled with the Gentiles awhile.

          The tribes will come around again but it’ll be bumpy for the nation of Israel in years ahead. Suits me fine, give them a bit more time to wise up. As for the synagogue of satan with their reformed this and their talmudic that, the future is grim.

          ‘As Ray’s generation was taught, whites are subservient to Hebrews, the “adam” or “first true humans”. No discredit to him or his, as many of the later Bronze Age Collapse raiders were indeed Aryan descent tribes in uprising and bandit opportunity.’

          The whatwhat? You seem to know a lot about me that I don’t. Whites are subservient to Hebrews? I was taught no such thing, neither by teachers, parents, culture nor later in life, by Scripture.

          However I am eager to know who exactly is ‘him and his’? Meaning me and mine? I could sure use some tangible backup about now. I will be pleased to discover the addresses and particulars of my secret cohorts! I am almost seventy but perhaps legal adoption might yet be on the table??

    • Templars were Vatican-sanctioned, as were the Crusades. Templars got in trouble when the king of France got indebted to them. Iirc.

      I think we’d be a lot better off with Templar Christian banking instead of the Babylonian sort.

      • The problem is the Vatican gradually and continually embraced usury. See Michael Hoffman’s excellent (but very dry) “Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin That Was and Now Is Not” for this grotesque and gradual transformation. The Vatican changed their rules to pursue their own selfish interests.

        The Templars started off independently and received Vatican sanctioning as an, essentially, mendicant order. They quickly, upon receiving largesse from many locations, became moneylenders at certain points. There is a solid book on Templars by Dan Jones that does a fair job giving a logical narrative to Templar history. Philip the IV’s persecution of the Templars was not truly about debt, but a much deeper rivalry with the Vatican, clergy, and nobility in general (which the Templars readily mixed).

38. Insofar as it goes, this is all true. But perhaps Zman will dedicate a future essay to the crucial role of the Midwit in maintaining a functional society.

    The beauty of our former society was that the Elite developed a strong set of rules and norms to be followed by the Midwits. If intelligence is normally distributed, these Midwits are really about 1/3 of the population. They are all the low-end “knowledge” workers, middle/low-level managers and NCOs/lower-echelon of the MIC.

    If they followed the rules/norms, everything went pretty smoothly. The Elite put the few smart people in charge of the many Midwits. This is the corporate structure or military chain of command.

    The problem is that the rule book has been shredded, bandits have thrown out the honest smart people and DIE folks have supplanted the capable midwits. The result is the anarcho-tyranny of the Elite. So the stupid run amok.

39. Was it Steve Sailor who commented that in all our studying intelligence we may be overlooking studying stupidity?

    • A test for stupidity is interesting.

      Clearly, low IQ is the major factor, but lack of wisdom seems to play a role as well. Many of the elites in the 19th century were Marxists, which seems pretty stupid.

      You can be really smart but have an inaccurate model of human nature and that causes you to believe stupid things, like the Marxists of the 19th century.

      Paraphrasing Jared Taylor, “there are some beliefs that are so stupid that you have to be really smart to believe them.”

      There are lots of people with high IQs, who can complete complex tasks, but can’t or won’t think independently, and they end up being programmed by the media/academia. Then, they believe stupid things like that they have a higher IQ than you and that you are stupid for believing what IQ tests have validity.

      • Wear a mask, take the jab, get boosted: it’s safe and effective.

      • “There are lots of people with high IQs, who can complete complex tasks, but can’t or won’t think independently, and they end up being programmed by the media/academia.”

        I work in healthcare, specifically the medical laboratory. We are completely full of just those people you describe. It is mind-boggling.

      • There is a world of difference between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence is a stew of the Four Cs–creativity, capacity, computation and curiosity. But those four characteristics have nothing to do with judgment, discernment and restraint, which seem to form the core of wisdom. Indeed, it increasingly seems that intelligence and wisdom are antithetical. Having said that, a certain baseline of intelligence appears necessary to wisdom. People with an IQ of 110 are far more likely to be wise than people with an IQ of 85. But what about people with an IQ of 150? It seems to me that their wisdom quotient is similar to that of the 85ers. An odd phenomenon, to say the least. And I wonder if it’s unique to the Age of Derangement.

      • People with very high IQs tend to be more susceptible to various neuroses and autism-spectrum disorders. Once you get north of 140, it becomes increasingly hard to find someone who isn’t a little “off”. This is especially true among the usual suspects.

        • This is why a throrough study of chess masters revealed that the sweet spot for IQ was not genius level, but 135. Smart enough to see the board and still retain the qualities necessary to own yourself and destroy your enemy, which is not the board but the fellow sitting across from you.

      • Don’t mistake intelligence for common sense. You may be capable of designing an entire computer system, but cannot make fire in the forest.

        • High IQ people invented things so we don’t have to start fire in the forest by striking flints or rubbing two sticks together.

      • Line. Very good restatement/clarification to today’s missive. One that has puzzled me for some time now. There definitely is something in the nature of men that makes one Z-man “smart” that is above and beyond “IQ”.

        For me—and only for me—I think it’s some (additional) combination of skepticism, distrust, and arrogance. These qualities in the extreme are probably sub-optimal, but in a healthy amount and balance…

40. There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

    • Actually, just listening to talk show call-ins confirms this, but in a way most folk who recite this common refrain don’t mean. Most of the callers can’t frame a cogent thought, therefore can’t pose an answerable question for someone with knowledge to respond to. Some of this in]s IQ related, but much is training and experience.

      Women are absolutely the worse, but that’s understandable, women want to talk about problems—not solve them. For the emotional, talking *is* solving—their particular problem anyway. Had this experience just the other day with wife. Only this time I bit my lip and kept from “man-splaining”, or solution offering. I also just opened a beer so I had something to distract me. Twenty minutes later the “conversation” was over and wife thanked me for “listening”.

      No solution offered, no amelioration settled upon, no progress made. Tomorrow the “problem” will most likely return. Luckily, it’s not *my* problem.

41. “The thing is, stupid people are a constant, in terms of their percentages”

    They’re an increasing percentage. There are reasons for this. A society — well, a place — like the USA has made it hip to be mediocre or even stupid. And definitely uncool to be a “geek”, “nerd”, or “egghead.” This is not some new phenomenon. The bandits who try to get elected make sure that any intelligence they possess (if indeed they possess any) is not on exhibit. GWB had a natural advantage here as he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. But I digress. Hofstadter wrote a whole book on anti-intellectualism in America but he could equally well have titled the book on anti-intelligence in America. The intelligent in the USA are a persecuted minority. They live in the shadows and are just barely tolerated because, well, you need the techno society to keep functioning. Even in the dystopic world of “Idiocracy” there must have been people in the shadows who made the tech work. In such an environment the stupid breed like rabbits. Their relative numbers increase. It’s the scenario of “The Marching Morons” and “Idiocracy.”

    • If only we slaves of the morons could get those folks on the rocket vacations to Venus going for real.

    • Since when has the USA made it uncool to be a geek or a nerd? Beginning during the Reagan years there has been a concerted push in the popular culture to elevate outcasts, in the guise of nerds or geeks, to the top of the food chain. The problem lies in the fact that there has always been a very limited supply of actual nerds, folks with pocket protectors and protractors who understand and solve complex problems. Geek and nerd have been redefined to mean “someone who watches a particular fantasy program too much.”

      Recently added to that is the requirement that you profess an undying love of something called “SCIENCE”. You don’t have to have a clue what it means, but you have to join its cult and sneer at those who won’t. Go watch any Youtube video on a sciencey-type subject and I guarantee the person narrating it will speak with a sing-song earnestness that belongs in a Kindergarten classroom.

      Nerds and geeks may have at one time been considered outcasts, but the memory of period has added an extra appeal to the labels today. People eat up science videos, signs in their front yards, and obsessing over Star Wars because being a nerd confers membership in a victim class, which we know is a sure-fire ticket to cultural superiority.

      • “People eat up science videos, signs in their front yards, and obsessing over Star Wars because being a nerd”

        That doesn’t make you one. This kind of obsessing over the externals of science — watching videos of Neil deGrasse Tyson or the daft “Big Bang Theory” — doesn’t confer scientific mastery. If I ask any of these chumps to solve the simplest second-order ODE such as y” + y = 0, they’ll be stumped. Science has become a cargo cult in the USA in the sense that people emulate and ape the externalities but are blithely unaware of the pulsing heart of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

        • True enough, but beside the point. When the image, if not the essence of the nerd is revered, then the nerd is no longer an outcast. A Hollywood director’s ignorance of string theory, is inconsequential. What matters is that he directed A Beautiful Mind.

      • You’re quite right. To a significant degree, Insane Clown World is the result of the revenge of the nerds.

42. The nation was hamstrung in its ability to deal with the simple minded by civil rights laws. This was especially true in states with large black populations. Prior to the sixties, the Southern ruling class (which had strong ties to military service) kept its foot on the necks of the low IQ population, black and white. As a result, the dysfunctional behavior of the stupid was bottled up and kept out of the white middle class. But that’s all gone now. Anyone not towing the civil rights line of the current fashion gets hurled into the void with the dogs of lawfare snapping at their heels.

    • Great point. Excellent point.

      They’re All Twerkers Now.

    • And welfare. That’s where the rubber meats the road on creating stupid factories. Trillions of dollars, of life blood, have been transferred to the dumbest, least deserving, least grateful.

43. Ah, the halcyon early internet days. Academics, pornographers, and gamers. Not a normie to be found lol.

44. “Bandits.” Pat, I’d like to solve the puzzle.

45. i think that a distinction should be made between the ‘mindless’ and the genuinely ‘stupid’. as in all things these are traits that are not mutually exclusive.

    • One of my dad’s favorite sayings was “ignorance can be fixed but stupid is forever.” I think that might apply here but I’m just a midwit plumber so I’m not sure how.

46. Haha! Z-man had a bad encounter irl to trigger this! Did some half-wit drive over your foot in the parking lot?

47. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Z? A plagiarist? For shame…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2GwrR-4Q9E

    At least he dried out and cleaned himself up for the podcast.😉👍

48. You askin for money?

    I like money two. we should hang out.

    • As I was reading it, I thought the essay was going to be about the Mexican Cartels moving in to seize effective control of much of the territory of the continental United States.

      NEO: That’s all? It’s the j00z?

      MORPHEUS: nods head

      ===============

      Although even the j00z seem to be getting st00pider.

      Yuge percentages of all websites I visit simply no longer work on any browser which I deploy.

      The obvious problem there would be pajeet incompetence, but as long as the fiat shekels keep flowing from the Federal Reserve, no one seems to give a d@mn that their websites no longer work.

49. Been around the world and found
    That only stupid people are breeding
    The cretins cloning and feeding
    And I don’t even own a TV

50. Is this Zman drunkposting?

    Ok I didn’t listen podcast yet, but the text of today’s post is REALLY out there.

    • I think you just proved Z’s point. Well done!

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