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In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.
In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.
It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.
The ideal politician in a liberal democracy has an extremely high verbal dexterity along with an extremely low degree of self-awareness. In fact, the best politicians of this age are glib narcissists who have never done anything useful. Much of the panic over Donald Trump is due to the fact he worked in the dreaded private sector. Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.
The reason for this is despite the fact we insist on calling it politics, there is little in the way of politics happening in a modern liberal democracy. Everyone in the political system agrees on the moral claims. As Marx noted, when you get the morality settled, there is no need for politics. Put another way, once everyone agrees on the goal, then you are left with a debate about how best to achieve it. The barrier to entry in modern politics is the moral questions.
As a result, the selection pressure in politics is for people who will never color outside the lines and always promote the latest thing. The more natural someone is at conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy, the less likely they are to question what is demanded of them. Of course, if they are especially good at appearing enthusiastic about the latest thing, then all the better. The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.
As we see with actors, a lack of self-awareness is key. Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. Humiliating yourself for laughs or applause works best when you cannot imagine the concept of humiliation. It is why the narcissistic moron is a well-known type in the entertainment world. An idiot who thinks highly of himself, but never questions the script is an ideal actor.
Just as an actor who easily “believes in the project” is always in demand, the politician who is always ready to run with the latest thing is always rewarded. His donors will make sure he is kept in the lifestyle he thinks he deserves. His party will always rely on him to take point on the latest thing. Joe Biden made a long career in politics being a narcissistic simpleton, despite stealing everything in sight. Joe Biden is the perfection of modern democratic politics.
It is not just electoral politics where we see this process, but the politics of the managerial elite as well. David French is a goofy looking buffoon but he has risen to the top of the political media because he has no shame. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to shine amongst the other simpletons. French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.
All of this is the result of democracy. Not the mechanics of voting, but the belief that the general will is the moral authority. Once a society accepts this claim, turns the mob into a god, then moral conformity must follow. After all, if there is no agreement, the general will is unknown, then the people are left with no moral authority. Therefore, the solution is to impose a moral consensus and religiously oppress dissent. The only way democracy can work is if everyone agrees.
This is why Western societies are now policed by a volunteer army of simpletons, prodded along by the autocrats. Democracy collapses if there is not a perceived agreement on the moral questions. Even though the people who rise to the top are stupid, they understand the need for consensus. This is why they so enthusiastically impose the latest thing on the public. Who they are depends upon the belief that everyone supports the latest thing.
None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true. Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus. Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.
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These are the people in charge.
“ The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.”
They are in charge. You said yourself the other day that money just buys you a seat at the table.
The ruinous simpletons are in charge.
The IQ in the West has been falling since 19th century, loosing several IQ points per generation, unintentionally byproduct of the welfare state and modern medicine. There used to be positive correlation between IQ and child survival/mortality (the evolutionary pressure would reward high IQ), it’s now the opposite. Nowadays, the higher the IQ, the lower the realized fertility, underclass criminal types being the only strata with above-replacement rates, the rest shrinking, meaning with every generation, the proportion of the high vs. low IQ as a overall % decreases. Also, the reproduction cycle is quicker for the low IQ types, whereby… Read more »
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy said it better.
Except that Idiocracy imagined that it took hundreds of years to reach rule by idiots over simpletons, but in fact it has taken only a few decades…It also imagined that a country could survive such rule in some form, but clearly that is not going to happen…
Morality is certainly the key to understanding the ideological landscape. It follows that to form an accurate idea of what’s going on in the world, one must understand morality. Darwin gave a terse explanation in Chapter IV of his, “The Descent of Man.” Westermarck elaborated on Darwin’s remarks in his “The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,” published in 1906, and available and Archive.org. In short, morality is the manifestation of evolved behavioral traits, or predispositions, in our species. It follows that there is no such thing as objective morality. Thanks to the Blank Slate debacle in the behavioral… Read more »
Have you ever read Nietzsche – Genealogy of Morality?
The only question is if it’s possible to return to healthy moral values and norms before societal collapse. I think it’s not.
I think it’s due to gene culture coevolution and the cycle of regimes.
Sad!
Nietzsche did write a very apt metaphor about a wall preventing mankind from seeing the truth about morality. When we finally built a ladder and climbed the wall to peak over the other side, we shrank back in shock and refused to believe what we had seen. Unfortunately, he never accepted what Darwin had to say about the subject. As a result, his thoughts about it are mainly of academic interest. The same goes for all the pre-Darwinian philosophers, and most of those who came after him, for that matter, with rare exceptions. Westermarck is the most significant exception and… Read more »
This post would have deserved all the kudos if not for the myopic attack on religion. REligion basically came about as a way to codify the evolutionary beneficial behaviours that also fall under the purview of morality. For most of human history (arguably until Kant) there was little distinction between the two. Same goes with apparently irrational codes of honour, etc. The OP cites the cringe arguments of 19th cent. atheists who took a literary (and literal) reading of sacred texts like they were trying to find plotholes in a detective novel or something. The Bible being non-seniscal had been… Read more »
Oh look somebody calls himself Drake says God doesn’t exist. :O)
It’s like a snake saying the fangs are just ornamental.
“ It is beyond me how anyone above the age of 12 who dares to think about the matter can actually believe in such an entity. ”. Einstein converted from atheist to a believer in a God once his math demonstrated that the existence of the universe itself broke so many laws of physics. Arguing “but why would a God do or say X” is non sequitur to discussions of existence.
“Why would God need a spaceship?” is non sequitur to the question of His existence, but it more saliently suggests that organized religion is the product of human imagination rather than divine inspiration.
If God is real, it’s unlikely that He spends his time giving Jews irritable bowel syndrome flare-ups as punishment every time they flip a light switch on a Saturday.
Sanna Marin should be forced to go fight for the ukrainians she supports. Or as it used to be called, putting your money where your mouth is.
Also, i bet you guys didn’t know attending the bildaburgers was progressive and brave! Cough Sanna and stacy abrams, cough
https://bilderbergmeetings.org/meetings/meeting-2023/participants-2023
Seems like this says more about the Bilderbergers than it does about Abrams
I wouldn’t go putting my money where Sanna Marin’s mouth has been.
She already gave financial aide to Ukraine.
[…] ZMan turns over a rock. […]
Now extrapolate. JFK barely escaped a nuclear war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis because a Russian submarine officer refused the order to launch during the blockade fiasco. And JFK was not a stupid man. But Brandon is more than stupid enough to stumble into a nuclear catastrophe, especially since he is committed to escalating the Ukraine War at all costs, including a false-flag nuclear incident. And there are no adults left in DC to curtail such a scenario. This is no trivial matter. Here are the options before us. One- continue dancing on the edge of… Read more »
Ummm, I don’t think so Tom.
If a nuclear war breaks out, there is no realistic contingency plan. A day, a month, we all die. Any survivors will envy the dead.
Whitley Strieber wrote a novel called War Day which is about an unlikely limited nuclear war and its terrible outcome for the survivors. I read it some years after it was published. Very informative about the post-war nightmare they would experience.
Fallout is an overblown fear. Most weapons are airburst. Thus, most people in rural areas, and their homes, should survive the initial cataclysm intact. To live in what kind of world, I don’t think anybody really knows. Virtually everything that made modern living possible would be gone at that point. Radioactivity of the water supply would be a very immediate problem.
Correct. The Japanese survived two nuclear strikes just fine… except for the people in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero. The dudes on Hokkaido were just fine. So were the American forces who occupied the country under MacArthur.
Now, I admit that things might be a bit different if you have hundreds of MIRVed thermonukes hitting your country. But a limited strike would not be completely catastrophic (except politically). You wouldn’t be driving a Toyota if it was.
Contemporary nuclear doctrine assumes an all-or-nothing scenario. Perhaps we shall find out someday if that assumption is correct or not…
Even a few people within the theoretical kill radius survived Hiroshima…
Hell, there was even an instance of guy surviving both strikes. He left Hiroshima because it got hit only to arrive in Nagasaki a few days later.
I fear more than anything, the weapons that dear leader in north korea would unleash upon the west coast, simply to exhibit his cojones.
It’s quite possible for people to survive long term in rural areas. Even the outer suburbs of major cities will survive the blasts. The main threat there is the “zombie horde” issue. Hell, even without a nuclear war there’s always a non-zero zombie threat to places like suburban Baltimore anytime the media starts pimping the race issue. One little-considered issue is that due to the general decay of everything the American nukes may largely fail to function properly or at all while those of Russia and China work as intended. The Russians and Chinese would probably not mount an outright… Read more »
Our nukes are quite robust and won’t fail to function if it comes to that, at least as things now stand. We also have above ground experimental facilities such as the NIF at Livermore, Z at Sandia, etc., that give us a leg up over the competition in an era of no nuclear testing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians resumed nuclear testing to eliminate this advantage. Playing Russian roulette with nuclear war is probably the biggest disadvantage to picking the wrong horse in the war. There are many others. China represents the greatest geopolitical threat to the… Read more »
Well you had a whole two or three generations of intelligence professionals who had been trained in Russian language, Russian studies, not like you can just let all that go to waste
The persistent shortage of tritium, and the poor maintenance record of the military in general, cast doubt on the percentage of nukes that will work, or fizzle….
There is no shortage of tritium as far as our nukes are concerned. We produce sufficient amounts in the Tritium-Producing Burnable Absorber Rods (TPBARs) that are inserted in conventional nuclear reactors. The Department of Energy, not the military, is responsible for “maintaining” (insuring the reliability) of our weapons. Our weapons laboratories, Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia, play a key role, and are still staffed by very bright people who are quite capable of insuring that our weapons won’t “fizzle.” OTH, the fact that tritium isn’t a naturally occurring element is a major reason why all the hype about fusion reactors… Read more »
I didn’t intend for this comment to be about the Day After, but the fear mongering about the end of all life on Earth is just stupid. Even in a full exchange of nukes between the USA and Russia, there will still be large swaths of the planet that remain largely unaffected by the consequences of nuclear bomb detonations (including radioactive fallout). And this includes most regions in the North Hemisphere that are outside the immediate blast radius of each explosion. Yes, there will be significantly elevated illnesses and birth defects in the surrounding populations, but most of the nearly… Read more »
What it comes down to is this, it will be bad, real bad. Medical care, food, water, everything will be an ordeal, a struggle.
So the Q will become the same Q as old ppl in declining health face: at what point is it not worth it any longer? The suffering in life versus the joy, a very difficult, individual decision.
Anyone who needs to get his mind right about the pros and cons of nuclear annihilation should see (again) the movie
‘On the Beach.’ Quite moving and a stern warning that the our global cabal masters seem to discount.
Communist propaganda.
Radiation is good for you, especially in high doses.
You get more energy and quicker.
The popularity of the Jerry Springer show really stood out to me, both then and now, as a marker of decline. It was in the 90s (I was in my 20s then) that I realized this wasn’t the world I’d been educated about, that it was changing, had changed, into something different from that. Something with a greater emphasis on superficiality, with a devaluation of inner thought (if there was any inner thought at all), something with restructured moral values from the ones I’d been taught were operative. And it’s important to note that the GR had barely begun. So… Read more »
I’ve heard it said that it is practically impossible to hold an engaged conversation with a person whose IQ is more than one standard deviation above or below your own. The less intelligent person will consider the more intelligent person a dull, boring intellectual, while the more intelligent person will conclude that the less intellegent person cannot possibly say anything of interest to him. I do not believe, however, that this applies to politics and marketing. The politicians/marketers are, on average, quite a bit smarter than the average voter, yet they can communicate effectively with them because politics/marketing is a… Read more »
It would be an interesting unmasking if you actually forced and recorded some of these “Man of the People” platitude politicians to actually try and have a real conversation with their less intelligent supporters. Say Obama talking to some random pavement ape, or even Trump with one of his MAGA true believers. Without the protection of that carefully crafted monologue I suspect even these guys, both highly intelligent manipulators, would find it near impossible to avoid it becoming awkward and uncomfortable. There was an amusing Onion article way back along this line, based on the “Bush seems like a guy… Read more »
“They need someone dumber. Someone who makes sense to them. The Springer fans can only be communicated with by someone else who “gets” Springer. They have to be led by someone who is able to mentally get on that level. If they are to be led at all, and not just herded…” Also, to wit “The View.” It seems to be a popular morning show. The show seems to be both a reflection and an inspiration to those indulging. The display of the “talent” themselves is too gruesome for me to even entertain enduring an hour of their shrill grunts.… Read more »
“Marketing” (to stupid people using emotional manipulation) and things like political campaigns in mass democracies are probably a purely transitional phenomenon. They reflect the existence of a society that was still relatively homogeneous but where “decision makers” (both for products and policies) were no longer of a very intelligent type. Thus, the old appeals to rational thought had to be replaced with something more visceral that stupider people could appreciate at the intuitive level. It was thus possible to maintain the appearance that people’s decisions were voluntary when really they were being subjected to scientific behaviorism that was pretty much… Read more »
I’m a real midwit, and I saw the same things in the early 90s. The ugliness of rap, the nihilism of grunge, the inability to engage anyone in abstract conversation.
I don’t think it is a matter of intelligence. There is something else that opens one’s eyes to the obvious decline.
People are not governed by their intellects.
You’re right. It’s not intelligence. I have a harder time saying I’m morally superior, but to those who were chanting “Jerry Jerry Jerry” I feel like I am
The show was scripted, albeit very loosely. I rented a shithole apartment in 2008 and a neighbor had a vhs tape of herself on his show. Everything she said on the show was made up and the audience were in on it. I just see a Jewish guy trying to make poor whites look like white trash. People watched it to feel smart and look down on poor whites.
“Shaniqua, is Dontay the father of your baby, or is it Lamont?”
“It be Lamont… he be da baby daddy” [chairs fly]
My judgment of the Jerry show wasn’t so much about the people on the stage, since society’s underbelly has always been there. It was more about the people in the audience. The people watching on tv. Coupled with my perception that the underbelly was growing.
Well all I can said is that if the United States is at a 7/10 for stupid, Canada is at a 14.
Could be alot worse.
I was once a very big fan of the Maple Leafs, although I have stopped watching any and all sportsball. However, I happened to catch a video on the local Toronto news after a recent playoff game in which the Buds had come back to win after trailing by 3 goals. As they interviewed a passel of mystery meats in downtown Toronto, the ringleader proudly recounted how, when the team was down, they had all got together and prayed, “in our own religions. How’s that for diversity!!” What’s worse, brown invaders who assert their own culture at the expense of… Read more »
Well the idea is (and this has been stressed for a long time) that we are a “cultural mosaic” whereas the mean amd racist Americans are a “melting pot” who try and force assimilation. Cultural mosaic meaning they are encouraged to practice their own culture to be one of many pieces in the mosaic. So they can do both assert their own culture at our expense and preach ruling class morality. But in practice, they just regurgitate the ruling class morality and have some empty culture to signal their diverseness (but never keeping the parts the ruling class disapproves of).… Read more »
The “dialogue” continues only until the percentage of Muslims reaches a certain threshold
My guess is that the Islamic Republic of Ontario could be one of the few parts of Canada that will still be livable once Trudeau gets his precious 100 million dirt worlders installed.
Why is that Pozymandias?
“Why is that Pozymandias?”
Just thinking that the mullahs might have a crude but effective way to keep order while the rest of Canada turns into a snowy version of LA. I must admit the image of obnoxious Toronto feminists forced into burkas provides me some amusement too.
Well you should come to Ontario again. The Muslims are currently a minor group compared to the hordes of Indian peasants we’ve let in.
Too bad Jerry Springers not around to host that dialogue between gays and Muslims.
They try hard to make it seem like hockey doesn’t have a 99% white fanbase.
Hockey is a problem because non-whites just aren’t that interested, they haven’t been able to co-opt the game as they have with other communities.
I believe a couple years ago the Leafs paid coloured people to sit in the lowest seats around the glass to make it look more diverse. I noticed that every single person along the glass was a PoC which seemed quite unlikely. And that is no longer the case so I guess it didn’t work out.
Fortunately, or luckily, or purposefully, country music was slain prior to this problem rearing its head
I still can’t get over the towel head they trot out there to cover hockey games on CBC.
It is tragically funny, like watching a clown die.
Lol who is that?
I don’t watch hockey anymore.
For B125:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/hnic-broadcaster-jets-south-asian-heritage-1.6745509
Glad i no longer watch that junk
“Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. ”
I’m not so sure about that. It’s people like that who make a huge effort to look good and to present themselves to others as an image that they think others will desire and admire.
But they have to be missing that little voice in the back of one’s head that keeps saying “You’re just making an ass of yourself, everyone’s laughing at you not with you, no one likes you, no one will ever like you, as soon as you leave the conversation will immediately be about what a loser you are.”
The problem of confluence of more dumb people leading more dumb people is the big Kahuna. Constantly marvel at the relative lack of all important “fund of knowledge” in the last couple internet generations. Nobody reads books. Sat down to watch “Dunkirk” with one of my kids and first question was “what’s Dunkirk?”. So we had a history lesson first. And the kid ain’t dumb, scored a 5 on the AP World test and earned two engineering degrees in 4 years. The teaching of one of my daughters AP US class was so bad I had to co-teach it and… Read more »
Well, average IQ in the west has declined by an average of 14 points over the past 100 years: news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/researchers-western-iqs-dropped-14-points-over-last-180634194.html If you read the final letters of this simple seaman who was executed by the Nazis in WW2, it feels like the average decline is actually 30 points: neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-final-letters-of-a-prisoner-about The capitalist machine serves as the medium which converts difficult to quantify things such as community, trust, positive values, spontaneity, nature — basically the things that make life worth living — into egalitarian flat dystopia. As William S. Burroughs said, “What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life,… Read more »
Informative.
I will add that Billy Burroughs also said something about America being saturated in evil long before the Puritans showed up. (To say nothing of the Anasazi.)
Splains a lot.
Burroughs is one of the great American characters. He had exactly the right background and inclinations to be a world explorer, but he was born too late for that, so he became a degenerate parody of an explorer, traveling the world to find what little remained “dark,” exotic drugs and illegal sex and pre-verbal experience in general. As a Harvard student he was recruited by intelligence, before even the OSS existed, but he rejected their courtship and became a lifelong critic. Hippie/yippie government-conspiracy rhetoric is almost entirely due to his influence—ironic, as “the sixties” were pretty much a US gov’t… Read more »
‘. . . ironic, as “the sixties” were pretty much a US gov’t psyop.’
Yes they were. Mostly run through Naval Intelligence. The elder brother of spookism, one might say.
Living in the Sixties reminds me now of an earlier lurch backwards to paganism and goddess-idolatry, Druidic Britain, in which the songwriters and musicians directed culture, politics and even warfare.
The Anglo West certainly is a neo-druid revival in many respects. With attentive overseers. Just ask the old boys at Bohemian Grove.
P.S. some of you might enjoy Cronenberg’s film take on ‘Naked Lunch’. Not exactly an easily adapted text.
Neoliberal Feudalism: “If you read the final letters of this simple seaman who was executed by the Nazis in WW2…” Having read about 2/3rds or 3/4s of it [I didn’t have the stomach to finish it], I can declare without hesitation that the Nazis did us a world of good by ridding us of the genes for that sort of bizarre charismatic holier-than-thou immanentizing-the-eschaton lunatic sh!tlib personality type. And I can guaran-d@mn-tee you that, were the tables turned, sh!tlib boy would never have bothered to deliver the letters to the Nazi families. [Unless he could have used those letters as… Read more »
All I’m sure of is that the portion of wealth, power, and population, which the people helped build and won, is being taken back via selfishness, consumerism, and political theater. You hear talk of transhumanism, neofeudalism, useless eaters, etc., from elite quarters, and it paints that picture if you take a big step back from it.
I often wonder, though, if it’s not some self-reglating mechanism, where everybody is playing a role they aren’t conscious of. Like a civilization-wide fever to fight off an infection, or something like that.
Could be a way to thin the herd. 7, 8, 9, 10 billion people is way too many. Not because the Earth can’t handle all those humans, but at some point you will get a critical mass of bad or dumb people. Nature finds a way to end overpopulation. If disease won’t do it, then spiteful mutations will.
In 2123, there may be as little as 4 billion people on Earth, with 3/4 of them in Africa. Nature is cruel indeed.
Obesity causes lots of health problems, of course.
I’ll say, though, I don’t see how 3/4 lives in Africa, unless they’re Chinese lol.
God created a garden for humanity, not a city, so I’m not too pessimistic if things going that way.
I would think Africans would be the first to die off, not the last. The Africans simply cannot produce enough food to feed such a large population. They are already beyond what they can self support using African agricultural methods. Africa gets a huge amount of food aid.
Africa, 1900, at <300 million
Their natural limit
Tars is correct
Thus, by nature's "mind", they sent out colonies thru slavery
If there’s a nuclear war Africa and South America are the most likely to be unscathed
Democracy may demand a moral consensus, but who controls the morality? I’d say that the money and organization behind the scenes does. Democracy is just a tool of the oligarchs. They control the money, the political organizations and the media. Therefore, they control who is let into the political system, so they choose only those who agree with their morality, which means that their morality becomes the country’s morality. Voting doesn’t count because we don’t get to vote on the people behind the scenes. Modern democracy with its concentration of power is the best thing to happen to oligarchs in… Read more »
I do not believe the mega-rich are capable of generating their own morality. They’re too consumed with becoming mega-rich. Rather, it is the intellectuals–chiefly in academia–who generate the moral system, which the mega-rich then appropriate and further disseminate.
I guess that a surprising percentage of the mega-rich specifically hate traditional whites and use their power to execute that morality.
For white mega-rich, I’d agree. For the the small hat mega-rich, they provide huge amounts of money to organizations and academia that promote their vision.
You have to remember that the current morality is an off-shoot of Jewish morality/self-interest. Inclusion, immigration, multi-culturalism and the sanctity of minorities didn’t just pop out of nowhere. It was pushed because Jews believe that it helps their tribe.
The foundations of Wokism didn’t grow organically.
I would argue–and have argued–that postmodern theory logically led to promulgation of inclusivity, open borders, multiculti, etc. The Finkels, in turn, recognizing a potentially powerful tool for furthering their own interests, simply made use of it. The Finkels didn’t create pomo–although Derrida, Bauman, Levinas and Cixous helped–but they’ve dam’ sure amplified it.
Yeah, I agree with that. We were laying the groundwork for much of this ourselves, but I’d still say that more than amplified but added and amplified.
Regardless, we’re not children led by the nose by the noses. We have agency. We put ourselves into this spot (even if we pushed along by the tribe), and we can dig ourselves out of it.
There is an interesting discussion on this on YouTube ….
I’ll have to say a name proscribed here, though. The title is something like:
Modern Times: Jordan Petersen and Camille Paglia.
I thought it was worth the hr & 42 min.
Same issue — Where did this mind virus come from?
Zman is likely on the right track with the idea that democracy selects for a sort of mindless conformity among the chattering classes and generally those in the public eye. I nevertheless subscribe to a strict puppet-view of modern governance. It’s that old cliche about the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules. It’s financiers at the top of outfits such as Vanguard and BlackRock who pull society’s most momentous levers, while politicians/ actors/ puppets play out a kind of “power theater” designed to befuddle the masses, a smoke-and-mirrors game magnificently buttressed by the bought-and-paid-for jerkoffs known… Read more »
Wkathman writes, “It’s that old cliche about the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules. It’s financiers at the top of outfits such as Vanguard and BlackRock who pull society’s most momentous levers …” I agree that those with money will always have more power to influence politics than others. If this is always true, then what can be done? I have two answers. First, in a homogenous society, I hope that the rich will identify with the non-rich more than in our current country, and be less inclined to hate or exploit them. Second, as much… Read more »
I agree with you on taxation. If you are a multi-billionaire, you have too much power, plain and simple. No single person, outside of the head of state–preferably a monarch?–should wield that much swat.
Both great idea. I’m all for taxing the rich ’til they squeal. One million dollars would change my life. So why does anyone need more than 10 million, or 100 million? Answer: They don’t. Take it all away and give it to the poor, or build infrastructure, or purchase machine tools…
No one needs more than $10 million. 99 percent tax on all wealth over $10 large.
Be careful what you wish for.
Billionaires will always be able to weasel out of aggressive taxation schemes. They can afford an army of tax attorneys and accountants, after all. Meanwhile, it’s those of more modest wealth and those in the upper middle class who will get caught in the snares of the confiscatory state.
Anyone who can figure out how to construct a system that keeps the moneyed interests from ultimately reigning supreme . . . will be worthy of every honor known to man and then some.
Bernie, is that you?
Wkathman writes, “Anyone who can figure out how to construct a system that keeps the moneyed interests from ultimately reigning supreme . . . will be worthy of every honor known to man and then some.”
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but doesn’t that mean that any attempts at finding a better political arrangement are a waste of time because we are helpless?
Not all of their money goes into conspiculous (or not) consumption – the vast majority goes into stocks, bonds, treasuries, municipals, businesses, etc – in other words, the nation’s capital stock. There are only so many vacations and potato chips they can consume – they don’t dump all their money into Monte Carlo yachts, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t last on the Forbes 500 for long. On the flip side, imagine if they were taxed until they finally left – the country – the middle class, working class, and indigent have very little money to put into the… Read more »
It’s the billionaires who can’t resist the urge to use their wealth to reshape the world to their own personal vision who ruin the image of billionaires. Otherwise, there’s nothing so inherently terrible about being one.
Remove voting for personalities, everyone can be a politican, like jury duty. Only have voters vote on legislation and the budget.
“Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.” Hell, it wasn’t all that long ago that having actually worked a real job was not only a badge of honor but gave the wanna be politician a solid leg up on his non-working opponent. As well he old saying goes, good times make weak men (and women) and that sure as heck seems to be where we find ourselves in this day and age. I guess that means hard times are a… Read more »
One would think having a real job and honorable military service would enhance a political resume, but Bush 1 lost to a dope smoking draft dodger, Al Gore lost to a coke snorting frat boy, then a decorated swift boat skipper lost to the same frat boy, then war-hero McCain lost to a dope smoking race hustler, and sniper dodging Hillary lost to another draft dodger. And note: None of these freaks every had a real job.
[…] The Tyranny Of The Stupid […]
David Felch himself is a tedious and boring person, but I’ve been wondering for a while whether there is a more interesting story about Con.,Inc. behind him. Ever since NR hired him back in the day, I thought that NR’s shadowy backers were really just looking for someone to perform outreach to the “religious Right”. “We need someone to talk the snake-handlers into showing up at the polls for Romney/Jeb/s**t-sandwich and this guy just might be able to do it.” And you can understand it because what other staff NR joker could have done it at the time? “Chubs” Williamson?… Read more »
This seems relevant somehow:
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1660415740355432448
The second guy is even better than the first.
Meet your future colleagues.
Looks more like a future CA senator to me than merely a future colleague.
That’s good old kinesthetic learning right there.
You can take the bunny out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the bunny.
It’s interesting how California might lose as many as five seats in Congress in 2030. California also gained eight seats in 1960 and seven seats in the 1950 and 1990 censuses.
Is there a state that’s seen such a dramatic reversal of fortune? In the Midwest and in some of the southern states (think ms or al) population has been more stable
California has had everything going for it until it dramatically decided to reverse course and squander the hard won plenty engineered into the landscape. It’s incredible, really.
All of these people should be prevented from leaving. These people never learn anything. They are flooding formerly conservative areas and turning them into the same shitholes they fled. They are like a plague of locusts.
They made their bed, they should be forced to lay in it.
is there any definitive data on that? The ones moving to Idaho i’m pretty sure lean republican.
As for the ones moving to Colorado, the conventional wisdom is that the ones moving from CA to CO in the 90s were displaced aerospace types (i.e. republican). But in the past fifteen years, the conventional wisdom is that the ones moving to CO are the new age types.
krustykurmudgeon: This issue has come up multiple times here. A Californian who ‘leans’ repuke is a social liberal and perhaps a fiscal moderate. He still supports trannies; he just doesn’t want his taxes to pay for their surgery. And he and/or his wife invariably finds regulations and spending (on education, public transportation, etc.) to be insufficient in his new state of residence.
I side with Tars. They are a plague.
Wasn’t orange county notorious for being home to a lot of john birch style conservatives? Obviously, orange county is more moderate now, but I assume that’s because the bircher types moved to Idaho or Arizona.
Recently, there were a lot of people moved to Colorado, from all over, solely for the legalized weed.
“is there any definitive data on that? The ones moving to Idaho i’m pretty sure lean republican.” Patterns have emerged. The red flags are 1. telecommuter/pensioner, who is insulated from the consequences of his politics wherever he goes, and 2. moving to a large city. Socialism is very much a social religion; they can’t handle independent life requiring know-how. If the Californian moving next door to you is visibly undamaged, works a real job and has interests such as gardening that Agenda 2030 wouldn’t like, then he’s probably okay. The root problem is that people would rather blame outsiders than… Read more »
When a person moves to a new state, there should be a period of time, 5 years for example, before they are allowed to vote or participate in local politics. It takes time to unlearn old habits and learn about new people and places. You should also lose your vote in your previous home area when you move, as it no longer applies to you.
Tars, I was reading something recently that suggested most of the blue state expats were of a more traditional or “conservative” bent and were making red states redder and leaving the blue states bluer. I recall Texas and Florida were purple a dozen years ago and predicted to be blue by the mid 2020s. They seem to be trending red now. Do you think this is a hiccup or is it possible that this is a trend that maybe has legs. Admittedly I lean toward this being a new facet of “The Great Sorting”… but you’ve always had interesting takes… Read more »
I’ve heard, though I haven’t put much effort into finding out for certain that places like Denver and Austin and cities in Idaho are shifting left because of immigration from California. I suppose it could be right wingers sick and tired of being outvoted in California, but that doesn’t seem likely.
please keep in mind that cali was flooded with east coast aholes for decades. then when real-estate exploded in the 70’s, good folks started cashing out and heading back east. a very sad story indeed.
@karl – what part of cali was settled by east coasters? I know that in places like Maywood, El Monte, Bell Gardens etc – a lot of the population that settled there initially were from midwest and border states.
The census is at least as rigged as the elections, if not moreso. In plain sight. NY is currently overrepresented, both in Congress and the EC. Something tells me they’ll find a way to do it again in 2030.
Do you think that California will lose seats in the long run, now that illegal foreign nationals can be counted for seat appropriation?
@penitent – if we were apportioning for just whites – California started losing people in the 90s, maybe even as early as the 1970s.
We’re at the point now where even the immigrant influx is enough to offset that. The state has lost 400K people since the 2020 census
Those at the top of the government/business machine* see themselves as “ranchers” and people as head of cattle. It doesn’t bother them if their “legacy” herd are fleeing. They know the planet is full of miserable people. As long as they can transport the human cattle somehow they will be able to fully rent out their overpriced, run-down apartment building full of bedbugs right under the flight path next to the airport. The idiotically simple strategy of packing as many low quality hominids into the zones they control is just far more profitable than anything else they could think of… Read more »
CA, IL, NY, MA are all losing their “heritage” populations. They’re also all “sanctuary” states and are counting on the new arrivals to keep the balls in the air for a little bit longer.
Hang around academics long enough and you will be introduced to new types of stupid. They can talk themselves into, or out of, some ridiculous ideas, and then shout down anyone daring to have a dissenting opinion. The best are those ranging far outside their chosen fields of, uh, expertise. Their secret methods, honed in faculty lounges, allow dissection of arcana unknown to mere mortals.
Ask them again the next day to see if they still hold to their views.
Reminds me of an episode of the tng Star trek where the crew encounter a spaceship of morons. They bring over some help and constantly demanding, you’re smart, you fix things. (How they got that far in space is never really explained).
This is where we are at now. Demanding millions in reparations for the useless class. Cozy sinecures for the fembots in the workplace. And all the while the mediocrities of our supposed elite class operating the biggest grift ever perpetrated on a populace. You know, the feckless media morons and elected co-conspirators.
Pakleds! There is a difference between intelligence and cunning. Ravens and coyotes are cunning and opportunistic. But they cannot gather the eggs, nor milk the cows, nor bake the bread. I read a short story once about a group of “persons” who did not want wars to continue and simply decided they had had enough and they stopped working, no protesting, no demands, no explanations, the bus drivers, bakers, truckers, bank tellers, grocery clerks etc, all simply stayed home. There was no stated goal and no time frame as to when they would resume work. By the end of the… Read more »
Maybe they were the “elites” that Elon gave first tickets to on his spaceship to Mars.
There was, I believe, a Heinlein novel in the same vein. Read as kid. A massive space ship that was sending humans on a multi decade trip. Some sort of revolt killed the trained crew and the subsequent generations fed all the books in the “converter” to provide energy. Just a huge rotating cylinder of morons with no idea how they got there or where they were going….
Not sure I agree with the concluding sentence, “Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.” Privation is a wonderful focuser and winnower.
When you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from, you don’t have time or patience for genderfluid trans-demonic pedophiles, and you don’t have any trouble figuring out whether masses of foreigners streaming into your territory, competing for that next meal, is a good thing.
In which case, the masses probably replace democracy with another, more autocratic form of government. And to the extent democracy is permanently banished, the enstupidation may indeed be arrested.
Right, wigs and sequins don’t take precedence over bread and clean water. Besides, it too hard to walk miles in high heels with a load of faggots (/) for the fire.
I think it is fair to say the FDR Great Depression period was the most progressive in our history and where a lot of the problems originate. Society is collapsing unevenly. We have about 23 million people addicted to drugs and alcohol. We are having over 100k opiate OD deaths a year. We have armies of homeless people (there is overlaps between the addicted people and homeless). We have the “urban” ghettos. Some of these people would exist no matter the state of society, but many are the former working and middle class. We have millions who have just given… Read more »
I live in a semi-rural Florida county. I’m surprised by how many (I’m assuming) homeless, or at least vagabonds, we have here. In Capital City I’m not surprised to see a handful during business hours; they will use the PCs in the library and so forth. In fairness, the ones I see are well behaved and clean given their social state. Also helps the police station is nearby. Since I drive several miles the same route most days, and foot traffic is relatively infrequent, I’ve even gotten to know at least one of the local bums by sight. More suprisingly,… Read more »
I would think the weather doesn’t help. While the rest of the country freezes and has snow and freezing rain, Florida is quite pleasant, at least during the late fall/winter/early spring.
In my experience, you can tell who the ruffians are, at least after a few years of the ruff lifestyle by sight. They get a very distinct hard look about them. There are a few youtube channels with videos of junkies walking around Kensington in Philadelphia. Most of them have that look.
French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.
I long for the day when I see the Zman and David French sharing a debate stage … or an MMA cage. Either is good. Maybe a Thunderdome scenario. French has Ben Shapiro riding on his back. “Master Blaster runs bartertown!”
Somewhere the oleaginous rumpswab is seething with fury and stroking his therapy dog.
I would guess he’s more of a cat person.
or maybe gerbils.
Richard Gere couldn’t be reached for a comment.
I might replace “stupid” with “docile”. Like our ancient ancestors who domesticated wild cattle, the system is selecting for docility. I don’t think David French or Mitch McConnell or Ben Shapiro are stupid. Just docile. They are like kept bulls roaming around the fields all day, with nothing much better to do than wander towards the nearest food source.
“ None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true.” Dutton’s schtick is to take a concept and “run with it” to make a point. Keep the science and ref’s to a minimum—especially on a YT video—but get the point across for the lay scientist/viewer. When he was teamed up with Woodley, Woodley would rein him in with more elaboration of documented scientific grounding and studies. Woodley has his place too and some of his paper presentations are quite good, but then again I developed a taste… Read more »
Science progresses through outlandish claims — some of which turn out to be true. That’s why the current dogmatic peer-reviewed and grant-grubbing model that heavily favors pleasing the mainstream consensus and the powers-that-be is poison to science.
Compsci…….Additionally, an important concept in evolutionary biology that explains much and is often ignored. Accumulation of heavy mutational overload. The later half of the 19th century gave rise to better sanitation and better doctoring. The development of chlorine, other disinfectants like iodine, the knowledge for doctors to wash their hands instead of sticking dirty hands into an open wound, and sanitation. Development of water treatment. At the turn of the century, 4-5 out of every 10 kids under age 5 died. By 1920, most people were staying alive, and the parlor (where Uncle Henry was laid out for the wake)… Read more »
I think of the African population explosion in terms of all the aid, direct and indirect, the latter no doubt greater, that the white west has poured into the place. If they’d just had the sense to leave the place alone, it never would have happened.
Jeffrey Zoar: Not just Africa. Without the ‘green revolution,’ we wouldn’t have been blessed with all the H-1Bs from India. Or all the Han pseudo scientific geniuses. White pathological altruism along with White medical and agricultural science and technology caused and enabled the third world’s population explosion, reducing our share of the world’s population from 28% in 1950 to a bare 9% today.
Keep your eye on our star, the sun. This is worth 2.2 minutes of your time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5nJAqije-Q
Range Fault, excellent summary. As to: “Prior to the turn of the century, the herd was culled quickly of weak immune systems and also low IQ as our brain is 84% of the human genome.” I might also point out that this society has progressed in the last 50 years into one where IQ is *more* important than ever before in the survival and prosperity of the average citizen. A technological society requires much more “smarts” than an agrarian society. We are definitely screwed as “we need even more of and simultaneously produce less of”. In there we perhaps will… Read more »
A political story from the weekend that may be an example of this. Both South Dakota Senators are endorsing Tim Scott for President. South Dakota is a small state with a June primary, there is no chance this helps Scott in any way. Thune even made the old joke that he told Scott he would come out for him or against him, whatever helped the most. There is no chance Scott is still in the field when votes are cast in South Dakota. What is the point of doing this? It is purely regime signaling that Thune and Rounds stand… Read more »
Thune got a big stiffy watching the check cash in his PAC, I’m guessing.
Scott should be forced to stay on the ballot in South Carolina.
If the pendulum has swung over the decades to having safety rescue the flawed, stupid genes of people who wouldn’t be breeding, then it should reverse itself as the stupid people, now in control, make the world far more dangerous and unsafe. Perhaps fentanyl is already doing this. Our streets are awash in drugs because our moral democracy thinks its helping people by giving them food and half way houses rather than doing hard time in slammer going cold turkey. We don’t even question the issue of having drug addicts around anymore, they’re a fixture under every other overpass. So… Read more »
Air Shanequa and like ventures will take a lot of intelligent people out, too, at least initially. Natural selection will kick in when the consequences of AS are predictable.
Iligal drugs are only a tip of an isberg in this country. The real problem is the legal drugs. They are all over.
and have been since the mid 1800’s; re: laudanum.
Ol’ doc Adams was one of the earliest dealers.
It would really make my Monday if French gets a notification he was mentioned in an article on the internet and comes on over and tries to prove he’s not a oleaginous rumpswab!
Mr. Whipple: “Please don’t squeeze the French!”
The Z Blog: come for the politics, stay for the adjectives.
“Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.” Dutton also says poverty will break up polities, such as the EU and US. Some of the new entities then may not be democratic.
People talking about prophetic fictional dystopias: “1984!” “Brave New World!” “The Time Machine!”
Me: “The Marching Morons.” (followed closely by Idiocracy, which is really just The Marching Morons updated with pop culture references and no “final solution.”)
BNW and MM don’t seem all that mutually exclusive
The parallel decline of morals has multiplied the force of stupidity. The old rules and religion at least kept people under some semblance of control. Free from all moral restraint, the stupid are running amok.
The job of the politician now is to justify and “woke-wash” on Sunday morning all the moronic travesties perpetrated Saturday night.
I’ve come to the conclusion that for at least 1/3 of the population, perhaps more, the highest moral value, the one to which all the other values are subservient, is partying til dawn/casual sex. And a lot of our societal problems are downstream from that.
I’m not saying that partying til dawn shouldn’t have a place, but it shouldn’t be first place
“Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles.”
And now smart people are forced at gunpoint to pay for stupid people to reproduce. Working whites receive almost nothing in government services even as they pay the majority of taxes. Meanwhile, Laquisha gets subsidized housing, food, and medical care.
George Floyd had what? Five kids? But at least they’re grateful, right?
There’s no way this is sustainable. Eventually the system will collapse, and reality will reassert itself. But how and when? That’s the trillion-dollar question.
You know what you sound like? Some privileged white guy with a high credit score. Time for serious introspection sir.
We all know so-called “merit” is just a figleaf for white supremacy.
It would be good for a laugh to know how many Shanequas claimed to be a Floyd baby mama between the settlement checks clearing and the bulk wig, 40’s, and Kool purchases.
I’ve been laughing at the acrimonious break-up between the Netflix showrunners of The Witcher series and actor Henry Cavill. Cavill is the rare actor who isn’t the kind of moron Z describes above. Before taking the role he read all the books, played all the games, and was promised that the series would be faithful to the source material. Then Netflix hired woke producers who hated the source material and decided they could write better stories. When Cavill objected, they were shocked that an actor could be so “problematic”. He’s been replaced by a useful idiot and the unwoke fans… Read more »
We really need to stop making things easier for the dummies. They’ve made so many tools to make things like programming easier that now we have retarded pajeets who have convinced management they know how to program. The resultant bloatware just gets worse and worse every year.
Computers were more fun back when things were still done with a command line instead of a GUI. It gatekept the retards quite well.
Natural language AI interfaces will probably make you dream of the good ole days of GUIs. God only knows what disasters will be perpetrated by midwits with AI.
> God only knows what disasters will be perpetrated by midwits with AI.
Not a whole lot because the midwits are also the ones running the AI.
I saw a remark by Wang recently vis-a-vis “Blacks don’t like running institutions” but that of course other POC’ers from the Global South have an idea of how they’d like to do that— where I am (west coast) the subcons seem to be champing at the bit to take over. Our institutions therefore will not be merely differently racially tinged, they’ll be an insecure overeducated Brahmin woman’s idea of a school play where she casts the black woman as her CEO and the witty gay guy as the chief theological officer. Further to your analogy of politics to theater/“narrative arts”… Read more »
> Our institutions therefore will not be merely differently racially tinged, they’ll be an insecure overeducated Brahmin woman’s idea of a school play where she casts the black woman as her CEO and the witty gay guy as the chief theological officer.
I’d say we’re already there. The managerial state, where no one really runs anything, has more-or-less reached it’s final form. We’re now slouching towards the Therapeutic State, where you get all of the above alongside the psychic destruction of all ideas of agency in your mind in the name of mental health.
I think it was Parks and Recreation that had a hilarious scene where a local politician gave a resounding speech through a teleprompter, then retired to an empty room to stare at the blank wall. The horrified onlookers asked his handler whether this was normal, and it was explained he’s the ideal politician, as he will just obey like a robot and has no outside thoughts or interests.
It’s not a coincidence that truly good orators are almost immediately labeled as fascists. Anyone who can speak off-the-cuff without putting everything through committee is seen as a threat.
Yes. Ron Burgundy would be an ideal politician.
Of course, none of this is new. It was all outlined and written about by Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides almost 2500 years ago. If you read The Republic as Plato outlines how a government devolves into tyranny, he could just as well be writing today. Thucydides warned against sleazy smooth-talked grifters like Alcibiades, but today you cannot go very far in government without behaving and thinking like him. What percentage of leaders in our sacred democracy have read any of these books, even in translation? It used to be required of any educated man, but nowadays, they don’t have to.… Read more »
Yep Mycale, great observation. Does anybody else *cringe* when commentators and politicians use/quote examples from modern movies and such to explain/illustrate moral problems and solutions?
What else is daily life in AINO but one big cringe?
I have an impossible time ascribing that one NATO tweet to the side of the victors
“Idiocracy” is a prophecy. We’re in it now, with Green Energy playing the part of Brawndo.
It’s got ELECTROLYTES!
Not like water. From out the toilet.
i can’t link it from this computer but there’s a revolver essay called “Beyond Parody: The World of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy Would Be An Improvement”.
Yes, our current idiocracy, unlike Judge’s, is blighted by diversity, which not only makes everything function worse, it makes it look and sound worse, too.
“Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus.”
Cyril Kornbluth or Mike Judge, please pick up the White Courtesy Phone. Cyril Kornbluth or Mike Judge, please pick up the White Courtesy Phone.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51233/pg51233-images.html
Hey, maybe Elon Musk’s plans to go to Mars are a cover to solve the Pop-Prob by sending people to Venus.
Dick Johnson to the front desk please. Mike Hunt is waiting for you. Dick Johnson to the front desk please. Dick Johnson to the front desk. Mike Hunt is waiting for you.
Oh what I wouldn’t give to be able to prank the Trust and Safety Officer like that.
Alas, in this day and age, all of us are Ben Dover, and the archons of the Power Structure are named Innis Reardon.
Let’s hope he succeeds in shipping out all the morons and canaille before they colonise Uranus.
I just asked ChatGPT to summarize this story for me, and it kept on LYING, LYING, LYING…
It essentially fabricated a new story…