Speaking of the acme of Western Civilization, Bruce Charlton continues to present convincing evidence that we are indeed getting stupider. Nick Land agrees ominously.
The first issue of Dark Matter Journal is up. And duly linked over on the bloggy roll. I see it as the higher IQ and longer attention span version of Theden. These two, taken together with the idiosyncratic yet magisterial Radish form the three-scoop sundae of reactionary public interfacing deliciousness.
Handle on the Criminal Justice System:
They say that fear comes from ignorance, but the more you actually witness the inner workings of the system, the more justifiably terrified you become of the nightmarish prospect of ever being caught up in it.
I actually doubt that the net flow of fear comes from genuine ignorance, but I imagine educated, and thereby putatively non-ignorant, people have a quite swollen and tender fear of vast swathes of what they imagine to be “ignorant” people. Which is why the impulse to “educate” them, i.e., bring them under “our” control, is as overwrought as it is useless.
Moldbug pens Крокодил Prayer.
When deciding whether or not to get on History’s “right side”, Malcolm Pollack asks the all important question: History? How many divisions does he have?
I really don’t have a horse in The Ukraine. (Really. I don’t own a horse at all.) But the world would be a whole lot better, safer, and more prosperous place if everyone who doesn’t have a horse somewhere could somehow, pretty please, stop managing to concoct these huge rats’ asses full of concern for where their horses ain’t.
If anyone has the tiniest pang of doubt that Moldbug’s suggestion that the phrase “International Community” can be globally replaced by “US State Department” with no significant loss of meaning, please listen again to how Cathedral apparatchiks talk when they think no one is listening (Thanks Jim!).
Henry Dampier is fabulous (and I mean that it a totally non-gay way)…
The libertarian in me wants to make a point about how interest rates are really important and that this is just the sort of thing [schlocky amoral literature] that happens when you suppress them through state policy. This is true. But the culture that wants to do those things is the prime mover in this.
Cart of interest rates, meet your Horse.
Brock Landers’ boy paints a couple of pictures of the Student Loan Industrial Complex, one a portrait and the other a sweeping landscape. Also do not miss this delightful rant on the stupidity of believing food labels are a cure for stupidity. (It’s an order or two of magnitude less believable than the proposition that education can cure it.)
And now for a brief word on PUAs, sluts, and wanking (please cover the ears of children and the easily offended)…
Not exactly from this week but… this is Laidnyc turning over a new leaf. It’s a strange way of phrasing it, to be sure. Every road into Jerusalem is also a road out of it, and all that. But which way on that road is Laidnyc going? (And I pick on him only because I sense a genuine, if yet grossly defective, regard for reactionary principles.) It is hard to say.
Here’s the deal—the reactionary deal—wanking to porn and banging sluts are not the same disorder, but they are both disorders. You don’t get much reactionary credit for not wanking to porn if instead you directed that energy, probably a whole lot more, into banging sluts. To be fair, banging sluts involves significantly more skill, status, and wit than wanking to porn. A slut banger is therefore likely much higher functioning than the porn wanker. Maybe The Reaction® has some use for him.
But like the porn wanker, the slut banger is still ruled by his dick, and that is deficiency in self mastery which, tho’ commonplace, makes him quite suspect—ironically suspect pretty much in proportion to the oh-so-validating notch count, not because he marginally fscked up society a bit more (ice cube on a glacier, sure), but because he dramatically, not marginally, fscked up himself.
Excusing the slut banging by reason of the existence of sluts (which is undeniable), is a third sort of disorder—which happens to be identical in every meaningful way to excusing wanking by reason of the existence of porn (also undeniable).
The Reaction® is looking for a Few Good Men—the Gooder, the better. You think I am going to give up my virgin daughter to a man one step up from a wanker—a wanker as it were with status, looks, and some skillz? Ummm… no. Sluts shall be shamed, early, often, and possibly for life in the reactionary world. But cads shall be hanged.
If you, by the grace of Nature or Nature’s God or both, can find it within yourself to identify your deficiencies, stop excusing them, and do something the hell about them, then I think there’s yet a place for you at the table of The Reaction®. Otherwise you are a traitor to our thedes; enjoy the decline indeed… you’re gonna need it.
All I got time for… Keep on Reactin’. Keep reading Theden (and Dark Matter… and Radish). TRP… Over. And. Out!
No point in hanging cads until women are first brought under control. The natural state of feral women is to have sex with the top ten percent or so, which would be OK if their perception of the top ten percent was sound, but they tend to go for low IQ thugs.
Your daughter is not going to be a virgin in this society.
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Good for the world. As an omega male, with no prospect of anything but wanking or sluts, I don’t care; in fact, I would prefer to see more violence. It’s entertaining, and if it’s sufficiently destructive, in the fallout I might either die or end up with a woman. Let’s go WWIII; I demand burning oil fields at least.
Democracy doesn’t effectively distribute power. All those young men running around in Nazi shirts supporting the revolootion to bring the Jewish banker to power? They didn’t have that much power either. But volunteering for a violent protest does give them social status above and beyond the social status they could get by volunteering for a non-violent protest, or merely door-to-door activism, or merely voting in an election.
We keep hearing about how having a king would be great, and by we, I mean the royal we. But realistically, having a king and an aristocracy would mean that I would have to recognize that someone is better than me. Tough sell. Easier to make things incomprehensible and let people think they’re higher status than they actually are. Not to mention, I have a fairly high IQ, so in such a system I have a realistic claim to superiority.
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Jim, your opinion is always welcome here as well as far and wide. But I think you underestimate the amount of control I maintain over the reproductive decisions of females under my care. You could of course be right, but so far, so good.
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Peppermint, I’m gonna invoke a bit of the (still wet and blurry) reactionary oath here and give you a swift kick in the pants… There. Feel better?
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Thanks for linking. A guide to raising daughter in the modern wastelands would be appreciated.
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“The Reaction® is looking for a Few Good Men—the Gooder, the better. ”
Why? Unless there’s a military coup, none of your ideas has the slightest possibility of being implemented. It’s all theoretical. PUA’s and wankers can theorize as well as you can.
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SOBL: hope that wouldn’t jinx it…
Hard Right. Bullshit, I and 1000s of unnamed and unknown men like me have implemented reactionary principles in their own homes and voluntary orgs. So no. It’s not all theoretical. You’re the one stuck apparently in a modern, power-politics way of thinking: it either “gets implemented”, i.e., state- or nation- or world-wide or else its “theoretical”. Again: Bullshit. We reject politics. By name. We are not building a movement to affect power politics, but building an institution built of people, coherent, strongly moored, and infinitely resistant to progressivism.
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I’m not convinced by Charlton’s argument (just on the link above) nor do I believe the inference from reaction times to general IQ decline is well estimated (if A is a correlative proxy for B, and if we think A changed, then we can guess B changed, too, but with far less confidence). But I speak from ignorance. I haven’t read his original reaction time work.
However, I have spent time in math departments and can offer opposing anecdotes, the most interesting of which is expansion. Math departments in1900-1950 were small in size and in (across the country) number. They are now large in both with the expected diminution of average success and talent (this, of course, is vigorously denied by officialdom).
The guys now at the top (and it’s 99% men at the top) have to deal with increased bureaucracy, increased workloads, and a completely different method of funding. Vastly more time nowadays is spent writing grants to pay salaries of not only the professors but graduate students, too. All this adds up to less time spent thinking and the concomitant loss of interesting results. Paradoxically, because of the reward system, productivity actually increases, as measured by paper outputs; but these papers are shallower, repetitive, and they choke the system.
Then the kind of results mathematicians favor have changed. The old questions, many of which are still unanswered, aren’t seen as interesting and so fewer people work on them, and if fewer work on them, then there is a smaller chance of solving them. You can’t get quick papers out of hard questions, so you pick easier ones (this goes back to your time horizon argument). Finally, math is (in many branches) cumulative. As time passes more must be learnt before one can add new things.
Well, now I have to do my homework and read Charlton’s main work.
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Briggs, I certainly hope “we’re” not getting actually stupider. I think there are really two questions of import: 1) is population average intelligence going down?; 2) is the intelligence of the smart fraction going down? These both play a role presumably in almost every measure of well being, but it is probably the latter that is more of long-term concern, since that is the population which will make the great technological breakthroughs.
Culture, in this case bureaucratization (which is a species of egalitarianism, i.e., leftism), weighs heavily on what we may do with our intelligence in both the average and smart fraction cases. Nothing would please me more than to find that it is purely these cultural pathologies that hold us back. Tho they are well entrenched, it would seem they are easier to cure than genetic pathologies.
I am loathe to trumpet a verdict either way on genotypic intelligence, but believe we should pursue social policies that at least first do no harm to it!
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@peppermint
Your not the only one. A tilde wave is coming and the results won’t be pretty.
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@Briggs and Nick
High IQ is moderately correlated with logical consistency. Hi IQ and stupid are perfectly possible. It’s called dysrationalia.
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Have any arguments about me publishing this on my twitter?
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All publicity is good publicity Brett.
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