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I’m fond of referencing Razib Khan’s observation–and auguring–about how we haven’t had our Sulla… yet. Trust in institutions, and the processes of those institutions, is plummeting. Across the Western world it increasingly feels as though every dispute involves bad blood. Good faith disagreements are the exception.
Do not expect millennials or Zs to arrest that trend. Expect them to accelerate it, on both sides of the political chasm and in every fissure all the way down into the abyss.
First, percentages of Clinton voters who agree that the House should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, by age. The poll was conducted in October and November of 2018. “Unsure” responses are excluded:
And the percentages of Trump voters who say the president should fire Robert Mueller, again by age range with the unsure excluded:
Tangentially, here’s R-I commissioning an embarrassingly bad trolling expedition, one that is trolling for the answer the organization wants (and gets, with 76% supporting to 18% opposing). Even the accompanying graphic is designed to manipulate middle Americans:
The question is especially germane in light of Trump’s recent ‘threat’ to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship. But attaching “or naturalized” gives the game away. The first definition of naturalized from thefreedictionary.com:
1. To grant full citizenship to (one of foreign birth).
Most Americans think those who have been granted citizenship are in fact US citizens. Shocker! Ask if the children of illegal aliens should automatically be granted citizenship if they are born in the US and the results will be much different.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
If we're going to predict events based on ancient Rome, perhaps it is time to compare the strategic vulnerability of Rome's aqueducts to electrical grids in the context of government policies as they impact populations of rural men supplying the bulk of the military personnel.
Just sayin…
As support for your argument you quote respondents by age to the questions of whether Trump should be impeached for young Dems, should Mueller be fired for young GOP/RW types.
This is the support for your leap to Sulla.
No, it isn't any such thing Sir. You are grasping not at straws but at the shadows of straws.
I have no objection to a Sulla, indeed I have no objection to whatever price of victory/survival. Especially if the price is to be suffered by our enemies.
However you Sir are picking gnat shit out of pepper and holding it up as evidence.
No Sir.
I suggest you drop the polls and data and try living amongst us for a year.
Like the Nate Silvers of the world you will be shocked at how data lies – LIES – data LIES more Sir than scientific Marxism.
Good Day.
Current Year America and First Century BC Rome share a common situation that is anything but superficial. Just as Rome was an unchallenged hyperpower in the Mediterranean after besting Carthage, the US enjoys global hegemony which can only be resisted at the local level, but except for the odd 9/11, American domestic security cannot be seriously challenged.
Even so, the Romans could recognize there would be serious strategic threats emerging. The Teutons demonstrated that hordes of Germans were up north, formidable in combat, and ready to move south. Crassus met his end against the Parthians, and it was evident that Alexander's victory in the east would not be replicated.
Today, the US is seeing the Southwest and California become ever less American by the month. Unlike others here (whom I respect!), I don't see a break up of the US along red/blue state lines as being very likely, or a break up along racial lines being in the cards, but I do see much of the country becoming less American, and if trends are not reversed, then it is very likely that holding the country together will become ever less feasible.
China also becomes more economically, technologically, and militarily potent by the year. They can no more sack DC than the Parthians could sack Rome, but bear in mind that after losing the Western Empire, Constantinople was nearly taken by the Sassanids.
Of course, this is an especially noxious place for a country to be in. There are no major outside security threats over the short term, but huge security risks lay ahead. Meanwhile, instead of pulling together and addressing the problems, much of the population is content to agitate against its various components.
For all the problems there are in the world, I've never seen much evidence that American and European SJWs see them as a threat to their own countries. After seeing ISIS, their reaction was to let in Syrian refugees! Would a country concerned about the rise of China spend its time worrying about trannies in bathrooms?
Bear in mind, the Roman Republic solved this issue for two hundred years by forming the Principate. De facto autocratic rule, the Emperor's powers checked only by his own security detail, but with an institutional Republican veneer.
Of course, this did not last. In the Crisis of the Third Century, the Empire buckled under changing conditions and its own internal tensions, and both the Germans and Sassanid Persians proved to be far tougher than their predecessors two centuries prior.
What emerged was the Dominate, in which Emperors didn't even pretend to preserve the old Republican ways. The population was simply too servile and just plain cucked to withstand their foes. The cucked late Romans wanted to give those poor Gothic refugees safety from those mean Huns!
As such, we currently find ourself in a position with elements of both the late Republic and the Crisis of the Third Century.
I'm not a huge fan of the Rome parallels but part of me wonders if we're a lot further along in the history of Rome than a Sulla or the Gracchi. In our accelerated timeline, I often wonder if someone like Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Caesar of America and Bill Clinton was the Trajan of America where Pax Americana hit its peak much. Then ever since then it's a slow and steady decline. No President will be able to enjoy the power that Bill Clinton did. Hillary would act more like a petty tyrant and would be completely unable to maintain existing alliances, much like how Obama's time in office saw one foreign policy disaster after another.
The Rome parallels often don't hold up but it's one to consider: we started behaving a lot more like an Empire under FDR's watch so any discussions of Sulla might be moot as we're too far down the road of maintaining the crumbling Pax Americana. Rather than plan for who will be Sulla or Caesar, we're probably going to need to prepare for who will be Elagabalus. It's due to happen this century if the LGBTBBQWTFLOL+ continue to get their way.
Birthright citizenship is America's self-destruct button.
Jim,
A military coup against Red State America would involve some military casualties (if it didn't end in outright mutiny). A coup against Blue State America would be over in a couple of weeks, ending in some combination of mass surrender or mass starvation.
Anon,
The hyperbole is intentional because I think the likelihood of massive eruptions of violence are highly unlikely. There is little taste for it. Waco was a big scandal 25 years ago that took an anachronistic reworking of OKC to be made to go away. That was at a time when violence against civilians was more tolerable (and rates of violent crime much higher) than today. And city police forces are much more formidable today than a generation ago.
Sid,
Nuclear weapons can make stretching the analogies difficult. Otoh, the idea of pitched military battles has plenty of utility, it's just that what were fought between soldiers then are now fought between wombs and migration today. And as you probably recall, I'm schizophrenic when making Rome/America comparisons.
Re: Crassus, I've long had Bill Gates as our analog to Crassus in my head. Lots of name recognition, lots of wealth, did some impressive things, but never really managed to earn the same affection Warren Buffet did. Gates' floundering in sub-Saharan Africa is Crassus' ill-fated campaign in Parthia.
Random Dude,
Or maybe we're a bit past that, with Trump being our Aurelian, a transitional figure who is a little too early for his time but who presages the coming of Diocletian. Then again it's easy to see us having passed all that, too… you're correct, of course, about the difficulty of the comparisons!
Anon,
There are a lot of candidates, but it's in the running.
Feryl,
Here's Agnostic's dreamgirl railing on about living wages and populist economics again!
Working-class concerns in the modern Democrat party are second fiddle at best, sort of like family values were to the GOP in the 80s and 90s (… and today)–it's not the driving force.
AE,
Nuclear weapons have changed the game decisively, but we don't know what the future of nuclear warfare will be. In the coming decades, advanced missile defense technology might mean that having nukes but lacking sophisticated delivery systems is meaningless. Look at what happens when Hamas fires their baby rockets at Israel – they're shot down by the Iron Dome. They might shoot off a thousand rockets to kill five Israelis.
That kind of missile defense technology would be an order of magnitude more difficult to apply to intercepting nuclear missiles, but AI gets better every second. I think that's one reason why Kim Jung-un has been reaching out for deals abroad and softening tensions with South Korea.
My view on America/Rome comparisons is that you'll never find a one-to-one correspondence, but it's helpful to look for parallels. I think Rome and America faced many of the same problems when Carthage and the USSR fell respectively – greater infighting, less bonhomie and internal cohesion, more posturing for attention and spoils. To make matters worse, it's acknowledged that threats are to emerge, so that increases the fearfulness and stakes of the infighting, as on some level people acknowledge it can't last forever.
I think Bill Gates's problem is that people acknowledge him as a great businessman but no one really likes the role he played in computers. He was talented enough at software that he could lead a software firm, and smart enough that he could win the game. But beyond that, Microsoft products are resented and have no cache. I hate Google as much as the next guy, but I usually use Google Docs for my kind of freelancing work assignments because I don't want to pay a $125 annual fee for Microsoft Office.
Someone compared Bezos to Crassus in a previous thread, and that deserves its own discussion at a later time.
Here's Agnostic's dreamgirl railing on about living wages and populist economics again!"
For what it's worth, "think of the immigrants" is befitting the current victim mania. These victim manias occur every 15 years or so, and take a little over 5 years to peter out. In the later 1950's, it was hysteria about communism taking people over (in reality, very few Americans ever had strong USSR sympathies). In the early 1970's, it was feminist BS about men all being horny predators. In the later 80's, it was hysteria about child abuse ("think of the children") and the occult. Agnostic likes to point out that people were openly derisive about communism hysteria in the 60's, lost interest in radfeminism in the late 70's and early 80's, and became much skeptical about claims of sexual abuse in the early 90's (as in, Clarence Thomas' accuser in 1991 was taken less seriously than Kavanaugh's has been in the current hysterical climate, whereas if Thomas had been nominated in the mid-late 80's, people would've been more credulous)
"Working-class concerns in the modern Democrat party are second fiddle at best, sort of like family values were to the GOP in the 80s and 90s (… and today)–it's not the driving force."
It's up to elites and older people to stop the corruption and ideological rigidity. AOC, not unlike Trump, is a crypto-populist restrained by the reigning political and cultural climate of the day. Which, I hasten to add, is determined almost entirely by the super elite. Bernie and Trump voters already demonstrated that the lion's share of normies want populist economics (to the point of ignoring Bernie and Trump's indifference or clumsiness toward ID politics and culture war distractions). It's mainly the elite and Boomers (who still form over like 70% of the financial elite, along with the fading Silents) who are obsessive cranks about enforcing neo-liberal orthodoxy and their cultural hobby horses. How much more evidence do we need that on average, X-ers and Milllennials are sick and tired of the corruption? We want more to be done, instead of just pablum about muh values and muh freedom (which, on an economic level, is what even many liberal Boomers are still fixated on; they absolutely are dead set against progressive taxes, re-unionizing, price controls, protectionism and the like; were this not so, society would have turned away from reactionary Darwnism already. And over and over again, the Boomers have shouted their hostility to the growingly progressive and intellectual streak that American society had in the 1950's and 60's thanks to the GI generation. Lowered immigration levels are also a needed protectionist measure for native workers, but sorry to disappoint the Alt-Right, but in American history the periods of lowest immigration have coincided with the strongest bursts of Leftism. The current "woke" Left are actually capitulating to pressure from the crony capitalist elties; where are the mass protests against Walmart, Amazon, et al? They really are offering neo-liberalism with a nominally kinder gloss, hardly the sort to install a government that even approaches America's highly Leftist culture of the 1950's-1970's, let alone attempts to create a socialist-communist utopia.
Also, again I have to tsk tsk the "conservatives" who claim that America has been a liberal country for 50 years. True liberals, if they had their druthers, would never have begun militarizing police in the 1980's. They wouldn't have so harshly criminalized drugs and crime in general beginning in the 80's. They wouldn't have allowed the hostility towards artists and intellectuals that the Boomers have favored their whole lives. They wouldn't have allowed taxes on rich people to stay so low for 35 years. They wouldn't have annihilated the private sector unions.
It's precisely the conservative fixation on "freedom" that's made homosexuality socially acceptable, and given us high immigration levels. Conservatives don't want anybody to be told what to do, period. Superficially, this means greater opportunities to accumulate wealth and absolve oneself of most social responsibilities, yet it also in the long-term means weaker ability to stop perversion and corruption. Not even Reagan and the Christian Right were capable of stopping homosexual officials in the business world, government and academia from thwarting AIDS investigations in the 80's, because both fags and Reaganites did not want the party to totally end; I mean, what are you people so stuffy about? Just relax and enjoy freedom, don't question why society now has higher levels of pathogens than it did in the 40's-70's. The only thing that remains taboo is outright street crime (the only thing that Boomers have ever had a consensus about), which feeds into a reactionary climate of primarily low-income losers being harshly punished while the privileged skate.
AE (1/2) –
A military coup against Red State America would involve some military casualties (if it didn't end in outright mutiny). A coup against Blue State America would be over in a couple of weeks, ending in some combination of mass surrender or mass starvation.
The left didn't have the majority (actual in most cases, on paper in those marked with asterisks) of the military, the police, the guns nor usually even popular opinion in:
1642 & 1688 Britain
1789 France
1822 & 1828 Portugal
1830 Belgium, France & Switzerland
1831 Brazil
1836 Spain
1848 Denmark, France, Germany & Switzerland
1854 Spain
1859 Italy
1868 Spain
1870 France
1873 Spain
1905 Russia
1910 Mexico & Portugal
1913 Mexico
"February" & "October" 1917 Russia
1918 Germany
1919 Egypt & Ireland
1922 Greece
1930 Brazil*
1931 Spain
1944 Guatemala
1945 China & Indochina
1952 Egypt*
1958 Iraq* & Venezuela
1959 Cuba
1960 Belgian Congo
1962 Algeria
1969 Libya*
1973 Afghanistan*
1974 Greece & Portugal*
1975 Spain
1978 Afghanistan*
1979 Iran and Nicaragua
1980 Rhodesia
1983 Argentina & Turkey
1985 Brazil
1986 Philippines
1987 South Korea
1990 Chile & South Africa
1991 Taiwan
1992 El Salvador
1996 Zaire
2002 Turkey & Venezuela
2011 Egypt
etc.
Underestimate them at your peril.
During the 2016 Turkish coup attempt, two putschist F-16s had Erdoğan's plane in their sights, but they were worried they had misidentified it. They couldn't stomach the thought of accidentally shooting down a civilian plane. So they let it land.
The leaders[1] were military men, so they made their first order of business securing military facilities. They were smart enough to shut down domestic media, but didn't think to shut down foreign media, in particular CNN, which carried Erdoğan's speech (delivered after his plane landed) live. They didn't fire on protesters, and the coup collapsed. The "peaceful protesters" they didn't fire on returned the favor by torture-lynching several dozen to several hundred surrendering putschist soldiers.
The 1991 Soviet coup attempt was much the same. The putschists captured Gorbachev[2] but didn't kill him. They didn't kill or capture the equally or more dangerous Yeltsin. They shut down domestic media but not foreign. Unlike the Chinese two years earlier, they didn't fire on protesters. Yeltsin of course had no such compunctions two years later, nor, presumably, does his successor.
[1] IMO it was more likely a genuine coup attempt rather than a false flag; even if it was a false flag it's clear that (as demonstrated by their subsequent imprisonment) almost everyone involved thought it was genuine, so their tactical errors remain relevant.
[2] Allegedly; IMO the conspiracy theory (commonly believed in Russia at least in 1991) that Gorbachev was in on it is more likely than not.
(2/2) –
Parentheically, I'll grant that those two coup attempts were nominally leftist[1], but remain relevant; coups succeed or fail due to tactics, not ideology. Moreover, the putschists were military men, ideologically illiberal, patriotic and small-c conservative/small-r reactionary, and so likely to think similarly to hypothetical US rightist counterparts.
Likewise, the collapses of rightist[2] governments listed above were similar. In almost every case, the government or its soldiers wouldn't fire on protesters or rebels, they didn't act decisively to eliminate opposition leaders and media, and/or they buckled to the non-negotiable demands of the "international community."
Our problem is that US rightists are, for the most part, fundamentally decent people. While they can, at a disadvantage, win a civil war, fundamentally decent people don't have what it takes to mount a successful putsch. They have "principles" (in this case, civic nationalist democratic right-liberalism). If they act, it is out of compassion—they only want what's best for the country and all its people. They don't have the stomach to arrest or execute "peaceful" opposition leaders, protesters and journalists, or probably even their armed countrymen.
The left has no such compunctions. Obviously, few are sociopaths, but they are the masters of propaganda, and also its victims—religious fanatics, for whom the ends justify any means.
They have sown nominally-rightist informants and turncoats far and wide. If attempting or fighting against a coup, they will immediately win over the general public and much of the armed forces if allowed the slightest chance to spread their message. They will use civilians as human shields. They will use decisive, deadly force, without limitation. They will fight fearlessly; God ("History") is on their side. If necessary, they will call for and welcome foreign military intervention, and they will threaten to and actually use weapons of mass destruction.
All that is not to say a rightist coup couldn't succeed, or a leftist one would, but the American right, as it exists now and in the forseeable future, is at a clear disadvantage in such matters.
[1] Although I would argue that Western center-leftism, particularly nationalist-authoritarian strains thereof, is center-right in the Islamic world. Islamism is not far-right but rather ultra-left, as in the French ultra-royalists, too royalist for the king.
Leftism is the drive to destabilize and ultimately destroy the traditions and institutions of Western civilization. Liberalism-leftism is itself a fundamental—since at least 1918 the core—tradition and institution of the West. Even far-left antifa anarchists and SDS Maoists would preserve (or, in the non-Western world, promote) much of what defines Western culture in relation to others. Only Islamists—the ultra-left—would totally eliminate every trace of Western culture.
This is why Western leftists and Islamic world far-leftists virtually always strictly follow the principle of pas d'ennemis à gauche WRT Islamists. Case in point: The atheistic Khalq faction of the Afghan Communists—suppressed as too radical by the Soviets—defected en masse to the Taliban after the Communist government collapsed.
[2] Relative to their immediate successor.
Random Dude, Sid, AE –
If we're drawing parallels between America and Rome, I'd say we're very far along on the very accelerated timeline.
Jackson = Sulla
Lincoln = Caesar
Andrew Johnson = Pompey
Grant = Augustus
McKinley thru Coolidge = Five Good Emperors
Hoover = Third Century Crisis
FDR = Diocletian
JFK/LBJ = Constantine
Nixon/Reagan = Julian
Clinton = Valentinian
Trump = Theodosius
Immivasion = barbarians
China = Huns/Arabs
Feryl, AE –
in American history the periods of lowest immigration have coincided with the strongest bursts of Leftism
I'm doing a deep dive into the data on this subject. The data on the number of newly-arrived legal immigrants per year* is surprisingly difficult to find, but I found it. AE, have or would you ever do guest posts? It's pretty good stuff.
Anyhow, suffice it to say this frequently repeated assertion of Feryl's is not true. The Presidents (since Truman's second term) who stand out as presiding over the largest (and seemingly permanent) increases in immigration are Eisenhower (the increase was almost entirely from German, Hungarian, Cuban and other refugees from Communism), Carter, HW and Obama.
And while the data I could find doesn't go back that far, the Harding-Coolidge "return to normalcy" under which the 1921 and 1924 acts passed, easily the most dramatic rightwards turn of the past 150 years, was not among "the strongest bursts of Leftism."
Moving on, the 1965 act didn't, at least at first, result in increased absolute numbers, but did instantly change the character of immigration from almost entirely white to almost entirely nonwhite. The 1990 act stands out the most as legislation that spiked the absolute numbers and the (gutting by Clinton and Gingrich of the) 1996 act as the biggest missed opportunity for restrictionists.
*As opposed to the number of immigrant visas granted, which is a lagging indicator and also double-counts asylees and refugees both when they arrive and when their applications are approved, and more generally any immigrant who switches to another type of visa.
society now has higher levels of pathogens than it did in the 40's-70's
This is laughable; common diseases of that period like polio, smallpox, mumps, measles and even chickenpox have been fully or virtually eradicated in the US. For that matter so has HIV relative to the 80s and 90s. In fact, the extreme lack of pathogens in modern America is thought to be the cause of the massive increase in allergies among young people, or more positively the rapid increase in the proportion of men* over 6' tall.
*Within each race—the influx of Hispanics and Asians is misleadingly bringing down the average.
Yeah, the idea that the Red Empire could instantly crush the Blue Empire is, sadly, a complete fantasy.
The right has the territory, the logistics, the weapons, the training… it may even have the numbers. But it doesn't have the WILL. It's a demoralized group of "leave me alone" types, ripping itself apart with ideological conflict and slave morality.
While the left has never been afraid to use influence to snatch power and use power to generate influence, the right is petrified of doing either. Even though the left owns nearly everything, it fights like it has nothing to lose; and even though the right has lost nearly everything, it always wants to count its blessings and look for a peaceful compromise as soon as possible.
It's sad and pathetic, but that's the reality. At the end of the day, the right is unwilling to exercise any power it has because it knows that the left will always, eventually, escalate to violence, and most right-wingers simply can't stomach the idea of violence, despite all the bluster.
Lance, Right Wing people while slow to change can manage it.
Larry Correia put it this way on his blog
A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.
Its probably not going to happen but a preference cascade can occur in rapid time and as fragile as the system is, a very few rebels could create mass death.
Otherwise as for leave me alone, this is very true and its why if the Right is to survive its going to have to move into dissident right territory and be willing to exercise power.
Snorlax,
I don't disagree about not counting out the left. Leftist coups tend to occur more because it's a regression to baser instincts. It's always easier to offer more free stuff, a quick and violent end to the "oppressors", and people will generally follow along because it's the government equivalent of the kid running for school president who campaigns on better school lunches and better snacks from the vending machines.
However, we're entering into interesting times. The left holds all the power so any revolution or dissolution is likely to come from the right rather than the left. Multiculturalism is a relatively new concept and is being introduced too quickly and wasn't as a result of conquest but as punishment towards the natives (whites). I think it's a mistake to look at past history as an insight in the future because this is new ground we're treading.
Another parallel with the United States, especially with respect to a multicultural empire, might be the Ottoman Empire: a strong start and then a steady but irreversible decline where the leadership cares more about decadence and harems than about leadership. Unsurprisingly, the (((tribe))) thrived in the Ottoman Empire until towards the final decades when the empire started to balkanize and they quickly lost influence.
"This is laughable; common diseases of that period like polio, smallpox, mumps, measles and even chickenpox have been fully or virtually eradicated in the US. For that matter so has HIV relative to the 80s and 90s. In fact, the extreme lack of pathogens in modern America is thought to be the cause of the massive increase in allergies among young people, or more positively the rapid increase in the proportion of men* over 6' tall."
I wrote a while back a detailed comment pertaining to why high immigration levels and overcrowding lead to the onset of worse disease epidemics. Agnostic also did a post on how the mainstream media/science misleadingly focuses on tech/medicine advancement for why infectious diseases declined in the 40's and 50's. In reality, the immigration moratorium of 1924, and the rapid build-out of the suburbs, greatly alleviated the dystopian urban over-crowding that the early 20th century was notorious for. We weren't being as rapidly exposed to strange and nasty germs anymore. Per Agnostic, the rates of certain infections were actually declining before widespread vaccination programs.
Agnostic, and others in the HBD-sphere, have often pointed out that people from northern rural areas seem to be about the least gay in the world. Most forms of male homosexuality originate in fetal exposure to a lot of really nasty pathogens. Jews and black Americans self-report much greater rates of homosexuality than white gentiles, and white gentiles are far less likely to be conceived by parents living in urban areas. Urban areas have the highest load of diverse pathogens because they are the most crowded areas and also the areas most frequented by transients, who bring with them bugs that the natives aren't used to.
Height-wise, white and black Americans have been getting shorter and shorter for quite some time, with the only real exception evidently being those born from 1975-1983 (and it's not clear why that is). This is likely due to consumption of artificial crappy food (w/sugar and transfats surging in consumption over the last 70-100 years), and a general environment of stress. Peter Turchin says that "immiseration" is key indicator of corrupt/dystopian time periods, and declining height is one of the primary signs of immiseration.
https://www.alternet.org/story/56303/are_you_one_of_the_shrinking_americans
America's social Darwinism is literally making us smaller. All the Pentagon gibs that Americans waste would be much better spent on other things. In the US, a relatively small privileged class can take care of itself, but other than that…..You're on your own. And if you feed your kids crap, get infrequent medical care, and are under great mental and financial strain from the pressure of paying the bills and not suffering a loss in social status, well, what kind of shape are your kids going to be in? We can do so much better than this.
"The left holds all the power so any revolution or dissolution is likely to come from the right rather than the left"
The Pentagon runs the White House. The Pentagon is fully on board with Reaganite norms (sky-high military spending, half-assed attempts at immigration reduction, private unions having little to no power or legal protection, de-industrialization, and the like). The Pentagon is the single most powerful force in America, as is evidenced by military spending surging to gargantuan levels since GW Bush. The Pentagon elites/Deep State were the biggest opponent of Trump, they figured he'd lose the election. Once he won, Mike Flynn (a maverick) was set-up and drummed out, and the Pentagon pulled off a coup subsequently, with even several Reagan era holdovers deemed to be insufficiently belligerent to the enemies of Saudi Arabia and Israel, so those guys got bounced too. McMaster got booted out and replaced by John Bolton, perhaps the single biggest warmonger of his generation. There's no other sector of society that could've pulled off the coup.
You folks have a strange idea of "Leftism". Media and academia focus, almost exclusively, on that which appeals to wealthy whites, and aspiring SWPL types. A true Leftist streak, and power, would express itself in angry demands for better wages, working conditions, and getting the goddamn profit-motive out of things, so that we can start to treat each other like human beings again. Bernie lost, because "Leftist" elites still love neo-liberalism, they just want a more "woke" variant of it. The NYtimes recently published an article by a striving woman who complained that we shouldn't shame women who want to get rich. Leftist? Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The modern Left has assimilated Reaganite norms. This isn't 1995 when the NYtimes ran an editorial calling for greater immigration control. That was before our political norms were totally debauched by the unholy alliance of the corporate friendly Left and the Reaganite Right. In the earlier 90's, we still had just enough left of the old-school trade/labor Left for liberals to mind their manners and not openly celebrate the destruction of the working class…Unlike the 1980's and 90's Right which gleefully celebrated downsizing and union busting (w/Rush Limbaugh openly saying that big firms were within their rights to layoff tons of people, because surely those workers must've been so inept that they deserved it…And the fuckers probably wanted a stronger union, too. Commies).
America is headed to ruin due to the Reaganite norms of immigration surges , regressive taxes, and run-away miltary spending. None of this is the least bit Leftist, in the classical sense (very seldom does "Leftism" scale up globally, and thus Leftist governments are less likely to practice invade the world or even invite the world. Cesar Chavez and his goons beat up wetbacks for how they undermined American workers). It's the neo-liberal movement, spearheaded by the Right in the 70's and 80's, that we should hold responsible for every single issue currently plaguing us.
"Anyhow, suffice it to say this frequently repeated assertion of Feryl's is not true. The Presidents (since Truman's second term) who stand out as presiding over the largest (and seemingly permanent) increases in immigration are Eisenhower (the increase was almost entirely from German, Hungarian, Cuban and other refugees from Communism), Carter, HW and Obama."
https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/table1
Immigration levels collapsed during the Depression and WW2, for obvious reasons. From 1946-1975 (essentially, the all-time peak in working class well-being) the number of immigrants admitted per year stayed below 400,000, with the single exception of 1967 for obvious reasons (that's when the '65 act was phased in). Carter was our first president to flirt with neo-liberalism (for which he was hated by the old Left). Since 1976, we've only had one year below 400,000, which was 1979. The numbers generally were in the 500-600 thousand range in the late 70's and 80's, and then, in 1989, there was a gargantuan surge w/over 1 Million (!) admitted. This continued unabated in 1990 and '91, peaking at 1.8 Million (!!!!!!!!!!). By 1995, the number had been pushed down to the modest level of 720 thousand. In 2001, the number again surpassed 1 million. From 2001-2015, there have only been three years where the number stayed below 1 million.
This all tracks with the massive decline in neo-liberal/social Darwinist thought from the early 1930's-early 1970's (the greatest time to be alive in America). As neo-liberal thought gradually was accepted from the late 70's-late 80's, levels of immigration rose up. As if on cue, during the "end of history" around 1990, the levels absolutely went beserk, sparking a pretty big backlash. But since elite favored populism withered away by the late 90's, levels have been pretty high.
"And while the data I could find doesn't go back that far, the Harding-Coolidge "return to normalcy" under which the 1921 and 1924 acts passed, easily the most dramatic rightwards turn of the past 150 years, was not among "the strongest bursts of Leftism."
Society was starting to turn on social Darwinism and hands-off norms in the 1920's. Facial hair was falling out of fashion (a sign of modest norms being renewed), prohibition was seen by many as a corrective to people living excessively indulgent lifestyles, and so forth. In comparison, the despicably decadent and corrupt 1880's and '90's were periods of popular belief among elites in Dickensian norms of inequality WRT widespread poverty and exploitation of workers. Saying that proles were genetically inferior became an excuse to fear them or pity them, at best. Since the 1990's there's been a growing interest in probing the intellectual faculties of the lower classes, with such studies often done under the (pitying) guise of trying to figure out what to do with poor slobs. Well, guys like Charles Murray could start by taking Reagan and Bill Clinton's cocks out of their mouths and fighting to stop Pentagon pork, union busting, off-shoring, and the like.
Moving on, the 1965 act didn't, at least at first, result in increased absolute numbers, but did instantly change the character of immigration from almost entirely white to almost entirely nonwhite."
Racial character is a red herring, since corrupt elites always want easy to exploit cheap labor. It absolutely makes no difference to them what the ethnic character of the cheap labor is. When the public begins to tire of the endless waves of cheap labor (as it did in the 1910's and 20's, and as it has done in the 2010's, see the rejection of amnesty), there maybe ethnic collectives of angry natives fighting back on reactionary racist grounds, yet at the end of the day people simply are sick and tired of newcomers crowding into a place that's full enough as it is. Fighting back against greed and corruption is Leftist, really, regardless of whatever motives the combatants may superficially have.
*As opposed to the number of immigrant visas granted, which is a lagging indicator and also double-counts asylees and refugees both when they arrive and when their applications are approved, and more generally any immigrant who switches to another type of visa."
The official government account of Visas/Green cards/naturalizations granted is useful because it tells us how elites are feeling about immigrants. If they dislike them (as they did in the 1920's-early 70's), one would expect elites to not be so quick to extend the privilege of official legal status to immigrants. And that's precisely what happened from the mid-20's-early 70's.
And duh, if the government is handing out legal status like there's no tomorrow, then one would sensibly assume that the number of illegal entries, expired Visa over-stayers, and the like would also be quite large. All flavors of immigration surged after 1975, sure enough.
Sid,
Another way Gates is like Crassus, Microsoft Office. It's his version of the fire brigade.
Presumably friendly states will sell delivery technology for nuclear weapons. Relying on anti-missile systems to stop nukes? That's brinkmanship right there!
Feryl,
Is it a cop-out to say this is an elite boomer thing? Twitter is hardly a boomer hangout (that's facebook) yet that O-C tweet got enormous engagement, far more than her regular tweets do. I scan the headlines of sites like HuffPo (shrieking millennials, mostly women) and it's all culture wars all the time, much more so than the old dinosaur leftist outlets like CNN. Polls show younger people are more interested in cultural issues than older people.
snorlax,
I'm only familiar with about half of those left-wing coups but even so the point is well taken.
In many ways, though, the past is a different country. In the early 70s, something like 500 bombings took place across the country in the span of a single year. Today's levels of physical violence aren't anything like what they were two generations ago, yet political dissolution strikes me as more likely now than it did then.
Yes, a guest post along those lines would be great. DM via twatter or gab or provide me an email and let's do it.
Lance E,
Very well put. For what it's worth, I think a Blue State coup attempt is more likely but that a Red State coup attempt would be more likely to succeed if actually tried.
AB.Prosper,
When the English began to hate, for the victims it was at that point too late.
"Agnostic, and others in the HBD-sphere, have often pointed out that people from northern rural areas seem to be about the least gay in the world.
Wrong." -Vermont link-
Does that link tell you where they grew up? Absent knowledge of where they were born, it makes no sense to judge an area by it's current residents. We don't know where they came from originally. Atlanta and MPLS are gay as hell; but the gays sure as hell weren't all born there.
"Moreover, the relatively prevalence of homosexuality in cities is easily explained by the fact that gays tend to move as adults to socially-liberal areas (that is, primarily cities), and gays who already live in socially-liberal areas are less likely to be closeted. This also creates a network effect where gays move to socially-liberal areas to find other gays."
Well, you just proved my point. Why bother posting the Vermont link, when you admit that these are studies of people with no background as to their place of birth?
"Jews are an extremely socially-liberal group and therefore less likely to be closeted. Blacks are presumably more likely to report being men who have sex with men (not necessarily gay) on account of their sky-high incarceration rate."
Jews are physically smaller than even Med. gentiles, to say nothing of Teutonic/Celtic/Slavic gentiles. Small stature is associated with homosexuality (seriously, we all went to school with at least one fairy who was skinny and often short, and decidedly lacking in a strong jaw or brow).
Blacks, while being overall physically robust, nonetheless have more than their fair share of fairies who do tend to be more gaunt than the West African norm. Going by the pathogen theory, what stunts psychological development into not progressing to the liking girls stage also stunts physical development. I seem to recall also that male homosexuals are uglier and worse smelling than are straight men (albeit gay men seem paradoxically to be very slightly more intelligent, esp. in verbal ability). Straight men tend to be inherently disgusted by gay men, perhaps this is because gay men represent on a phenotype level, what men tend to find distressingly child-like but also shallow and sociopathic (a phrase that suits people like Tom Cruise to a T).
Gay men are the unique product of being stunted in development yet still possessing intelligence. That's why institutions sometimes have great big fag purges, or at least paranoia that predatory gays are infiltrating and corrupting an organization to the point that the gays need to ferreted out. Gays are vastly over-represent in the ranks of sociopaths found in prisons, law, intelligence operations, and politics. Chateux Heartiste often notes how weaselly various evil-doers are, and weaselly is an apt description of most gays. Yes, it's true: there's a reason fiction generally casts the better looking actor as the hero; attractive looks and a solid build are often a marker for advanced development and thus good morals. Ya know who also is famously ugly besides gays? Jews.
Snorlax is absolutely correct. The left has very strong advantages in any internal American conflict: they are very motivated, they KNOW their enemies are dangerous evil retards who would be better off dead, and they are concentrated rather than dispersed.
The water/electricity argument is, tactically, not a bad one, but politically unreliable – think about it: how many of your local county officials will be willing to shut down all water and power to the city and demand unconditional surrender? How many, instead, will muddle along and hope things will just work themselves out somehow, and thus let the city-based fanatics do whatever they want without repercussions?
Fun fact: according to homophobe hall of famer Paul Cameron, a study done by a psychiatrist who worked with prisoners found that they had a much higher rate of gay behavior BEFORE long-term incarceration than the average non-offender did. This psychiatrist noted a lot of over-lap between gay personality and the general criminal personality (disregard for others, glibness, grandiosity, etc.)
The way ghey behavior observed in American black men is thus not so much caused by incarceration as it is by their general sociopathy and poor psychological development. And let's face it, extroverted drama queen blacks are hardly masculine/stoic in their demeanor.
The obsession with "machismo" is actually well, kinda campy. Northern European men, and Northern Asians, have low rates of homosexuality (and sociopathy), and don't feel the need to act "macho". Why bother when 99.8% of the guys around you are straight, and thus will assume that you are straight too. It's the opposite the fag-filled black community, where everyone is paranoid that the brothas will think they took a dick up the butt.
"I scan the headlines of sites like HuffPo (shrieking millennials, mostly women) and it's all culture wars all the time, much more so than the old dinosaur leftist outlets like CNN. Polls show younger people are more interested in cultural issues than older people."
There's something to be said for getting a brain once you get older. I tend to only really speak for people born in the early-mid 80's, because that's who I am. And the hunch I get is that most early Millennials are following in the footsteps of Gen X-ers in their antipathy towards neo-liberal yuppie culture. Once you get into your thirties, you start to get frustrated at not having the advantages and opportunities that Silents and Boomers totally took for granted, as is evidenced by those generations shredding New Deal America to pieces. When you're in your 20's, the world is full of possibility, and you tend to be focused on your peer group. If you don't start to hit certain milestones by the age of 30, then angst starts to set in that you're falling behind and probably being cheated. And seldom will you blame your peers for that; not when it's older generations hoarding so much wealth and power. When Boomers got competitive in the late 70's and 80's, they were such a ginormous generation that they did tend to focus on their own generation, esp. when most GIs had retired by 1990.
I'd also hasten to add that it tends to be status whores and counter-culture weirdos who shout the loudest and most often. A lot of Millennial normies have better things to do than sling shit on HuffPo. Rush Limbaugh calls this stuff "Millennial media", which is a major disservice to this generation. Trump won white Millennials, at least the males. Boomers and X-ers who fling crap at Millennials need to be careful; Millennials have absolutely no responsibility for Neo-liberalism itself, or the fact that this ideology is on the verge of collapsing under it's own weight and hubris. Hell, even some Millennial blacks supported Sanders over Hilary (Keith Ellison sensed this and became one of the more notable people to not support Hilary. It was Hilary who went full bore on SJWism by pandering to gays, blacks, and coastal elites; while Sanders when he was being himself focused essentially 100% on economic issues and a sense of fairness to everyone, as opposed to pedestalizing various ID groups.
"In many ways, though, the past is a different country. In the early 70s, something like 500 bombings took place across the country in the span of a single year. Today's levels of physical violence aren't anything like what they were two generations ago, yet political dissolution strikes me as more likely now than it did then"
Many Boomers went out of their way to do shocking and destructive things, because they disliked the upbeat and orderly culture of GIs. Millennials grew up with a strong sense of awareness that post-GIs had deliberately created a world of violence and disorder. So what's left to tear apart? Nothing. At some point some rebuilding has to be done. A lot of Gen X-ers don't strongly prefer either chaos or order, being skeptical of attempts to be too…Good, or too bad. So that leaves Millennials, with the support of populist Boomers, creating enough positive changes that elitist Boomers and nihilistic X-ers will know better than to get in the way of a social re-birth.
Likely negative outcome? There just isn't a strong enough sense of a collective mission to bring more people together, and instead we get decades more of society full of people who have varying degrees of nihilism and apathy, with non infrequent spikes of….Bad manners and impulsive judgement (vigilante killings, trust not going beyond the family, frequent rip-offs, truculent militias and bands, thinly veiled regional tensions based on past conflict). That's what happened to America in the 1870's-early 20th century, because of the Civil War shit-show.
"The data on the number of newly-arrived legal immigrants per year* is surprisingly difficult to find, but I found it.
…
*As opposed to the number of immigrant visas granted, which is a lagging indicator and also double-counts asylees and refugees both when they arrive and when their applications are approved, and more generally any immigrant who switches to another type of visa."
What data is this? Where did it come from? Link?
I don't see much reason myself to doubt the veracity or usefulness of the DHS's figures. Anecdotally and politically, the DHS's figures always match, without fail, what we commonly regard as periods with high or low immigration. Everyone knows that immigration in the early 1990's was absolutely out of control; sure enough, the DHS says that 1991 was a historic year for legal immigration. Everyone knows that the surging immigration waves of the early 20th century sparked a major backlash; the DHS shows that legal immigration from 1900-1915 was very high.
And as I said earlier, illegal immigration closely parallels legal immigration, for obvious reasons; giving legal citizenship away freely induces people to come and stay here illegaly w/o fear of reprisals.
@snorlax
It's true that exposure to pathogens is down, but it is also true that most people's immune systems are shot to s**t by eating 'food' full of soy and vegetable oils, sedentary lifestyles, poor sleep patterns and insufficient exposure to sunlight. I'm not sure that's relevant to the gay germ, which must hit you in very early childhood, unless it's an in utero thing.
Citing how successful was the Left these last 500 years (in various revolutions) is like citing rising share prices for individual stocks within a larger bull market.
So.
What.
If you can't get to actual cause, studying effects is navel-gazing.
I've been on record for years that the coming trend change will be characterized by an inversion of the rising social trust and Utopianism (better understood as the Gnostic Heresy in both openly religious and occult, putatively secular forms) that defined Leftism writ large. Westerners have been outgrouping for 500 years. I think that trend is past.
What we see everywhere our eyes are allowed to recognize is one institution after another being destroyed from within by the very individuals who depend on it or who own it. Government (and news media, "churches," medical systems, pretty much everything) becomes ever-less capable.
All these systems now obey the iron laws of monopoly, inevitably closing in on the Black Hole Phenomenon where resources go in and nothing of value subsequently emerges. The nation-state, instituted to bring order and stop internecine warfare, is now the primary source of disorder and inter-group warfare.
For the last 40 years the West's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous were placed on each Nation's National MasterCard, a phenomenon always present during the inevitable run-up to bankruptcy.
It resulted in a misallocation of capital resources on a scale never-before seen. The denoument of this will be a long period of idle capital (while most of it degrades to valuelessness) including the "investment" people made in their "skill sets." Unemployment on a scale never imagined is certain, as is an endless pathological stream of "top-down fixes" that will make things worse (just as did such efforts in the 1930's.) Politics will determine haves and have-nots, leading to a downward spiral of collapse and hardship.
It won't matter, eventually, who controls Congress or the Judiciary. The FedGov will eventually be irrelevant. What is local will rise to exclusive relevance as social trust "distance" shrinks.
Leftism grew to a pathological collective suicide pact. It's long-past due a reversal.
Sorry guys. The People are against you. Especially, People of Color (you know, the future).
Just look at some of these representative YouTube videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUolzAltwKI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YpUSt6Z2hg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMsuvEGnvPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWt2vy9DHsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtFtfh96tdA
while Sanders when he was being himself focused essentially 100% on economic issues and a sense of fairness to everyone, as opposed to pedestalizing various ID groups.
What is with the Sanders respect around here?? To the extent that he fixated more on the rich and corporations rather than ID politics it is because he is an aspie obsessed with the rich and corporations as the source of all misfortune in the world.* It is no credit to his ideals.
Then when pressed Sanders did things on ID politics that even Hillary wouldn't, such as letting his rally be taken over by those cetaceans, or backtracking completely on open borders in the face of Ezra Klein.
Also when it comes down to it, not that much in Sanders' plans was actually looking out for the little guy, as opposed to givaways to the the medium-but-jealous-of-the-big guy. Single payer, yes, that would help the little guy, but most of the other stuff, no. "Free" college?? Yeah, that's great for the middle class kids who want to party for a while while studying on someone else's dime, but it doesn't do much for those in the ghettos and trailer parks who need immediate access to jobs, transportation, more police protection, etc., and not courses in how many genders there are.
* there is plenty to dislike about the rich and corporations, but they are not responsible for Islamic terrorism, ghetto violence, and all of the other stuff falsely ascribed to them by Sanders and his like-mindeds.
O/T
Germany records fourth budget surplus in a row. Leftists complain that they still spend too much, even though they are nowhere near the 2% NATO minimum. I'll be my usual contrarian self and argue that the leftists are right. That hike in military spending would be more effective paying migrants to return, and putting Frau back in the kitchen.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/another-german-budget-without-new-debts/
The cost of the invaders has prevented a larger *tax cut* than would have otherwise happened. But luckily for the establishment, a raise in the retirement age, a cut in pensions, and a tax increase haven't happened. To be fair, Germany should be giving the surplus to Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as they only are achieving one because the Euro is undervalued for Germany but overvalued for the Meds.
Random Dude –
Another parallel with the United States, especially with respect to a multicultural empire, might be the Ottoman Empire: a strong start and then a steady but irreversible decline where the leadership cares more about decadence and harems than about leadership.
Yes and no; the Ivy Leaguers who make up our elite remain an intellectual overclass.
The IQ c 95 Turks may be idiot savants in the field of warfare[1], but that wasn't sufficient defense for an overextended, backwards empire in the face of vastly more advanced, populous and nationally-homogenous imperialist Europe. As you say they mitigated this somewhat by relying on higher-IQ minorities[2], but in turn this created its own problem, an elite filled with fifth columnists[3].
I suspect the Turks may've been smarter in their heyday but fell victim to the strongly dysgenic effects[4] of Islam.
AE –
In many ways, though, the past is a different country. In the early 70s, something like 500 bombings took place across the country in the span of a single year.
The political violence of the 1970s was astroturfed by the KGB to the tune of hundreds of millions[5] in the US and billions globally. Independent of the immivasion and further radicalization of the domestic Left, our new era of international conflict is liable to be bloody.
Yes, a guest post along those lines would be great.
Fantastic; email me at [email protected] . I'll need a few days to complete the post. What software do you use for your charts?
Deter Naturalist –
When you have a 500-year bull market it's an extraordinary statement to say "this time is different." One consistent pattern is that the left thrives most in periods of sharply-increasing hardship following periods of relative peace and prosperity.
We had better hope there isn't a societal collapse, for the obvious reason that they tend to be unpleasant for the body politic, and because it's difficult to envision one that doesn't end in the Chinese turning us into slaves/biofuel.
[1] They performed spectacularly in light of their overwhelming numerical, logistical and technological inferiority in WWI and even more so Kemal's War of Independence. We don't have much data since then but the little we have from Korea, Cyprus and Syria suggests they remain pretty kickass.
[2] Primarily Greeks and Armenians, to a lesser extent Jews and Slavs.
[3] A pretty apt analogy to the present or the late Roman Empire.
[4] Christian Arabs, who don't practice cousin marriage and lack the African admixture of their Muslim neighbors, may be the world's most intelligent ethnicity—even more overrepresented in prestige occupations than Jews in the US, and Christian schools outscore Jewish ones on standardized tests in Israel. Stands to reason as they're the most direct descendants of the people who created the world's first, and for over 4 millennia (approx 3300 BC-AD 900) most advanced civilizations.
[5] And back then, that was a lot of money.
Feryl –
Society was starting to turn on social Darwinism and hands-off norms in the 1920's.
1
2
Facial hair was falling out of fashion (a sign of modest norms being renewed)
lol ok.
Facial hair went back into fashion in the "strongly Leftist" 1930s. It's also considered a sign of piety in nearly every world religion.
Well, you just proved my point.
No, at worst I didn't prove my point. Neither your nor I has proved your point.
Why bother posting the Vermont link
Other rural/cold states including New Hampshire, Maine, Colorado, New Mexico and Indiana(!) are also among the gayest. Speaking as a lifelong Masshole, I've never heard of NH nor ME being a popular spot for gays to move to, nor would I think of them as particularly socially-liberal states. Compared to the region (rest of New England, NY, Atlantic Canada) they're practically Mississippi.
If you want an example that's (near as makes no difference) based only on birthplace, Sweden is the cold, rural land of very healthy and attractive giants, and therefore has no homosexuality. (Not).
to say nothing of Celtic gentiles
The Irish are stereotypically short. As a resident of the most Irish region of the country, I can say with great confidence that this is an accurate stereotype.
male homosexuals are uglier … Jews
Again, on account of where I live I know quite a few of both groups, and while I haven't made an extensive study of it, I've never noticed this. If anything I'd say it's the opposite, though that's mostly or entirely because they're less likely to be fat. There are unattractive features associated with both ("gayface," "Jew nose"), but they aren't universal and outside of extreme cases individual features matter little to attactiveness. I doubt either group would be so overrepresented among Hollywood actors and other celebrities if they were much uglier than the general population.
they had a much higher rate of gay behavior BEFORE long-term incarceration than the average non-offender did.
Yeah because almost all prisoners are repeat customers. It's impossible to limit a study to first-timers because juvie records are sealed (and it's near-certain almost all were juvenile offenders).
What data is this? Where did it come from? Link?
They come from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service from FY[1] 1949 to 2001, then the Office of Immigration Statistics from FY 2002 to 1Q[2] 2018. I'm being coy for now because I don't want to debate my methodology before I've explained it in depth.
[1] Fiscal year: Jul 1 to Jun 30 (so FY 1949 was Jul 1, 1948 to Jun 30, 1949) until FY 1976, Sep 1 to Aug 31 from FY 1977 onwards (so FY 1977 was Sep 1, 1976 to Aug 31, 1977). Jul to Aug 1976 was reported separately.
[2] First quarter of FY 2018: Sep 1 to Dec 31, 2017
Gabriel –
Agreed that there are many unhealthy trends in modern society (and like I said, the lack of pathogens seems to be causing some, most notably the massive increase in the prevalence of allergies*). But the specific claim that Americans are more exposed to pathogens today than in the 1940-70s is laugh-at-loud preposterous.
I don't take Cochran's "gay germ" hypothesis seriously, seeing as it's based on no evidence and is unfalsifiable. At least name a specific germ or range of germs as the hypothesized culprit so it's a testable hypothesis.
For example, I suspect that Toxoplasma gondii may be a (but almost certainly not the only) cause of SJW-leftism. This is a testable hypothesis, based on real suggestive evidence—studies showing that a large percentage of the population in Western countries are infected, which correlates with both affluence and cuckish thought patterns.
*And, full circle, the unhealthy effects of soy may be due to undiagnosed allergies.
More O/T
The closing of the two GM factories in OH/MI is a punch in the gut, and a major threat to the re-election of this Administration. Considerable effort should be undertaken to have (Tesla?) take over either one or both of the factories.
I like Rome parallels as much as the next guy, but I feel like anyone who has read a history book has realized that America is already falling, and it's not going to stop until it comes crashing down. Rome stopped being great the second it's people lost the willpower that let them raise three armies in a row to stop Hannibal. There was never any question of surrender or even defeat when their response to Hannibal's messenger suing for peace (and their surrender) was roman citizens throwing trash at him from the wall tops, despite their three horrendous losses.
As anyone paying attention has certainly already figured out, America reached that point decades ago. Our citizens are not only -not- a monolithic bloc, but would be more than happy to split the nation in twain to get away from each other.
Would anyone here die for present day America? I certainly wouldn't.
Anonymous,
"People of color" are only a threat to us insofar as whites allow their parasitism to continue. Even if successful, at most all they can do is kill their host and thus themselves along with us.
A few random questions from reading these comments:
1) a) What is the mechanism by which Toxoplasmosis would lead to SJW-leftism?
b) Is Toxoplasmosis more prevalent in Western countries than third world ones? It is correlated with cats, which have been domesticated in the Middle East for the longest.
2) What is the reasoning behind supposing that soy has deleterious health or mental effects? Soy consumption is highest in East Asia where they also have the highest IQs.
Christian Arabs… may be the world's most intelligent ethnicity—even more overrepresented in prestige occupations than Jews in the US, and Christian schools outscore Jewish ones on standardized tests in Israel.
Christian Arabs are high achievers, no doubt. And it is true that they have the highest exam scores in Israel. But I think a number of other data points point to them not being the most intelligent – that still has to go to Jews and probably specifically Ashkenazi Jews.
We can consider science Nobel Prizes, which are as of now (but probably not for long) a metric of real achievement. If you consider science Nobels which have gone to people from the Arab world, more have gone to the tiny Jewish minority than either the much larger Christian minority or the Muslim majority.
I would like to see the stats on prestige occupations in the US. My sense is that Jews are the most overrepresented, or maybe even Hindu South Asians, but I could be wrong.
In Israel, there are some complications such as Haredi Jews don't take or do very badly on those standardized exams, because they go to crappy schools and don't care about getting into university, and they are a large fraction of the exam-age Jews. Also, Christian Arabs have the lowest TFR in Israel, so there could be effects due to that with more parental investment per child.
Jig,
Part of the results in the Muslim world may be "public choice". There's a surprising number of Arab Muslim students studying in Western institutions, paid for by their home government. It's not as if the oil-rich countries couldn't start their own institutions, or even pay the instructors enough to avoid bribery. Its that subsidizing madrassas is considered a better use of resources, and carries higher prestige in society versus slaving away in a research lab. There also may be a reluctance to collaborate with non-Muslim institutions.
A similar situation probably exists with the Haredi as well. IIRC, women have higher labor participation rates than men.
"Facial hair was falling out of fashion (a sign of modest norms being renewed)
lol ok.
Facial hair went back into fashion in the "strongly Leftist" 1930s. It's also considered a sign of piety in nearly every world religion."
Fittingly enough, Darwin had an extravagant beard. Facial hair got more and more common in the late 19th century. It then gradually fell out of fashion in the early 20th century; by 1940, only a smallish number of men had thin mustaches, while nearly everyone else was clean shaven. This continued into the late 60's (look up pictures of George Carlin; he wore a suit and had no beard at that time, then in the 70's he grew a beard that he wore until he was dead). Watching old NFL games and looking at trading cards, in the late 60's some players had longer sideburns or mustaches, but that was it for facial hair (we're talking normies here, not bikers or hippies). Around 1973, some players start to grow beards or thicker mustaches. This would intensify as the decade went on, as by around 1980 at least 1/3 of the players had beards. In the mid-late 80's, clean-cut fashion came back in style, although it was still much more common to see professional level men with beards and thick mustaches than it was in the 1920's-60's. By 1992, goatees became an iconic part of 90's fashion, and more and more men were no longer shaving on daily basis, as can be discerned by how it was getting tougher to see men with "smooth" faces (whereas in the 1920's-80's, daily shaving was normal for many people).
In the 2000's and 2010's, goatees and moderate to full beards are now worn by at least 40-50% of guys.This all tracks cycles of corruption; in non-competitive periods, men are not as insecure about their status, so they're less likely to fall back on the cheap tactic of growing facial hair to prove that they're older and therefore probably of higher status than young guys who can't grow facial hair as easily.
Other signs of corruption include violent sports, W/hockey and football considered the outer limit of popular and dangerous sports entertainment in the 1960's. In the 70's and 80's, boxing drew growing crowds of spectators (and gamblers) who didn't find football or hockey to be ferocious enough, w/Muhammed Ali, George Forman, and Mike Tyson all becoming iconic celebrities of a culture that wasn't quite the same as it was in the 1940's-60's, when most people (as in, non-Boomers) were relatively gentle, modest, and hopeful.. By the first UFC in 1993, it was apparent that even boxing didn't offer the proper spectacle anymore, as UFC began it's rise to respectability with the modest PPV and home video success of it's initial set of tournaments, w/viewers enticed by the promise of knees and elbows to the head of a downed combatant, and kicks delivered to the groin and the face.
"Ali and Frazier's first fight, held at the Garden on March 8, 1971, was nicknamed the "Fight of the Century", due to the tremendous excitement surrounding a bout between two undefeated fighters, each with a legitimate claim as heavyweight champions. Veteran boxing writer John Condon called it "the greatest event I've ever worked on in my life." The bout was broadcast to 35 foreign countries; promoters granted 760 press passes.[42] "
So the the initial frenzied, circus-like atmosphere surrounding the pitting of two brutes against each other seems to have appeared in 1971, whipped up largely by Silents and Boomers, two generations who were beginning to chafe at the modest and gentle norms established and enforced by the GI Generation in the 1930's-1960's. These same generations also presided over a massive increase in brawls and cheap shots in hockey, baseball, and basketball in the 70's and 80's (w/ basketballer Rudy Tomjanavich nearly killed by a punch thrown by a much bigger player in the late 70's). Silent Gen coaches were heavily responsible for the 1983-'84 NHL season setting a record for penalty minutes, esp. related to fighting.
"I don't take Cochran's "gay germ" hypothesis seriously, seeing as it's based on no evidence and is unfalsifiable. At least name a specific germ or range of germs as the hypothesized culprit so it's a testable hypothesis."
Gays are obviously under-developed and mal-developed. They bear evidence of infantilization, such as smaller stature, weaker overall phenotype, lack of sexual interest in woman, and a lack of empathy and integrity (as I said above, gays and criminals over-lap each other in their propensity to commit crimes and rationalize taking advantage of others. Plus it's documented that in the 80's, many gays knew they were terribly ill but still kept having sex anyway. Straight men and women would never, in a million years, ever act so despicably (and of course, many of the infectees knew beforehand that they were taking serious risks by having casual sex, yet did so anyway and got infected).
Male homosexuals are deepy despised and distrusted for good reason. They are frequent carriers of disease, and their sociopathy makes them very threatening and predatory.
In lieu of no other apparent explanation for homosexuality, some kind of natal event that inhibits proper development seems pretty reasonable. And I don't know why you keep rejecting the association of urban parental environment and warm weather with gayness. In the HBD-sphere, it's been suggested in some circles that parents ought to have kids in cold and dry climates, preferably away from teeming urban areas, to protect their unborn and infant children from pathogens that can inflict damage on children. This is all the more true for Northern Europeans, who are not acclimated to warm and humid weather (unlike Sicilians, who have greater natural immunity to malaria than say, the Swedes). Blacks and Jews are more gay than white gentiles are? Why? Jews don't pick up teh ghey in prison (they almost never commit street crimes frequently enough to be arrested). Paul Cameron plausibly argued that elevated levels of homosexuality are observed in inmates before they had any sustained incarceration (offenders self-reported higher levels of gay sex in their "free" days than one would expect from gay males only being about 2-3% of the population, tops); as we know, lots of black men are criminals, but that which makes you a sociopath can also make you a sexual deviant. Besides, in today's PC climate, it's not as if there are legions of closeted white gentiles staying in an iron clad closet. And gays can generally be detected by hetero guys, and every school I ever went to (pre-college) had just one or two obvious gays for each yearly cohort of students (one of them was black,BTW, in a school that was 80-85% white), with one or two others on the borderline. Based on anecdotal evidence, maybe 20-30% of gay males are more difficult to detect, but that just makes them a minority group within an already small minority, so small as to be trivial in importance (as Steve Sailer would say, masculine gays are the exception that proves the rule).
Black women are quite promiscuous, and are more likely to live in filth than whites, both of which could also contribute to a stressful fetal experience for their children (blacks do have higher rates of STDs than whites). It's also been observed, on numerous occasions, that blacks in general are more physically and psychologically unhealthy than whites. I seem to also recall that studies indicate an association with an urban childhood and life-long propensity to report stress and anxiety. There are very obvious reasons to suspect that, at least for Caucasians and blacks, urban childhoods are so outside the realm of the trad. ethnic norm that it's utterly irresponsible to conceive children, and raise them, in urban areas. Asians and Hispanics seem to be much more comfortable with crowding, and are more naturally stoic, thus less likely to feel overwhelmed by police sirens, gun shots, teeming masses of strangers, and the like.
"Again, on account of where I live I know quite a few of both groups, and while I haven't made an extensive study of it, I've never noticed this. If anything I'd say it's the opposite, though that's mostly or entirely because they're less likely to be fat. There are unattractive features associated with both ("gayface," "Jew nose"), but they aren't universal and outside of extreme cases individual features matter little to attactiveness. I doubt either group would be so overrepresented among Hollywood actors and other celebrities if they were much uglier than the general population.
Nepotism and ethnic networking is all over Hollywood. It's Hebrew-wood.
Gay actors aren't uncommon in theater, but seem substantially less common in popular film. Gay Silent Gen movie actors have largely been exposed at this point (Rock Hudson, Robert Reed, Anthony Perkins, et al), but it doesn't seem as if there were really that many of them.
Steve Sailer often notes that the occupations most associated with frequent obituaries of, ahem, suspect men in the 1980's were dance, fashion design, interior decorating, and figure skating. Actors and musicians did quite a bit better WRT to their apparent cause of death, if they did die in the first place. Musician deaths in the 70's, 80's, and 90's were generally associated with drugs and self-destructive behavior in the absence of homosexuality, Freddy Mercury notwithstanding (and it took a while for George Micheal to succumb to his sinful life, while Prince is suspect it is still clear that he died from an over-dose, due to his deepening addiction to pain-killers several decades after he had rejected his early hedonist image, and Prince generally was known to kind of a recluse and control freak in his later life, as opposed to a walking STD warehouse that most gays are). Steve Sailer says that he's surprised at how many androgynous male celebrities from the 70's and 80's turned out to be straight, at least if their lack of apparent AIDs is any indication (and they would've died from "cancer" in the 80's or early 90's if that many of them were really gay).
Almost all notable male actors from the 70's and 80's, though they were part of the generation hit most heavily by AIDs (people born in the 40's, 50's and 60's), are still alive; they haven't died of "cancer". It could well be that actors are simply much less hedonistic, even when gay, than those who work in the other professions I mentioned; who knows? As Steve Sailer has said, being a rock star is incredibly dangerous because it means you never have to grow up, as you are surrounded by people who think your are cool for acting like an asshole with the moral sense of a two year old. But for actors, its different. Tom Cruise is eccentric and possibly gay, but he's aged well, and continues to make big movies, because Cruise is clearly a pro who cares about his work. He's not getting blasted at all night orgies on a regular basis.
"The closing of the two GM factories in OH/MI is a punch in the gut, and a major threat to the re-election of this Administration. Considerable effort should be undertaken to have (Tesla?) take over either one or both of the factories."
Well gee, what's been the general GOP reaction? Howls of outrage and betrayal? Or more whining that liberals ruin everything with their high taxes and their unions? Or utter indifference or ignorance toward de-industrialization, as has been the case since the 80's with the GOP?
And that's just the rhetoric; what about policy, and protecting our jobs?
Jig (1/2) –
What is the mechanism by which Toxoplasmosis would lead to SJW-leftism?
The personality profile of Toxoplasma-infected subjects was studied using three standard psychological questionnaires, i.e. Cattell’s 16PF, Cloninger’s TCI, NEO-PI-R (Big Five), and one special psychological questionnaire, Toxo94, that searched for specific changes expected to occur in subjects infected by the parasite transmitted from prey to predator (Flegr, 2007). Several studies have shown that infected men exhibited lower scores on Cattell’s factor G – superego strength (they have tendency to disregard rules) and higher scores on Cattell’s factor L – protension (they are more suspicious and jealous). In women, the shift in these two factors is opposite to that of men; they mainly show a positive shift in Cattell’s factor A – affectothymia (they are more warm-hearted, outgoing and easy-going than the more reserved, detached and critical Toxoplasma-free women). With a new version of Cattell’s questionnaire (v. 5), the infected men showed increased, rather than decreased, scores on superego strength [(Flegr, 2010b) for an explanation of discordant results between studies, see chapter 4]. Cloninger’s TCI showed that infected subjects, both men and women, have decreased scores on factor NS – novelty seeking, i.e. a lower tendency to search for new stimuli (Flegr et al., 2003; Skallová et al., 2005). Ethopharmacological studies have shown that lower novelty seeking scores are characteristic for individuals with an increased concentration of dopamine in the brain tissue, which is in an agreement with the increased synthesis of dopamine in tissue cysts of Toxoplasma found in the brain of infected hosts and with results of ethopharmacological studies performed with Toxoplasma-infected mice (Hodková et al., 2007; Skallová et al., 2005). Some studies also suggest that infected subjects have higher scores on Cloninger’s ST – self-transcendence (Novotná et al., 2005; Skallová et al., 2005). The NEO-PI-R questionnaire showed more extraversion in infected subjects, both men and women, and less conscientiousness in comparison with Toxoplasma-free subjects (Lindová et al., 2012).
On the basis of predictions of the manipulation theory and introspection of the Toxoplasma-infected author, a special questionnaire called Toxo94 was constructed (Flegr, 2010b). This questionnaire consisting of only 10 questions was distributed to several groups of subjects tested for toxoplasmosis, such as two large groups of university students and a group of women screened for toxoplasmosis during pregnancy (Flegr, 2010b). The results showed that infected men more often reported that diplomacy is not their strong point, that their instinctive (reflex) behaviour under imminent danger is rather slow and passive, that they believe that some people have the power to impose their will on others with hypnosis or through other means and that when they are attacked, physically or otherwise, or when they should fight for something important, they stop fighting at a certain moment because their own subconsciousness betrays them and they loss the will to fight back. The infected women more often report that diplomacy is not their strong point, that their instinctive (reflex) behaviour under imminent danger is rather slow and passive, that they believe that some people have the power to impose their will on others with hypnosis or otherwise and that they have a weak instinct for self-preservation: in situations where somebody else might be afraid, for example being alone in a forest at night or in an empty house, they remain calm.
Is Toxoplasmosis more prevalent in Western countries than third world ones?
I misremembered this; it looks like it's the reverse. So that would be evidence against my hypothesis, or at least that it isn't the only or primary factor.
(2/2) –
We can consider science Nobel Prizes, which are as of now (but probably not for long) a metric of real achievement. If you consider science Nobels which have gone to people from the Arab world, more have gone to the tiny Jewish minority than either the much larger Christian minority or the Muslim majority.
AFAIK, Jewish Nobelists from Arab countries have been primarily drawn from Ashkenazim who were for whichever reason first or second-generation immigrants, and not native Mizrahim (a low-achieving group except relative to Muslim Arabs). First world expats and their children in the third world are of course economically and educationally elite even by first world (or even Ashenazi) standards, so it's to be expected they would be enormously overrepresented by any metric of success.
Christian Arabs in Arab countries are a poor and uneducated group (by Western standards) who face intense discrimination in or are barred from many areas of employment, and so resemble pre-emancipation European Jews, who also didn't produce many famous scientists.
I would like to see the stats on prestige occupations in the US.
I don't have stats, but if you (as I have, although I didn't think to compile statistics) look up groups like politicians (current and former members of Congress, governors and Cabinet secretaries), Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, generals and admirals, endowed chairs at major universities, celebrities and so on, they're hugely overrepresented.
I saw somewhere a claim that Copts are overrepresented among surgeons by a factor of several hundred, and by 20,000 in one of the more prestigious disciplines. I can't find a link, but it seems plausible if you look up famous surgeons.
In Israel, there are some complications such as Haredi Jews don't take or do very badly on those standardized exams
The university entrance exams are optional, and it looks like Haredim don't take them. According to this paper, only 81.9% of Jews took those exams in 2011 as compared to 91.2% of Muslim Arabs, or 95.5% of Christians.
The proportion who took the most difficult combinations of subjects on their exams was 31.2% of Christians and 13.5% of Jews. That 13.5% would have to be pretty much entirely Ashkenazi for them to match the Christian %. And that's going by the official numbers; but given the recent and AFAICT[1] implausibly large drop in the proportion of Israeli Jews who claim Ashkenazi ancestry, it seems like there's a massive undercount akin[2] to self-identified vs actual English ancestry[3] in the US. If so it would be mathematically impossible for them to match the Christian %.
there could be effects due to that with more parental investment per child.
Doubt it; adoption studies have repeatedly shown that bad parenting can hurt but good doesn't much help a child's academic performance, particularly when it comes to smarter children.
[1] Gabriel can help with this.
[2] Quelle ironie, since Ashkenazi Jews created the perception in America that English ancestry is somehow shameful.
[3] e.g. A 3/4 English, 1/8 Irish and 1/8 German American will as often as not claim only Irish and German ethnicity on the Census, lest he be taken for a "WASP" and/or "preppy."
@snorlax
I don't take Cochran's "gay germ" hypothesis seriously, seeing as it's based on no evidence and is unfalsifiable. At least name a specific germ or range of germs as the hypothesized culprit so it's a testable hypothesis.
I'm not sure this is a strong argument. It took 20 years from prions being hypothesized to actually finding them and then people were looking.
Gabriel can help with this.
Unless you are religious, ashkenazi is associated with being a leftist from tel aviv. I think probably the average 505-50 would not say they were ashkenazi. If you are religious you will, probably, say you are ashkenazi if your father is ashkenazi, and 'mizrahi' if your father is 'mizrahi'.
With that said, there is a factor causing underestimates of Ashkenazi IQ, which is that Russian and Ukrainian gentiles will – unless they are especially uppity – say they are ashkenazi.
Jewish Nobelists from Arab countries have been primarily drawn from Ashkenazim who were for whichever reason first or second-generation immigrants, and not native Mizrahim
I don't believe that is the case. I am thinking of examples like Serge Haroche and Claude Cohen-Tanoudji. You could also throw in Jacques Derrida although he isn't science. They aren't immigrant Ashkenazim, although they come from families which were highly assimilated to the French colonial culture.
Anyway, I would like to revise my prior claim that Jews are the smartest group in the world and instead claim that honor for Tamil Brahmins. They are around 1% of South Asians but have 75% of Science Nobels won by South Asians (admittedly at 3/4 we are still in small number stats) with ridiculous overrepresentation in intellectual professions in India, US, UK, Canada, etc.
Also Parsis are quite impressive in India.
Of the high achieving groups, Christian Arabs are the most outgoing and 'gold-chain-y' and that's why they dominate politics in Latin America for example.
So here's my hierarchy:
Tamil Brahmins
Ashkenazi Jews
Parsis ?
(possibly other small endogamous groups in India)
Christian Arabs
Koreans
Japanese
Igbo ?
etc.
AE, I don't suppose there is any IQ data or proxy for IQ split up among ethnic groups finely enough to settle this, is there?
Serge Haroche is half ashkenazi, Derrida and Cohen Tanouji are/were both authentic sephardi, who have an average IQ of 100. Christian Arabs easily outdo normal 'mizrahi' Jews.
Gabriel (1/2) –
I'm not sure this is a strong argument. It took 20 years from prions being hypothesized to actually finding them and then people were looking.
But the prion hypothesis specified in great detail the mechanism of action and physical/chemical characteristics of the hypothetical pathogen, which made it a testable hypothesis.
It also provided compelling evidence of phenomena that could not be explained by alternative hypotheses—the consensus hypothesis about the origin of male homosexuality[1], or even the PCified version[2] comports with all known phenomena associated with male homosexuality as well or better than "gay germ."
"Gay germ" is more like if I said, without providing evidence, that "something like prions" is what causes cancer. "It's not PC" is not evidence. Death by a thousand cuts isn't PC, but that doesn't make it a good way to greet your neighbor.
And people are certainly looking for the cause of male homosexuality. Whomever finds it will get a Nobel, probably even if it's a bit un-PC like "gay germ," although I'll grant that if it were very un-PC like "it's a choice" or "they were all molested as kids"[3] it would probably be ignored. Plus they're also looking in China/the non-Western world, where there aren't any PC constraints.
[1] Some combination of genetics, in-utero hormones, epigentics and socialization.
[2] Same minus socialization.
[3] Independently of PC neither of those looks likely since they fail to explain phenomena like "gayface" or lisping. ("Gay germ" could, if it were a really bizarre germ, but a genetic or hormonal explanation is far more straightforward).
(2/2) –
there is a factor causing underestimates of Ashkenazi IQ, which is that Russian and Ukrainian gentiles will – unless they are especially uppity – say they are ashkenazi.
You know better than I, but I don't think this would make much difference:
1a) Russian gentiles have many flaws as a group, which I'd sum up as a tendency towards self-destructive and sadistic behavior, but they aren't stupid—avg IQ c 100. Russian Jews intermarrying with them shouldn't be any more dysgenic WRT IQ than intermarriage in Anglosphere countries.
1b) While it does appear American self-identified Jews' avg IQ has declined in recent decades, it hasn't by nearly as much as it "should" based on the intermarriage rate. This is probably due to a compensatory positive effect from outbreeding.
2) RJews who recently emigrated to the US are really, really smart. They're way overrepresented in STEM, particularly at the highest and most difficult levels, even relative to other Jews. They do spectacularly on science and math olympiads, etc.
And we likely got a lower proportion of the genuine article than you did; I doubt there was any more than a cursory genealogical investigation[1] as a condition of entry. It's likely the halfsies, quarters and zeroes[2] among them aren't as often in the "really, really smart" category, but the strong top end should compensate for that.
3) The three groups
Rgens who would be willing to marry RJews
RJews who would be willing to marry Rgens
Rgens whom RJews would consider marriage material
are almost certainly each some points to the right of their respective bell curves. And the intersection of the three still more so.
4a) Somewhat more speculative, and overlaps with 3, but religious converts tend to have higher IQs, so that's probably the case for RJews who converted to Christianity and Rgens who converted to Judaism. The former AFAICT would not hold true for Jews outside Russia; converting to Christianity[3] is so stigmatized it looks to be the province of schizophrenics and other kooks, but again AFAICT there isn't nearly the same stigma amongst RJews.
4b) Religiosity correlates negatively with IQ, so likewise nonreligious or less religious Rgens and RJews would be higher IQ. Also overlaps with 3.
5) Admixed Rgen/RJews aren't a large enough proportion of Israeli Ashkenazis to move the average very much, particularly since for the reasons stated above the spread would be in the ballpark of IQ 106 vs IQ 110.
[1] The honor system, IIRC.
[2] Sorta; Rgens are 5% Ashkenazi, which makes the 99% overlap between internet antisemitism and Russia-firstism pretty hilarious.
[3] Attending and/or raising kids in a spouse's "mainline" "Protestant" far-left fake church appears to be borderline acceptable.
Jig –
Like Gabriel said, all three of them were ethnic European Jews who were upper-middle or upper-class French-speaking French citizens. I would categorize them as Pieds-Noirs, not native North Africans. It's also apples to oranges (or rather, apples to nothing) since Algeria and Morocco neither have nor (in the modern era) had a native and ethnically-distinct Christian community.
Tamil Brahmins
India actually is the SJW caricature of America. Brahmins really do benefit from obscene unearned privilege while cruelly tyrannizing the diverse masses.
One of my nerdy habits is to get a sense of foreign cultures by going to country subreddits. A thread in r/India that's stuck with me was a guy complaining that: His family owns an apartment building, and a Brahmin recently moved in. After a few days, the Brahmin demanded they and all the tenants only cook vegetarian meals in the building. His family and the tenants are naturally annoyed by the forced vegetarianism.
The replies were all along the lines of "so sorry for you," "what an asshole," relating their own anecdotes of mistreatment by Brahmins (e.g. being caned as a small child for taking candy that had been left as an offering to some god) and so on, but what struct me is that not one questioned the premise that a Brahmin tenant could order around his non-Brahmin landlord and neighbors!
I don't if they're Tamils or not, but as a software developer I work with many Brahmins. They are good at sounding smarter and more competent than they are, which is typically not at all. (As in, I have to redo all their work myself). They are ludicrously ethnocentric and nepotistic. If given hiring power they will hire only from their hometown and subcaste. As a matter of course they present their subordinates' work as their own and take full credit.
So I'd put a few asterisks next to any statistics about Brahmin accomplishment.
I'd say the top four smartest ethnicities in alphebetical order are Ashkenazi Jews, Christian Arabs, diaspora Chinese and northeastern US WASPs. It's probably pretty close to a four-way IQ tie between them. IQ doesn't include everything, such as a quality I'd describe as "go-getterness," which I'd say AJs and CAs have more of than DCs and NUWs.
Igbo ?
Uh, no. Igbos are the Jews of sub-Saharan Africa (give or take a Tutsi or Ethiopian), but seeing as SSA is avg IQ 75, you don't need more than 85-90 to be the Jews of SSA. If Igbos were among the world's smartest ethnicities, Igboland would have a first world standard of living.
If Igbos were among the world's smartest ethnicities, Igboland would have a first world standard of living.
I think there was a very destructive war, nearly genocidal, against the Igbos back in the 60s or 70s, with millions dead. That probably stalled their progress, and also they are chained to a corpse (as Churchill would say) being forced to be part of Nigeria.
Occasionally you see those stories about an African kid getting a perfect SAT and into all 8 Ivies or something. I think those are Igbo.
But yes, maybe not among the world's smartest overall. It's hard to tell.
northeastern US WASPs
Which major figures in science and mathematics can we point to here, like one could with Jews and Tamil Brahmins*? There's Josiah Willard Gibbs. And Ben Franklin. Linus Pauling? Serious question. They've had 300 years of relative prosperity and good institutions but I'm only coming up with a few names. Maybe northeastern US WASPs are only at white US average IQ levels but combine it with other positive mental traits like better time preference relative to other US whites, to explain their wealth and good behavior.
*in the column of Tamil Brahmins add Ramanujan.
On the other hand, maybe English and Scots have to be up there, or rather some subgroups thereof, considering that they have the most major figures in science. Indeed if you were forced to name just one most important person in each science, they might almost all be British – Biology: Darwin, Physics: Newton, Geology: Lyell, Computer Science: Turing. There must be IQ substructure in Britain, because how else can the same ethnicity produce those people and town after town of chavs?
Jig,
Anglo culture has a bias against "pure math" and considers economics as of higher prestige. There's also a tendency for these figures to pursue Wall Street as a career, where they've made quite a lot of "discoveries".
For our own purposes, Angus Deaton of Scotland has been very influential.
"Do not expect millennials or Zs to arrest that trend. Expect them to accelerate it, on both sides of the political chasm and in every fissure all the way down into the abyss."
So, Millennials and Z's, especially the men, are labeled as being low T creatures who lack the guile and gumption to even scare their own shadow…yet they are magically going to arise like the angry Saxon, demand retribution, throw liberals and neo-cons out of helicopters, and reclaim "Western Civilization"? It is becoming a clown show with this narrative.
The United States is broken, to be sure, but not beyond repair. Again, the devil is in the details. Secession and the eventual break-up of America is just tough talk by Internet arm chair intellectual warriors.
Things will get interesting.
@snorlax
Whatever else we know about homosexuality, we know it's destructive to reproductive fitness. I find Cochran's/Jayman's mathematical argument about the impossibility of a genetic explanation to be persuasive. In addition, we have parallels of hitherto unknown pathogens discovered as the cause of irritable bowel syndrome. Now, I'll admit that on issues like this I tend to rely on people I trust and I trust Cochran a lot, so maybe it's skewed my thinking.
On the PC thing, I'm pretty sure that saying 'homosexuality is caused by an infectious disease' would be way more offensive than 'homosexuality is caused by mother bonding'. I'm going to run an experiment next time I'm in the company of liberals.
On Russians. The average Russian IQ is 97, the average Ashkenazi IQ is 105-112 based on American evidence. The Russian population of Israel is 900,000 of whom about a half are estimated to be not halachically Jewish (i.e. 50-50 Jewish or less and even some of the ones who are halachically Jewish would fall into this category). The reason for this is that Ariel Sharon, who was himself a gentile since his mother was from some weird Russian sect of Judaizing Christians, and was in charge of immigration during the collapse of the SU, correctly surmised that more Russians meant more votes for him. There are 2.8 million Jews of partial or full Ashkenazi ancestry in Israel, from which I think you can subtract somewhere in the region of 400,000 Russians who will tick ashkenazi but have majority Russian descent. On top of that , it's clear that the smarter Russians and Russian Jews went to America or came to Israel and then went to America. Put together, that seems enough to throw off the numbers by a couple of points.
Has anyone actually tested Igbos? I can't find anything. One the one hand, their artistic, cultural, intellectual achievements etc. seems pretty modest, but until very recently they had little contact with other civilized peoples and since then they've been put through the ringer. Parenthetically, the fact that the Igbos never got their own country while all the other no-hopers got there's is a very damning indictment of the 20th century.
Feryl,
There's something to be said for getting a brain once you get older. I tend to only really speak for people born in the early-mid 80's, because that's who I am. And the hunch I get is that most early Millennials are following in the footsteps of Gen X-ers in their antipathy towards neo-liberal yuppie culture. Once you get into your thirties, you start to get frustrated at not having the advantages and opportunities that Silents and Boomers totally took for granted, as is evidenced by those generations shredding New Deal America to pieces. When you're in your 20's, the world is full of possibility, and you tend to be focused on your peer group. If you don't start to hit certain milestones by the age of 30, then angst starts to set in that you're falling behind and probably being cheated.
This meshes well with the finding that white men in their thirties have really shifted away from the Democrat party over the last several years. They're not going to the Paul Ryan-wing of the GOP, though. Whatever the merits of the progressive left in terms of economic well-being, those 'leaders' are so deep in the anti-white male mindset that I doubt someone like Ocasio-Cortez or even Bernie Sanders could say something like "white millennial men feel abandoned".
Deter Naturalist,
Agree. If we don't intentionally maneuver ourselves to a soft landing, we'll get a FedGov crash.
Jig,
Well put. Speaking for myself, it mostly comes down to Sanders serving as an imperfect avatar of the old left. But he's obviously a coward. Compare the way he prostrated himself over and over to someone like Ron Paul, who never yielded an inch.
Not that I'm aware of re: IQ of groups like the Parsis in India. I do recall Steve Sailer writing about them several years ago but that was based on educational and occupational metrics, not intelligence IIRC.
snorlax,
Used to use Excel, now I use google docs. I like the aesthetics, it's easy to manage and share, etc. Email just sent, subject "Hey snorlax, it's AE".
Matey,
Fabian tactics were arguably analogous to National Review/Buckleyite conservatism of the 80s and 90s. On the other hand, Rome expanded *enormously* from the second Punic War to Trajan.
AE –
Just wrote you back.
You can always tell a software developer because they know nothing about commonly-used spreadsheet programs…
"This meshes well with the finding that white men in their thirties have really shifted away from the Democrat party over the last several years. They're not going to the Paul Ryan-wing of the GOP, though. Whatever the merits of the progressive left in terms of economic well-being, those 'leaders' are so deep in the anti-white male mindset that I doubt someone like Ocasio-Cortez or even Bernie Sanders could say something like "white millennial men feel abandoned"."
I listen to a podcast sometimes that has several black/mullato Millennials born in the late 80's. And even they make fun of PC, and are tired of all the haranguing and humorlessness. Of course, they're even less likely to buy into stale neo-liberalism than are the white guys of that generation. I really do think that 50-70% of Millennials are just fed up with politics in general, being alienated from the Reagan Right and the SJW Left. It really is miserable to be a cranky ideologue devoted to either one.
What obviously is troubling are the Boomers and Gen X-ers who talk crap about Millennials, and don't give them any credit for anything. Back in the late 70's-early 90's, you couldn't even safely walk the streets in large swaths of this country because of Boomers and X-ers. And domestic violence was much worse back then, too, so for many people there just wasn't any place to to be safe. It's very difficult, IMO, to envision a Mad Max type future happening any time soon. I think that Millennials are headed down the same road as the young adults of the Civil War era; alienated/withdrawn and melancholy, rather than sanguinely adventurous or boldly rebellious.
Also, keep in mind that Boomers and early Gen X-ers so defiantly were willing to do drugs, have sex, get into fights, break windows, in spite of the prosperous and generally competent society they were born into. Millennials know that these older generations totally pissed away the many gifts, and positive possibilities, of the America that Missionaries, Losts, and GIs worked so hard to achieve.
It looks like people born in the 1930's-1960's have done an increasingly poor job of leadership, setting standards, accepting accountability, and so forth, as time's gone by. Millennials have diddly squat to do with any of it, and people born in the 70's haven't really had a chance yet to prove anything, though I suspect that they'll over-lap with Millennials in feeling alienated from the broken system they inherited.
"On the PC thing, I'm pretty sure that saying 'homosexuality is caused by an infectious disease' would be way more offensive than 'homosexuality is caused by mother bonding'. I'm going to run an experiment next time I'm in the company of liberals."
Left-handedness is kind of an abnormality/defect, because it's basically caused by the brain not being properly wired. Men or more likely to be left-handed, and left-handers tend to be either "fast" or "slow", and they also tend to be over-represented in both deviance and eminence. Men are more likely than women to be victims of developmental mishaps, and there's very strong evidence that there are more "born this way" male homosexuals than female ones. Ergo, homosexuality is a developmental abnormality, though curiously, just like left-handedness, it's not all bad (gay men have slightly better verbal IQ). W/ lesbians, I don't know if it's a case of a natal mishap as much as it is highly masculine, or highly dour, women who perhaps consciously alienate men. Most lesbians seem very poorly socialized and joyless. With gay dudes, there's really no hope for finding lasting happiness (it can't be found in a glory hole). W/lesbians, if they had decided to relax and have fun, they could've found a suitable boyfriend/husband, and learned to appreciate what they had. It's also interesting that some highly masculine women who are heterosexuals will have tomboyish interests but still exercise self-control, or they will be depraved nymphos and bi-sexuals (try-sexual women, sluts, and porn starts are much more masculine looking than normie chicks). Most lesbians, on the other hand, are notoriously disinterested in sex, suggesting that dour affect is at play here, as opposed to sexual attraction (hot blooded horny women will screw a lot w/ guys, while the most depraved ones will do chicks too).
Society used to hate left-handed people, but first acceptance came in the 70's, then later on we understood that it was a biological anomaly beyond the control of anyone. I do think that we're headed down the same road with homosexuality; society will accept a biological explanation (even the germ one) as a way to better understand it, rather than risk continuing to have the same primitive superstitions, and moral judgements, about gays not unlike how we felt about left-handed people. And accepting that homosexuality, or left-handedness, is an inherent trait, is not the same thing as condoning poor behavior, or sin. Understanding predisposition to deviance ain't a bad thing for society; conservatives who mistake scientific knowledge for the corruption of society need to get a clue. We know a lot more than we used to, and that's hardly a bad thing. It is true, however, that corruption cycles still occur in the presence of greater knowledge, but that says more about generational ineptitude and misplaced priorities (cut taxes for the rich, or regulate greedy banks and the property owning class?) than it does science and it's interaction with morality. And of course, Boomers are notoriously disinterested in intellectualism and empiricism compared to GIs, and how's that worked out?
Feryl,
A flimsy excuse for self-indulgence: I'm left-handed in everything but cutting with scissors (presumably because that's how I was taught in pre-school) and throwing a frisbee (no idea why that is the case). I'm not ambidextrous with anything, though. Those two things are right-dominant, everything else is left-dominate.