Are You A Social Contrarian?

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I’m curious to hear what my readers think of the various concepts and theories that frequently come up on this blog, and of the key assumptions underlying the Karlinist Weltanschauung.

Very quick n dirty summaries of terms and their discontents:

Peak oil: Oil is limited in quantity, and at some point its production will inevitably decline – with severe repercussions for the economy; but can also be shorthand for more general problems of declining EROEI and resource depletion. Mainstream conservatives, polluters, big business hate it; Serious People usually dismiss it.

AGW: The world is warming, and human activities are largely responsible for it. Mainstream conservatives, polluters, big business hate it.

Limits to growth: Unsustainable trends in resource consumption and pollution set the world up for a severe socio-economic collapse in the 21st century. Serious People usually dismiss it; mainstream conservatives hate it.

Intelligence theory: Individual life outcomes are significantly dependent on IQ (i.e. wealth, risk of criminality, etc), while the rate of development significantly depends on the national level of human capital. Universal taboo.

HBD: A significant proportion of the differences between human groups (or races) can be attributed to differences in genotypes, which express themselves in areas such as IQ, physical abilities, character, etc. Universal super-taboo.

Game: Chicks respect alphas and despise betas; nice guys don’t get laid. At the macro level, the combination of female hypergamy and sexual revolution has led to a kind of “soft polygamy” in the US. Great for alphas, but life for sexless betas is ever more hellish. Universal taboo.

Low-carb diet: The typical US high carb diet has greatly contributed to huge obesity rates; paleo, Atkins, 4HB-type diets are the way to go. Lazy fat people who want to rationalize and excuse their own obesity tend to hate it, as do many vegetarians with their misplaced empathy.

80/20 principle/Parkinson’s Law: You accomplish 80% of things in 20% of the time, but unfortunately work expands to fill up all the time available for it – but it is possible to find one’s way out of limbo (e.g. muses/location-independent revenue streams; aggressive outsourcing; mini-retirements). Lazy people / office plankton who worship their jobs and don’t want to take a risk make fun of and dismiss this.

Transhumanism: Human enhancements, e.g. cognitive (ranging from nootropics to chip implants if the technology appears for it) and especially longevity (e.g. SENS). Technophobes are against this, i.e. most people.

Technological singularity: This quote by John Good encapsulated it: “The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” Technophobes are against this, i.e. most people.

The Collapse Of Britain In A Few Headlines

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Here’s a sampling of recent headlines from the country that loves to lecture others on freedom of speech and rule of law.

Racist Tube rant woman Jacqueline Woodhouse jailed: A London Underground passenger has been jailed for 21 weeks after she admitted hurling racist abuse at fellow passengers. – BBC

Girl gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling ‘kill the white slag’ freed after judge hears ‘they weren’t used to drinking because they’re Muslims’. – Daily Mail

Police misused powers during royal wedding, protesters claim. (AK: on preemptive arrests of republicans) - The Independent

The hijab has liberated me from society’s expectations of women: Wearing the hijab doesn’t have to be about religious dedication. For me, it is political, feminist and empowering. (AK: What’s worse than a feminist, and a radical Islamist? A feminist Islamist) – The Guardian

No 10 guide to changing nappies and baby talk: New parents will be given government advice on changing nappies, breastfeeding and “baby talk” under a multi-million pound initiative to support family life. – The Telegraph

UK economy’s fall into recession deeper than expected: Contraction of 0.3%, coupled with more bad news from the eurozone, increases pressure on government to intervene to boost economic growth. – The Guardian

Is there any reason, any reason whatsoever, for other countries to listen to Britain on absolutely anything? Flee it as quickly as you can possibly can. :shock:

“Cycle of Poverty” Is Just Another Way of Saying “Idiot’s Limbo”

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Case in point: This article (“Caught in the cycle of poverty”, Anna Gorman) from the LAT, which is a microcosm of everything that is wrong in US demographic and social policy. It is a story about the “challenges” facing a poverty-stricken African American woman clearly intended to evoke sympathy for her. That didn’t go over well in the readers’ comments section even though the LAT is basically the West Coast equivalent of the liberal/lefty NYT.

Indeed, at first glance, it is difficult to find sympathy for her. Our heroine, Natalie Cole, is a high school dropout who’d popped out two kids by the age of 17 (!). She then popped out another two with her Latino boyfriend. She was asked to write a resume for her job application but never did so. She does not take her medications or turn up for appointed check-ups despite already by the age of 27 being ”heavyset” (read: Obese) and suffering from a variety of health ailments. She shoplifts. According to the author, “She wants to provide a better life for her children but seems not to know how.”

On the other hand however we have to bear in mind that LAT readers are fairly intelligent, whereas there is cause to doubt Ms. Cole is even functionally literate. She has most of the correlates of a dull person: Single motherhood; inability to follow simple instructions; obesity; etc. Despite wanting to, she seems unable to get a GED certificate. From the portrait given by the LAT it is hard to imagine her having an IQ of more than 75. No amount of further education or counseling can bestow her with the tools to escape idiot’s limbo. As such, it is obviously unfair to judge Ms. Cole so harshly for her welfare dependency.

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The Evil That Obesity Apologists Wreak

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Apart from a few (typically loser) countries with national fat fetishes, men do not want to fuck fat girls. Or even see them. Most certainly, they do not want to feed the bizarre princess complexes typical of Anglo femdom.

Is it fair that obesity lowers a young woman’s social status far, far more than a man’s? Of course not. Proof:

A few further observations that can be made on this topic:

* Is it an accident that the two major countries – the US and Russia – with the highest divorce rates are where chicks are substantially fatter than dudes? It is after all hard to keep the attraction simmering through more and more layers of blubber. A typical scenario appears to be: (1) Chick gets fat; (2) Dude loses sexual interest; (3) Chick initiates divorce (and payoff!); (4) Becomes a columnist at Jezebel railing against the patriarchy.

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So It Begins…

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Rise of the naked cannibals.

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said. …

The officer, who has not been identified, approached and, seeing what was happening, also ordered the naked man to back away. When he continued the assault, the officer shot him, police sources said. The attacker failed to stop after being shot, forcing the officer to continue firing. Witnesses said they heard at least a half dozen shots.

This is how it ALWAYS happens in the movies. I’d keep a close eye on the victim (aka Patient Zero) and close down all air traffic from the American continent as a precautionary measure.

The incident, which came as crowds descended upon South Beach for the annual Urban Beach Week hip-hop festival, snarled traffic on the causeway for several hours.

The alternate, “edgy” interpretation is that said victim might have been okay if he’d followed John Derbyshire’s Rule 10d.

Nah. Zombies are far likelier.

A New Mindset, A New Direction

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One of the weak points of my blog(s) is that posts are too long. Sean Guillory once told me that 1,500 words is the magical point at which readership begins to plummet, but I frequently go well over that length. Another negative point from the POV of readership is that they are also considerably wonkier than what you’d find on average in the blogosphere if I do say so myself.

I have decided to change tack. From now on, many if not all of my posts both on here and at Da Russophile will be shorter in length, and will have greater relevance to everyday life and current affairs. An additional bonus is greater readership. After all, many of the great pundits I follow such as The Oil Drum, Joe Romm, Steve Sailer, Robert Lindsay, GNXP, Nikolay Starikov, Kononenko, etc. churn something out every day.

Much as I like them, I’m forced to admit that Facebook and Twitter have had a harmful influence on my blogging productivity. After all its much easier to surf the interwebs, find a good link, and write a 140 character commentary on it as opposed to crafting a proper blog entry on the subject. They are excellent publicity and connectivity vehicles but they also encourage and incentivize laziness. So expect to see less of me there and more of me here from now on.

Berlin Gets Bad News From PISA

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There are several ways to influence national mean IQ levels. One is to improve nutrition and education, but vitally important though they are, they suffer from diminishing returns as populations bump up against their genetic ceilings. Another is to promote eugenic policies, or at least policies to mitigate the dysgenic trends that are typical of modern developed societies, but they tend to be ethically questionable and politically unfeasible. The third major lever is the immigration system, but how can we assess whether it’s doing its job of only letting in the people who would be a net benefit to the host country?

In my wanderings through the interwebs, I found that the NCES has an excellent “International Data Explorer” with all kinds of socio-economic data on the tested students of each country that participated in the PISA standardized tests (which correlate closely with IQ). Of particular interest was data on scores broken down by immigration status (native, 1st generation, 2nd generation), which was frankly stunning in the degree to which it confirms various stereotypes and explains why migrants succeed in some countries and live in lawless ghettos in others. See the graph below (click to enlarge).

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In Which I Appear On The Stark Report

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You can listen to the 56 minutes of my interview on The Stark Truth about race realism, IQ / human capital, and economic development here. (That, or read the posts linked to therein if you haven’t already. I didn’t say much new).

Many thanks to Robert Stark, and the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network which does sterling work in publicizing alternate viewpoints.

The Hunger Games: Food For Thought

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Recently I went to watch the movie adaptation of the first book in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian trilogy. (The image left is h/t Natalie). Centuries into the post-apocalyptic future, the US – now known as the nation of Panem (or “bread”, in Latin; presumably an allusion to the interplay of panem et circenses that is its dominant theme), is ruled over by a privileged elite based in the Capitol, a hi-tech, glitzy metropolis situated in the Rockies. Surrounding it are twelve Districts, places of poverty and squalor that are obliged to send tributes to the Capitol as the blood price for a rebellion 74 years in the past. These tributes are both material in-kind (individual Districts specialize in fishing, agriculture, coal, electronics, luxury goods, etc) – and human. Every year, the subjected Districts have to send a male and female child, drawn by lot or a volunteer, to compete in national televised blood games.

Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the trilogy, is a teenage girl living in District 12, one of the poorest and most underprivileged. They specialize in mining coal, which is burnt in another district to produce power for the Capitol. While some reviewers see the books as a critique of capitalist exploitation, it is pretty clear that the dominant economic system is command economy geared to the goals of extracting superprofits from the peripheries and funneling them towards the citizens of the Capitol to buy their quiescence. (As Eric Kain points out, “Arbitrarily picking Districts to supply only one type of good to the Capitol means that human capital is badly mismanaged… a flourishing market economy likely would have meant a far more wealthy populace in the Capitol as well.”)

WARNING: The rest of this review will contain major spoilers.

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The Political Crisis In The Netherlands: The Rise Of The Reds?

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Da Russophile readers will probably know of Nils van der Vegte. He is a Dutch scholar currently based in Arkhangelsk who runs the site Russia Watchers (with Joera Mulders), with whom I did a co-translation of an article on emigration to Belarus. He also has some strong opinions about politics in his native Netherlands. This article is about the possible political ramifications from the recent collapse of the Dutch government.

On Saturday the 21st of April the Dutch minority government fell after the populist Party of Freedom, under the leadership of Geert Wilders dropped out of the negotiations stating that the new proposed budget cuts would hit its electorate too hard. The question is, what now? New elections will be held in September or October 2012 but what will happen in the meantime? And what will “Brussels” and the financial markets say about the fall of the Dutch government? Some of my international friends asked me about the situation and as I have no blog to explain this, I am most grateful to Anatoly Karlin to provide me with an opportunity to do this.

The political system: A short history

Before I start with a short history of Dutch Politics, it is important to say something about our political system. This is not going to be a very detailed history of more than a hundred pages but to understand the problems of The Netherlands one needs to have some basic knowledge about how things work. The political system is sometimes defined as a consociational state: a mix of parliamentary representative democracy and a constitutional monarchy. My country does not have a president, it has a king or queen (during the last century we only had queens). The king does not have any real powers, his power sharply decreased following the introduction of Ministerial Responsibility in 1848, together with a new constitution. The Prime Minister is the most powerful figure in the government as, for example, in Britain. To form a government in The Netherlands, one needs 75+1 seat in the House of Representatives[1], which consists of 150 seats in total.

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