The Death Penalty: It’s Conditional

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on August 12, 2012

User Jennifer Hor writes:

Last time I looked at the financial cost of capital punishment in the US was several years ago and already in the late 1990s – early 2000s, the cost of executing someone was US$8 million in Florida… There are costs involved like the various appeals processes which take up people’s time and hiring and paying juries for several trials that might take weeks or months. Economic austerity may be the one thing that gets cash-strapped states like California to abolish the death penalty.

My highlights. The death penalty is expensive in America only because it chooses to make it so. I’m not much against that because the US is also clearly rich enough to afford the process. The only problem of course is that it in effect nullifies the deterrent value of the DP. I read in Freakonomics that the average life expectancy of a man on death row is actually higher than of a bro selling drugs in the hood. So what kind of deterrent is that? Either go the Singapore/China route of a quick trial and execution – or you might as well cancel it altogether.

But it’s not really an issue I care about much either way. It’s not exactly going to make the US or California bankrupt. As long as the DP applies for appropriate crimes (e.g. premeditated murder, serial murder, national treason during wartime, etc) and not stupid shit like blasphemy or drugs possession then I’m basically fine with it. I’m not a bloodthirsty person but why the hell should I care about the life of some lowlife who derives entertainment from killing people or eating children or whatever?

I submit that in some places and circumstances however the DP would be highly useful. In low IQ / high testosterone countries where violent crime levels are extremely high – and where policing isn’t very effective. Visceral demonstrations are very good deterrents and this is in fact probably the reason why virtually all pre-industrial societies enforced the DP. I submit that the DP would still be highly desirable in places where violent crime is out of control like Venezuela or South Africa.

IQ Is A Social Construct Except When It Isn’t

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , , was written by for on August 10, 2012

That is, when it happens to show that someone is a mental retard and as such shouldn’t be executed for murder.

Just the old liberal hamster wheel logic in action.

I’m actually quite indifferent to the DP. But I’m not indifferent to using mental retardation as a defense. If anything it is more of a reason to execute the murderer as the very dull operate by instinct and emotion, not cost/benefit calculations, and as such cannot be expected to reform and make positive contributions to society even if provided with incentives to do so.

The other reason is shown by the graph above. Stupid people are simply far, far more likely to be criminals than normal people. Making retardation a defense against the DP effectively puts the most criminally prone cognitive fraction of the American population above the law.

Why Everyone Is Getting The Aurora Shootings Wrong

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 22, 2012

(1) Mass shootings of this type account for far less than 1% of US homicides. As such it is pointless and bizarre to try to make some kind of anti-guns point with them.

(2) They are a relatively new phenomenon; even the term “postal killings“, describing mass shootings at postal offices, was first coined in 1993. This suggests that other factors are at work. In particular, these shooters almost always tend to be whites or Asians with no girlfriend and frequently specializing in STEM fields; a remarkable fact given that most homicides in the US are committed by low-class Blacks or Hispanics. They are also loners: James Holmes himself, as well as Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), George Sodini (who was so desperate at never getting laid that he attended seduction workshops), Marc Lépine, etc. In short what ties most of them together is that these mass shootings are driven by beta male rage.

Here is how James Holmes was described by a female classmate. Note that “weird” coming from a chick is the kiss of death to any romantic prospect:

“I always thought that he was a little strange. I could never put my finger on it, but something told me to not get to close to him, female instincts I guess,” the female student told NBC News. “I had tons of classes with him and lived across from him in the Honors dorms. He was a very smart guy though. He was a little bit of a weird guy, but we were honors students, so weird people were kind of common.”

(3) Why now? I assume that from the 1980’s on society passed some critical tipping point. Before it was possibly to get a good girlfriend just by being a “nice guy”; today it is necessary to skilfully game women to get laid with any frequency. Today the combination of obesity (especially among lower class women) and unleashed female hypergamy (especially among higher class women) which enabled alpha male soft polygamy has made half of femdom practically inaccessible to your average beta. Your typical shooter isn’t just a beta but a raging omega; condemned to a life of celibacy by a social ineptitude that society no longer caters for because of the aforementioned factors. Some of them marry their cats or become homosexuals; a few go on killing sprees driven by sexless rage.

(4) That said, it’s important to keep in mind that these mass shootings are in the end a mere cultural curiosity, more than anything. They dominate the airwaves but the chances of getting killed in one is probably no more than the chances of dying in a terrorist attack on US soil, or getting struck dead by lightning. Only a fool or paranoiac would spend his days worrying about it. The vast majority of homicides in the US are accounted for by inner city areas, where homicide rates can go as high as 40/100,000 (e.g. Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Washington DC). As is well known all these places have in common a racial composition of a certain character. Meanwhile there are quite a few states with West European-level homicide rates of below 2/100,000: New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Hawaii, Maine, Utah. What’s immediately striking is that these are the states with the most, erm, European-like populations.

(6) The main liberal-collectivist argument against gun rights is that they increase homicide rates. However these is no real statistical evidence for this. At least in a reasonably high-IQ population, there is no reason to think that sprinkling firearms all over makes homicide rates any worse. The liberal-collectivists hate this because they deny HBD theory and reality and affirm human equality, and would rather law-abiding citizens go defenseless against criminals than admit they are wrong. Indeed, they are like radical Communists or fascists, putting ideology ahead of people.

(7) Feminism (with its attendant obesity apologism and female hypergamy) is for the most part responsible for mass shootings. NAM’s (Non-Asian Minorities) – especially Blacks, who account for about 50% of homicides on 13% of the total population [statistics linkie] – are responsible for the US homicide rate being more than twice as high as Europe’s. Guns are faultless; to the contrary, they tend to incentivize the very middle-class civility that is typical of low-violence societies. That is why the liberal-collectivists and cultural Marxists and Guardianistas oh so predictably hate them and want to take them away from us.

From our cold dead hands they will!

EDIT 7/25: And I was completely, 100% correct as always surprise surprise.

Exercises in Banality: The Moral Preening By Khodorkovsky Apologists

This about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for on December 29, 2010

My views on Khodorkovsky – and by extension his being found guilty of $25bn embezzlement – aren’t exactly a secret (1, 2, 3) so I’ll keep this brief.

1. As usual, the only people who care about this are Western politicians eager to score cheap shots against Russia’s “assault” on transparency and rule of law (note that the same people have no problem with repressing Wikileaks and killing Assange – everyone should be subject to equal scrutiny, but some more equally than others!); MBK’s lawyers and PR-men whose job this is; and the legions of naifs, fools and ideologues manipulated by them. BTW, my favorite photo is above, showing elderly ladies parading with that chic glossy poster of their hero, with Medvedev and Putin darkly conspiring behind his back. I’m sure they funded it all out of their pensions.

2. The standard argument of MBK’s PR-men goes something like this: how could Khodorkovsky be guilty of embezzling $25bn, from his own company? And especially considering that he’s already been found guilty of tax evasion? But that’s just begging the question; insinuations, not facts. While MBK *might* not be directly guilty of this, I’m sure the prosecutors have found some legal loophole or another sufficient to convict him. I can imagine a scenario where the proceeds from the tax evasion he was originally convicted for – if retained by MBK’s various LLC’s and holding companies, which they presumably were – could also legally constitute embezzlement.

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Book Review: Howard Bloom – The Lucifer Principle

This , about History, tagged , , , , , was written by for , on July 15, 2010

Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That’s Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle” in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear to be good. For in the world painted by Bloom, peace is submission, social hierarchies are natural, ideas are polarizing, and liberal individualism is invidious to the collective “superorganism” that both oppresses, nourishes and saves us. Fascism really is the “natural state” in every sense of the term.

Bloom, Howard – The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995)
Category: human society, psychology, history; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Amazon reviews, James Schultz

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Violence is Reality

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for on October 11, 2009

Realism has been falling out of favor since the end of the Cold War, condemned by the Kumbaya crowd, avoided by the liberal, PC-gone-wild intelligentsia, and denigrated by “end of history” ideologues (many of whom all too cynically remain realists while cloaking it under the mantle of “liberal interventionism”). What they all have in common is a denial of reality – denial of basic human psychology, and the inevitability of its transmutation onto the level of inter-state relations. Let’s look at this through the prism of human violence throughout history.

Imagine living in a society in a near-constant state of war, both within and without. A society where you lose 0.5% of your population to violence every year, a rate which would translate to 2bn war deaths during the 21st century. As a man, you are constantly mobilized for fighting and your chances of meeting a violent end are roughly equivalent to that of a French man during World War One or a Russian during the Great Patriotic War – throughout your entire life. Overall there is a 15-60% chance you will die by the club, spear or arrow. Doesn’t sound like a great deal, right? But such was human reality for the vast majority of its history, “noble savage” myths to the contrary. Quoting Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization:

The high war death rates among most nonstate societies are obviously the result of several features of primitive warfare: the prevalence of wars, the high proportion of tribesmen who face combat, the cumulative effects of frequent but low-casualty battles, the unmitigated deadliness and very high frequency of raids, the catastrophic mortalities inflicted in general massacres, the customary killing of all adult males, and the often atrocious treatment of women and children. For these reasons, a member of a typical tribal society, especially a male, had a far higher probability of dying “by the sword” than a citizen of an average modern state.

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America’s Liberty Cycles

This about Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , was written by for on September 2, 2009

This is my first follow-up post to The Belief Matrix, in which I attempted to advance a universal model for civilizational responses to subsistence crises (The Malthusian Loop) and the Western challenge (The Sisyphean Loop).  The first country I’ll apply this too is the US, because doing so will allow me to make several important points about the nature of the belief matrix – namely, that even nominally “Western nations” like the US – that archetype of the West – is imprisoned within the Sisyphean loop.

This is because the Idea of the West, as previously defined, is a rationalist absolute, whereas all other human societies are not. Hence the US can never attain full union with it, but only try to. Instead, decade by decade and century by century, it redefines liberty. This is a mostly consensual social activity that rarely veers into large-scale violence, the Civil War being the most vivid exception (though even it was an extraordinarily civilized affair by the standards of the time). This process is so internalized that Americans, along with the British or the French, think of themselves, and define themselves, as “Westerners” with no apparent conflict between it and their national identities. To the contrary, they are complementary.

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Victimized Venezuela III: Myths And Reality

This about Politics, tagged , , , , was written by for on April 19, 2009

At the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, two great leaders, Obama and Chavez, shook hands in what could be the symbolic first gesture of reconciliation. Treasonous neocons will no doubt rush to condemn this as yet another limp-wristed and unilateral concession to “America’s enemies”, reminding their listeners that Chavez closed down opposition media, nationalized American assets and welcomed Russian warships and strategic bombers to his realm.

Yet their stubborn animosity is worse than just imperialist arrogance – it is stupid. They fail to realize that in the past decade Latin America in general, and Venezuela in particular, has become too politically mature to be easily manipulated into serving US (corporate) interests by economic hitmen, CIA operatives and their local surrogates. It is to Obama’s credit that he is willing to move from willful denial to cautious acceptance of the decline of overt American power in Venezuela and elsewhere.

For that is the new reality. The Venezuelan opposition is increasingly discredited for its unconstructive hostility to the government and extra-legal attempts to overthrow Chavez, one of which nearly succeeded in 2002. This resulted in blowback against the US for its covert involvement  The government’s refusal to renew the licenses of opposition media outlets that seditiously backed the abortive coup is thus completely understandable, as is Chavez’ personal animosity towards Bush and outreach to other states in similar straits. Furthermore, it should be noted that the owners of newly nationalized companies, including American ones, were fairly compensated.

Meanwhile, within five years of taking real power in Venezuela, a corrupt, disorganized and class-ridden country, Chavez managed to a) double the GDP, b) halve the number of people living in poverty and c) drastically improve practically every indicator of social wellbeing from child mortality rates to inequality to tertiary education enrollment rates (I already covered these successes in prior posts). This does not mean that Venezuela is no longer a corrupt, disorganized and class-ridden country – it still is, to an extent – but the improvements are undeniable and Chavez enjoys high approval ratings. It is thus unseemly and dishonest of the Western MSM to excoriate Chavez as a thuggish populist strongman and economic illiterate.

Let us hope they take a clue from Obama. Or from Mark Weisbrot and his fellow authors, who in their latest paper, The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators, give a glowing verdict on the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution.

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